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a job we have no passion for puts us at risk of living a life we have no passion for.
There are many reasons why these things happen. But I submit to you that one big reason is the tyranny of rules—rules that suggest we “should” do life in a particular way because everyone else seems to be doing it, too:
One of the keys to being extraordinary is knowing what rules to follow and what rules to break. Outside the rules of physics and the rules of law, all other rules are open to questioning.
Ask Descartes
Of course, there’s a darker side to culture: when we get so focused on our rules that we turn them into decrees about how life “should” be
We block our bayesian learning
the world of relative truth. It’s the mental world of ideas, constructs, concepts, models, myths, patterns, and rules that we’ve developed and passed from generation to generation—sometimes for thousands of years. This is where concepts such as marriage, money, religion, and laws reside. This is relative truth because these ideas are true only for a particular culture or tribe. Socialism, democracy, your religion, ideas about education, love, marriage, career, and every other “should” are nothing more than relative truths. They are simply not true for ALL human beings.
Similarly, few people discover how pervasive and powerful the secondary world of our culturescape really is. We are not as independent and freethinking as we’d like to think we are.
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.
Once you understand that the rules aren’t absolute, you can learn to think outside the box and live beyond limits imposed by the culturescape.
