Be Polarizing and Find Your People

A new client of mine asked me yesterday: “What is a difficult person?” She’d read some of my articles around how to work with difficult people and was curious. This question floored me for minute.

You see, for decades, I had self-identified as a difficult person and wore it as a mark of pride. I’ve always been a person with a distinct point of view. I have strong opinions on everything ranging from the best pets (cats that think they’re dogs) to the right approach to solve a design problem. And I know that everything in the world can be framed as a design problem.

This made me quite polarizing when I worked in tech. Many people I worked with loved how I was—direct, transparent, passionate, and full of ideas. Other people couldn’t stand my aggressiveness and the way I made them feel when I debated and picked their ideas to pieces. When working in corporate, I learned to adopt a broader leadership range to be more inclusive and draw out opinions of people not like me. And this is what I shared with my client. That “difficult” is often in the eye of the beholder.

My client’s question of “What is a difficult person?” made me reflect on my pride in being difficult, in having a strong point of view, and in being polarizing. Because being polarizing helps you to find your people.

Ones and Tens

One of my coaches shared a thought-provoking article from Steve Pavlina on Ones and Tens. Steve shares that when we play it safe, most of our relationships in life aren’t 1s or 10s (out of 10) but tend to hover around the middle of the scale.

Playing it safe is an effective social strategy if your goal is to create loose bonds with a variety of people. When you stick with polite conversation, keep your most striking differences and oddities private, and do your best to avoid controversy, you’re likely to do well socially on a surface level.

Playing it safe is what happens in networking conversations, cocktail party chatter about the weather, and the agendas of 80% of our oh-so-boring work meetings reporting out status or mind-numbing project details that you’re not at all invested in.

But if you never take social risks, you’ll also prevent yourself from attracting those deeply intimate 9s and 10s. These types of connections require some risk taking, such as by sharing the parts of yourself that aren’t popular and which aren’t as socially acceptable.

In order to get those 9s and 10s, you must risk creating some 1s and 2s. Many people fear the 1s and 2s more strongly than they desire the 9s and 10s, and so they settle for 7s at best.

The search for 1s and 10s requires the introspection to know what it is you strongly care about, and the courage to share it widely with others.

Ones and Tens at Work

I’ve worked with a wide variety of corporations through my 22-year career ranging from world-class design firms, startups, and technology companies. Working at a design firm on innovation projects for clients was incredibly creative and non-committal for my restless soul. With a 3-month project, any abusive clients who were 1s would soon be gone. You’d hope to extend the client who were 10s on future projects with them or their next companies. Either way, the work was a beautiful shiny new object.

Working on products deeper in-house was harder. I’ve made the mistake of thinking that I could change culture and processes during a short-lived 3 month stint running a mobile innovation team at JP Morgan Chase. I knew it was the wrong culture fit on day one, but tried to stick it out. That job, as well as most of the people at the company, with the exception of the boss who lured me in, were 1s.

At Facebook, where I got my polarizing feedback, I learned that there were a lot of brilliant, high-achievers who cared deeply about their work and the people around them. It was easy for me to find 10s. There were people who on a personal level were a 1 for me due to our fundamentally different values about personal success vs team success. However, I was able to find aspects of these people which I could respect enough as a 10. We could find common goals that we believed in and focus on that tiny sliver of shared values to build our mutual 10-ness.

Now, working as an entrepreneur, I surround myself with coaches and designers who are 10s for me. We partner and co-create programs together and it feels magical to work with 10s who are simultaneously similar and different from me. Increasingly, I’m only working with clients who I consider to be 10s. I’m lucky enough to have had the space to better understand what’s a 10 for me, and to have the business luxury to say no to those who don’t fit the criteria.

Tens for Me

People who are 10s for me have some common threads:

  • Playful and curious; committed to boundless self-exploration & growth in their lives

  • Courage to be open, vulnerable and share the scary things

  • Kind. Innately believe in the goodness of others, that people are well-intentioned even while they make mistakes.

  • I hold them in awe. They inspire me to be better

Where it gets even more interesting is when I find people with crazy, creative passions. My own passions include trying a lot of different risky, adrenaline-inducing adventures. Ways I’ve found of accessing that weird is through surfing, traveling like a local and exploring new-to-me cultures, and spending time with the Burning Man community. The nature of other people’s passions doesn’t really matter. I simply love the utter fanaticism of having a passion and it makes me want to learn more about the person and their obsession.

Ones and Tens in Life — Seeking Intimacy

Life can be perfectly pleasant with many 7s surrounding you. There’s neighbors, family members, friends who’ve been in your life for a while. You may enjoy spending casual time with them, perhaps over a beer or a movie. Conversations may be light banter over sports, politics, or celebrity gossip. This is a fantastic default-mode to be in.

Yet 2020 isn’t a year that’s convenient for default-mode. As we narrow our pandemic bubbles and closely limit the people we physically interact with, we crave deeper intimacy and connection. We’ve lost the casual conversations with strangers at a bar or coffee shop. This is the time to re-consider the 7s in your life and seek out the 10s.

Be polarizing and try some new things when interacting with people:

  1. Share your desiresThings can be really difficult right now in the 8th month of a global pandemic when we continue to immersed in multiple world crises. Yet it’s OK to dream and think about what you really want. It’s OK to think about your bucket list and all the dreams and desires on it. Rather than waiting for the pandemic to end, consider adapting some of the bucket list items for what’s feasible right now.

  2. Fly your freak flag
    What makes you a freak? What’s your crazy passion or obsession that everyone else outside of your small niche would consider crazy? Is it an addiction to cosplay, antique cars, the spiritual realm, a polyamorous life, or woodworking? What are you petrified to talk about to others?

  3. Claim your boringness
    And if you think you have nothing that you’re passionate about, then talk about the details of something that could bore the other person to death. It could be needlework, baking, reading a book, catching up on emails, watching a WWII documentary— whatever brings you joy, relaxation, and is an indicator of how you spend your time.

It’s all a mater of perspective if the activities you spend your time on are weird or boring. Declaring them out to the world, being polarizing, that’s the first step to finding your people. In your next Monday zoom staff meeting, try sharing how you really spent your weekend.

And when you proclaim these things out in the world, you’ll find that other people respond to you. It may inspire them to share their bucket list or connect with the pleasure of a solitary night of Netflix. And through these interactions with people who might be 7s or 8s, you can refine what you love. You can learn more about your desires. You can experiment and try on new ways of being. You’ll find some new intimate relationships, and you might offend some people along the way (congrats, you’ve found a 1!). Try it out! I guarantee it will make life a lot more interesting.

Tutti Taygerly