Black and White Are Only Two Colors Among Millions

For IT professionals, engineers, all of us logical left-brain people. We have a natural tendency to either say something is right or something is wrong. You’re either smart or you’re dumb; black or white, there is not gray in the world for a lot of engineers.

If that sounds familiar to you, that’s how I am. But, as of the past few years I guess, I’ve gotten better at my YouTube video on marketing. This is a struggle I’ve dealt with for a very long time that I’m sure if you’re an IT pro/engineer, somebody of that caliber, I’m sure you have too.

Let’s say you get to work and a co-worker comes up with some kind of solution, maybe. And you immediately think that’s wrong. Or, let’s say you use a PowerShell alias versus the full command line name.

Code is definitely a big example of the whole left-brain right or wrong mentality. You know we’re all about coding styles. You should use semicolons; you should not use semicolons. Tabs versus space is a good one right there. It’s either, you’re right or you’re wrong.

I think that it’s something that a lot of people, like myself, really need to do better at. We need to be okay with the squishy stuff. Ask some questions about things. Your brain is going to immediately think, “that’s wrong, change it; you should do something different, that is right”. You have to kind of catch your thought as you’re thinking that, and be more self-aware of what you’re thinking and get the context behind things.

Twitter is a good example of another. People say something on Twitter and you immediately want to just attack them with “you’re wrong, that’s ridiculous”, but you don’t know the context of things. You don’t know where they’re coming from, or what situation they’re in.

Once you hear some explanation and context behind that, you can see “okay, I’ve kind of changed my mind and I can kind of see that” That’s the gray stuff; It’s not the right or wrong stuff.

I kind of want to make this post a quick one because it was something I’ve been thinking about for a little bit. Especially this morning when Adam Fowler on Twitter had tweeted something about the concept of on-premise versus on-premises; how people are getting caught up on names. It’s the exact same thing with the names; on-premise, on-premises.

If the majority of the community knows what you’re talking about. It doesn’t matter what you call it. It’s that engineering IT mentality of “that’s right, that’s wrong”. People will be vehement about just arguing their point. For what? It really doesn’t matter in the long game.

There is no black and white and everything is gray.

This post was brought to you by yet another #CarTalks YouTube video. Be sure to check out all of the other #CarTalks videos and other video content on the Adam the Automator YouTube channel!