Make the Rules | Rules that you want | Rules that are for you by Sawan Kumar

Make the Rules: Creating Success on Your Own Terms

Making the rules means taking control of your success by setting your own standards, expectations, and pathways to achievement rather than following others' blueprints. In the context of personal and professional growth, the ability to make your own rules is a fundamental mindset shift that separates those who follow conventional paths from those who create their own. Sawan Kumar's philosophy on making the rules emphasizes that you must establish the framework for your success, define what winning looks like for you, and design systems that work specifically for your goals. This approach is particularly powerful in entrepreneurship and real estate, where following generic templates often leads to mediocre results. The message is clear: make the rules that align with your vision, values, and capabilities, not the rules that others have arbitrarily decided should govern your industry or life.

Understanding the Core Principle: Why You Must Make the Rules

The traditional approach to success involves following established guidelines, studying what others have done, and replicating their formulas. However, this methodology has a critical flaw—it assumes everyone operates under identical circumstances, possesses the same strengths, and pursues identical goals. Making your own rules recognizes that your unique combination of skills, resources, network, and vision requires a customized approach to success.

When you make the rules, you're essentially saying: "I will not be constrained by industry standards that don't serve my objectives." This doesn't mean ignoring best practices or proven strategies entirely. Rather, it means evaluating these practices through the lens of your specific situation and adapting them to fit your reality. For someone in real estate, for example, making the rules might mean focusing on a specific niche market that others overlook, using unconventional lead generation methods, or structuring your business around your lifestyle preferences rather than chasing the image of success promoted by your peers.

The Psychology Behind Rule-Making

Making the rules is fundamentally about empowerment and autonomy. When you establish your own standards, you:

• Release yourself from the burden of meeting others' expectations
• Create accountability based on your own values rather than external pressure
• Develop a sense of ownership in your results and failures
• Increase motivation by working toward goals that genuinely matter to you
• Build confidence through personalized rather than borrowed success

Start Doing Things: The Action-First Mindset

One of the core messages in Sawan Kumar's training is that you must start doing things rather than endlessly planning. Analysis paralysis—the state of being stuck in planning and research without taking action—is one of the most common obstacles to success. The principle of starting is deceptively simple: action creates momentum, generates feedback, and reveals the next steps far more effectively than theoretical planning ever could.

When you start doing things, several important shifts happen:

1. You gain real-world feedback: Theoretical planning happens in a vacuum where you make assumptions that may be incorrect. Taking action reveals whether your assumptions are valid and what adjustments you need to make.
2. You build confidence: Each action, regardless of outcome, builds your belief in your ability to execute. Confidence grows through doing, not thinking.
3. You discover solutions: Problems you couldn't anticipate in planning become obvious once you're actively working. Solutions often emerge through the process of working rather than pre-planning.
4. You create momentum: Small actions compound. Starting with imperfect execution beats never starting with a perfect plan.
5. You establish credibility: In business and entrepreneurship, people work with and follow those who are actively producing results, not those with the best ideas on paper.

Overcoming the Fear of Imperfect Action

The biggest obstacle to starting is the perfectionism trap. Many aspiring entrepreneurs wait until they have the perfect business model, perfect pitch, perfect website, or perfect amount of training before they begin. This waiting period can last years, and many never actually start. Making the rules means accepting that your first attempt will be imperfect, and that's not just acceptable—it's necessary. Your imperfect action today will teach you more than perfect planning ever could.

You Are Your Competitor: Reframing Competition and Self-Improvement

A crucial shift in perspective that Sawan Kumar emphasizes is that you are your primary competitor, not the person in the next office or the top agent in your market. This concept fundamentally changes how you approach growth and success. Most people focus their competitive energy outward, comparing themselves to others and trying to beat their competitors. However, this creates a perpetually moving target and often leads to burnout, resentment, and reactive rather than proactive business strategies.

The Problem with External Competition

When you make external competitors your primary focus, you're essentially letting them set your agenda. You're reacting to their moves, copying their strategies, and measuring your success against their benchmarks. This approach has several disadvantages:

• It's unsustainable: You can never fully control what competitors do, so you're always playing catch-up
• It lacks authenticity: Copying others' strategies rarely works as well as developing your own based on your strengths
• It creates a scarcity mindset: If the market is zero-sum, every competitor's win is your loss, which creates unnecessary stress
• It prevents innovation: Copying keeps you in reactive mode rather than innovative mode

Competing with Yourself for Excellence

When you make yourself your competitor, you shift to internal benchmarks. Your goal becomes: "How can I be better than I was yesterday, last week, or last month?" This mindset is far more powerful because it's within your control. You're asking questions like: "How can I improve my lead generation process?" instead of "How do they get so many leads?" You're asking "What can I do differently this month to increase conversions?" instead of "Why are they converting at a higher rate?"

This competitive reframing creates several advantages:

• You focus on continuous, sustainable improvement in your core skills and systems
• You measure progress against your own baseline, which is always achievable and motivating
• You develop authentic strategies aligned with your strengths rather than copying others
• You enter an abundance mindset where your improvement doesn't require anyone else's failure
• You become less reactive to market changes and more focused on execution excellence

Start Thinking Big: Scaling Your Vision and Ambitions

Starting to think big is about expanding your mental model of what's possible for you and your business. Many people unconsciously place ceilings on their ambitions based on their current circumstances, their reference points, or their beliefs about what people like them can achieve. This self-imposed limitation is one of the greatest barriers to significant success. Sawan Kumar's emphasis on thinking big is a call to remove these artificial constraints and expand your vision to match the actual potential available to you.

How Big Thinking Changes Your Actions

Your thinking directly determines your actions, and your actions determine your results. If you think small, you unconsciously take small actions. You make decisions optimized for a small vision rather than a big one. For example, if your vision is to serve 50 clients this year, you might be satisfied with one lead per week. But if your vision is to serve 500 clients, the same lead generation rate becomes obviously inadequate, and you're forced to innovate and scale your systems.

Big thinking rewires your decision-making process because larger goals require different approaches. A real estate agent thinking about serving 100 clients annually might rely entirely on referrals. An agent thinking about 500 clients must develop systematic lead generation, build a team, implement tracking systems, and create scalable processes. The vision itself is the catalyst that drives better thinking and execution.

Making the Rules at Scale

When you combine thinking big with making your own rules, you're no longer constrained by "how the industry does things." You're free to ask: "What if we did this completely differently?" What if instead of the conventional sales process, you created an entirely different client experience? What if instead of competing on price, you compete on transformation? What if instead of following the typical career path in your field, you created your own hybrid model that no one has tried before?

Big thinking gives you permission to make bold rules because you're thinking in terms of creating something genuinely different, not just improving incrementally within existing constraints.

The Integration: Making Rules, Taking Action, and Competing with Yourself

These three concepts—making the rules, starting to do things, viewing yourself as your competitor, and thinking big—are deeply interconnected. You cannot truly make rules that serve you if you're still thinking small or waiting for perfect conditions to start. You cannot properly compete with yourself if you're measuring yourself against external competitors. You cannot think big while operating within someone else's framework.

The integration happens when you commit to all four principles simultaneously:

• Make rules that align with your big vision, not industry norms
• Start implementing these rules immediately, imperfectly, and iterate
• Measure your success against your own previous performance, not competitors
• Allow each iteration to inform bigger, bolder thinking

In practical terms, this might look like:

An aspiring real estate agent might make the rule: "I will focus exclusively on luxury properties in the historic district, which is underserved." This breaks the rule of being a generalist like most agents. They start doing things immediately by calling 10 historic property owners this week, even though their marketing materials aren't perfect. They measure success by whether they get one listing, then two, then three—competing only with their previous week's performance, not with the top agent in their market. They think big about creating a specialty brand in luxury historic properties, which eventually allows them to develop systems and team structures that their broader competitors cannot.

Applying Make the Rules Thinking to Your Business and Life

The philosophy of making the rules applies far beyond real estate or a single industry. Any person in any field can benefit from these principles:

In Entrepreneurship

Make the rules about how you structure your business. You don't have to follow the traditional startup path of venture capital funding, or the traditional corporate structure with multiple management layers. Start doing things by launching your product or service before it's fully refined. Compete with yourself by measuring growth month-over-month rather than benchmarking against industry unicorns. Think big about the impact and scale your business can achieve.

In Career Development

Make the rules about your career path. You don't have to follow the traditional progression of moving up the corporate ladder. You could create a hybrid role, specialize in an underserved niche, or transition entirely into a different field. Start doing things by developing the skills you need now, through projects, courses, and practical application. Compete with yourself by tracking your skill development and knowledge growth. Think big about the unique career you can build that plays to your strengths.

In Personal Growth

Make the rules about what success means to you personally, rather than accepting society's definitions. Start doing things immediately rather than waiting for January 1st or some other arbitrary date. Compete with yourself by celebrating personal progress rather than comparing yourself to others. Think big about the person you could become and the life you could build.

Conclusion: Taking Control of Your Success

The message of making the rules is ultimately about taking control of your destiny. In a world where countless voices try to tell you how you should operate, what you should want, and what's possible for someone like you, the courage to make your own rules is a radical act of self-determination. Combined with the commitment to actually start doing things, the discipline to view yourself as your primary competitor, and the vision to think big, making the rules becomes a complete philosophy for achieving meaningful success on your own terms.

Your rules don't have to be elaborate or complex. They simply need to be authentically yours and aligned with your vision. Start identifying where you've been following someone else's rules unnecessarily. Begin today by taking one action aligned with your vision, no matter how imperfect. Measure your progress against your own growth. And permit yourself to think bigger about what's possible. When you make the rules, start doing things, compete with yourself, and think big, success becomes not a distant possibility but an inevitable result of consistent, aligned action.

About This Video

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