When Breaking the Rules is the Coolest Thing in the World

I was a total nightmare when I was a kid. I remember my first day in school, they just started to forbid teachers from physically hit and verbally abuse children. It was the late 80s.

In my very first class, I had an old teacher that was complaining the entire time about how intensely she disliked those new rules. She was trying to explain that hitting children is always for their own good, and that the best way to keep children in line was a good ol' fashion beat down.

To her, that use of violence was an absolute necessity to maintain order and keep children obedient.

I’ve heard that school was bad, but not that bad!

After she was done complaining about that new pesky “no-violence against kids” policy, she wanted to try a new way of control and so she started recounting all kinds of scary tales about the devil and his luciferous plans to ship us all to the blazing flames of hell.

She was threatening us that if we don’t do as she said, if we don’t respect authority figures then we will be sent to a bone chilling place full of fire, and burning and screaming…

Wait, all of that for a fucking a chewing gum?

Anywho, she kept talking about how the devil was bad and scary and evil… He was a bit of pyromaniac too. She told us that he lies, and deceives and he kills and he steals and that sometimes, he likes to stab people with a fork.

So either we do exactly as she says, or else.. The furnace.

And then she told us to do the homework.

Yeah, right! I’ll take my chances with the pyromaniac.

I didn’t do my homework. I figured I’ll just keep my book at home and tell her that I did in fact do the homework, but just happened to forget my book at home.

Can’t go wrong, right?

Next day, I wake up put my stuff in my backpack, purposely leave the homework notebook out according to the plan. And then I went to school, feeling like the smartest kid in the world.

Now I’m sitting in class, and as expected the teacher started asking about that stupid homework.

What I didn’t expect on the other hand, is that she was going desk to desk checking everybody’s homework. This is worse than those asylum movies where the evil nurse checks everybody’s mouths to make sure everyone got their daily dose of mind-numbing substances.

That was way less scary in my head. I thought to myself as she was getting closer.

When she arrived in front of me, I almost peed my pants. I just started to pretend that I was genuinely searching in my little backpack for that goddamned stupid notebook. I was more stalling than anything else really, while trying to come up with something… And then all of the sudden she yelled at me:

― “You forgot it didn’t you?”

Click! Magic ideas come from the most unexpected things.

― No I didn’t!

― Then where is it?

― The Devil took it!

The whole class erupted in laughter.

― The devil doesn’t exist! She screamed at me.

― No? I can’t wait to tell my parents the good news! The devil doesn’t exist? There is no hell..

She panicked. Again, the whole class laughing.

― No, that’s not what I meant!

She tried to take a step back because otherwise she would lose her best tool. The last thing she probably wanted is to lose her ability to scare innocent little kids with violent threats of eternal damnation if they don’t do what she says.

― That’s not what I meant, he does exist but he doesn’t steal, he doesn’t do these things.

― So he’s a good guy?

The kid next to me can’t stop laughing, and so are a few others. So she had no choice but to let it go, and I’ve got away scott free.

Well, that went ok.

Shortly thereafter, she went back to those multi-dimensional scary stories, those hair-raising, blood-curling, pants-pooping tales from the crypt.

Only this time, she has changed her strategy. She was saying that Satan was not acting in the physical world precisely, so he cannot steal our notebooks. She said while giving me that look like I stole her candy or something like that.

She was mainly explaining that Satan was smart, and cunning and deceiving and that he tricks you into disobeying your teacher and the rest of authority figures.

She even grabbed some weird book with goofy illustrations that shows shadowing figures being toasted in the scorching flames of hell. And then she was showing us a picture of Lucifer and his fork, being beaten by his older brother the Arch-angel Michael before he was thrown in the bottomless hole.

The picture looks like this:

She walks around the classroom to make sure that we all could see the picture in its entire grandeur. Doing so while explaining how Satan was the smarter being since creation.

I don’t know, he seems pretty stupid to me.

Now all eyes on me, everybody waiting for what I was gonna say next.

The teacher’s face immediately changed, she dropped the book on my table, crossed her arms, probably disagreeing already with whatever was coming out of my mouth.

I’m sorry to say this but… You don’t bring a fork to a sword fight.

The entire class exploded in laughter. That laughter was even blurring the screams of the teacher, while an epiphany landed on me.

This is my audience.

I have no business pleasing authority figures that just want to force us to obey whatever arbitrary rules that were passed on to them by people who were not very bright in the first place.

Life changes all the time, you don’t have to “conserve” everything that you see, what woks stays and what doesn’t you change until you find what makes you in harmony with yourself, what makes you, you.

Unfortunately, being you isn’t always easy. In fact most established systems in history acted as a gate-keeper that try to shield people from becoming the free version of themselves.

Whether it’s a woman who fell in love with a black man in the past, or an artist that wants to follow his dreams and drop of that fancy law school that was sucking the life out of him, they all sooner or later rebelled.

They won’t go back in history as rebels, but they were rebels nonetheless. Everybody has to face that choice in their lives. You either have to find a way to achieve your goals even if those goals were never attempted before. Or you can blame the dusky skies for being born in the wrong time in the wrong place.

Sometimes the obstacles are so great that even after you start your journey with a substantial success, people will still trying to bring you down anyways. Take bitcoin for example, not only it was a pipe dream for five years straight, but it was declared dead over a 100 times already. The end of Bitcoin, rivers of digital ink has been spent on mistaken obituaries.

The truth however, is that it’s still around and kicking.

In fact, any visionary in human history has probably faced the same in their lives, even today. Examples are many, Snapchat, to Airbnb.. They were all pipe dreams. Apparently Blockbuster even refused to buy Netflix for an extremely small amount because they refused to accept that something that has never been done before could work in ‘real life’.

So let’s be honest here, anything that has never been done before is guaranteed to have a strong resistance from people who fear change. Anything new can be scary for some people, and that fact will never change. So maybe it’s a better use of time and energy to work around that fact.

It’s surprising how many times I received this type of message on Facebook: “I saw you were on steemit, I looked into it and it’s a scam. You won’t be able to withdraw a single dime from it”

It’s like the two of us come from totally different planets.

The truth is, if you come up with any new disruptive invention then you are bound to receive all kinds of let’s call it “aggressive resistance” from some people. Some will call it a scam, some will keep reminding you that it will never work, and some will just keep giving premonitions about your imminent demise. The eternal prelude to an apocalypse drama.

But you shouldn’t give those voices too much time or else, you’ll never have time to improve your product. As the old wise Chinese proverb goes:

“You should never underestimate the relentless nature of trolls”

Actually, it wasn’t a Chinese proverb, it was a drunk guy in the bar last week.

Can’t argue the wisdom part though.

Bottom line, you shouldn’t play their game. Nothing good will ever come from arguing with someone who has fear as a motivating factor, and who already have made up their mind anyways.

You shouldn’t play their game, nothing uplifting and inspirational will come from there. All that you will find is all sorts of irrational exaggerations, complaining, slandering…Etc.

I’ve seen that game, that game sucks.

As Mark Twain once said: “Don’t argue with stupid people, they will drag you down to their level and beat you with their experience”.

Life sometimes forces you to be a rebel, and it’s not a bad thing. It could be at your first day of school or it could be at the eve of launching a revolutionary disruptive product. And when that time comes, I want you to know that sometimes the best way to be a rebel is not to resist, but it’s to play the game on an entirely different board.

It’s like that scene from Supernatural in a conversation between Crowley and Abbadon:

“That’s where you’re wrong and that’s why you’re going to lose.

You think this is a war, this is about hearts and minds.”

“Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.” ― Rob Siltanen

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