Good Life Project - Attention Rule-breakers: Not So Fast.

Episode Date: December 8, 2016

Calling all rule-breakers, rebels and deviants from the norm… Before you run screaming from convention, consider why the rules, the norms, the cultural guides exist in the first place. Then, ask yourself, before choosing to abandon them, if they still matter, and whether the better path to creativity, innovation and expression might be to master […]The post Attention Rule-breakers: Not So Fast. appeared first on Good LifeProject. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hey there, it's Jonathan. So are you as much of an audiobook junkie as I am? Because I've started to listen to them an awful lot. It's this amazing way for me to go deep to learn a whole bunch of stuff and also just to have fun when I'm kind of between places. So I love podcasts and I start to listen to audiobooks a lot more. So I wanted to let you know, if you like that, that my new book, How to Live a Good Life, is actually available now as an audiobook. And you can grab it wherever audiobooks are sold. Audible, Amazon, iTunes, all the normal places. And I also narrated that.

So if you're cool with my voice on the podcast, then hopefully you would enjoy that narrating a book as well. So if that sounds interesting to you, go check it out. I hope you will find it super valuable. And now turning it over to the rest of our show. Hey there, it's Jonathan. I'm coming to you with a weekly short and sweet good life project riff. I want to talk to you about the power of norms and rules, why they're there, and when and why to break them. I'm a little bit of a rebel, have been for the better part of my life. I don't do all that well with other people's rules. I'm constantly questioning where they came from. Are they relevant to me?

Do they still matter even if they mattered 10 years ago? And I think probably a little bit earlier in life, I would basically just try and if there was a rule, I would try and go around it. And it's interesting that my lens has changed a bit as I've moved a little bit further into this season of my life. And it's interesting that my lens has changed a bit as I've moved a little bit further into this season of my life. And I've started to realize that it's not that all rules, all norms are bad. It's that it's important to understand where they came from and why they're

there. And very often, the most powerful way to understand when to deviate from the norm or break the rule is to first master the norm and master the rule. And more importantly, to understand why it got put in place in the first place. Your writing is really interesting example of that. When I write now, I break the rules of grammar. I break normal sentence structure constantly. And sometimes I get comments from people who are saying, no, do this, do that, don't do that. How can you not have a comma there? How can you put this is a sentence fragment. And what's interesting is, you know, when I write books, there are two phases of editing, there's the editorial edit with my main editor,

and that's largely about storytelling and content. And then there's the copy edit, which is largely about structure and grammar and making sure that everything matches up with the either Strunk and White or the Chicago Manual style, whatever may be being used. And I break so many of the classical rules. But here's the thing. The reason I break them is because I know them. The reason I break them is because I spent a lot of time mastering them. I understand what the rules are. I of Law Review. So we ran a scholarly journal called Law Review, and we published a massive amount of articles. And as the managing editor, part of my job was to make sure that every word was vetted and structured and researched and validated. So the style manuals and the conventions were what I lived and breathed for a chunk of years. And then as a practicing lawyer, I had to master that stuff too. And I hated it master that stuff too.

And I hated it because that wasn't natural language. That wasn't how people spoke. But I also really, really valued the fact that I understood why they were there. And when it came time for me to leave the profession and start writing more like a human being, and focus more on storytelling and rhythm and cadence and match more the way people speak, it left me in a profoundly different position to understand how, when, and why to deviate from the norms and how, when, and why to sometimes revert to them and to follow those rules. And that's always stayed with me because I see a lot of people completely eschewing the norms and the rules from the get-go, never knowing what they are, never going deep into trying to understand why they

were made in the first place. What was the rationale, the reasoning? Was it safety? Was it ease of conversation? Was it to preserve order? If you don't understand what the norm or rule is, and more specifically, if we don't take time to understand why those things came into existence in the first place, and then we just go and completely ignore them or deviate from them or break them without ever understanding what they're about in the first place, we are very likely destined to fall into a hole and not be able to operate optimally. Interesting, more recent example. So there's a deli that opened on my block in New York City. And as they were putting it under construction, I could kind of peek in. And what I saw was that they painted

all the walls in the deli with blue paint. They also made the sign and all of the branding blue. Now, here's the thing. There is a norm in the food industry, which is that blue does not sell. There are very few blue restaurants. There are almost no blue foods in nature, save blueberries and a few other random things. And there's actually been research done in this showing that the color blue actually suppresses appetite. Now, if somebody saw that and actually paid attention and said, well, I want to open a deli and I love the color blue, so I'm going to just paint it blue even though I'm looking around and seeing there's nothing else in this industry that's blue that's survived for very long. And if you had asked any experts in the industry, they would have learned that, in fact, blue is this color,

which generally you don't mess with if you're looking to cultivate appetite and engage people in food type of activities. You know, so here's a norm that was fiercely broken. And I don't know whether the owner of this place ever sort of like sought out trying to understand the relationship between color and the business of food. But what I can tell you is that there have been very few people in that location for a very long time. And I'm quite concerned that it may not succeed. And does that mean that because the whole place is wrapped in blue is the sole reason for this? No, probably not. But could it be a pretty significant contributing factor,

knowing that there is a very definite psychological effect between appetite, desire for food, and that particular color? Yeah, to the extent where I'm very likely going to either sneak something under the door one night or maybe even see if I can actually find out who the manager or owner is and say of them, when you actually ask why, are built not on rational reasoning, but are built on mythology or reasons that are no longer valid. So there's the classic story, I'm sure you've heard some variation of it, where, you know, for generations in one particular family, somebody cooks a roast by first you put it in a pan, you cut off both ends, and then you put it in and you cook it.

And a couple generations later, finally somebody says, hey, listen, why do we cut off the ends of the roast before we put it in the oven to cook? And there's no clear answer when you ask the mom, and then you ask the grandma what happened. And then finally you go back to the great-grandparent who's still alive and say, do you know why this is? And they say, well, sure. You know, back in the day, 80 years ago, we all lived in very, very, very small apartments with these tiny micro ovens. And in order to fit the roast into the oven, you actually had to cut the ends off of it. So it's a great example of norms and rules that get established because for a very rational reason when they first happen. But then once you, you know, things change over time, nobody ever questions them. And we just continue with behavior that no longer is rational. And that guides our lives. And it constrains us in ways that are no

longer valid. So what I want to leave you with is whether you consider yourself a rule breaker, a norm follower or not, the big idea here is anytime you're looking to do something, whether it's interact with people, create something in the world, and there's some sort of set of rules in place or there's a norm, a social norm, before you decide whether to follow it or not. Ask one question deeper. Ask yourself, why does that exist in the first place? What were the underlying circumstances? What was the experience that led this to be the guiding ethos in this particular domain? And then you will find yourself in a much better place to decide whether you should then completely abandon it or deepen into it and really master it and learn how to operate within it at a level where you then have enough experience and knowledge to understand how, when, and why to deviate from it. So something to think about. The power of norms, the power of rules, and how and when to deviate. And in a world where norms and rules are changing at a breakneck speed,

I think this is a really good time to reassess. Hope you thought that was valuable, interesting. Can't wait to be back with you next week. I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project.