50 Cent Is My Life Coach

For years now, the man who wrote Get Rich or Die Tryin' has been getting very rich
indeed—off record sales, energy drinks, self-help books, exercise routines,
headphones, you name it. His newest product? A comeback record, Animal Ambition.
You see, 50 Cent is healthier than you and wealthier than you, but he also believes you
can get there, too, if you follow his advice. GQ's Zach Baron spent a month as the hip-
hop mogul's prized pupil, making vision boards, hitting the gym, and reorienting his
consciousness, to see if he could get a little bit more like 50.

50 Cent says: Make a vision board. Do it tonight, when you get home. Open
your laptop. Create a new folder. Think about the things you want for your
future. "I want you to Google pictures and put everything you want in this
folder," 50 Cent says. "Everything. All right?"

He’s wearing a Yankees cap and a snug, fatherly argyle sweater with horn
buttons that keep getting snagged on his various enormous muscles. His
beard is like the line a surgeon draws before he cuts. His office in Midtown
Manhattan, where we’re sitting, is spare. On the table in front of him is a deck
of playing cards with the "I <3 NY" logo on them that he periodically picks up
and shuffles and a white squash ball that he periodically picks up and
squeezes.

All right, I reply.

50 Cent thinks for a minute. Actually, he says, my girlfriend—the one I just

mentioned, the one I’d just moved in with? 50 Cent would like her to make a
vision board, too. Then we’re going to compare. "Take things out of your folder
and things out of her folder to create a folder that has everything," he says.
"Now the vision board is no longer your personal vision board for yourself: It’s
a joint board." That joint board will represent what we have in common. It will
be a monument to our love.

But there will be some leftover unmatched photos, too, in each of our folders.
And that’s what the joint board is really for—what it’s designed to reveal. "The
things that end up on your vision board that aren’t in hers are the things that
she has to accept," 50 Cent says. "And the things that she has that you don’t
are the things that you have to make a compromise with." In a healthy
relationship, he explains, your differences are really what need talking about.
This is how you go about making that conversation happen.

"See?" 50 says, smiling. "Now, they ain’t gonna tell you to do that in no book."

There were good reasons why I asked 50 Cent—the same 50 Cent who
named his dog after Oprah, and not in a nice way—to become my life coach.
He has seemed, in the decade since his first record came out, like a person
with wisdom, or at least savvy. He’s published a couple of self-help books—
The 50th Law, a best-selling meditation on fear and the impossibility of trust
transfigured into a set of boardroom commandments; last year’s Formula 50:
A 6-Week Workout and Nutrition Plan That Will Transform Your Life. In his
office hangs a poster of the movie he starred in opposite Robert De
Niro,Righteous Kill—a testament to an improbable second career on-screen
that continues this month with his new drama series on Starz, Power. He
invested early in Vitaminwater and earned $100 million. His new album, his
first in nearly five years, is called Animal Ambition; maybe he’d be willing to
impart some of that ambition to another man.

It was sort of a stunt, the life-coaching thing, and in the beginning I treated it
that way. I liked the notion of becoming a better person. Who wouldn’t want to
become a better person? But I’d also become fascinated with the ways in
which 50 Cent had failed—over the course of his long career but especially
lately. He was ubiquitous, sold an unfathomable number of records, and then
suddenly he wasn’t and he didn’t. He was said to live alone in an eighteen-
bedroom Connecticut mansion that formerly belonged to Mike Tyson, wore a
bulletproof vest every day for five years, traveled in a bombproof car. He
abjured alcohol. His life in 2014 seemed lonely and impossible. He was a
living example of someone who had entirely captured the attention of the
culture and then watched the culture speed right by. I thought I’d go to him,
ask leading questions, present what I perceived to be his problems as my own
—I’m 31, I’ve had some success already, but now I fear my best days are
behind me, what should I do, 50 Cent?—and in doing so get him to talk about
himself, about the existential predicament of what comes after success so
large it can never be repeated.

But so far he was the one asking most of the questions. About my girlfriend:
"How long you been together?"

Two years.

"That’s new still."

Yeah.

"She’s your best friend?"

Yeah.

"I think friendship is the strongest form of relationship," 50 Cent says. "Don’t
ever forget to be friends. And you be conscious. Because there’s a point that
your friendship would develop that it has so much value that it would become
priceless. And at that point, you should consider marriage."

I’d come to hold up a mirror, get 50 Cent to talk about himself, his dreams, his
fears, his regrets. Except here he was—enthusiastically inquiring about my
dreams, my fears, my regrets—holding up the mirror first. He did it without
irony or skepticism—it wasn’t a joke to him, even if it sort of was to me. That
was lesson one.
He has led a remarkable life. You don’t need to be all that taken with the
tabloid aspects of his story, the nine gunshots he absorbed and survived, to
see that. His mother gave birth to him at 15. She told her son it was an
immaculate conception. "To make me feel special about not having a father,"
he says with a sly grin. She was murdered eight years later in a manner
almost too terrible to recount—drugged by a friend, the windows shut, the gas
turned on, left to die at her own kitchen table. She had been a drug dealer; at
12, he became one, too. When his debut, Get Rich or Die Tryin’,came out in
2003 and sold nearly a million copies the first week and then nearly another
million the second week, he moved from his bedroom in his grandmother’s
house directly into Tyson’s old mansion. There was no in-between.

He’s lived there ever since, a Gatsby with no Daisy.

That first time we met, we talked about marriage and fatherhood. It was
heartbreaking, some of the things he said. He’d had his first son, Marquise,
when he was 21. It’s what made him start rapping in the first place—a way to
live to see his son live. Now his son is 17 and they don’t speak, because 50
and his son’s mother don’t speak. They fell out over money. They were
together before he was 50 Cent, and, he says, she feels she’s owed
something for that.

"Me and my son, we don’t have a relationship anymore," 50 said, squeezing

the squash ball. "It’s based on his mom. He’s adopted her way of thinking."
He’s trying to do it over now, he said, with his second son, whom he had by a
different woman in 2012—to do it right this time, even though he’s already split
with that boy’s mother, too. "I don’t have anything negative around the concept
of kids," he said.

Women are different—harder for him, he said. He was alluding, I presumed, to

problems that have been extensively documented in the press. Breakups.
Allegations of domestic violence. If you’d read the papers, it was insane to ask
him for romantic advice. And yet I’d asked. I wanted to know what he’d say,
whether he felt that it was possible for someone to succeed where he had not.

"The one place that I will admit that I’ve been inconsistent is in my personal
life," he allowed, there in his office. That’s when he told me about the vision
boards and encouraged me to go home and make one with my girl. He gave
me a hug. He couldn’t remember my girlfriend’s name. "Let me know how it
goes with Whatshername," he said earnestly.

I broke the news to Whatshername when I got home. "50 Cent wants me to
make a vision board?" she asked. "What do I put on my vision board?"

"Your hopes and dreams for your future and our future together," I said.

"Hmm," she said. She asked me what 50 Cent thought of us. She confessed
to being worried he wouldn’t approve of our relationship. His public persona
was so Machiavellian; does 50 Cent believe in love at all?
"50 Cent believes in us," I reassured her.

"Well," she said, "he hasn’t seen our vision boards yet."

I began living like he told me to live. That first morning, I’d arrived at his office
wearing jeans and sneakers, and, in time, I asked him what he thought about
the outfit. He looked me up and down. "Look, GQ may send you to interview
50 Cent because you come dressed casual," he said diplomatically. Around
him and his friends, I blended right in. "But they would send the guy in the suit
to go fucking interview George Clooney in a heartbeat."

So you’re saying I should wear a suit to work?

"It’s how people perceive the person that they’re actually sending you to go
interview," he said. Me coming into work every day in Nikes: Maybe I didn’t
entirely look like I belonged in a room with the type of man  GQ aspires to
celebrate. I looked down at my scuffed sneakers. 50 Cent had a point.

All right. I’m gonna wear the suit tomorrow.

"And when you do it, I bet you people ask you, ’Hey, you look good! Where
you going? What’s going on?’ Because it’s not an everyday thing for you.
When you clean up, people notice."

And they did—it was overwhelming how dramatic the difference was. "Whoa,"
said Whatshername, when I emerged from the bedroom the following morning.
"Nice suit!" co-workers said in the hall. "Do you have a job interview?" asked
the woman in the office across from mine. The magazine’s deputy editor, an
elegant, impeccably dressed man, strolled by my door and then stopped. For
the first time, perhaps ever, he took in my outfit. "I like your suit," he said. He
summoned a photographer. "Let’s put him on the GQ Instagram," he said to
her, walking away without another word.

The less that’s said about the photo shoot that ensued, the better, but twenty-
five minutes later, there I was, the garishly lit photo appearing on my iPhone
screen: shoulders trollishly hunched, shirt billowing at the waist, hands
jammed awkwardly in my pockets, my best attempt at representing
the GQ brand. 50 Cent’s advice had been sound, but I was a flawed vessel,
and we were now approaching the limits of it.

The comments were swift and merciless. "Not a fan," wrote ristoski31. "Please
hook your boy up with a shirt that actually fits," added_swizzjr. "What’s with
the sloppiness going on in the midsection?" asked lawrenzok.

Now that lawrenzok had pointed it out, I saw the sloppiness myself. I kept
scrolling.

"This looks like a preacher or an Amish farmer," wrote a man named skygriff.

"We’ll start light, and then we’ll go up," 50 Cent says, racking weights onto a
bench press. He’s wearing a white T-shirt, black sweatpants. Some of his
muscles are very close to me and some are very far away—they take up so
much space. We’re at a gym he likes in Midtown—private, discreet, with
baskets full of free fruit by the doors.

He motions toward the bench, and I lie down on it. He gently shows me how to
use my thumbs to judge where I should grip the handles, and how to twist the
bar so it comes down freely. I twist, and the bar drops, 50 gamely counting as
I struggle to raise the insignificant weight he’s put on there for me. I do six
reps. He’s kind enough to act impressed.

Then he takes over, starts with 125 pounds on the bar. I figure this is as good
a time as any to turn things around, ask about the new record, the old records,
what it feels like to be trying to recapture an audience that 50 Cent once
owned and presumably would like to own again. In February he left his
longtime label, Interscope, to go independent. He felt like he was no longer a
priority for the label. "When people couldn’t care less about you actually being
successful," he says, "you can feel it."

One hundred forty-five now…

50 says it was around his third album, 2007’s Curtis, that he first got the
feeling things were going sideways for him as an artist. He challenged Kanye
West to a sales competition and lost—an intimation of what was to come.
Kanye’s Graduationdidn’t just outsell Curtis; it was the beginning of Kanye’s
long reign as rap’s most influential artist, the weirdly emotional guy who
crowded 50’s sound right out of the marketplace. 50 knew it, too—even he
liked Graduation."I listened to that shit a million times," he says. Then
2009’s Before I Self Destructcame out and basically flopped. People were too
busy listening to Kanye and Drake, 50 says now. "Maybe I was supposed to
be under a palm tree, instead of putting the record out."

One hundred eighty-five…

After Self Destruct he regrouped, acted in a bunch of films, came out with an

energy drink, his headphone line, SMS Audio, the books. Went away from
music. It was painful, but he understood. He represented a vision of street-
oriented realness that not enough people cared about anymore, even if his fan
base wouldn’t let him be anything but that. "I even saw when keeping it real—
like, that concept or that phrase ’keeping it real’—went out of style. Now it’s
like, it doesn’t matter what it is, it just matters that it sounds good." Rappers
these days are free to fantasize, become anything they want—except it turned
out no one wanted to grant 50 Cent that same freedom: " ’Oh, no, no,’ " he
says, " ’not you! We need you to be what we need you to be. But everybody
else can.’ "

Two hundred five...

His muscles expand like hot-air balloons.

Two hundred twenty-five…

Animal Ambition is about what 50 calls "the different effects" of prosperity, by
which he basically means the end of his professional and personal
relationships with the two artists most closely associated with him, Lloyd
Banks and Tony Yayo, fellow members of 50’s G-Unit, guys who have been
onstage and on records with him since the beginning, who have lately turned
to jealousy, envy, greed, or sloth, depending on which version of the story he’s
telling at any given moment.

Two hundred forty-five…

Not to doubt his honesty here—he has been known to manufacture beefs to
promote records—but there is something so sad about this. Conflict is what he
knows; no one in rap has used it more to his advantage. But to see him
basically eat his young…

Two hundred sixty-five…

Imagine a plant, he says: "If you spent ten years watering it, it’d fucking grow."
And if it didn’t? "Doesn’t that tell you you need to get new seeds? Fuck this.
New seeds—let’s do something different now." He’d made Banks and Yayo
famous by letting them stand next to him on stages around the world, given
them every opportunity to succeed, and yet they couldn’t get there on their
own.

Two hundred eighty-five…

"I enabled these guys," he says. Now they felt entitled to success they didn’t
earn.
But they’re your friends.

"Right. I wouldn’t have been a friend if I didn’t help them. But helping them
hurt them. Can you see that concept?"

Do you miss those people in your life?

"Not really. Not now. I make adjustments."

So you did initially?

"Yeah," he says. But… "Maybe I was paying them to be friends. You

understand what I’m saying?"

Three hundred five…

50 does one set, stands up, stretches, does another set, then grabs a towel.
Um…why Animal Ambition? (I am a professional journalist.)

Animals "will kill us," 50 explains. "Every single one of us." A fit lady trainer
lopes by, all steely Frank Gehry curves.
"Look at that," 50 says, nudging me. "That’ll keep you working out a bit
longer."

She comes over, introduces herself. She’s got Nets tickets tonight. Perhaps
50 Cent would like to come? They exchange numbers. She lopes away, both
of us maybe staring a bit.

50 catches me doing it.

"Stay focused, Zach!" he says. "You’re getting ready to get married!"

Me and Whatshername made vision boards. We’d been laughing about it, but
the task turned out to be challenging: translating the vague dread I generally
feel when I picture the future into a collection of brightly colored images. I sat
there with my laptop, Googled photos of French-farmhouse tables and
Catalonian vacations. I used a Wikimedia Commons image for marriage—a
stone carving of a man and a woman, holding hands. Most of it ended up
being work stuff: books I’d admired and aspired to imitate; awards I’d someday
like to win. 50 Cent had given us permission to use Pinterest; for my final
image, I found a photo of Whatshername that I particularly liked, her eyes
wide with surprise, and made that the cover of my board.

Her cover, when we finally sat down to make our joint board, was a lemon
tree, an idealized version of the plant in the corner of our apartment that she
was desperately trying to keep alive. We were side by side on our couch as
she took me through her board: a pregnant Sofia Coppola, some "cool
babies," Kardashian children, a home in Laurel Canyon, a $600 lamp, fancy
magazines she aspired to work for, like eight more pictures of Sofia Coppola,
white wine, Gwyneth Paltrow and Ina Garten having dinner together, Roger
Federer holding a koala—on it went, photos of outdoor showers and liquor
pyramids alternating with photos of pregnant women, small children, books
that you might read to small children, trips you might take those small children
on. It’s important that she not sound crazy here; Whatshername is a beautiful,
accomplished woman with ambition and taste. But there were so many kids on
her board, it was like an orphanage. I felt like we were trapped in a CBS
sitcom, so stupidly gendered were our respective visions. Also there was a
photo of a woman getting a diamond facial—"That represents the fact that I
want a diamond facial," she said.

"Um…do you have any questions about my board?" I asked. My whole shirt
was soaked in sweat.

She said she thought it was pretty self-explanatory.

I cleared my throat. "So…"

I’ve already dragged Whatshername into this far beyond what she deserves;
suffice it to say what came next were tears and a conversation we’d never had
before, about children, ones we might actually have together, how many and
how long from now—but also talk of our respective careers, and money, and
the future. In that moment, I loved her even more. And who knows what any of
it meant, but it happened. It went exactly like 50 Cent said it was going to go.
The life coaching, or whatever it was we were in the middle of building, took a
hard turn in Warsaw, where 50 had come to promote his headphones. He’d
been an improbably good life coach. Reporters, presumably, didn’t usually
come to him talking about themselves—their girlfriends, their night terrors,
their inability to lift weights. But I had, and he’d run with it—he even invited me
here. The first thing he said when he saw me, in the lobby of our hotel, was
"How was it with Whatshername?"

I told him how it was with Whatshername: all the photos of the kids, the tears,
my back drenched in sweat.

"See?" he said, pleased.

He’d been like this the entire time: interested, honest, forthright, open to
wherever the conversation took us. We were on a party bus now—a
preposterous one, with a stripper pole, a DJ booth, his own Get Rich or Die
Tryin’ cranked loud, and a grimy banquette where we sat and talked. Outside,
Warsaw was going by: crows at the roadside, bare brown leafless trees just
beginning to flower, ugly square-block housing units.

Then the conversation took us to an unfortunate place. He said an unkind

thing about another rapper, Puffy—actually, what 50 said was: "He’s a
sucker"—out of the blue, basically. It was so sudden and severe that I asked
him if he even meant it, or whether he was suddenly remembering he had a
new record to promote and was obligingly supplying the controversial quote
that would help do that.

I watched his face drop and grow cold.

"You think I celebrate that kind of thing?" he asked. He meant conflict for the
sake of conflict.

Kind of, yeah?

"It’s not to pick fights. You know what it is?" he asked. Then he stopped and
gathered himself. "I’m looking at you not understanding and trying to have you
understand."

At first I thought he was upset because I’d questioned his sincerity. But it
wasn’t that. "I could lie to you," he said. He glared at me. "And instead I
actually shared ideas with you that I would use myself. I like the life-coach
concept—it’s a cool concept. But my life’s not all the way right. To be coaching
someone else, all I can do is give you the things that I would use. You see
what I’m saying? We all have imperfections, man. We all have things that are
not right."

We’d spent all this time together, and now I could see him wondering—maybe
he’d been talking this entire time and I hadn’t been listening, or had been
listening only to what I wanted to hear, like when he said entertaining things
about animals, or profound and sad things about his sons. I’d asked about
money and exercise and romance and he’d answered every question,
participated in this mad idea I’d dreamed up. Now here he was, admitting
doubt—something I’d been looking for traces of since we’d begun talking. Did
he worry that he might be past his prime, the way others thought he might be?
Whatever he had, did he still have it? I’d finally goaded him into doing it. And
for what? For him to react like any other human with feelings would.

This was to be my last lesson, though I didn’t realize it at the time: that he’d
willed everything he had into reality with a set of tools no different or better
than mine. The earnestness, the effort, the endless self-belief—out of nothing
more than that, he created 50 Cent. The guy who is about to put another
record out whether anybody wants it or not. The guy whose mother died at the
hands of a person she must have trusted; the guy who just jettisoned the
oldest friends he had. And yet he’d behaved like a friend to me. Could I say
the same?

Our last meeting is early the next morning: 50’s headed to the local mall to sell
headphones. In the car on the way over—on the party bus, we talked out our
differences by the stripper pole; I apologized—I ask if he has any final words
of advice for me.

When I write the story, he says, don’t make him out to be any kind of expert.
That would be a lie—that’s what he was trying to tell me yesterday. He was a
man with flaws, like everyone else; he was happy to give advice, but only if he
was depicted as he was. As for me: "Put yourself in the interview," he says—
the suit, the gym, the vision boards, all of it. "Because if we don’t actually talk
about the suit and how people responded to it in the story, this shit was for
nothing." It’s his way of telling me, I think, that he gets it: why I’m here, why
I’ve been here.

And then we’re arriving at the mall, our Lexus cruising down into an
underground garage. Ten blonde women line up in front of the car, five on
each side, with huge breasts and huge high heels, like some sort of
welcoming committee. They yell hello in creepy unison and then break into a
run ahead of us, giraffes on stampede, reassembling again in lines of five at
the elevator doors. We pass through the perfumed gantlet a second time as
they chant: "Bye!"

Even in the chaos, 50 looks for me. He motions at the girls as they all
disappear through the elevator doors: "Zach! Don’t get confused, Zach!"

I leave and go home to be with Whatshername.