we grow through discomfort or insight. But never through apathy.

We’re all swimming in a massive sea of human beliefs, ideas, and practices. Some are beautiful and bring joy; others are
unnecessary, limiting, and sometimes even crippling. A fish is the last to see that it’s swimming in a substance called water.
Likewise we’re often last to see how this mass of human thoughts—what I call the culturescape—completely saturates and
influences our lives.

When you grow up, you tend to get told that the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world.
Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life, have fun, save money. That’s a very limited life.
Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact. That is—everything around you that you call life was made
up by people no smarter than you. And you can change it. You can influence it. . . . Once you learn that, you’ll never be
the same again. —STEVE JOBS

One of the keys to being extraordinary is knowing what rules to follow and what rules to break. Outside the rules of physics and
the rules of law, all other rules are open to questioning.
So it seems that what language delineates, we can more easily discern. Our language shapes what we “see.

Of course, there’s a darker side to culture: when we get so focused on our rules that we turn them into decrees about how life
“should” be and label people or processes as good or bad if they don’t follow the rules.

But there’s also the world of relative truth. It’s the mental world of ideas, constructs, concepts, models, myths, patterns, and
rules that we’ve developed and passed from generation to generation—sometimes for thousands of years. This is where
concepts such as marriage, money, religion, and laws reside. This is relative truth because these ideas are true only for a
particular culture or tribe. Socialism, democracy, your religion, ideas about education, love, marriage, career, and every other
“should” are nothing more than relative truths. They are simply not true for ALL human beings.
I call this world of relative truth the culturescape.
Many of these beliefs and systems are dysfunctional, and while the intention is that these ideas should guide us, in reality they
keep us locked into lives far more limited than what we’re truly capable of. A fish is the last to discover water because it’s been
swimming in it all its life. Similarly, few people discover how pervasive and powerful the secondary world of our culturescape
really is. We are not as independent and freethinking as we’d like to think we are.

The world of absolute truth is fact-based. The world of the culturescape is opinion-based and agreement-based. Yet even though
it exists solely in our heads, it is very, very real.

Realizing that the world you’re living in exists inside your head puts you in the driver’s seat. You can use your own mind to
deconstruct the beliefs, systems, and rules you’ve been living with. The rules are very real in the sense that they actually govern
how people and societies act, but very real does not mean very right.

Safety is overrated; taking risks is much less likely to kill us than ever before, and that means that playing it safe is more likely just
holding us back from the thrills of a life filled with meaning and discovery.

Give me the thrill and excitement of the unsafe, rule-breaking, dogma-

questioning life anytime over the boring unfolding of a safe life.
The common thread between every extraordinary individual we’ll talk about in this book is that they all questioned their
culturescape. They questioned the meaning of careers, degrees, religions, ways of living, and other “be safe” rules. In
many cases, their willingness to break away from the culturescape has resulted in innovations and new beginnings that
will shift the future of humanity.

Law 1: Transcend the culturescape.

Extraordinary minds are good at seeing the culturescape and are able to selectively choose the rules and
conditions to follow versus those to question or ignore. Therefore, they tend to take the path less traveled and
innovate on the idea of what it means to truly live.

If you can’t win, change the rules. If you can’t change the rules, ignore them.

QUESTION THE BRULES

Where We Learn That Much of How the World Runs Is Based on Bulls**t
Rules Passed Down from Generation to Generation
You will find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view.

Who’s more foolish, the fool? Or the fool who follows him?

—SAYINGS OF OBI-WAN KENOBI, STAR WARS

It’s a stunning statement. Dr. Marsden is saying that when we make decisions, we’re more likely to defer to the hive mind
than to make a decision based entirely on our own thoughts and best interests. We don’t have beliefs so much as beliefs
“have” us.

Dr. Marsden continues:

The evidence shows that we inherit and transmit behaviours, emotions, beliefs, and religions not through rational choice
but contagion.

FIVE WAYS WE TAKE ON BRULES

1. Childhood Indoctrination
2. Authority Figures
3. The Need to Belong
4. Social Proof
5. Our Internal Insecurities

Law 2: Question the Brules.

Extraordinary minds question the Brules when they feel those Brules are out of alignment with their dreams
and desires. They recognize that much of the way the world works is due to people blindly following Brules
that have long passed their expiration date.

“What if . . . all the rules and ways we lay down in our heads, don’t even exist at all? What if we only believe that they’re
there, because we want to think that they’re there? All the formalities of morality and the decisions that we see ourselves
making in order to be better (or the best) . . . what if we think we’ve got it all under control—but we don’t? What if the
path for you is one that you would never dare take because you never saw yourself going that way? And then what if you
realized that one day, would you take the path for you? Or would you choose to believe in your rules and your reasons?
Your moralities and your hopes? What if your own hope, and your own morality, are going the other way?”

—C. JOYBELL C.

PRACTICE CONSCIOUSNESS ENGINEERING

Where We Learn How to Accelerate Our Growth by Consciously Choosing
What to Accept or Reject from the Culturescape
If you want to teach people a new way of thinking, don’t bother trying to teach them. Instead, give them a tool, the use of
which will lead to new ways of thinking.

—BUCKMINSTER FULLER

Consciousness engineering is an operating system for the human mind. And the beauty of it is that—like the best hacks—it’s
really simple. It all boils down to just two things.
1. Your Models of Reality (Your Hardware) When an old belief no longer serves you, you have every
right to swap it out. Yet we don’t. When you use the Brule Test to challenge your Brules and swap out obsolete Brules
for rules that work better, you’re upgrading your hardware so your operating system works optimally. In people-speak,
that means you’re choosing what to believe, and your life is yours to control.

Replacing outdated models of reality is essential. Our models of reality do more than just create our feelings around an
event or life in general. To an astonishing extent, they seem to influence the reality of the world that we experience every
single day.