Why to never follow rules
alexsblog.org
alexsblog.org
I would say you should always question why specific rules exist, and you should feel free to challenge and sometimes break them if they are pointless bureaucracy, but choose your battles and don't rebel just for the sake of rebelling. Leave that for the 16 year olds.
"Instead, dismiss any other rules than yours immediately. Show them that this is your game and they have to play by your rules and not otherwise. Introduce them confidently on your playground."
I think about rules like "you must use version control" and "the test suite must pass before you push to the main repository."
These might be hard and fast rules at one organization, but not another. I interpreted the quoted statement to mean that it's okay for someone from the latter to dismiss a strict "don't break Jenkins" rule immediately.
Using the underlying playground metaphor, that's quickly going to leave the person playing alone in a playground that no one visits.
I prefer the suggestion of the old maxim: "Know the rules before you break them", which is pretty well aligned with your suggestion.
Also, the closing line - "You can be shark or fish. Not both." - is biologically wrong. A shark is a fish. Indeed, I like the metaphor as well: No matter how hard a shark may try, it's still a fish.
“Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively.”
http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/16419-know-the-rules-well-so...
(Also, if you believe QI, there's debate about whether a classification of 'fish' can even exist since it covers such a wide range of species as to be essentially meaningless. But I'm not an icthyologist.)
Followed by "Of course there are always the great exceptions. Genius is far rarer than people think, and genius has ways of its own."
The problem I have with online quotations, including those from goodreads, is that few people make an effort to verify the quotation. For example, one of the variations I know is listed at http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/558213-learn-the-rules-like-... ; it attributes "learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist" to Picasso. However, I can find no citation to Picasso actually saying that.
Quotation is one of the places where I've found it best to reference something like Bartlett's Familiar Quotations. I actually did check my dated paper copy before posting, but it doesn't have an entry for a quote like this under "rule" or "break". That's why I just said it was a maxim. ;)
BTW, Snopes, at http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/hoaxes/dalai.asp, says the Dalai Lama didn't say/write the above attributed line. Instead, it's a false attribution in an email chain going around in 2000, derived from an older email chain, derived in turn from "Life's Little Instruction Book" (1991) which said "Learn the rules then break some."