You hear all this talk aobut how you have to march to your own drummer, think out of the box, blah blah. The truth is, you can't change anything until you know all the rules.
Advice admonishing you to break rules is so shallow. How can you break rules without learning them first? People who understand all the rules know intuitively how to break them because they know the rules that really are not working. People who do not know rules are not breaking rules. They are annoying people.
Because for the most part, rules are there to make peoples' lives easier. There are lots of us in society, in the workplace, driving through intersections. If we don't have rules there is chaos. Some rules need changing, but you can't tell that until you know the rules and how they work together.
So instead of giving you advice on how to break the rules, I'm going to give you advice on how to learn them fast.
1. Learn multiple sets of rules at the same time.
The more types of rules you learn, the faster you get at learning them. This is, basically, what a liberal arts education is — learning systems in disparate categories.
I'm fascinated by the yarn bombers. Here's a photo of some of their work:
What makes the yarn bombers so fascinating to me is the practitioners have learned two sets of rules that don't usually go together: How to do yarn work at a high enough level to do it on the street, fast and furtively. And how to create street art in a way that has social impact, defies arrest, and leverages networking tools to pass along knowledge. Read more