Why rules are like noses

Whenever I can, I like to quote the A-Team. 

Some people like to quote Einstein. Others think Mark Twain is the business. For me, it’s very hard to go past the wisdom of B.A. Baracus (Mr T’s character from the A-Team). 

He says, “rules are like noses, they are meant to be broken.” See what I mean … genius. 

My wife Trish says that I have “just the right amount of dodginess,” which I think means an appropriate disrespect for rules and authority. 

I think the best rules to break (or to question, at least) are the unwritten, unspoken rules about how we live our lives. The big ones. Where we should live, how we should work, when we should work, et cetera. 

There is an unspoken rule that we should work at least between 9 and 5, Monday to Friday, most weeks in the year. I speak to a lot of people who have left the corporate world to launch their own practices but who still feel guilty if they are not working during these hours.

I love getting my work done in the morning, and then catching a movie on my own in the afternoon (although admittedly that used to happen a bit more when I lived in Fitzroy and didn’t have kids). I did that very consciously as part of retraining myself that I didn’t have to be working from 9 – 5. 

Living a conscious life (or doing life-by-design as we say at Thought Leaders) means questioning the default way of doing life. 

I love Tim Ferris’s Four-Hour Work Week. Not because I want to work four hours a week, or live like he does, but for the model he gives of testing all the basic assumptions we live by.