Live Inside The Box

There are rules and laws everywhere we look. Specifically, there are three places from which rules come; nature, physics and man. You definitely can't break the rules of nature and physics. So why do people always think they can break the rules of man? Of course, the rules of man are not as fixed and unchangeable as the laws of nature and physics, but they're still mighty hard to change. It's to one's advantage, therefore, to work within the laws of man. I will explain more on this later, but first, let's examine some great examples of rules in nature and physics.

In nature, the small are hunted and the large get away unscathed. This is a basic rule in nature. Size matters and it matters greatly. Lions never attack elephants because elephants are huge! They sometimes attack water buffalo, however, although water buffalo sometimes win and sometimes lose. The law here is that size matters; it's something that can't be changed. Animals naturally evolved to deal with this law in their own way; animals who can't evolve to be large because of lack of food supply evolved other things. Maybe their skin became tougher or maybe they can run faster - but the basic fact remains that size matters. It is an unchangeable law.

In physics, too, the rules are unchangeable. You cannot deny the pull of gravity, can you? Birds can in a way, however. Birds are not really denying the pull of gravity; what they're doing is actually taking the law of gravity and the law of matter density and using those things to their advantage. (Okay, they are not doing it - they were born with it.) In effect, they're not playing with gravity at all, because gravity still affects them equally. What they're playing on is being lighter than air. When birds flap their wings, they're able to float on air like a duck floats on water. In effect, the birds are lighter than the air that fills the sky! Gravity always pulls the heavier things to the bottom, so by becoming lighter than air, birds are able to fly. And humans obviously learned from birds, since we can fly in airplanes.

The basic concept of this post is just that simple; you shouldn't try to break the rules as is oft said. What you need to do is to understand the rules and be able to use them to your advantage. (Well, not if you live in a dictatorship with crazy rules - then, it is your duty to break the rules!) In a free society such as ours, in order to get what you want (and I suspect that one of the things is money), you've got to really understand the rules and be able to use them to your advantage. It's just like how birds don't break the rule of gravity - they instead use those rules to their advantage and become lighter than air. It's the same in society; society rewards those who do certain things that are within the rules.

I'm not at all saying not to think creatively, but after all, we live in society with other people and all the things we think of as success have to do with other people. To give you an idea of our ideas of success having to do with people, answer for yourself these few questions: Would you rather have a magnificent house in the middle of the desert, or in a great city? Would you rather have a billion dollars, or a billion sea turtles? Would you rather have many friends, or many cats? After answering for yourself these questions and asking of yourself even more, I'm sure that you'll see that we live in society and it's a major part of who we are (no matter how much we deny it).

So... your mission is to go out there and understand the rules of society. Use those rules to your advantage; do what other people aren't doing and you'll see different results. But, you still want what society has to offer, so you must use society's rules. Live inside the box!