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I’m so excited to bring you a blog all about how to break the rules and live a dangerous life! The thing is, danger is different for everybody and I asked ChatGPT (the artificial intelligence that’s just started coming to the forefront), all about its ideas on danger and living against the status quo and I thought I would start this blog with my findings.
One of the biggest things that ChatGPT told me was that danger is subjective. And it’s true! I can easily talk from a space of living in the world of privilege, of being in Australia as a white female, able to run my own business and do the things that I do. I have a very different lens with which I get the privilege of looking at the world through. And it’s that lens that I want to break, it’s that lens that I want to challenge and start to think about things differently. So, when I asked ChatGPT, “What is it like to question convention and go against the status quo and how would you describe it?”, it said things like:
- Breaking the mould
- Doing something that’s unconventional or unexpected
- Challenging the norm
- Thinking outside the box
- Colouring outside the lines
- Going against the grain
- Defying convention
- Swimming upstream
- Being a nonconformist
- Taking an unconventional approach
- Being a trailblazer
- Stepping outside of one’s comfort zone
When I consider the way that entrepreneurs and small business owners were taught to do things pre-pandemic, we were told to follow a process. You’ll see it all the time on sales pages…here’s my step by step…this is how it will work. And in all honesty, that’s come from a bro code from bro marketing, where that world, the online marketing space, was dominated by a bunch of wonderfully privileged and intelligent white men.
But what we got to see and experience in the pandemic was a questioning of those rules and step-by-steps that were set up by this system.
In my book, Unrestricted, I’ve often talked about brules. And again, that’s a notion that was set up as well, ‘bullshit rules’. Instead of taking rules on the conventional way and the constrained to traditional thinking way, how could we start to question them? What would it be like? Would that feel dangerous to us and what would be the outcome?
Growing up in Australia and being part of a Defence Force family, my dad is bound by a set of rules. I went to ten different schools, and they were bound by sets of rules also, especially the all girls Catholic school that I started high school at. I was bound by a set of conventional and traditional rules that influenced the way I thought and acted. I then ended up in the Girl Guides and you guessed it…another set of rules! Then, I went into the Air Training Corps. I finally was the one giving and instilling the rules, not questioning where it had come from, what it meant, whether it was right for me as an individual or if it could be done in a better, more interesting, more useful, more innovative way that may create a different result.
And then going through the university system, going through the hospital system as a medical laboratory scientist and working as an employee. Rules, rules, rules. So, of course, if we’re grown up with rules and they have created the boundaries with which we live our lives, there’s a safety net there, which is great. There’s a lot of safety when there’s rules. But there is also a notion that we can’t necessarily break the rules because that would be unsafe and dangerous…right?!
The thing about that is, not all rules are actually there for the benefit of all or the highest benefit of all. Especially in the entrepreneurial world, we’ve started to see that many of these very masculine and systemised sets of rules are creating a really different culture of being able to access information and go to the next level in your business and your life. It’s created a real generation of hustle and burnout for entrepreneurs.
So, what would it look like if we went against the rules? What would it look like if we went with flow?
What would it look like if we changed the way that we honoured our energy, our menstrual cycles, our energy cycles throughout the day, the cycles of the moon, the cycles of astrology, and how we feel? What would it look like if we did things differently?
Now, what it looks like in creating a vision is one thing. The possibility of a spacious schedule, the possibility of more productivity, a possibility of less burnout, less days off, more freedom, more connection within the family unit, and a healthier lifestyle for each individual that works within a company. These have actually all been measured and tested, especially since we’ve come out of the other side of the pandemic.
A lot of really great research from the organisation, Gallup. But the vision for that is very different to the feeling of that. Because the feeling when you ask for an extra day at home, when you get the sense that you need some downtime and time off, when you need to take time off for health reasons or something else, the feeling of going against the rules, swimming upstream, defying the conventional rules that we’ve all been grown up with, that feels dangerous. Just as I learned the rules in all of the different places and spaces I did growing up, we can unlearn the rules. It just takes practice just as much as putting a uniform on to go to school.
It took practice for each of the ten different schools that I went to. The final school I went to for Year 11 and 12 was in Canberra, Australian Capital Territory (ACT) and colleges in the ACT don’t have uniforms. So until Year 10, I was ruled by the rule of getting up in the morning, putting on my uniform, wearing a uniform all day, taking that uniform off at the end of the day and looking after that uniform. It took a little bit of change in Year 11 and 12 to feel what it felt like to not wear a uniform. It felt dangerous not to go to school in a uniform. It felt odd. It felt like when you cross your arms the wrong way.
It feels frustrating when we can’t get used to something straight away. Most of us like to adjust fast when new scenarios or things are thrown our way. But for some of us, we sometimes want to just give up and go back to the old way. Some of us might get curious about why is it so? What would be the benefits and disadvantages of not being able to do that now? It’s that curiosity that I want you to think about.
What are all the internal rules in your everyday life, from the beginning of the day to the end of the day, that could do with bit of a shake up and a bit of questioning? Think about those rules that you can actually unlearn and in doing so, something can be learned.
My invitation to you is to brainstorm what inspired action you could take to change the way that you have been doing things, to do things differently. What is the one thing that you could do to truly feel dangerous but not cause yourself danger or anyone else, but truly feel dangerous? To do things differently, to be the trailblazer, to defy convention, to think outside the box and colour outside the lines and break the mould, change it up and see what could be done differently.
I think the more of us that start to question, to get curious, the more that have a conversation around this, the more ripple effects we have of innovation, of creativity, of things that have never been done before coming to light.
I think with the advent of things like ChatGPT, we have the opportunity to get the menial tasks that we have just been following rules by to be done by somebody else. And then a massive opening for creativity comes in and a massive opening for time and choice and freedom and adventures.
If you got something out of this blog or you know that somebody else will, please share it.
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