Meet Your Community | Break a Rule Promise & Success Path | The Hidden Reason You Laugh at Dave Barry | Would You Buy This?

Break a Rule Newsletter #4

Hello Rule Breakers!

I hope your long weekend was full of unconventional refueling and fun.

I’m here to fulfill my promise to every Break a Rule subscriber.

To help you take one new intelligent risk this week.

More on this in the newsletter, but first.

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Meet Your Community

I wanted to take a minute to let you know that as a subscriber you’re surrounded by some seriously talented and growth-focused pros.

Break a Rule launched a few months ago and I’ve made sign-up available to all guests of my corporate speaking gigs in the last few months.

So far, that’s 633 subscribers which includes professionals who are associated with:

Gambino Realtors - Rockford, Illinois.

Independent Insurance Agents of Houston - Houston, TX obviously

Aya Healthcare - A travel nursing agency based in San Diego, Ca.

Credit Union West - Based in Arizona.

Maine Asphalt Pavement Association - Augusta, Maine

Pacific Interstate Insurance Brokers - Eldorado Hills, CA

Rocky Mountain Association for Financial Professionals - Littleton, CO

Merrill Gardens Senior Living - Seattle, WA

Additionally, I’ve made some incredible friends from an online writing course that I initially took in the fall and I just repeated.

So some new subscribers are coming from there.

Write of Passage - Austin, TX

And finally we have new individual subscribers from the Substack network.

Welcome to you all.

My plan is structure Break a Rule in a way that allows you to start benefiting from each other’s risk-taking courage, professional spirit, dedication to growth, and sense of humor!

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The Break a Rule Promise

For a long time I’ve wanted to create a way for individuals with a passion for growth to use the Break a Rule model for ongoing professional development as a follow up to my corporate presentations.

The problem has been, there are too many benefits that come from engaging with the Break a Rule model.

I’ve been guilty of making things too complicated and not being clear enough about what is being offered here.

Here’s my current simplified promise.

The Promise

I’ll help you take one new intelligent risk every week.

Intelligent risks are fundamentally important for professional growth, career success, meaningful work, and a fulfilling life.

And yet, humans are risk-averse by default.

That means, without making an intentional effort, risk-averse behavior will win, and we won’t get to live our best personal and professional lives.

I see Break a Rule as a tool and community where together we can:

• Keep the value of intelligent risk in our attention.

• Train ourselves to see opportunities for intelligent risk in our lives.

• Grow our courage for acting on those opportunities.

• Celebrate our risk-taking wins and progress.

We’ll do it through the simple commitment to take one new intelligent risk every week.

I’d love to hear from you—are you engaged by that vision?

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The Break a Rule Success Path

With a clear focus in hand, the next step is clearly define the method of follow through.

How will we take one new intelligent risk every week?

Here’s my current roadmap for how it can happen.

STEP 1 -

Take the Risk-Finder Quiz

You only need to take this step once every few months or so, but it’s a more important step than many people realize.

If you signed up during one of my speaking presentations, you’ve probably already taken the quiz. If you’ve forgotten or misplaced your results, please take the quiz again. And if you’re new to Break a Rule, taking the quiz should be what you do next.

A good friend of mine recently pointed out to me that the quiz leverages the Pareto Principle (the 80/20 rule).

What you find out when you take the quiz is which of the 7 rules you’ll most benefit from breaking.

In other words, you discover which 14% of all possible growth actions are going to be most beneficial to take a risk on. The other 86% you can stop worrying about.

The 14% you focus on is going to bring 86% of the results you are looking for in terms of success, growth, and fulfillment. (Roughly, the 80/20 rule.)

Cool, huh?

STEP 2 -

Consult the Challenge Library

Once you have your quiz result, you’ll know which rule to focus on breaking, and you’ll find risks to take in the challenge library that correspond to your rule of focus.

The Challenge Library is where you’ll go to select a risk action to focus on for the week.

I have 350 challenges on my hard-drive, already researched, created, and written. They just need to be loaded into the challenge library. This is time intensive and my plan is to add another 7 challenges (1 for each rule category) every week for the rest of the year.

So each week, you’ll have access to a new risk-taking challenge.

If you’re a paid subscriber, you’ll have perpetual access to the whole library.

As a free subscriber, you’ll be able to access the newly posted challenges for one week before they’re gated behind the library paywall.

There are currently three sample challenges in the library for each of the 7 challenge stacks, and those will remain freely accessible.

The first set of new challenges will be posted in the next few days. I’ll send another announcement when they’re up.

STEP 3 -

Take the Risk

This is it.

Where the rubber meets the road.

Did I mention you actually have to TAKE the risk?

The beauty of this is that you can take any version of the challenge and it still counts. As long as you are stretching a little outside of your comfort zone, you’ll be building the capacity for engaging in an area of your life that has tended to be a weakness in the past.

That’s all that matters.

If you stretch a little each week, over time, you’ll see incredible results in your life.

STEP 4 -

Share with the Community

You might be tempted to skip this step, but we’ll all be missing out if you do.

The step is to talk about your experience of taking your risk.

To do this, just go back to the challenge you choose at the beginning of the week in the challenge library and leave a comment on that post about how your risk-taking practice went.

Even if you completely failed to engage it, sharing that in public to the rest of the community inspires accountability for all of us. It’s a reminder that we’re committed to this practice, even if we don’t always check the box.

I’m going to add another section here to the weekly newsletter once we have engagement to share some of these comments. I’ll call it something like Weekly Heroes.

Chiming in will be hugely beneficial to both you and the community. It’s how you can start conversations and making connections with other like-minded pros here.

The trick at the beginning will be having the courage to go first and get the ball rolling.

Ready to take the risk?

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THIS WEEK’S STORY

I’m really proud of this article which is about a humorist that I’ve idolized for years named Dave Barry.

I wrote this tribute to him, because Dave is a perfect example of what I call an Intelligent Misbehaver, willing to break social rules to offer something exceptional to the world.

You’ll laugh, you’ll cry.

Enjoy the article!

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Would You Buy This?

Here’s an idea I’m playing with.

I have lots of crazy ideas for entrepreneurial ventures and businesses, most of which are too ambitious to follow through with.

But I also have simpler ideas from time to time, and I thought I’d start sharing some of them to get your frank and honest feedback about their potential.

First up, this T-shirt below.

Most of you are here because you met me abusing you and your table mates at a conference.

I have this idea to sell T-shirts after my speaking presentations that look like this.

What do you think?

Would you buy this?

$20.00 cash, 100% cotton, all sizes available, back of the room sale after my speaking presentations.

I’m not trying to sell you this now!

Just want your feedback.

: )

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Keep Your Eye Out (what a weird saying that is)

But I still want you do keep an eye on your inbox for this week’s fresh and new challenges that you’ll be able to use to . . .

TAKE ONE NEW INTELLIGENT RISK THIS WEEK!

Until then,

Rick