Precedent Is Meant to Be Broken Here

The first time I sat in a real courtroom, what struck me wasn’t the drama. It was the stillness.

No one improvised. Every motion had a name. Every name had a history. The judge wasn’t inventing the rules in real time — she was standing on a thousand decisions made by people now dead, in rooms now gone, reaching forward to hold this one together. That’s what precedent does in the law. It is the load-bearing wall of the whole building. Stare decisis — Latin for “to stand by things decided.” You don’t tear down a load-bearing wall because you’re bored with it. You leave it standing because the ceiling is resting on it.

Then I think about a studio.

A choreographer at the barre. A pastry chef at three in the morning. A musician with a track half-finished and a feeling that something obvious is wrong. In that room, “this is how it’s always been done” isn’t a foundation. It’s a dare.

Same word. Opposite job.

In a courtroom, precedent holds civilization together. In a studio, it’s the thing you’re there to defy.

I’ve spent this season of Breaking Precedent talking to people who live at the second end of that spectrum — the studio end. Christina Tosi, who put a cereal-milk soft serve on a menu and made a generation rethink what “dessert” was allowed to be. Rachel Sussman, who turned two paragraphs in a school textbook into a Broadway musical and put the women's history left out center stage. D-Nice, who turned a living room and a laptop into a stage for the whole world during the loneliest spring any of us can remember. Windy Chien, who tied a different knot every day for a year until the rope became a body of work. Tamara Rojo, who runs a ballet company, refuses to treat the canon as a cage. Sarah Hoover, who wrote her way out of a story she was supposed to keep performing.

Not one of them asked permission.

And here’s what I kept noticing, conversation after conversation: none of them were reckless.

We picture the rule-breaker as someone who never learned the rules in the first place. It’s the opposite. Tosi trained in fine dining before she put what looked like a kid’s snack on a menu. Rojo danced the classical repertoire flawlessly before she ever bent it. The mastery came first. The break came second — and it only worked because of the mastery.

You can’t break a precedent you don’t understand. Without that understanding, you’re not breaking anything — you’re just stumbling into something different and hoping it lands. That’s an accident, not a choice. To break a rule on purpose, you have to know exactly what it is, why it was built, and what it’s holding up — and then decide to walk through it anyway.

The studio isn’t lawless. It’s the one room where breaking the rule is the work — and you still have to earn it.

So I keep coming back to a question that runs through this whole show, and the book I’m writing from it: Does it really have to be this way?

The answer depends entirely on which room you’re standing in.

There’s a framework I lean on for this. Most of what governs our lives falls into one of three categories. Rules are written and enforced for a reason — the load-bearing walls. Traditions are inherited, comforting, and often worth keeping, but they’re choices dressed up as obligations. And precedents are the sneakiest of the three: a thing was done once, it worked, and now it quietly runs the room forever. Nobody decided it should be permanent. It just never got questioned.

The artist’s gift — the real one, under the talent — is knowing the difference. Knowing when you’re looking at a wall that holds the ceiling up, and when you’re looking at a wall someone painted to look like it holds the ceiling up. One you respect. The other you walk through.

That’s a skill, not a personality trait. And it’s not just for artists. The founder staring at “that’s not how this industry works.” The kid in a family who’s the first to do anything differently. The operator who suspects the org chart is a tradition wearing a rule’s uniform. Every one of them is standing before the same question I am: load-bearing or just outdated?

I started in the most rule-bound corner imaginable. I founded a company built on strangers trusting strangers to come into their homes, which every reasonable person told me was a wall I could not move. It turned out to be paint.

The people I admire most aren’t the ones who break everything, and they aren’t the ones who break nothing. They’re the ones who can tell which is which.

Precedent is meant to be broken here — in the studio, on the canvas, in the company you’re building, in the life you’re allowed to reinvent. The trick isn’t courage. The trick is knowing which room you walked into.

So, look at the wall in front of you this week. The one everyone treats as fixed.

Is it holding up the ceiling, or could it use a new coat of paint?