Today I get to share with you a guest post from my friend Jonathan!

Jonathan Malm is a creative entrepreneur and writer. He is the author of Created for More, a 30-day devotional to help you develop a more creative mind. You’ll find him in San Antonio, Texas, roasting his own coffee beans and enjoying life with his Argentine wife, Carolina.

I have a friend I call a travel hacker.

He always seems to get free airline flights or free nights in hotel rooms. I’m not entirely sure how he does it, but I always have such hilarious conversations with him.

He says things like, “My wife and I are staying in a hotel room downtown tonight. There’s no special reason, but we heard the hotel chain is giving away tons of points if you stay a certain amount of nights in their hotels this month. We’ve done the math and realized it was worth the cost for future free nights to visit random hotels and stay there instead of sleeping at home.”

This is what I would call the ultimate form of creativity. This is what I’d call breaking the rules.

Now, you’ll notice, he didn’t do anything wrong in order to get these free nights. There’s nothing illegal about what he’s doing. But he has learned to exploit the rules for his own purposes. People do the same thing with couponing or with credit cards. They get extremely creative.

The reason I call it breaking the rules is because people don’t think it’s possible to do things like that. They’ve made a “rule” in their head that says they can’t.

My brother broke one of these rules when he started his organization,Summit Leaders. He wanted to create an adventure leadership conference, and he wanted to ask a well-known church leader to be his first speaker at this event.

 

Instead of reaching out to the church secretary and going through the “proper channels” (or obeying the rules), he guessed the guy’s email address and got straight to him. He agreed to speak and the success of the organization continues today.

He broke a “rule” that wasn’t actually a rule.

You see; we all create rules in our heads. We create a set of truths or lines that we’re afraid to cross. But I’ve found breaking these “rules” is absolutely crucial for reaching your creative potential.

 

Most of these truths are merely our own inventions. They’re simply creative blocks we’ve set up for ourselves.

But they don’t need to hold us back.

What rules have you created for yourself that you need to break?

·      Maybe you need to self-publish a book instead of assuming you need a publisher to make it happen.

·      Maybe you need to reach out to a leader at well-known church and ask for their opinion or help with your ministry.

·      Maybe you need to approach a volunteer and ask them to make a larger commitment.

·      Maybe that item you’ve been dreading on your to-do list doesn’t actually need to get done.

These are all simple rules. But breaking them can mean a profound impact on your creative life.

I’d love to hear your thoughts. What rules are you questioning today? How do you plan to break “rules” in your life?