Robert Greene, 50 Cent - Chapter 3: Turn Shit into Sugar - Opportunism lyrics

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 it'self 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: