Courtney’s Thoughts
I am a rule breaker from way back. Just ask my mother. I liked to push the envelope, to see how far I could get. This is likely the reason my father once removed my bedroom door from its hinges. You can’t slam a door if you don’t have a door.
We are programmed from an early age to follow the rules. Grow up. Get a job. Get married. Buy a house. Have kids. Start saving for retirement. Work more. Earn more. Do more.
So yes, as Barry has alluded to, one self-imposed rule that I try to maintain is leaving the office between 4:30 and 5 p.m. almost every day – even if I haven’t crossed everything off my list. Regardless of what time my day started and even though I’ll probably crack open my laptop later that night.
I do it on purpose because my team is watching. The people I lead need to know that boundaries matter. Family matters. Dinner together matters. Walking the dog matters. Getting to the soccer game matters. We’ve somehow convinced ourselves that staying late is a sign of commitment. Sometimes it isn’t. The goal isn’t to work more hours. The goal is to make the hours work harder.
And that is why I love this current chapter of my life. I am making the rules. And here’s the best part: You get to break your own rules.
In fact, some of the happiest people I’ve ever known have done exactly that.
Like my friend Adam.
By every traditional measure, Adam had done everything “right.” He built a successful career, was an entrepreneur, earned the titles and the paycheck. Bought the house. Put in a pool. Life was solid.
Then one day, he told me about sitting around his kitchen table with his family. As they talked about what came next, he realized something had changed. He didn’t want the next promotion. He didn’t want another rung on the ladder. He wanted to be the community guy again.
He wanted to wake up every morning knowing his work made someone’s life a little better. So, he broke one of society’s biggest rules. He changed course and took a pay cut to join me in working at Bluffton Self Help.
People spend decades chasing the biggest salary, convinced that’s how the story is supposed to end.
Adam chose something different. He chose purpose over prestige. Service over status. Impact over income.
In a cruel twist of fate, he didn’t get nearly enough time to write that final chapter.
But maybe that’s exactly why it deserves to be remembered.
Adam reminded all of us that success isn’t measured by what’s printed on your business card or deposited into your bank account. It’s measured by the lives you touch, the people who miss you when you’re gone, and the legacy you leave behind.
Adam broke the rules because he had figured out something many people never do: Life is simply too short to spend it climbing someone else’s ladder when your heart is calling you somewhere else.
I can’t think of a better reminder that sometimes the rules worth breaking are the ones we’ve accepted without ever stopping to ask whether they were ours to begin with.
Adam broke the rules because he had figured out something many people never do: Life is simply too short to spend it climbing someone else’s ladder when your heart is calling you somewhere else.
Barry’s Thoughts:
A while back, Courtney posted something to Facebook about a rule she follows where she leaves the office between 4:30 and 5 p.m. every day, whether there’s still work to do or not. It’s an admirable rule, even if it’s an obvious cover for her to be the giant slacker we all know her to be.*
Myself, I have a little more complicated relationship with rules. As I’ve mentioned in this space before, I was granted a one-month vacation from high school after our SRO found a BB gun in my car. That vacation came about, school officials assured me, because of the then-recently enacted Safety in America’s Schools act, which required expulsion for any student caught with a firearm.
The thing is, it wasn’t a firearm. That’s not just my opinion. That is literally what the letter I later received from the President of the United States said. That rule never applied to my situation, and school officials knew it. It was just the easiest way for them to feel like they’d done something to address the serious problem of students with broken toys in their cars.
That incident forever changed the way I looked at rules. A lot of them exist just to make the people in charge feel like they’ve done something. It’s why I’ll always ignore a sign for 15-minute parking. No one’s enforcing that rule, and it impacts no one if it’s broken. It’s just words on paper so someone can say they’re helping improve parking. Thus, it’s only a rule for those compelled to follow it.
But the greatest joy in life is being the reason those rules exist. If you’d ever been to the Bluffton Fourth of July fireworks back when they were at the high school football field, you might have noticed a rule against bringing a grill. That rule wasn’t there the first year of the event, probably because they didn’t think anyone would be dumb enough to drag a grill out onto the football field.
I am being snarkly facetious here. Courtney gets up at zero dark thirty to do CrossFit before helping lift up the most vulnerable in our community and is overall a disgustingly productive human being. Thankfully she’ll never read this far into my column, so I’m free to pay backhanded compliments.
I’m proud to say, I was that dumb. And the next year, there was a rule against it. Someone has to push against the status quo – it’s the only way we establish what rules are worth setting down on paper. Someone needs to be at the vanguard of tiny little rebellions, so we know where the lines are drawn. When I see a sign reading “No Oreos in the library,” I wave a tiny salute to the chocoholic who made that rule necessary.
I’m not saying you should break literally all the rules. A lot of them were written for a reason. Thou shalt not kill, that’s a great rule. Don’t drink and drive – that’s self-explanatory. Treat others as you would want to be treated – it’s the Golden Rule for a reason.
But the rest of them? There’s always wiggle room. If breaking a rule harms no one, but annoys the person who decided they needed to be in charge of rules, I say be a rebel. Cook a few hot dogs in a football field, eat an Oreo over a good book, overstay your welcome at the parking spot for a few more minutes.
Sometimes it makes life worth living to know you’re breaking the rules.