One of my college chemistry professors had a bumper sticker pasted to his office door. It said, “It takes alkynes to make the world.” This is a chemical play on words that my science friends are rolling their eyes at and my non-science friends are impatiently thinking, “Get to the point, Sherri.” Alkynes are organic molecules that have a carbon-carbon triple bond. There are several alkyne molecules that are critical to life forms of various types (including us) so, yes, it takes alkynes to make the world. Additionally, the word is pronounced “Al”—like the man’s name—“kines”—with a long “I”. This sort of sounds like “all kinds,” as in “it takes all kinds to make the world.” This saying is another valuable truism.
We all know this intuitively yet it is often hard to remember in practice. When I was younger, the issue was the struggle to understand and accept myself which led me to judge those different from me as being inferior. Of course, this was also balanced by a paranoia that they were indeed better than me. When you get older, the issue around putting that saying into daily practice often revolves around fear and regret: Fear that someone different from you is dangerous and/or regret that you didn’t choose that path yourself. So, the best thing to do to uplift yourself is to diss them.
We’ve all heard the jokes that begin, “There are two kinds of people in this world.” In my exhaustive research for this essay, I went down a bit of an Internet rabbit hole on examples of this joke. The funniest ones, by the way, are visual: pictures of a neat desk, for example, along side a wasteland of paper and tchotchkes with a table underneath. I know that these dichotomies of extremes are oversimplifications, but they do often make a point. Here are a couple that have resonated with me:
There are two kinds of people in the world: entrepreneurs and corporate types. I could never be an entrepreneur, even though it looks really glamorous and can make you really rich. To be a successful entrepreneur, you need to be passionate and persistent to a degree I just can’t muster. I was, however, a really good “corporate type.” I worked well within that structure. Entrepreneurs and corporate types often get really judgy with each other. One is not better than the other, though! We need both. Without entrepreneurs, we’d never get new businesses. Without corporate types, we’d never be able to grow those businesses to the level that they need to be to serve the community.
There are two kinds of people in the world: creative types and execution types. Look, we all know we need both types and rarely do you find both characteristics in one person. Creatives tend to value ideation more than execution, though, and vice versa. It’s natural to value what you like and what you do more so than those characteristics that don’t reflect you. And herein lies the problem.
For those of you still waiting for me to make a point, these dichotomies got me thinking about this challenge of embracing things that are new or different and finding common ground.
My regular, very patient readers know that Trish and I are starting a major renovation of our house. When we last left our story about a month ago, I was really unsettled getting prepped for this and waiting for it to start. While I’ll tackle stories about rolling with punches during construction later, today I wanted to talk about our living situation. Since our whole house is basically impacted with this construction and we have two cats that are neurotic enough already, thank you, we decided to move out. We are amazingly fortunate that Trish’s sister and brother-in-law live half a mile away and offered us their home while they winter in Florida. I can’t even begin to describe how generous this is and my gratitude to them! We are cohabitating this first month, since they leave after Thanksgiving, and this had led to an unexpected pleasure—getting to know my in-laws more fully than I’ve been able to during various family gatherings.
I was pretty nervous about sharing the house, particularly over an extended time period. It’s their home and I really wanted to respect their “life flow” but know that no matter how hard we try, our presence will be disruptive. My relationship with my in-laws is way more important than having a temporary place to live. What I’ve found over these past few weeks, though, is that we are finding common ground even as we navigate our differences. Here a couple of examples:
There are two kinds of people in the world: those who pack a dishwasher as efficiently as possible and those who randomly toss items in. I’ve plumbed this territory before. I actually brought this up during one of our preparatory discussions, wanting to understand little habits like how they loaded the dishwasher. Tom and Trish both said, “Who cares? They all get washed.” Megan and I both started twitching a bit and said, “But we need to be able to get as many dishes in there as possible!” I looked at Meg with new-found appreciation and respect.
There are two kinds of people in the world: Sleeping Beauties and Price Charmings. The Lawlor women have a special skill. Trish, for example, can drink six expressos at bedtime and the warmth of the liquid will put her right to sleep. Megan apparently has similar sleeping skills. Tom and I, awake at 6:00 am to feed the cats, have bonded over their ability to fall asleep so quickly, and sleep long and loud. Clearly, our level of tolerance is beyond gallant.
There are many other examples, mostly small things, that I’ve found over the last couple of weeks that I (or we) have in common with Megan and Tom that I never knew before. And finding those little commonalities makes me feel even closer to them. What could have been a “family tragedy” has really been a lot of fun! (Here’s hoping Tom and Meg are also laughing…)
Finally, I have also been thinking about “there are two kinds of people in the world” in the context of how divided our nation has become as we emerge from the midterm elections. We can blame 24 hour news channels and social media, which have certainly exacerbated our divides, but it’s more than that. It seems like we’ve stopped seeing each other as whole human beings and just define the “other” by a single characteristic: political ideology, race, class, whatever. I firmly believe, though, that we all have far more in common than we realize and if we’d just take a little time to get to know each other better, maybe we’d find a way to bridge some of these divides. I’ve written before about the dangers of making assumptions about the whole person based on some (probably irrelevant) defining characteristic. I’ve also written about the key workplace advice I got early in my career to always look for something you like about, and can learn from, each person you meet. That advice works just as well in our broader lives as in the workplace. Don’t get stuck on “there are two kinds of people in the world.” There really aren’t. We are all just humans.