Rule 6. Learn to Ask Why

You won’t be able to do your best for your employer if you can’t see the big picture. You may be only a humble cog in a huge grinding machine, but if you can’t step back and see what the whole machine is up to, you won’t be able to do your little coggy things as well as you could. What’s more, if you only ever talk in terms of your cog and your immediate neighboring cogs and bolts and shafts and pistons, everyone around you will see you as belonging neatly in that little part of the machine.

But you have aspirations to move into bigger and more important parts of the machine, don’t you? Of course you do—you’re a Rules Player. You want to grow and develop and make a bigger contribution. And to do that—and be seen as a suitable candidate to do that—you need to understand what drives the whole thing and what its purpose is.