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June 15 - September 23, 2021
there can be beauty in the wilder ride of an unrestricted life.
quit following the socially approved rules for how life is supposed to work.
People sometimes have to take jobs they dislike in order to make ends meet.
One of the keys to being extraordinary is knowing what rules to follow and what rules to break.
Our language shapes what we “see.”
Language became the building blocks to culture.
A fish is the last to discover water because it’s been swimming in it all its life.
The world of absolute truth is fact-based. The world of the culturescape is opinion-based and agreement-based. Yet even though it exists solely in our heads, it is very, very real.
We create and receive these constructs. We transmit them from generation to generation. They can be incredibly empowering or completely restrictive.
Much of what you think is true is all in your head.
Realizing that the world you’re living in exists inside your head puts you in the driver’s seat.
the shift from slow, steady growth to irregular, up-and-down growth.
What if life was not meant to be safe? Instead, what if it was meant to be a beautiful joyride, with ups and downs as we take off the training wheels of the culturescape and try out things outside what is practical or realistic?
What if we accepted that things will go wrong—but that this is simply part of life’s beautiful unfolding and that even the biggest failures can have withi...
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in this day and age, we no longer need to fear tigers by the riverbank. Safety is overrated; taking risks is much less likely to kill us than ever before, and that means that playing it safe is more likely just holding us back ...
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The common thread between every extraordinary individual we’ll talk about in this book is that they all questioned their culturescape.
Extraordinary minds are good at seeing the culturescape and are able to selectively choose the rules and conditions to follow versus those to question or ignore.
Therefore, they tend to take the path less traveled and innovate on the idea of what it means to truly live.
“I have a high tolerance for pain.”
While breaking away from the rules of the culturescape may indeed feel scary, I’ve often noticed a repeated pattern. The dips contain amazing learnings and wisdom that lead to sharper rises in the quality of life afterward.
Every crappy experience I’ve had—from having my heart broken, to almost having to leave my own company due to a conflict with a business partner, to depression and staring down gaping dark holes of the mind—led to some small-but-significant insight or awakening that boosted the quality of my life and made me stronger. I now welcome these dips with an inner delight: Wow, this sucks! I can’t wait to see what I’m going to learn here!
We try to avoid the dips by sticking to the passed-down rules of the culturescape, only to wake up one day wondering how we missed out on so much.
Life has a way of taking care of you no matter how dark it can sometimes feel—I promise.
“I constantly get out of my comfort zone. Once you push yourself into something new, a whole new world of opportunities opens up. But you might get hurt. But amazingly when you heal—you are somewhere you’ve never been.”
You can be 12 or 80—it’s never too late to question the rules and step out of your comfort zone.
It all starts with questioning the accepted rules of the culturescape.
If you can’t win, change the rules. If you can’t change the rules, ignore them.
before you can challenge the rules of the culturescape, you have to identify the limiting rules that might be holding you back.
Much of How the World Runs Is Based on Bulls**t Rules Passed Down from Generation to Generation
many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view.
Human beings are far less rational than we think. Many ideas we hold dear and cling to as “truth” fall apart under close inspection.
Just as disease is spread by contagion from host to victim, so ideas are spread in the same way. We often take on ideas not through rational choice but through “social contagion”—the act of an idea spreading from mind to mind without due questioning.
When we are unsure of how to react to a stimulus or a situation, these theories suggest that we actively look to others for guidance and consciously imitate them.
The evidence shows that we inherit and transmit behaviours, emotions, beliefs, and religions not through rational choice but contagion.
We think we’re making a rational decision. But often, the decision has little to do with rationality and more to do with ideas our family, culture, and peers have approved.
Blindly following may be efficient, but it’s not always smart.
I’m not advocating that you instantly reject all the rules you’ve ever followed, but you must question your rules constantly in order to live by the code that is most authentic to your goals and needs.
“My family/culture/people have always done it this way” is not an acceptable argument.
Our politics, our education and work models, our traditions and culture, and even our religions all contain Brules that are best discarded.
studies have shown that a college education really doesn’t guarantee success.
And does a college degree guarantee high performance on the job? Not necessarily.
college degrees aren’t as important as they once were.
“When you look at people who don’t go to school and make their way in the world, those are exceptional human beings. And we should do everything we can to find those people.”
I’ve personally interviewed and hired more than 1,000 people for my companies over the years, and I’ve simply stopped looking at college grades or even at the college an applicant graduated from. I’ve simply found them to have no correlation with an employee’s success.
College degrees as a path to a successful career may thus be nothing more than a mass societal Brule that’s fading away quickly. This is not to say that going to college is unnecessary—my life at college was one of the best memories and growth experiences I’ve ever had. But little of that had to do with my actual degree or what I was studying.
At first I feared following my heart because I felt I would cause great disappointment for those I loved. But I realized that with a huge life decision such as this, I shouldn’t do something to make someone else happy that would make me so unhappy.
Do you remember the day you chose your religion?
And for many, the desire to belong to a family or tribe overrides our rational decision-making process and gets us to adopt beliefs that may be highly damaging.
While religion can have immense beauty, it can also have immense dogma that causes guilt, shame, and fear-based worldviews.
I believe that religion was necessary for human evolution, helping us develop guidelines for good moral conduct and cooperation within the tribe hundreds and thousands of years ago. But today, as humanity is more connected than ever and many of us have access to the various wisdom and spiritual traditions of the world, the idea of adhering to a singular religion might be obsolete.
