This YouTube masterclass (host Darcy Juarez with Dan Kennedy) revisits Kennedy's 1997 book How to Succeed in Business by Breaking All the Rules. Early discussion summarizes that many widely followed rules (e.g., "everyone should go to college") were invented by self-interested groups and are reinforced over time; Kennedy notes a new edition/audio release is forthcoming and that the book's arguments have held up on rereading. The conversation frames rules as tools of agendas (academia, institutions, pandemic-era policy) and urges questioning conventional wisdom.
Chapters
Whoever it was who went into a room and made them up in the first place, Right. Probably did not create them with your success or your happiness in mind. That's not why most rules are written.
Hello and welcome to this month's masterclass. My name is Darcy Juarez. I'm here with Dan Kennedy. And today we're discussing a great book from Dan, how to Succeed in Business by Breaking all the Rules. And Dan, this is the 1997 edition. We've got that there. But the title, your title emphasizes Breaking all the Rules. Do you mean that literally?
You pretty much the add, but those that will actually put you in jail. Because no success advancement, you know, is worth five years with a roommate. They Brutus in a, you know, in a small gray room. But short of that. Yeah. And the book, as you say, dates to 1997. And there's a new edition now, soon, shortly, depending on when you see this video redone as a note as an obs series book. And I hadn't looked at it in eons myself and got it down. I actually had to get one from somewhere. I didn't even have one. And I look at it because now entrepreneur wanted to do it as a no BS book. And Nightingale's doing it as an audio as well. So it'll be Kindle and it'll be audio book and all of that. And it held up very well. So I reread it for the first time last year, I think, since maybe 1998, and it held up really well. And this principle held up really well because most of the rules that we obey, particularly the ones that affect how we do business, but not all of them, but broader, we. We don't consider really where they came from, who put them together in the first place. Right. And how they've been reinforced to the point that kind of everybody accepts them and goes along with that. So many of the things we are going along with have roots older than the book and haven't been questioned in years or decades. And a lot changes, you know, in. In life and. And in business. And. And the other thing to remember about that is that whoever it was who went into a room and made them up in the first place, right. Probably did not create them with your success or your happiness in mind. That's not why most rules are written. Right? So to just sort of unquestionably go along with. Every kid should go to college, right? So like that's discussed in the book. And so we've arrived at this idea literally reinforced almost as a rule that you will be so disadvantaged in life if you don't go to college that everybody should go, regardless of their academic achievement up to that point, regardless of their study ethic, regardless of whether they have any earthly idea of why they are going or why. No, everybody should go. Right. Well, who made the rule? Academia. Right. I mean, so, you know, you, you never ask. A bald man should never ask a barber if he needs a haircut because the only thing a barber has to sell is haircuts. And the only thing the university community has to sell is go to college. So they got pretty aggressive about turning this into a rule. Right. And so there's a bunch of these.
Okay, so can we, can we dissect that a little bit? Can we go into where the rules come from and who makes them and kind of what that's all about?
Yeah, so but for 10, none of them have derived from a mastermind meeting with God and been brought down the hill on stone tablets on Moses's back. The rest of them have all been put together by mere mortals who went into a room and for some purpose created another commandment or another six or another 10. So they come from mere mortals, and they typically come from mere mortals who have their own agenda. The rules are created as tools for an agenda. So again, academia. So Harvard's admission guidelines, well, they didn't come down from the mount. The people running Harvard sat in a room and said, who do we want here? Yeah. And who of what do we want? How do we rig it essentially, so we get what we want? Right. A, a current recent example is everything that went on during the virus. Right.
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