Why You Shouldn't Let People Put You in a Box

As you go through life, people are going to stereotype you. They are going to do all in their power to put you in a box based on how you look, where you work, and where you live. This allows them to mentally file you away alongside the thousands of other boxes consuming their mental real estate.

Take Emmett, for example. Let’s say that Emmett is an entrepreneur who lives in Palo Alto, attended Stanford, and wears tee shirts and jeans to work every day. When you meet Emmett and learn about these characteristics, you immediately try to put him in a box that you neatly file next to the boxes consisting of all the other entrepreneurs that you know. For you, this categorization is effective in that it allows you to infer many other things about Emmett based upon his entrepreneurial characteristics – most of which are probably correct. But for Emmett, the fact that you filed him in the entrepreneurial box in the first place may make him feel the need to hide his other interests in order to assume the mold associated with his primary domain.

What if Emmett is an entrepreneur who paints watercolors two nights per week and writes fiction novels on the weekend? What if he lives in Palo Alto but spends three months of the year in Montana taking care of his parents? What if he only started his company as a means of generating enough revenue to support his dream of becoming a full time writer or artist? With this additional information, the box that we tried to put him in may not be as appropriate as it originally seemed.

We are not meant to be singular beings, put in boxes, stacked away collecting dust. We are complex, creative, living beings constantly exploring and trying to improve our understanding of the world around us. When people that we meet want to force us into nice little boxes, it is not our responsibility to help them to do so. It is our responsibility to simply be the multifaceted beings that we are. 

Having interests outside the scope of your primary domain does not make you strange. It makes you interesting. It gives you something to talk about when you bring clients out to dinner. It stimulates creative thinking in your primary domain, as it allows you to draw new connections derived from the influx of outside material.

Don’t be afraid to break the mold and defy stereotypes. Be the investment banker who bakes, the athlete who sings, or the ballet dancer who spends her weekends going to heavy metal concerts.

Keep breaking barriers. Never limit your journey simply because it doesn’t make sense to other people.

The Debilitating Nature of Caring Too Much

Have you ever wanted something really badly? And when you did, what did that feel like? Every morning when you wake up, the gears in your mind start turning, and one cup of coffee quickly turns into six, and your mind doesn’t stop churning until your head hits the pillow at 2AM (on a good day). The days just roll by, and instead of staring at your watch waiting for time to pass, you’re constantly chasing it, wishing you could slow it down. Why? Because you care. You care so much about the purpose, the process, and the outcome that your goal becomes all consuming.

Being passionate about an idea and becoming so strongly invested in something that you care about the outcome is a good thing. But the more that you want something, the more likely you are to fall victim to caring too much, to becoming so focused on the outcome and achieving your goal that you go into a bubble and lose your sense of perspective.

Intensely caring about something that you hope to achieve is positive in the sense that it helps to align your interests, but caring too much can be debilitating. When we care about something 'just enough,' we maintain a certain degree of perspective that allows us to see that we are more than one individual goal, and our character does not rest solely on the evaluation of our successes and failures. Caring just enough allows us to voice our opinion, to take the risks necessary to help to carve out the path to help us to reach our goals in the first place. It comes with a whimsical attitude aligned with the many alternatives we have at our fingertips if all else fails.

But the more invested that we become in our success in a particular endeavor, the more we put ourselves at risk of caring too much. Caring too much can be debilitating and slow us down in reaching our goals, as the feeling reinitiates our fear of failure. When we care so much about succeeding, failing or falling short of our goals no longer feels like an option. We lose sight of all alternatives and get sucked into a vortex where we place unnecessary weight on our words and actions. In the process, not only do we risk losing the love of the game, but we risk undermining ourselves in the process.

The key to winning is not to stop caring, but to train yourself to maintain a sense of perspective that allows you to care just enough. Here are a few ways to begin to find an acceptable balance between constantly firing with an intense drive and maintaining an overarching perspective:

1)  Remind yourself of the alternatives. If all else fails, what is your next best option? In the grand scheme of things, if you had to resort to your next best alternative, would it really be all that bad?

2)  Do something for yourself every day. The more that you want something, the easier it is to adopt a singular focus. While this singular processing mechanism can be efficient for some time, once it reaches a tipping point, it may be taken too far. To prevent this degree of burnout, do something every single day just for the sake of doing it – something completely for yourself and unrelated to your primary focus or goal.

3)  Read stories or talk to other people about the state of their lives. Expose yourself to diverse perspectives or delve into fantasy worlds that are far from your own. Learn about the lifestyle, the goals, and the various aspects of the lives of others. Not only can this often be a humbling experience, but it can remind you that there is more than one way to live your life.

4)  Take five minutes to write down a list of things that you have accomplished up to this point in your life. When you care so much about achieving something or reaching a goal, it is important to remember all of the effort that you expended and the small wins that have gotten you to where you are standing today. This will help you to remember all of the tools that you have at your disposal and that your reputation is defined by more than any one individual outcome.

5)  Stop worrying about what everyone else is doing. We are all different people, with different backgrounds, with different personalities, who move at different paces, and who have individualized approaches to reaching an end goal. Just because someone else is taking a particular approach in attempt to reach an end goal, it does not mean it is the most efficient path, nor does it mean it is the path best-suited for you. By overtly worrying about what other people are doing and how they are doing it, you are putting unnecessary pressure on yourself to be someone that you’re not. Focus on you. Move at your own pace, and keep your eye on the prize.

While caring about something, whether it be achieving a goal or bettering yourself in some way, is an important aspect of improving your odds of achieving it, caring too much can drive you into overload and put you in a position where you are constantly putting unnecessary pressure on yourself. When you begin to feel this happening, it is important to consider the counterfactual – if all else fails and this doesn’t happen, what is my next best alternative? Chances are, you’re going to be alright. As much as you want to reach your goal, you may be unknowingly driving yourself into a wall by caring so much that your drive is debilitating - and maybe, just maybe, you’d actually perform better if you kept caring, but you just learned to care a little less.

Maybe You're Not Crazy After All

Who designed this chair? It’s one of the most uncomfortable chairs I’ve ever sat in – and they claim to be a five star restaurant? There has to be a better way to make this. Did I finish that paper I was working on? I thought I did but I think I may have gotten distracted and forgotten to submit it.  The line of people waiting to be seated is making the dining area entirely claustrophobic – isn’t there a better way to structure the flow of seating? I feel like these people are standing on top of me. And I can literally hear everyone’s conversations at the tables around me. I can’t even focus on what this guy is saying.  Did I unplug my curling iron this morning? I hope it’s still not plugged into the wall. I really need to stop doing that. Why is he wearing that shirt? This is supposed to be a business meeting.  I wish business meetings didn’t have to be so stuffy.  If only every business meeting could be over ice cream sundaes, or maybe over bowling, or I’ve always wanted to have a meeting on one of those yachts that I saw in that movie one time.  He has green stuff in his teeth – am I supposed to say something about that? Hmm, better not. I’ll stick to the salmon just in case.  I wouldn’t want my teeth looking like that when I stand up to talk.  I’m so late.  There goes another one down the drain. I should really stop making three sets of plans in one night.  Should I get up and leave? It’s probably okay, right? I mean, I’ve been here for three hours – how much of my time do they really deserve? What excuse should I use this time – keep it vague or go specific?  This silverware is terrible.  My rice keeps falling through the holes in my fork, and I feel like a child eating it with a spoon.  I think it’s time I try to innovate on silverware – I mean, we’ve had the same three utensils for how long now? What were we talking about again? Oh, right – sales figures of some sort.  Let me flip through the presentation real quickly on my lap. Or did I leave it in my other bag? Am I supposed to travel tomorrow, or was that next week? If only I could find my calendar.  That’s a terrible idea.  I don’t understand why we’ve been talking about this for forty minutes.  We could have accomplished this in ten. Focus, Jenna, focus. Look at the person in front of you, and control your mind – control your thoughts.  Finish what you need to and flesh out your ideas later. Or maybe I should just jot them down on my napkin really quickly, because I might forget.  I doubt anyone will even notice.

Whether at a business meeting, dinner, a movie, or an event – these are usually the types of nonlinear thoughts that are flowing through my mind.  I can’t help it – it’s how I’ve always been. Since the time I was little, my mind has always gone to crazy places, and the gears are always turning.  As I started to get older, I began to wonder if everyone thought like this, if all people sat down for a meeting, starting out talking about revenue figures and then went to the beaches of Santorini, to analyzing the person at the table’s wardrobe choices, to brainstorming ways to make the table they're sitting at less shaky or the pen they're writing with stop smudging on their paper, all before the presentation is over.  When I came to realize that not everyone’s minds went to the imaginative lengths that mine did, I started to wonder if I was somehow ‘broken.’ 

I had never met anyone who noticeably had a mind quite like mine, until I crossed paths with an entrepreneur who had recently come to New York to scale a company he had started in Cleveland.  For as long as I can remember, I always wondered if I was the only one whose mind went to ten different places and back again all in the midst of maintaining a conversation about the movie that I saw last weekend; but when he started taking momentary pauses in the middle of dinner to write down the ideas that would come to him, I began to see that his mind was a lot like mine – spinning in circles and jumping from one place to the next in a nonlinear fashion.  Seeing the way that his mind worked in action simultaneously scared me and excited me, as nobody else’s way of thinking had so closely resembled my own.  Maybe I wasn’t crazy after all - maybe I was just ‘different.’ Or maybe we were both crazy, and our wandering minds would begin to feed off each other, stretching our imaginations to new limits.

His mind fascinated me – not only because it was the closest I had ever found to one that resembled my own, but because in many ways, he was even more divergent than I was.  In a midst of minutes, even seconds, he can rattle off ideas left and right – identifying countless problems over one dinner.  After all of the years that I had spent trying to mask my divergence to try to fall in line with the system, I couldn’t help but wonder how powerful my mind could really be if I started surrounding myself with people more like him - if I learned how to fully capitalize on my ability to think differently rather than trying to cover it up.

After meeting more and more entrepreneurs whose minds were somewhat similar to mine, I began to realize that I’m not broken, but simply different. Fitting in has always been hard for me; I always want to do things differently, to find a better way rather than accepting the conventions that society has placed upon me.  I used to wonder if thinking in this way was problematic, in fear that I would never be 'normal' or fit in.  But why fit in when you were born to stand out?  Though it may take a while to find your ‘group,’ to find those people who you can sit around a table with and feel like in many ways, you’re looking at a reflection of yourself – they’re out there.  You just need to keep looking – for people to collaborate with, for people to support you, and for people who can help you to channel your divergence into new ideas and products rather than encouraging you to fall in line with everyone else, when maybe you were never meant to be in that line altogether.

The Power of Divergent Thinking

Your alarm is ringing. The shower is running. Cars are speeding.  People are passing.  Your coffee is spilling. The meeting is starting. Your boss is waiting.  The office is buzzing.  Your husband is calling. Doors are slamming. Dinner is cooking.  Wine is pouring.  Sparks are flying.  Seconds are passing. Minutes turn to hours. And hours to days. And days to weeks. And weeks to months. Time is passing.  My head is spinning.  And the game goes on.

But where were you in all of that? If I had to guess, my bet would be that you were the one spilling the coffee, running late to the office, racing home to cook dinner, drowning your day in wine, and trying to get to bed at a decent hour, all so that you could wake up five hours later to do it all again. Rinse, and repeat.  But it doesn’t have to be this way.

The majority of people that we encounter on a daily basis have become slaves to the world that society has built for us.  Since elementary school, we have been confined by a set of rules that we are told we must follow in order to get ahead.  If we don’t listen to the teacher in kindergarten, we don’t get to move on to first grade.  And if we don’t follow the rules in first grade, we don’t go on to second.  And so on, and so forth.  But if we conform to the system and study hard enough, we may end up giving the valedictorian speech at our high school graduation, all while being showered in praise by the teachers, parents, and mentors who have guided us along the way.

The problem with grades is that they don’t follow us all the way through life. While a perfect grade point average in high school or college may make us feel like we are the best of the best, we are going to reach a point in our lives where convergent thinking is no longer rewarded.  After university, the rules that have constrained us for the first twenty-two years of our lives no longer set the framework that dictates who succeeds and who fails.  It is at this point in our lives that the game changes.  Yet, too many people continue trying to play the same game that they grew up playing, as it is the only game that they know how to play. 

When we walk out of the gates on our last day of university, it is no longer convergence, but rather divergence that distinguishes the few from the many.  Given that the efficiency of society relies upon conformity, we are often not exposed to the type of divergent thinking that is required to succeed in the later stages of our lives.  If schools were to teach us how to think divergently, we would start asking our teachers ‘why’ - and when brought to scale, this alone holds the potential to uproot the system in its entirety. 

Over time, it becomes second nature for the majority of children and young adults to conform to the rules of the system.  They get so caught up in trying to reach the top, that they lose the ability to seek out the blank space that exists beyond the world that they know.  But for a select few, the idea of conforming eats away at us. From the time that we are little, curiosity drives our everyday actions as we strive to understand all of the layers of the world that we find ourselves in. This desire to use our minds as a tool for deeper exploration follows us all the way through college – and when we receive our diplomas and are finally set free, we are given the opportunity to play our own game, a game in which divergence is rewarded.

Rather than endorsing the conformity of society, the ability to think divergently gives us the opportunity to be the catalyst of change. We can see the world in a way that many others can’t – seeking out problems and building solutions to things that others did not even find to be problematic in the first place.  We may walk and talk like the convergent thinkers that surround us, but we are constantly challenging the assumptions that build the foundation for the world that we find ourselves in.  When set in the right context, the ability to think divergently is the most valuable skill in the world, as it gives us one thing that others don’t have – the ability to implement change.  We are the ones who ensure the growth of the very society that constantly rejected us.

It is never too late to start thinking differently.  Every one of us holds the power to use our imaginations as a tool to innovate – not only to change the world around us, but to change our own lives as well.  Just as with learning any new skill, it is going to take time to train your mind and body to use divergence to your advantage.  Your imagination is your greatest gift, and once you are able to let your inner curiosity run wild, you will have all of the tools necessary to design the world that used to only exist in your dreams.