When we start learning something, we’re told about rules. For a while, we think rules describe what we can do and how things work. We follow them literally, afraid to break them, checking ourselves against checklists.

If we keep going in studying this domain, we begin to understand more deeply how it works. We move from rigid rules to frameworks - they give structure to our thinking and actions, but they don’t constrain as much.

We realize that rules are like training wheels on a kid’s bike. They protect against mistakes and guide our first steps, but overall you don’t have to follow them if you understand what you’re doing.

What happens to rules next? It depends on why they existed in the first place.

If a rule exists for safety - it either stays in force, or gets replaced by some other way of ensuring safety, or gets replaced by conscious risk that we’re willing to take for a certain effect.

If a rule exists to provide structure - sooner or later it becomes a constraint that will be discarded. Or the opposite - it will be used creatively to create something new.

The better you understand the domain, the more arbitrary your actions can be in achieving goals. Frameworks are meant to help, but you can’t let them limit the solution space.

This stage, when we’re capable of improvising and finding beautiful, elegant, and precise solutions - I call freestyle.

Can you improvise without going through the rules stage? Of course. It might be unsafe, but mainly - in many cases it will be ineffective. Unless you have something inside that creates structure in the absence of rules. That’s probably what we call talent - the ability to generate structure from within. Most people need to go through the stages of rules and frameworks to effectively reach the freestyle stage. But there are exceptions.

I don’t yet know how to recognize the moment when a framework transforms from helper to constraint. I don’t know where trust in yourself comes from at the freestyle stage - rules give confidence through external authority, frameworks through structure, but freestyle? I don’t have answers yet.