You've Already Decided Who People Are. That's the Problem.
I’ll admit something unflattering: I’m a judger.
Right before I sat down to record this week, I was quietly sizing up strangers. My co-host had to tell me to knock it off. I do it constantly — I meet someone, run them through a fast internal test, decide where they go, and file them.
Most of us do. We just don’t say it out loud.
And the conversation I had this week — ostensibly about Marilyn Monroe — turned into something that’s been rattling around my head ever since. Because the real story of her life wasn’t about glamour. It was about how completely the world reduced a brilliant, well-read, business-savvy woman down to a single image, and then refused to look any further.
The uncomfortable part is that this isn’t a Hollywood problem. It’s a me problem. And probably a you problem.
We Reduce People to Their Most Useful Version
We don’t keep the whole person. We keep the slice we need.
The barista is “the barista.” The colleague who’s good at one thing becomes only the person who’s good at that one thing. The employee you decided three years ago was “not strategic” stays filed under “not strategic,” no matter what they’ve learned since.
It’s efficient. That’s the seduction of it. Carrying the full, complicated, contradictory version of every person you meet is expensive. A box is cheap.
But here’s what the box costs you: the moment you decide who someone is, you stop being able to see who they’re becoming.
Two Things Stop Happening
When you box people, two things quietly die.
First, they stop changing in front of you. Not because they can’t, but because there’s no point. If every contribution gets filtered through “well, that’s just how they are,” people learn to stop bringing you anything that doesn’t fit the file. You get the version of them that’s easiest for you to deal with — and you mistake it for the whole person.
Second, you stop letting yourself be seen, too. This is the part I underestimated for most of my life. If I show up as a fixed character — the confident guy who has it together — I never get a real relationship. I get a performance, returned. The boxes go both directions.
The best relationships I have are the ones where both people let each other be the full, messy, evolving version. Those are the ones that survived something hard. Not in spite of the honesty — because of it.
Why We Do It
We box people for the same reason we perform for them: fear.
We’re terrified of being caught not having it together, so we present a tidy, finished version of ourselves. And we extend the same courtesy in reverse — we want everyone else to be a tidy, finished version too, because a fixed person is predictable, and predictable feels safe.
Add in whatever stereotypes the world hands us — about age, gender, what a “jazz musician” looks like, what a “blonde” must be — and we end up navigating a room full of cardboard cutouts we built ourselves.
The cruel irony: the people sharp enough to notice the box, like Marilyn, sometimes learn to weaponize it. Most people never get that chance. They just quietly shrink to fit.
The Leadership Lesson
If you run a team, this stops being philosophy and becomes performance.
Your highest-leverage move as a leader isn’t a better strategy deck. It’s refusing to keep your people in the boxes you assigned them on day one. The analyst who could be a leader. The quiet one who’s actually your best thinker. The person you’d written off, who’s been growing the entire time you stopped looking.
Talent doesn’t announce itself when it’s trapped under a label you applied years ago.
So the practical work is unglamorous: assume there’s more. Ask the second question. Let the grocer be more than a grocer, the employee be more than their last review, the partner be more than the version you got used to.
in your life have you already decided you know?
And are the people closest to you allowed to be their full, complicated selves — or just the version of them that’s most convenient for you?
Everyone you meet is a more complicated version of themselves than they’re willing to admit. That includes the famous, the forgotten, and the person who handed you your coffee this morning.
It also, if you’re honest, includes you.
If you want the full conversation that started all of this — a deep dive into the most-seen, least-known woman in history — it’s on this week’s episode of Sorta Sophisticated.
🎧 Listen here:
