It’s not that Adam Driver lived a conventional life. He was a landscaper in Indiana. Moved to California for acting. Failed. Moved back to Indiana. Joined the Marines. Then got his big break on Girls.

And yet, how does one live such a seemingly contradictory life? A one filled with so many possible personas, from soldier to artist?

“Benign rebellion” – that’s how. “Sometimes you have to shock yourself out of your rhythm.”

One of my very first newsletters here was discussing, essentially, this very same quote–warning against the productive, yet potentially destructive nature of habits. It’s a trend that’s won over the self-help world for years now, but one that I feel fits into the larger societal trend of overwork and over-optimization.

There's something deeply unsettling about how we've transformed self-improvement into a form of self-restriction. We treat personal growth like software updates. Build the habit. Track the progress. Optimize the outcome. For lack of a better term, we’re trying to “debug” ourselves out of being human.

But what we're really doing is creating a world where our breakthrough, “lightbulb” moments become impossible by design. Think about it: these moments – in art, in science, in personal growth – rarely come from following established patterns. They come from the moments when we step outside those patterns, when we allow ourselves to be moved by something other than our scheduled intentions.

The truth is that growth isn't linear–it actually doesn't follow a productivity curve. Sometimes it requires us to deliberately unlearn what we've carefully taught ourselves. Sometimes it demands that we temporarily abandon the very systems we've built for security.

Each time Driver shocked himself out of his rhythm – from landscaping to acting, from civilian to Marine, from failure back to success – he wasn't just changing careers. He was practicing a form of growth that our habit-obsessed culture has forgotten how to value: the art of strategic reinvention.

Don't misunderstand – there's nothing wrong with habits themselves. We need routines to function, systems to create, patterns to build upon. But we need to recognize them for what they are. The moment we start believing that excellence can be reduced to a set of habits, we've already lost the very essence of what makes excellence worth pursuing.

And sometimes, the most productive thing you can do is to break your own rules. Just to remember why you made them in the first place.