When I first came across TEGWAR, I had no idea it would completely change how I think about business rules marketing.
TEGWAR is a fictional card game from Mark Harris’s 1956 novel Bang the Drum Slowly, later turned into a 1973 film. The name stands for The Exciting Game Without Any Rules. In the story, baseball players hustle fans who are thrilled to be playing cards with their heroes, and the fans keep losing because they assume rules exist that simply do not.
I found it morally repugnant. Essentially stealing from people who trusted them. But underneath that ugly surface is one of the most useful insights I have ever come across for anyone building an online business.
Most of the rules you think govern your business do not actually exist.
We carry around these invisible constraints, handed down from corporate life, from school, from watching what other people do online. And we treat them as gospel. But most of them are assumptions, not requirements.
There is no rule that says you must have a website before you can earn money online. There is no rule that says you have to build an email list first, though I would argue it is a genuinely good idea once you are ready. There is no rule that says you must create a product, or sell someone else’s product, or follow your passion, or use artificial intelligence, or avoid it.
So if these rules do not exist, where does that leave you?
This is where business rules marketing gets interesting. The most effective marketers are not the ones who follow the rulebook. They are the ones who write their own.
Think about how a Game Master operates in a tabletop role-playing game. Before the campaign begins, the GM sets out a framework, a set of guides for how the game will run. But here is what makes a great GM different from a rigid one: they treat those guides as living documents. When the players take the story in a direction nobody expected, the good GM adapts. The framework bends. The outcome is often better for it.
That is exactly the mindset that works in online business marketing.
When you write your own rules, you stop waiting for permission. You stop looking for a template that fits perfectly. You start testing what actually works for your situation, your audience, your strengths. And because your guidelines are not carved in stone, you can change them when circumstances shift, when a strategy stops working, when a new opportunity appears.
This approach matters even more for people building income online later in life. If you are over 50 and you have spent decades working inside other people’s structures, it can feel genuinely uncomfortable to operate without a rulebook. But that discomfort is often just unfamiliarity, not danger.
The practical version of this looks like starting small. Build one thing. See what happens. Adjust the guide. Build the next thing.
Maybe you start with a single-topic PDF and share it through a couple of traffic sources. Maybe you write a handful of blog posts and see which topics get traction. Maybe you find a small niche nobody else has noticed and build a simple site around it. None of these require a rulebook. They require a framework you wrote for yourself, flexible enough to evolve.
This is what I distilled into a one-page PDF called The RPG Playbook for Business. It takes the Game Master approach and maps it directly onto the process of building a sustainable online income. Single page, no fluff, designed to be actually used.
If this way of thinking resonates with you, grab the PDF below.
Download The RPG Playbook for Business:
