Leave Room for Yellow Lights
No one ever really has a plan for a yellow light. You pull up to an intersection, and you're generally looking for a green or a red. Do I stop, or do I go? A yellow light forces you to make a snap decision. You have to consider how much time you have before red. You have to think about the conditions of the road, how close the person behind you is, how good your brakes and tires are. Over the course of a second or two, you have to decide to slam the brakes or gun it.
In general, human beings prefer simplicity. We like binaries. Mondays are either good, or bad. People are conservative, or liberal. Gay, or straight. Male, or female. We work best when we can easily sort things into boxes so we can make fast decisions. We don't like yellow lights. We don't like it when things challenge us to make decisions or consider multiple factors. It's disruptive. It's inefficient. We suddenly have to use new language, or ask questions, or change our tried-and-true pre-meeting small talk.
In business - especially in marketing - this is even more true. There are entire disciplines of marketing built off the back of predictability and efficiency. Demographic models absolutely fall to bits when we have to step outside of "men and women" or "white and non-white." Marketing Personas are written to embody our simple human boxes. Female, CEO, Educated, Middle-Aged, New Hire, Start-Up Background. That's good. We know how to work with that. Whatever labels we need to apply to an unknown person are ok, as long as we know they'll stick. Are they daring or risk-averse? Did they come up in the company, or are they new, from somewhere else?
But relying on these binary "red or green light" assumptions is harmful. For starters, it's bad for business. A marketing campaign written for newly-hired female CEOs might gain some basic attention from the handful of target individuals that fit that criteria, but it is more effective to write a campaign specifically for one individual at one target company. It's more effective to get to know a person, and to think about them in particular. But we don't usually do that, because it's hard. It's challenging, and expensive, and slow. It requires us to consider a whole bunch of factors instead of ticking off boxes in an itemized list.
The real world doesn't operate on a binary. You have sunny days and cloudy days, but you also have partly-cloudy days with a 30% chance of rain. Some news is good, some is bad, and some is somewhere in the gray area that makes up most of the newspaper on any given Sunday.
So, all I'm saying here, really, is to leave more room for partly-cloudy days in your life. Understand that not everyone you meet or do business with is going to fall into the simple alignment of boxes you've built for categorizing. Start learning how to cherish your yellow light moments, when you're forced to pause, pay attention to your surroundings, and not only make a decision, but make the right decision for the moment. Instead of getting frustrated that a new client doesn't neatly fall into your existing campaign themes, enjoy that you have an opportunity to create something new and personal for them. Instead of avoiding coworker that you can't neatly drop into a binary gender category, take the opportunity to learn about them as a person.
Don't treat your business or personal interactions as an intersection you need to get through as quickly as possible. Treat them like chances to grow, learn, and challenge yourself. It's worth it.