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The three most familiar divisions of time we make today continue to be based on the motions of heavenly bodies, though now we call this astrophysics. The length of a year is determined by the time it takes the earth to circle the sun; the length of a month is (more or less) the time it takes the moon to circle the earth; the length of a day is the time it takes the earth to rotate on its axis (and observed by us as the span between two successive sunrises or sunsets). But further divisions are not based on any physical laws and tend to be based on historical factors that are largely arbitrary. There is nothing inherent in any biological or astrophysical cycle that would lead to the division of a day into twenty-four equal segments.

We study history not to know the future but to widen our horizons, to understand that our present situation is neither natural nor inevitable, and that we consequently have many more possibilities before us than we imagine. For example, studying how Europeans came to dominate Africans enables us to realise that there is nothing natural or inevitable about the racial hierarchy, and that the world might well be arranged differently.

So we summarize this chapter and link it to hidden asymmetries, the subtitle of the book. Society doesn't evolve by consensus, voting, majority, committees, verbose meetings, academic conferences, tea and cucumber sandwiches, or polling; only a few people suffice to disproportionately move the needle. All one needs is an asymmetric rule somewhere--and someone with soul in the game. And asymmetry is present in about everything.

In philosophy classes, I often came across the idea that the world is an illusion. I never really knew what that meant, although it sounded deep. But after two decades studying moral psychology, I think I finally get it. The anthropologist Clifford Geertz wrote that "man is an animal suspended in webs of significance that he himself has spun."32 That is, the world we live in is not really one made of rocks, trees, and physical objects; it is a world of insults, opportunities, status symbols, betrayals, saints, and sinners. All of these are human creations which, though real in their own way, are not real in the way that rocks and trees are real. These human creations are like fairies in J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan: They exist only if you believe in them. They are the Matrix (from the movie of that name); they are a consensual hallucination.

Ten years later, I was running CD Baby, and for the first time, an employee told me he needed to quit. I said, "Drag. Well. OK. I wish you the best! Who's your replacement?" He looked confused. I said, "Have you found and trained a replacement yet?" He looked a little stunned, then said, "No ... . I think that's your job." Now I was stunned. I asked a few friends and found out he was right. People can just quit a job without finding and training their replacements. I had no idea. All these years, I just assumed what I had done was normal. There's a benefit to being naive about the norms of the world--deciding from scratch what seems like the right thing to do, instead of just doing what others do.

Whenever one of us began to set our sights lower, lose faith, or "accept reality," the other would chime in via phone or e-mail like an AA sponsor: "Dude, are you turning into the bald fat man in the red BMW convertible?" The prospect was terrifying enough that we always got our asses and priorities back on track immediately. The worst that could happen wasn't crashing and burning, it was accepting terminal boredom as a tolerable status quo. Remember--boredom is the enemy, not some abstract "failure."

Reality is largely negotiable. If you stress-test the boundaries and experiment with the "impossibles," you'll quickly discover that most limitations are a fragile collection of socially reinforced rules you can choose to break at any time.

what we call hours, minutes, and days are arbitrary: There is nothing physically or biologically critical about the day being divided into twenty-four parts, or the hour and minute being divided into sixty parts.