When Exceptions are Distractions

Let’s think linearly for a moment. Students are students before they become leaders. Students master fundamental ideas. Thought leaders distill these fundamentals and lead by breaking them or adding to them.

For the skeptical thought leader, the exception to the rule is your best friend. The outlier that proves the rule wrong provides hope for a deeper truth. It’s these examples that ensures that a theory remains just a theory.

When you’re a novice, however, the exception to the rule is a distraction. When you’re new, solutions backed up with volume is more important than exceptions. Is it easier to teach a teenager in Colorado to drive a car with the steeling wheel on the left side of the car or the right? Sure, you can argue with me and say, “Well, you can’t tell me that he won’t need to drive a car one day on the other side of the road with a left side drive!” You see where I’m going with this.

To understand something advanced, let’s say quantum mechanics, the student ought to first understand basic physics first, even if quantum mechanics later debunks principles of physics. Trying to understand quantum mechanics would likely leave a novice in a position that neither understands physics nor quantum mechanics.

The health and fitness expression of this is run amuck, too. Men and women who are unwilling to practice basic concepts of training and nutritional practices are, all too often, eager to cite obscure examples of fitness success as justification for their lack of fundamentals. Take for instance super athlete, Herschel Walker, who is notorious for sleeping just five hours per night, eating one meal per day (usually a large bowl of lettuce), and does two thousand push ups and two thousand sit ups before ten in the morning. When a novice student of health and fitness uses his obvious athletic superiority, body composition, and physical prowess as a justification for ignoring the incredible volume of examples of nutrition and fitness habits that tend to work most everyone else, she is making a critical error. If you haven’t mastered the basics of strength training, building a substantial work capacity, and a balanced nutritional plan, it seems misguided to subscribe to some obscure dietary practice and find an outlier who has success with it to justify your plan.

Once you’ve mastered the basic principles and methods with volumes of support (and only then), you can look to the exceptions to the rule for insight. Until then, it’s a distraction that leads you further way from true and complete understanding than when you first started. Remember, the best way to break the rules as a leader is to understand them well enough to best break them.

 

Logan Gelbrich

@functionalcoach