🌅 🌊 🌈 Which Kind of Precedent Breaker Are You?
Not all disruption is created equal.
Some change is inevitable. Some is nostalgic. And some hits you like lightning out of nowhere. I call them sunrises, tides, and rainbows. And through every episode of Breaking Precedent, I’ve started to see these patterns emerge in the people who are reshaping our world.
🌅 Sunrises are changes you can see coming—if you’re paying close enough attention.
Eric Ryan is a Sunrise Breaker. As the founder of Method, Olly, and Welly, he’s made a career of redesigning tired consumer categories just before they were ready to tip. “If it seems so obvious that I ask, ‘Why hasn’t anyone done this before?’ then I know I’m on to something,” he told me .
I’ve lived this myself. When I started TaskRabbit in 2008, the pieces were all there—mobile phones, GPS, a growing interest in gig work. I just connected the dots. What started as a snowy-night dog food dilemma turned into a new way for people to get things done—and a new way for others to make a living. The gig economy was coming. I just helped give it a name.
🌊 Tides pull us back to a deeper truth—often one we forgot or buried.
Justice Stephen Breyer, in discussing the Dobbs decision, warned what happens when we dismiss long-standing precedent simply because we disagree with it. “Even if the past law wasn’t perfect, beware of changing it,” he said. His dissent wasn’t just a legal argument. It was a warning about what happens when we pull out a thread that holds the fabric of our society together .
Patrick Brown of Impossible Foods is a tide breaker too—not inventing a new need, but returning us to one we’ve ignored: food that feeds people without destroying the planet. His mission isn’t to convince people to love veggies—it’s to upgrade the technology we’ve been using to make meat for 10,000 years. He’s pulling us toward a more sustainable, ethical food system, not by changing what we crave, but by changing how we produce it.
🌈 Rainbows are surprises. They’re the “that’ll never work” ideas—until they do.
Kara Goldin is a Rainbow Breaker. When she launched Hint Water with no preservatives, no sugar, and no artificial anything, the beverage industry told her it couldn’t be done. She figured it out anyway. Her success didn’t just rewrite the playbook for flavored water—it changed how an entire industry thought about what’s possible .
Artist Trevor Paglen is a rainbow in his own right. He once launched a work of art into space—not to claim it, but to make sure no one could. His goal? To prove that beauty, ideas, and ownership don’t have to be bound by gravity or by precedent. “Art is different from a lot of fields,” he told me. “It’s really people making stuff up for the most part.” That’s the magic of rainbows: they don’t follow the rules—they invent their own .
So: Which kind of breaker are you?
A Sunrise, seeing around corners and building what’s next?
A Tide, reclaiming something essential we’ve lost?
A Rainbow, leaping into the unknown and dazzling us with what you find?
Each one is valid. Each one is powerful. But they move differently. Whether you’re building a company, challenging norms in your family, or taking a bold step in your career—the question is the same:
What needs breaking? And what needs remembering?
Listen to the full summer episode here and, let me know in the comments: Which type are you? Not sure?
