Own your rules
jasonleow • 3 Jun 2025 •
There are no real rules, so make rules that work for you. – Tim Ferriss
You start off by emulating your heroes and idols, following the rules they followed, the things they did, the trends they rode on.
But that’s their path, and no one ever succeeded by following someone else’s path. Well… not true success anyway. The kind that feels authentic and ‘owned’ by you and you only. Money and fame can be emulated for sure.
I think most people turn the corner into true success and own their path once they start making rules that work for them instead of following rules that worked for someone else.
Can’t tweet daily? Write blogs.
Too shy to build in public? Build SEO, run ads.
Don’t have an audience? Buy someone else’s audience.
No time to go monk mode? Use AI agents, outsource to a VA, work in small chunks consistently.
I feel that way too.
The more I own my own way, the more success I seem to find.
Circa my Carrd plugins:
They say, you need your own domain, a .com. I used the platform’s default subdomain.
They say, find one marketing channel and focus. I went for a thousand flowers bloom.
They say, charge more. I gave away 90% of my work for free.
They say, drop it if there’s no results within a few months. I stayed on, despite no results for years.
More and more, I feel this is right.
The less I listen to others, the more success I get.
Comments
The goal of most motivational speakers is to transform their audience into the kind of people who make good motivational speakers.
I once came across a startup tip that every piece of startup advice works just as well as its opposite (niche-down vs go mainstream, get VC capital vs bootstrap, etc). The same applies for many other approaches (write long blog posts vs short blog posts, be everywhere vs be good at one channel, etc).
Alignment with our own values and preferences is really important. At least when getting started.
💯 I’ve learned to listen to less and less advice and follow my intuition.