Subversion

I understand the need for best practices in any field, but it’s equally important, probably more important, to learn the hacks around the best practices.

Yes, the best practices are there for a reason, but they are also being used by people with way more money and experience than you. You will not be able to compete with the big dogs by using their methods. Those methods have already been perfected by the big dogs.

The only way to beat the big dogs is to find a way to ethically subvert their methods.

You have to know the methods so well that you can recite them in your sleep, but you then need to go deeper, and find the ways around those methods which won’t get you in legal or ethical trouble. Doing things the way they were done is a great model at the beginning of your career or for learning a new skill, but in studying you will learn that the way most people do things is broken and time-intensive.

Big companies cannot move nimbly enough to fit through cracks in systems, but you can, and you should do so at every opportunity. The way best practices can help is by showing you the consequences of your actions. If you are willing to live with the consequences, then you can make big gains quickly.

Your advantage is being able to turn on a dime and subvert the best practices, exploiting them to your gains whenever possible. There are all sorts of ways to climb the ladder faster, and usually they come from analyzing the best practices and finding out how to do them in 2 steps instead of 20.