Chapter 3: Turn Shit into Sugar - Opportunism

Every negative situation contains the possibility for something positive, an opportunity. It is how you look at it that matters. Your lack of resources can be an advantage, forcing you to be more inventive with the little that you have. Losing a battle can allow you to frame yourself as the sympathetic underdog. Do not let fears make you wait for a better moment or become conservative. If there are circumstances you cannot control, make the best of them. It is the ultimate alchemy to transform all such negatives into advantages and power. Hood Alchemy If one is continually surviving the worst that life can bring one eventually ceases to be controlled by a fear of what life can bring. - James Baldwin For well over a year 50 Cent had been working on what was meant to be hist debut album, power of the Dollar, and finally in the spring of 2000 it was ready to be released by Columbia Records. It represented to him all the struggles he had been through on the streets, and he had hopes that it would turn his life around for good. In May of that year, however, a few weeks before the laugh date, a hired assassin shot nine bullets into him while he sat in the back of a car, one bullet going through his jaw and nearly killing him. In a flash, all of the momentum he had built up reversed itself. Columbia canceled the release of the record an dropped Fifty from his contract there was too much violence associated with him; it was bad for business. A few inquiries made it clear that other labels felt the same-he was being blackballed from the industry. One executive told him flatly he would have to wait at least two years before he could think of resurrecting his career. The assassination attempt was the result of an old drug beef from his days as a drug dealer; the killers could not afford to let him survive and would try to finish the job. Fifty had to keep a low profile. At the same time, he had no money and could not return to street hustling. Even many of his friend, who had hoped to be part of his success as a rapper, started to avoid him. In just a few short weeks he had gone from being poised for fame and fortune to hitting the bottom. And there seemed no way to move out of the corner he found himself in. Could this be the end of all his efforts? It would have been better to die that day than to feel this powerlessness. But as he lay in at his grandparents' house, recovering from the wounds, he listened a lot to the radio, and what he heard gave him an incredible rush of optimism: an idea started taking shape in his mind that the shooting was in fact a great blessing in disguise, that he had narrowly survived for a reason. The music on the radio was all so packaged and produced. Even the tough stuff, the gangsta rap, was fake. The lyrics did not reflect anything from the streets that he knew. The attempt to pass it off as real and urban angered him to a point he could not endure. this was not the time for him to be afraid and depressed, or to sit around and wait a few years while all of the violence around him died down. He had never been a fake studio gangsta and now he had the nine bullet wounds to prove it. This was the moment to convert all of his anger and dark emotions into a powerful campaign that would shake the very foundations of hip-hop. As a hustler on the streets Fifty had learned a fundamental lesson: