I broke all the rules because that’s what came naturally to me. I had to in order do what I felt was necessary. I created a draft of an about page – spent an entire day on it. I went through three drafts, editing, taking into account what others said should be in any good about page. It felt kind of forced to me but hey, everyone else was doing it, and I didn’t want to make any mistakes.
The rest, as you can tell, is history. There is no about page. I threw the third, final draft away on a sudden whim – a stroke of genius or idiocy – take your pick, and decided to put up a blank wall open to comments, with nothing but a paragraph with guidelines for what people could post. Why? Because I don’t like writing about pages. Something about it just bothers me. I’d rather other people write about me – they can describe who I really am and what this site is about better than I can. They can describe the good and the bad, and thus present a better picture of this site than I can.
Is my about page an example of the Failure or Wisdom of the Crowd? Honestly, I don’t know, and at the time of this writing, that question is irrelevant. I have no idea what will happen. Maybe the comments expressed there will completely misrepresent everything my website is about. Maybe they’ll embody the essence of my site better than I’d ever be able to. Whatever the case, I’m breaking the rule that I need to write an about page for no other reason that it just feels right to do so. There are rules in life, until you decide that there aren’t. When it comes to success, you’re not going to get there by following all the rules. There are way too many, and if you follow them all you’re going to end up a pushover who only listens to what he’s told to do. You develop no independent thought or judgment of your own. You develop no conviction for what is right or wrong. You rely on the rules to tell you what you can and can’t do, what is acceptable and what is not.
For what it’s worth: it’s never too late or, in my case, too early to be whoever you want to be. There’s no time limit, stop whenever you want. You can change or stay the same, there are no rules to this thing.
- Benjamin Button
Want to know the dirty, secret truth? All those lists of rules of how to be successful are rules you need to follow. That is, until you don’t, and succeed anyway. Everyone starts somewhere and we usually start by attempting to copy someone else’s path to success. Hell, even I did. I went to college and listened to my parents and the collective Failure of the Crowd. I followed the rules, until they stopped making sense to me and I decided to just do what I wanted from that point on. Choose the life you want to lead, even if that means breaking the rules and facing the consequences. Hell, you might even choose to break the law. People do it all the time. People speed, jaywalk, run red lights, even sneak jumbo-sized Hershey’s chocolate bars into their math notebook out of CVS from time to time. You make your decisions after weighing the risks and rewards, and accept whatever happens as just the breaks of the game. C’est la vie.