Have you ever noticed how difficult it can be sometimes to be a human? Or at the very least show your humanity?
You must remember customers are human, just like you.
Being the founder of a business requires constant positioning and navigating unknown terrain. It’s much different than being a manager or leader within a large, established organization. For me, it’s not so much the pace of change, but the people who come and go. It’s not easy.
Everything swirling around us says to constantly scale, automate and innovate.
And yet it’s the humans who are our families, friends, and customers. Don’t forget that customers are humans. And we are human too.
We’ve explored this pressure, this tension, between success, automation, empathy, and human connection for the past couple of podcast episodes (Maria Ross and Angela Henderson).
It’s also shown up in my own life and the lives of my clients in sometimes excruciatingly painful ways. It’s the heartache, the joy, the love, that separates us from the automation, the machines, whirling through a series of yes/no, all-or-nothing decisions.
The most maddening thing about being human is we live in a frustrating world of grey. Of histories and patterns. Of uncertainty.
It’s you, it’s me, it’s everyone. There is no neat and tidy ending to this piece. It feels trite to say, ‘so go get ‘em, Tiger!,’ or some such thing. We are all just a bunch of messy humans hurling through space on an enormous rock, doing the best we can.
Remember and embrace that.