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Just because you studied marketing in college doesn’t mean you can’t throw it all away to write comic books.
Just because you didn’t go to college doesn’t mean you can’t start a marketing company.
Just because good girls aren’t supposed to code and real men aren’t supposed to paint and folks who get into law school aren’t supposed to drop out (all things that people I know have said) doesn’t mean you can’t do all of those things.
Here’s something that I know. The rules suck. The rules are dumb. The rules are designed by people who had a clear agenda. The rules are there to keep everyone in nice, ordered little boxes. But none of us have to listen to them.
Life is meant to be creative. It’s meant to be lived creatively. It’s meant to be played with and experimented with and enjoyed, and the rules state the opposite.
The rules want you to go to primary school and learn to say Yes and go to high school and learn never to say No and then go to college and learn to say whatever the hell you need in order to get a job. Because the rules say you need that job because you need to buy a house. Because the rules say you need to spend 50 years paying off that house…
The rules just keep us in line, and they prevent us from getting wild and really living. That’s just good enough.
If I had listened to the rules when they were laid down for me, I wouldn’t have dropped out of college twice, started a band, toured the world, written a punk rock Zine, met a long list of VCs, blew my chances at 3 startups, created a blog that’s reached over a million people, started a creative agency, learned to paint or worked in child care.
If I had listened to the rules, I wouldn’t be who I am today.
The good news is, nobody has to listen to the rules. They don’t have to define us.
We can play the game our way.
And win or lose, that’s the better path.
[This post by Jon Westenberg first appeared on Medium and has been reproduced with permission.]
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