THE RULES TO BREAK

By the time The Rules of Love was published I was getting a lot of messages from younger readers, many in their early to mid-teens, or still at school or university. I didn’t particularly want to put together a book of Rules that were exclusive to this age group, and in any case that would be difficult because – as these readers were telling me – the Rules apply across all age groups. However, these readers were finding many of the books somewhat premature from their viewpoint, such as The Rules of Management, or Parenting, and I did want to give them something broader that would be as relevant to them as to everyone else.

I’d long been collecting traditional rules which my experience told me didn’t actually work, or not reliably – what I thought of as rules to break. You know, things like ‘give as good as you get’ or ‘look after number one’. Collecting these together would be useful to all Rules players and would be really relevant to those younger readers. After all, it takes time – sometimes a lifetime – to build the confidence to follow your own path against the conventional advice. So a book that showed, from real life observation, that it’s often better to ignore these so-called pieces of wisdom would really play to these readers along with everyone else.

I would just say that it wasn’t difficult to come up with a whole book of these traditional words of sage advice. They’re not necessarily rules that should be broken every time, but they are rules that shouldn’t be followed blindly because they only apply some of the time. You might argue – certainly I would argue – that in that case they’re not actually rules. Suggestions maybe.

When I came to assemble these Rules to break, they didn’t seem to group particularly together. I could perhaps have shoehorned them into rough groups, but I couldn’t see the point of that if it wasn’t going to add anything helpful. So this is the only Rules book without sections. Just a hundred Rules not to follow without thinking twice.18

Since the book is called The Rules to Break each of the 100 chapters is headed up with the rule to break – and ends with the better Rule to follow. However, that would be quite confusing here, as none of the other sections of this book work on that basis. So for our purposes here I’ve titled the top ten Rules from the book with the actual Rule that works.

There was a huge spread of Rules from this book that were nominated. Top votes went to ‘Success is what you say it is’ and ‘Keep the moral high ground’. Keeping the moral high ground gets a mention in The Rules of Life too, and is one of those Rules that I find myself referring to frequently. It’s such an essential one for smoothing one’s passage through life. One I put a lot of effort into passing on to my kids too.