Rules are meant to be Broken!!

In 1911, Rutherford gave the electron theory to the world and his theories were considered as Laws or Rules. Then came Bohr, he challenged his theories.He had the conviction to break established laws and then came the electron theory that we are studying today for which Bohr even got the Nobel prize. He changed the Rule by challenging it, he believed in breaking the rules.

Rules are made so that someone can challenge them. In fact , Rules allow a person to think outside the box. If you are asked to join nine dots with straight lines without lifting your pen, the only way to do that is by going outside the box. But the fact remains that we rarely think of going outside the box. That’s why the theories we have been studying are going on for centuries because no one wants to challenge them. No one wants to break the rules.

Denzel washington, once said in his speech,“Rules are there to be broken.Take risks,professionally.”These rules that I am talking about are not just the rules out there in the world that we have been following but it also includes the rules that we have made for ourselves within our minds to comfort ourselves. Breaking a rule is like breaking a barrier. That Barrier could be anything. An aspiring singer who wants to sing and make it big, but his parents want him to be an engineer. For him, the barrier is to overcome his parent’s ambitions and pursue his own passion.

Whenever I read a book, I always come across one such character who breaks all the social and mental barriers to get his dreams. People around us try to make us feel that we are secured until we are binded by all the rules they have made. Actually they fear us because everyone who breaks a rule and thinks outside the box makes it big.

As Will Smith said in The Pursuit of Happyness ,“Don’t let ever somebody tell you that you can’t do something. People can’t do something so they try to make you feel that you can’t do that either.”That’s what has been happening all around. In colleges, students are not given any creative freedom so that they could explore what they are good at. They are just asked to follow the same curriculum that has been there since ages.But rules do help some people and in fact most of us. It helps because it allows us to hide from challenges.

Rules are actually responsible for many of the atrocities that happen in our society. Honor killing is one such perpetrator’s rules.Superstition,which also evolves from rules,is just another example. The Berlin Wall was also one such Rule that was a guarded concrete barrier that physically and ideologically divided Berlin from 1961 to 1989. People challenged it because it was impacting the trade in Germany. The socialist economy of India until 1991 is also an example of rules that restricted India’s GDP under 3% for more that five decades. It was the rule breaking capabilities of Dr. Manmohan Singh that changed the shape of Indian economy.

If rules were to be followed then there would have been no Denzel Washington, there would have been no Mark Zuckerberg, there would have been no Kerry Washington, there would have been no Octavia Spencer but not only that if rules were to be followed there would have been no Steve Jobs. So, we need to strive for more and striving will lead to rule breaking and that will impact not only our lives but the lives of others and only in a good way.

I really like this one quote, “Learn the rules like a Pro so that you can break them like an artist.”