What can I get away with?
Productively questioning what you’ve always thought to be true
Hi there! You’re reading the Bonfire newsletter from Kevan Lee & Shannon Deep. If you like the types of things we talk about here, you’ll enjoy our free online events! The next one takes place Wednesday, July 8.
Are these rules even real?
As part of our regularly-scheduled event programming, we host a values workshop—we just completed one last week—during which we guide people through an exercise to select a series of core values for their professional and/or personal life.
Before jumping into the exercise, we lay some groundwork, including a simple reflection on where your values come from: what’s inherited versus what’s chosen.
From our perspective, it’s totally fine for your values to come from either bucket. The notable part of this reflection is simply noticing why you might value the things you value, whether you were the one to choose them for yourself or whether another person, situation, environment, or culture modeled the value for you.
In cases where you identify a value that is inherited from a past person or place but is no longer true of who you are today (or who you want to become), then this exercise is freeing! You mean, I don’t have to value [fill-in-the-blank] just because that’s what everyone else around me valued when I was growing up? Phew!
It’s freeing, and it’s eye-opening. Whenever I do this exercise, I can’t help but take the question of inherited vs. chosen and run with it, exploring all the other areas of my life where I might be living one way and never questioning why. Why do I work the way that I work? Why do I choose the people I choose? Why do I gravitate toward certain art and media and activities instead of others? (I promise not every Bonfire event will send you for an existential ride like this one does me.)
Once I crack open that Pandora’s box of questioning, I feel a weight lift off my shoulders.
What else can I let go?
What can I get away with?
What rules are real, and what rules did I inherit without questioning?
We will sometimes ask ourselves a version of this question at Bonfire. Our version: “In what ways are we free and don’t even realize it?” We asked this at the start of the year, and it led us to rebalancing our work so that we could focus more on creative projects. Questions like these, from a place of curiosity and intention, can be useful across all sorts of different cross-sections of life: work, creativity, personal, and more.
Here are 3 primary areas where it could be fun to try asking yourself, “What can I get away with?”
1. The creative version
What can a creative project get away with?
Most people don’t make their most original creative work when they’re trying to obey invisible rules. The problem, of course, is that you may not know you’re following invisible rules because they are, well, invisible.
See if any of these rules sound familiar:
A newsletter has to be useful.
A personal essay has to have a point.
A business has to look like other businesses.
A bio has to sound professional.
A landing page has to explain everything.
A career has to make sense in retrospect.
Do these rules actually exist? Or have we just seen them repeated so many times that they started to feel like the only way to do things? This is where “What can I get away with?” becomes a creative reflection because it allows you to question the norms of what you otherwise might expect from a creative output. It allows you to think big and think differently from the get-go.
Can I write the weird version?
Can I make the simple version?
Can I publish the thing that feels obvious to me but might be useful to someone else?
Can I make something that is sincere without sanding all the edges off first?
Can I choose taste over best practices?
Sometimes the work gets better not because we add more effort but because we remove the performance of legitimacy and best practices. Real creative constraints do exist, of course. Deadlines are real. Audiences are real. Clarity matters. But a lot of what blocks us is not real constraint but is inherited “rules” that put unnecessary guardrails around what will otherwise be really creative work.
The question is not, “Can I ignore all the rules?”
The question is, “Which rules are helping the work, and which ones are just making it more generic?”
2. The business version
What can a business get away with?
A lot of businesses are built by asking, “What should a real business do?” A lot of business-builders (raises hand) are tempted to think this way, too. Whether you’re striking out on your own freelance journey, starting a new business venture, or working in-house to grow a company, I wonder if some of these invisible rules have seeped their way into your thinking:
A real business should scale.
A real business should have a funnel.
A real business should hire a team.
A real business should always be growing.
A real business should sound confident, polished, and certain.
Maybe! Or maybe those are just the default settings of a certain type of business and a certain flavor of ambition.What if instead you asked:
Can we get away with staying small?
Can we get away with being selective?
Can we get away with a business model that protects our energy?
Can we get away with doing fewer things?
Can we get away with not pretending we want to build the same company everyone else is building?
That’s part of why I like the phrase “What can I get away with?” It has a rebellious quality, but sometimes the rebellion is very practical and intentional. Many, many business success stories have come because someone chose to build a business in a new way. Some of our Bonfire friends who’ve built their own freelance careers or boutique businesses are living super fulfilled lives doing things their way. Within a business context, “what can we get away with” may end up being not just a saving question but the basis for an entire business strategy.
3. The values version
What can a life get away with?
Some people ask “What can I get away with?” and mean: How close can I get to the line without consequences? That is not the interpretation we’re talking about here. Instead, the question is: What can I stop spending my energy on, without fear of repercussions (that don’t actually exist)?
Can I get away with saying no faster?
Can I get away with choosing a quieter life?
Can I get away with disappointing people?
Can I get away with wanting what I actually want?
Can I get away with no longer valuing something just because I used to?
Maybe you inherited the belief that being dependable means being constantly available. Maybe you inherited the belief that success has to look impressive from the outside. Maybe you inherited the belief that rest has to be earned, or that ease is suspicious, or that changing your mind means you were wrong before. These beliefs can become so familiar that we mistake them for core values and consume them into our identity.
But values are not meant to be a museum of old obligations. They are meant to help us live more truthfully now. And in this way the question of “what can I get away with” can be translated to say “what can I release.”
Conclusion
Not everything you can get away with is worth doing. But some of what you’re carrying may not actually be required.
Let us know anything that comes to mind in the comments!
But wait! There’s more…
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