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

If you want to win at life, you have to make your own rules — the kind that are designed by you, for you, so the game tilts in your favour instead of someone else's. After training over 79,000 students across 74+ courses from my base in Dubai, I've seen one pattern repeat: the people who design their own rulebook win, and the people who play by inherited rules quietly lose.

Direct Answer: What Does It Mean To Make Your Own Rules?

To make your own rules means consciously designing the personal principles that govern how you think, act, and measure success — instead of unconsciously absorbing them from school, family, or society. You cannot rewrite government laws or the rules of a sport, but you have full authority over the rules of your own life. The three non-negotiable rules I live by are: get doing instead of waiting for perfection, compete only with yourself, and think big without boundaries.

Why Most People Never Set Their Own Rules

Here is a number that should bother you: only 5% of people actually set goals for themselves, and it is no coincidence that the world's wealth is concentrated with that same 5%. The other 95% never sit down to define what winning even looks like for them, then wonder why they keep losing a game they never agreed to play.

I know this because I lived on the wrong side of that statistic. Until Class 8, I was a failure in school — bad at studies, bad at games, bad at everything I touched. The reason was simple: I was playing by everyone else's rules, being measured against everyone else's benchmarks.

Rule 1: Get Doing — Stop Waiting For Perfection

The first rule I made for myself is brutally simple: start doing things now, even when you are not ready. Most people stay stuck because they keep waiting for the perfect moment, the perfect skill level, the perfect circumstances.

Think about how this plays out. You want to start posting on social media, but you are waiting until you get better at public speaking. You want to learn swimming, but you are waiting until you become "good" at it. Here is the problem: you will never become good at swimming until you actually jump into the water. Perfection is not a starting line — it is a side effect of repetition.

Concrete action today: pick the one thing you have been postponing "until you are ready," and do the messiest possible version of it in the next 24 hours. Switch the camera on. Record the bad first video. Write the rough first draft. Movement creates clarity that thinking never will.

Rule 2: Be Your Best Self — Compete Only With You

The second rule changed my life when I was in Class 9. I had to switch schools, and the new teachers did not compare me to other "successful" students. The moment external comparison stopped — and the moment I stopped comparing myself to my classmates — everything changed. I went from being a failure to being my best.

Here is the logic: every other person you compare yourself to has a different mind, different experiences, different training, and a different game they are playing. Comparing your life to theirs is like comparing your football match score to someone else's chess game. The metrics do not even line up.

The shift is from horizontal comparison (you vs. them) to vertical comparison (you today vs. you yesterday). Did I do better than my yesterday self? That is the only honest scorecard.

Rule 3: Think Big — Remove The Boundaries On Your Thoughts

The third rule is where most middle-class operators get stuck. We are conditioned, often from childhood, to believe certain things are "not for us" — the five-star hotel, the Mercedes, the luxury holiday, the dream home. That conditioning becomes a ceiling on every action you take, because your action can never exceed the size of your thinking.

Here is the analogy that makes it click. A car can comfortably do 200 km/h on a clear road. But if you have decided in your head that you will never push past 100 km/h, no matter how good the conditions are, you will not press the accelerator past 100. The car has the capacity. Your thought has the limit. The result follows the thought, not the capacity.

God, or nature, or whatever you believe in, gave you the ability to think without limits. As a human being, what right do you have to install boundaries on it? Stop putting boundaries on your thoughts, your effort, and your potential.

How To Design Your Personal Rulebook This Week

Once you internalise these three rules, the next move is to customise them. Your rulebook should answer four questions clearly:

• How big do you want to think? Write the number, the lifestyle, the impact — specifically, not vaguely.
• What action will you take daily, even imperfectly? One non-negotiable rep per day beats a perfect plan you never start.
• Who will you stop comparing yourself to? Name them. Unfollow if needed. Their game is not yours.
• What does winning look like for you? If you cannot describe the goal, you cannot hit it — just like in football or basketball, no target means no goal.

Why This Matters More Than Any Other Skill

I teach AI, automation, GoHighLevel, Canva, and business systems for a living. I can tell you from watching thousands of students that tools and tactics are downstream of mindset. A student who has made their own rules will outperform a student with better skills but borrowed rules every single time, because they keep showing up when the borrowed-rules student quits.

The 5% who set goals own the wealth not because they are smarter — they are simply playing a game they designed.

Your Next Step

The fastest way to win the game of life is to make your own rules, write them down, and start playing by them today. Right now, open a note on your phone and write the three rules you will live by this week — get doing, be your best self, think big — and then commit to one specific action under each rule before you sleep tonight.

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Keep Learning

If this was useful, these are worth reading next:

• Success is not what we pursue but what we attract
• Success is not what we pursue but what we attract
• Or go further with the AI Mastery Course — used by 79,000+ students across 150+ countries.

Framework	Core Idea	Best For	Cost	Time To See Results
Sawan's 3 Rules (this post)	Get doing, compete with self, think big	Solopreneurs, career-pivot operators	Free	30-90 days
Atomic Habits (James Clear)	System design over goal setting	Behaviour change at scale	$15 book / AED 55	90-180 days
Stoic Operating System (Ryan Holiday)	Control what you can, accept the rest	High-stress operators, founders	$18 book / AED 66	60-120 days
Naval Almanack	Specific knowledge + leverage + judgement	Long-term wealth thinkers	Free PDF	1-3 years
Tony Robbins UPW	State change + identity shift events	People needing immersion energy	AED 3,500-13,000	Days (then decays)

Source: Publisher list prices on Amazon.ae and official UPW Dubai pricing 2026.