It doesn’t take a lot of sense to break the rules. It does however, take a lot of sense to break the rules effectively.

You can really easily identify a couple of extremes in people in regard to playing by the rules. The “goody two shoes” always play strictly by the rules. They seek recognition and achievement in a clearly pre-defined path that’s been laid out before them, and they don’t really recognize alternatives to that mindset as being valid in any way. These are the teacher’s pets, the corporate yes men… you recognize them. They thoroughly believe that they’re going to get ahead by playing it by the book as closely as possible.

The other is the flagrant rule breaker, who sees most any system as a challenge to rail against it. These are the guys that spend more time in detention than out, the people working in low-end jobs that you know are below their potential. They believe that the system is ineffective and the only way to get ahead is to take it on your own terms.

Strangely enough, their end will be somewhat similiar. The guy who tries to do everything by the book will find that there are plenty of people who will do the same, and probably better. They tend to be the guys that end up in a difficult and critical job doing all the work with all of the stress and none of the thanks or rewards. The guy who refuses to play by the rules never gets a chance to get started in the system, so they work below their potential and find themselves unsatisfied with their state.

The smart guy avoids this… by breaking the right rules.

There’s an old adage among musicians that you have to know the rules to break them. Music becomes interesting when you add a bit of the unexpected. If you only play the scales that theoretically “work” with the backing, it’ll sound nice but the audience will lose interest because they’ve heard it all before. If you never learn what people expect to hear, but just play your own thing, a few people may listen for novelty, but it will very quickly become annoying to all who listen. But if you play what people expect to hear, but introduce a bit of dissonance or “out” playing to it, you’ll capture the imagination. Formulaic players will produce proper, but boring fluff. The ignorant will just never interest anyone. Very few would want to hear Jimi Hendrix making albums full of dissonant feedback and out of tune warblings. But when he sets it in a solid foundation of classic blues, people sit up and take notice.

The guy that gets ahead learns how to play by the rules. It gives him a place to start, some structure and an open door into the system. But he knows how to judge his situation and break the rules occasionally to differentiate himself from the crowd.

Let’s talk some practical examples:

  • On the football field, the quarterback that runs every play exactly as handed to him becomes as predictable as the playbook and as easy for the defense to read. The maverick likely never gets a chance behind the ball and when he does, keeps his own team as on edge as the opposition. The guy who recognizes the value of the playbook, but trusts his own instincts enough to call an audible occasionally becomes a real threat.
  • A great musical example is King Crimson’s “21st Century Schizoid Man”. Even if you’re not a musician, have a listen. There’s a lot of dissonance going on, a lot of shifts in tempo and an unexpected verse structure – but the song feels very comfortable and fun. It’s not exactly predictable at first listen, but not completely unpredictable.
  • Early in my career I was asked to salvage a computer purchase – they had spent a lot of money on a bulk purchase of PCs and were really unsatisfied with their performance. After learning that the users really needed processing power, I purposefully crippled the graphics systems on them to give the rest of the PC more resources. The result was a slightly poorer visual experience that no one really cared about and a much more responsive machine. I also got a raise for that one.
  • In one of my college psychology courses, a lot of people chose classic research projects like Jung, Freud, etc. I chose to dissect the psychology of Mark Twain instead. I got a lot of positive comments for “thinking outside the box” on the project, a top grade (even though I admit it wasn’t my best paper) and as a bonus cut my workload in half – since I was already doing a paper on him for a Literature class.

Being a rebel without a cause generally gets you nowhere. You have grand designs of beating the system in some manner and realize too late that all the rewards you’re looking for are indeed there in the system. Being the shill gets you started on the right path, but efficient cogs in the machine tend to find their place and are forgotten until they break down.

It’s the guy who’s smart enough to know when to step out of line that tends to get what he’s looking for.