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Breaking the Rules

By Peter Lloyd

I picked up A. J. Jacobs's The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible and found it to be one of the most innovative works of research I've ever read.

Previously, Jacobs spent a year reading all 32 volumes of the 2002 Encyclopædia Britannica in order to write The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World.

Being of an irreverent bent, I grabbed Biblically, because I expected it to poke fun at the Bible's long list of archaic laws. Instead I found proof once again that laws are made to be broken.

Many years ago, in my own experiment, I and my roommate tried to obey for a week all the rules set down by the rector of our dormitory. Granted we were subject to more rules than residents of an ordinary dormitory. We lived in a Catholic seminary.

Not only did we find it impossible to comply, we attracted a good deal of resentment from the rest of our community. It dawned on me then that rules were meant, literally, to be broken. And not just by creative people in their attempts to invent or come up with divergent ideas.

I can't think of a rule or a law that lawmakers expect not to be broken. Otherwise, why would they proscribe the penalty for breaking it? There's no law that I know forbidding anyone to put their left sock over a bicycle handlebar on Tuesdays. That would be silly. Laws prohibit things lawmakers know people want to do and will do.

Besides, if laws were made that were not meant to be broken, we'd have no use for a legal system.

So my experiment, not as ambitious as A. J.'s yet not unlike it, proves a moot point. Of course we can't obey all laws. And not just because they are all made to be broken. Lawmakers always overdo law-making. They can't help themselves. It's what they do. Just as bagpipe players play longer than anyone wants to hear them, lawmakers write more rules than anyone can obey.

Yet there's craft in this prolific compulsion. If lawmakers can convince you to subscribe to their system and its laws, they have to make sure to keep you busy trying and falling short. Consider the color levels of martial arts belts. As soon as a critical mass of students gets to black, management has to have higher degrees of black to achieve. It's just bad business to let anyone finish.

No, the creative exhortation to break the rules, should not be difficult for anyone to follow. The greatest innovators are masters at rule breaking. If you're new to it, start slowly. You'll find it comes naturally. Before you know it, you'll be using your dessert spoon to slurp your soup!

Peter Lloyd is co-creator with Stephen Grossman of Animal Crackers, the breakthrough problem-solving tool designed to crack your toughest problems.
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