Hey everyone, it's Malcolm Gladwell here, your guest host for the week.

Welcome to Radio Headspace and to Wednesday.

As you know, this week is all about performance.

Today I'm going to talk about a subject that scares a lot of people, breaking the rules.

Don't get me wrong, rules are great to keep us safe and have their place, but a lot of

innovation can happen when we challenge the status quo.

And I'll talk about a friend who helped open my eyes to the beauty of breaking and bending

the rules and how that changed my perception of the world.

And rules have two functions. One, version of rules are what I would call necessary rules.

When you see a red light you stop, and that's a rule that actually allows for the safe

and free movement of people throughout the world.

There's another set of rules though that are simply about the codification of norms,

that simply describe how we think people ought to behave.

That second category of rules can be highly subjective and can be based on assumptions

that don't make sense in a new and modern world.

And what innovators very often are are people who question that, who say, wait a minute,

that thing that we thought of as being the first kind of rule, a kind of necessary rule,

isn't a necessary rule, it's just a codification of a norm and we'd be better off without

it.

And I'd encourage to go ahead and break that rule.

One of the first great rule breakers I met in my life was the guy named Terry Martin,

in my little town in Little High School in Southwestern Ontario.

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