Many norms, folkways, and standards exist because they’re (almost always) the best way to do something (by some metric).

The USB-C standard isn’t the most bleeding-edge option that technology and manufacturing can offer, but it’s a really solid, relatively high-performing default that’s a significant upgrade compared to what came before.

The three act story structure, similarly, isn’t always going to be the absolute ideal way to present a narrative, but a lot of the time it’s better than the relevant alternatives.

Some defaults are natural evolutions of what came before, while others are standards of convenience: trains often use a given track gauge not because it’s optimal, but because there’s gobs of existing infrastructure that uses that standard, and it would be too expensive and time-consuming to switch to a new one.

The TED talk format has become the de facto template for presenting talks on all sorts of subjects, while tech-world product demonstrations and releases have mimicked Apple’s format since the early 2000s. Sometimes these approaches become the common template (at least for a while) because they’re genuinely better than other available options, but sometimes they attain dominance because it would be inconvenient to do otherwise (because YouTube’s algorithms incentivize a certain type of content, perhaps).

It’s possible to deviate from existing standards, but it’s often an uphill climb, and that can be true even if your approach is obviously better in some clear and measurable way.

That said, sometimes we’ll diverge from the prevailing path out of ignorance (not knowing how it’s ‘supposed’ to be done), sometimes we’ll do it because we personally believe our way is better or we don’t like something about the typical approach, and sometimes we’ll just want to experiment or break something or fool around in less-trodden spaces.

I tend to like learning how things work, and that includes learning the rules (spoken and unspoken) and norms of the context in which something I’m learning about exists.

It can be both thrilling and rewarding to fumble through such spaces like a child, though, learning everything from first principles and being forced to imagine and invent our own reasons for doing all the things we might do there.

Being forced to answer the questions, “Why this way? Why not this other way?” for ourselves—rather than leaning on someone else’s reasoning—can be a mind-stretching exercise. And though it won’t always be feasible or appropriate to approach something new from that angle, it can be a truly valuable (if often effortful) experience when we’re able to make it work.

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