The Self-Reliant Entrepreneur

January 25Exceptions to Every Rule

History jeers at the attempts of physiologists to bind great original laws by the forms which flow from them. They make a rule; they say from observation what can and cannot be. In vain! Nature provides exceptions to every rule. She sends women to battle, and sets Hercules spinning; she enables women to bear immense burdens, cold, and frost; she enables the man, who feels maternal love, to nourish his infant like a mother.

Margaret Fuller—Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845)

In his essay “Education,” Ralph Waldo Emerson stated that Nature loves analogies, but not repetitions. Most innovation is created by breaking the rules rather than repeating the past.

In the simplest sense, entrepreneurs are often rule breakers, but not in the criminal sense. They are often the first to see the unjust, or at least unnecessary, in even the simplest of rules—and from there they innovate.

But innovation does not come from copying; it comes from collecting analogies in the context you find yourself and rearranging how we do it here.

Innovation benefits from analogies, but not from repetitions.

Challenge Question

1. How can you be the exception to the rule today?