Ordering Off the Menu

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

George Bernard Shaw

There are two kinds of people: those who accept the status quo, and those who challenge it.

Most people think the difference shows up in the big stuff. Political beliefs. Career risks. Starting a company. Taking a public stand. That is where we imagine the world changers live, out on some grand stage, fighting some grand fight.

That is not where the difference lives. It lives in the small stuff.

The people who actually change things are challenging every micro aspect of their lives. They look at a restaurant menu and treat it as a suggestion. They ask the kitchen to swap the sauce, drop the onions, add the ingredient that makes the dish theirs. Not because the menu is wrong, but because the menu was written by someone who never met them.

They join a company and get handed the standard onboarding. Here is how we do comms. Here is the process. Week two, instead of memorizing it, they come back with a rewrite. Not out of arrogance. They read it, saw it could be better, and could not help themselves.

The menu is everywhere once you start looking for it. The default 401k allocation. The lease terms. The meeting that has always been an hour. The job description as written. The way your industry has always priced things. Every one of these is a menu, drafted by someone else, for someone else, at some other time.

Reasonable people order from the menu as printed. They assume the defaults were chosen for a reason, and they adapt. It is efficient. It is polite. It is how most of life gets lived.

Unreasonable people ask a different question: does this actually fit me? If it does not, they negotiate. They tweak. They rewrite. They treat the world as a draft.

Here is the part I find most interesting. This is not a behavior. It is a posture. Someone who customizes their lunch order is running the same mental loop as someone who rewrites their company’s process, and the same loop as someone who eventually rebuilds an industry. The scale changes. The instinct does not. You cannot accept every small default and then suddenly challenge the big ones. The muscle does not work that way.

This is why I love interacting with people who challenge everything in front of them. Not contrarians, who oppose things for sport. Challengers, who ask whether the thing could bend to their will, and who are equally open to being told why it should not. The conversation with these people is alive. Nothing is settled. Everything is negotiable.

The honest counterargument: this is exhausting to be around. Servers do not love the custom order. Managers do not love the new hire with opinions about the comms process. There is a real tax on the people around you when nothing is ever accepted as-is. Some defaults exist because they are genuinely good, and relitigating them wastes everyone’s time. The unreasonable person is often wrong, often annoying, and I will not pretend otherwise.

But Shaw already answered this. The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The world stays exactly as it is. Every improvement you have ever benefited from came from someone who looked at the menu and said no, I want it a different way.

So I know which side I want to be on. I would rather be the unreasonable one. I would rather order off the menu.

Because that is how things change. Not in grand gestures. In small refusals, repeated daily, until the world adapts.