Don’t run for class president. Don’t go to HOA meetings. Don’t join a committee. Don’t get involved in political campaigns.

All of these activities are about reform. Get into the institution, play by its rules, and try to make it behave differently than it wants to.

Forget this approach. It sucks. Here are four reasons why.

It Makes you Less Happy

Have you ever been to a town hall meeting? Life’s too short to endure such horrors. The worst life to live is a boring one. The machinations of every political institution are stale and boring and full of self-serious processes, procedures, and practitioners. Your every moment is too valuable to suffer through it. It’s inhumane. If Roberts Rules of Order are relevant to any effort you’re involved in, get out and go build something new.

You Can’t Change the Game by Playing

Political institutions do one thing best: restrict individual fun and freedom. It’s natural to want to reduce the role of these rule-happy entities. But you can’t win playing by their rules. You can’t vote your way to a system where votes no longer curtail progress.

Trying to reduce the role of the state by engaging in politics is like trying to put a casino out of business by playing blackjack there. “Oh, I have it figured out. I’ll beat the house!” No. You won’t. They want you to think that. They want you to keep playing. Abiding by house rules is no way to protest or change them. Especially when the house gets a little richer every time you do.

If you don’t want the casino to keep luring people in don’t go in yourself. Build something better that people want to go to instead.

Progress Always Comes from Without

Political institutions are reactive. They wait until the world forces them and then they change. If humanity is a car these institutions are the brakes, able to stop progress but never create it. If you want to get to a new destination you need the accelerator.

Accelerators are new ideas and products and services that forge ahead, paying no mind to the consensus-seeking bureaucrats nested in the status quo. Accelerators don’t care about argument, nor protest. They care about creation. They build the world they want to live in instead of hoping to prevent its decay.

There is No Permanence

The great thing about innovation is that it only needs to happen once. That painful, grueling, child-birth like experience of the creative act or eureka moment is born out of imagination, hard work, and courage. If the result is of any value to the world it lasts forever and serves as the stepping stone to still greater innovations.

The wheel was invented once. No one has to re-invent it. Its world-improving powers are permanent and irreversible.

Any apparent victory within a political structure is fleeting by definition and design. You align all the powers and elites and interests just so after years of butt-numbing meetings and pompous proclamations from people you’d never want to have a beer with but now you must woo and coddle. You have your mandate or constituency or whatever other serious-sounding label you slap on the gaggle of interests vying for a win within the house rules. You get your way. Hooray!

Until the next month or year or election cycle when the new interests group outmaneuvers you and the tables turn in an instant. Everything you created in your coalition vanishes, along with all the money you convinced people to throw at it. The same tiny sliver of ground must be re-won, each time as if from scratch. Only then do you realize that broader social forces created by the outsiders accelerating humanity are the master, not the servant, to these stale political institutions that apply their rusty brakes against all odds.

Go Out and Build Something

Build something instead. Exit. Go your own way. Forget the suits and speeches and posturing and canvassing and internal climbing and deal-making. Go build your wildest dream. Imagine and create things that excite you. Move to a place that doesn’t suck. Create a job that’s not boring. Live a life you want to live.

Don’t wait for the world to change or beg for permission to let it evolve. Go change your own world. The rest will follow.

Reprinted from the author's blog.