You make the rules

Growing up in orange groves in a town called Tangerine forced us to create new rules for entertaining ourselves during the Summer.

I remember playing hide and seek when I was about ten years old. In my neighborhood when we played hide and go seek us older kids created a rule that when you're the seeker in order to have found someone you could not just tag them before they reached home base you were also required to tackle them. Me and my buddy PJ Allen made it up and since we were the loudest and had been there the longest everyone played that way.

When Jeremy Belser, a kid who none of us wanted to play with but always included to increase the number of players, came home with scrapes on his forehead from being tackled on a patch of Devils Backbone, (a nasty vine covered in thorns) his overly protective mother strictly forbid us from playing tackle hide and go seek. Despite our many attempts at trying to explain to her that her son was only injured because he was slow and was so easy to take down she refused to budge.

Again we tried to persuade her by explaining that we didn't really like Jeremy but were willing to include him to add to our numbers because playing tackle hide and go seek with five people is less exciting than playing with six. She stood unmoved. She'd just say, "I'm not saying you can't play hide and seek you just can't tackle." In our minds that was hide and seek, there was no other way. She was trying to change the rules but not creating a better game for us.

Jeremy's mom never tried to reinvent the game she just tried to impose rules on us. Now that I think about this I realize that it wasn't Jeremy's fault he was such a whiny little kid. It was his mother's fault for lacking any imagination. If she didn't like the rules of our game she could have reinvented them by coming up with something more conducive to slow weak Jeremy that would still allow us to have fun. Instead her son just missed out on all the fun.

Don't stop looking at the game and figuring out how you can change it. Don't create rules that take away. Create a better game.

Look at Apple, Google and Facebook they weren't always the biggest or the loudest but they are successful by not just changing the rules but creating a better game.