The Three Rules You’ll Never Break
You don’t win by breaking rules. You win by making the ones you want to keep.
Breaking other people’s rules can be satisfying. Fun, even. Sometimes we break the rules to find success. But all too often, we break our own rules. Not because we have to, but because we have bad rules.
We’re not really born rule-breakers. Our minds crave order — we constantly make new sense of the world we see and experience, judge it based on our experiences and expectations. The alternative is insanity, which isn’t an appealing solution. But why do we make bad rules for ourselves? And how can we know which ones are good?
For this exercise, we look to Calvinball, the game envisioned by Bill Watterson in his comic strip Calvin and Hobbes. It is a game with exactly one permanent rule: you never play Calvinball the same way twice.
That’s the only starting point. New rules and scoring systems and win conditions are constantly created turn by turn as the game progresses. Watterson created the game as Calvin’s response to the arbitrary structure of organized sports. Even when the protagonists attempt to play football, the game quickly devolves into a heated Calvinball match. As Calvin himself remarks:
As insane and bizarre as Calvinball can become, with the scores unclear and the goal uncertain, the characters never break the central rule of the game — the one they made themselves. And that’s the way life should be too.
The biggest reason we like rule-breaking is because most rules are bad rules or don’t really exist. If you had a good rule for life — a rule that everyone could play by, a rule that made the game of life fun and challenging and exciting — you wouldn’t try to change it. A good rule, as I define it, is one that you can always follow and never want to break.
Now I’m going to give an example of a bad rule — one I want you to break.
Your Buckets Are Bad
You may have heard about the framework of “health, wealth, and relationships” — three buckets you can slowly fill with your experiences and investments. Everything you do should contribute in some way towards maximizing these goals. As you fill these buckets, your life grows fuller and fuller as well, maximizing itself, until (I suppose) it swells to a most impressive size and casts a dark, imposing shadow on all other lives that surround it, which now must cower in awe at your super-full life.
Okay, I’ve made that rule sound ridiculous. But it’s a bad rule, and it comes with bad metrics. A metric is whatever measure we use to keep score for ourselves. In soccer, the metric is most goals scored. In golf, it’s least strokes used. In Calvinball — well, who knows?
But remember, life is Calvinball. The life rulebook — if you have a copy, please email it to me — doesn’t come with metrics. Someone has to create them for us, or we have to create them for ourselves.
In this case, health, wealth, and relationships are bad metrics because they are outside of your control. Human bodies are preprogrammed to weaken and die — our health is fleeting and often vanishes in a heartbeat. Our wealth is accumulated and lost according to luck and the winds of economic change, and many rules for acquiring wealth are written by the wealthy or the cruel. Our relationships change because other people change — they change their goals, they change cities, they leave us or wish they had. Taking these metrics for ourselves, we often feel helpless, conflicted, or upset, because other people or nature or bad luck can take away our points. These are not fair rules.
This is the rule I want you to break. These are the metrics I want you to reject. Because they won’t make you happy.
Life isn’t soccer. Just because you stopped trying to shoot directly towards these goals doesn’t mean you stopped playing. I’m going to give you new rules. New goals to aim for. New metrics to keep score with. Metrics you can control completely.
1. Truth
There is no metric more essential than truth. You must be honest with yourself about your own beliefs, intentions, and desires. You must always seek to understand the beliefs, intentions, and desires of others. You must discover exactly how the world came to be the way it is, and ask yourself honestly how you wish it would become.
Every day you should wake up hoping to understand yourself and others more fully, and every day you should sleep feeling as though you moved closer to the truth. This will give you a sense of continual progress.
Pursuing this goal is more about rejecting what is false than it is identifying any one great truth. If you can ever remove a prejudice, practice empathy, or observe the world from a new perspective, you can dispel a thousand misconceptions and approach truth.
Michelangelo once stated, “every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.” The world often appears to us as a block of stone — opaque, unchangeable, at times ugly or difficult to move. In pursuing honesty, we chip away at the small or big lies we tell to ourselves and others and attempt to reveal the statue in the stone. And once you chip away a lie, you never try to glue it back on.
So how do you really feel about your family? Why are you really pursuing this friendship? What does this person really want from you, or from the world? Are you sure? Look for truthful answers to all your questions — and do not be afraid to approach others seeking their opinions. Sometimes people are only waiting to be asked.
2. Time
Every day you should wake up intending to dedicate as much time to your pursuit of truth as possible, and every day you should sleep feeling as though you did so.
It is of course impossible, even for monks, to spend the entirety of the day pursuing truth. We must feed ourselves so we do not starve, perform tasks we do not like, tolerate people we do not enjoy, and struggle at things we do not feel we can accomplish.
But as you do these things, you must be mindful and honest. What is it about this task that we do not like? What is it about this person we find so disagreeable? Why do we feel as though this struggle is unwinnable? Is there another way? You may find that the negative emotions you often feel can be eased by reframing even unpleasant activities as positive steps towards your ultimate goal of pursuing truth. You will sleep better that night knowing you are closer to understanding your own assumptions and emotions.
Do not allow your time to be compromised by your negative habits. Even if you’re not meditating in a dark room or backpacking through Europe, you can be making progress.
3. Tenacity
Every day you should wake up unwilling to compromise in your pursuit of truth, and every day you should sleep feeling as though you never compromised.
I have been describing to you internal experiences. No one can prevent you from thinking about your interactions or your beliefs more critically or mindfully, even as your health fails or your home’s value falls underwater or your friends betray you. Tenacity is the ability to continue committing your time towards pursuing truth regardless of outside pressures.
Be honest with yourself about which pressures often force you to compromise. Is there someone negative in your life you cannot be honest with for fear of their response? Do you eat or drink in a manner that makes you feel lazy or unaccountable? Do you lie to yourself because it’s easier to believe you’ve already found the truth? Know why you compromise and refuse the temptation — with these metrics, you are always in control.
Tenacious pursuit of the truth takes time. In fact, it takes a lifetime. It does not end. You do not retire at age 40 and start over on a sailboat. Every day you seek to question and to understand, chipping away at your block of stone, searching for the beauty you know is there, unrevealed. That’s the only rule.
Which brings me back to Calvinball.
Calvinball is a great game because it has one simple, definitive rule that no one wants to change — a fun, challenging, exciting rule that everyone can play by. Now your life has rules like that as well.
So forget the other metrics. Maximize your truth. Maximize your time. Maximize your tenacity and always fight to play by your rule. And when you succeed at your life, maybe others will learn to play by your rules too.
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