I was cooking dinner for my friend the other night. We got onto the topic of baking cookies.
“I was so bad at baking,” she said. “Then at some point I realized it was an exact science and I just started to follow the recipe meticulously and I got better.”
Then we talked about whether it was possible to be “good” or “bad” at something that requires you to follow an exact recipe.
I asked her if she’d change the recipe just slightly if she thought it would make the cookies taste better. She said she might.
If we assume there is one universal recipe for cookies, then yes it seems to be an exact science. In the same way that gravity’s acceleration is about 9.8 m/s squared and Cobalt has 27 electrons.
However, if we remember that at some point a baker sat in a room and tested many batches of cookies until he came up with the “perfect” recipe (in his mind), which then became the recipe everyone else uses—then that recipe seems to be more of a theory than a scientific law for cookies.
Especially if we imagine that the original baker had a slight aversion to salt. Or maybe he liked his cookies just slightly more doughy. Or whatever else that would have caused his recipe to be the way it is, subjective to his own tastes.
Society is made up, just like recipes. You can follow the rules and get a pretty good result. But that’s not to say you can’t break the rules and get an even better result.
The same applies to language and business and health. Everyone else is inherently worse at making up rules for your life, if only for the fact that they aren’t you.
Follow the rules when you don’t have an alternative. But once you’ve got the hang of the popular recipe, start testing at the margins to see if you can’t make something better.
I for one leave my cookies in the oven a little longer. I like them crispy around the edges.