A few more thoughts on rules...

I'm currently reading Patti Digh's book Life Is a Verb: 37 Days to Wake Up, Be Mindful, and Live Intentionally. My "pen" (or at least my Kindle keyboard) has been handy and active. What follows are a selection of highlighted quotes and margin notes that seemed to me related to my prior post.

"Any fool can make a rule and any fool will mind it."  -- Henry David Thoreau

This may not be a direction to break rules, but at the very least it suggests we should not simply (foolishly) follow any arbitrary rule. We need to use our minds to first understand the rule, then make a knowledgeable choice about whether to follow it.

"Rules are not necessarily sacred, principles are."  -- Franklin D. Roosevelt

So, what principles do you live by? What happens when a rule contradicts one or more of those principles?

These quotes are used in a section of the book entitled "Bust Your Toast Rules." The concept of toast rules came from a story of ordering toast in a restaurant only to be told it was "past toast time." Toast rules are arbitrary. Could the waiter not make a piece of toast after a certain time of day? Wouldn't the customer have been much more satisfied had the waiter given some thought to the situation and chosen to break the "toast rule?" Ms. Digh goes on to write:

"It's one thing to acknowledge the absurdity of other people's rules; it's another thing altogether to recognize and own the absurdity of the rules that we've made up (helpful hint: They're all made up, some so ingrained that we can no longer see they are Toast Rules). So when a rule pops to the surface, see it for the Toast Rule it is, made up to serve some social norm that is itself made up.... Bust your toast rules."

What rules have you created for yourself? Are there some that should be tossed out like so much burnt toast? Or is each guided by your principles?

P.S. Lest it sound like I'm some sort of anarchist, believing in no rules at all, let me be clear that I am not. I do, however, think it's important to understand the purpose of the rules, compare the application of that rule to each circumstance, and make a mindful choice about whether to follow.

Breaking the Rules

I enjoy an apt quote. I'm also intrigued by the nature of how our brains work. Have you ever noticed when working in a particular topic area that certain quotes stand out which might otherwise be uninteresting? This happened to me while defining a set of best practices (rules, guidelines) for a project. While doing so, I was also reading Tim Hurson's Think Better: An Innovator's Guide to Productive Thinking where he summarizes his "productive thinking" method as follows:

"As in any discipline, to become good, you need to first learn the rules. To become great, you need to break them."

He follows up with a Chinese quote (he did not happen to say proverb, which I found somehow interesting):

"Not to have a method is bad; to stop entirely at method is worse still."

So, first we need to understand the rules; then we become great by learning when it's appropriate to break them.

Questions: Do you think to be truly great you must break a few rules? Are there rules you are unwilling to break? Does it help to think of the set of rules as a box, following rules as staying within the box, and breaking rules as "thinking outside the box"?