Forget Business
"It's not personal, it's business" is, in a word, ridiculous.
Not long ago, I wrote about the trick to self-confidence. (Short version: Act confident — fake it — and you’ll seem confident, which has essentially the same effect upon the people you’re speaking to.)
My post was framed as advice for getting business done. But my friend Liz commented on that post, writing “Forget business, I’m sharing this with my kids.”
Indeed, I think of Your Intermittent Lex as a place where I’m both sharing business strategy and life hacks — because, to Liz’s point, it’s all the same advice. If it works in business, it works in the rest of your life. And it’s true the other way, too.
I’ve shared before that one “trick” of mine is following-up well — responding to people and checking in with them appropriately. That also, of course, matters a ton in friendship. People like when you, you know, respond to them and acknowledge their existence!
You know what else matters in both friendship and business? Honesty, and kindness, and being genuine. When I shared advice on writing great emails, I wrote about sounding human. There’s a misfired instinct in business to sound “professional.” I’m not suggesting you should write work emails that say “yo, sup, wanna buy some stuff lol.” But I am suggesting that adopting that overly stuffy tone that doesn’t sound in any way human, that “professional hat on” kind of speech — doesn’t really achieve the effect you want today. Instead, it makes you sound like a robot. (Or worse, an AI.)
That line I alluded to in the sub-headline — “it’s not business, it’s personal” — strikes me as hilariously out-of-touch in the modern era. Most of us take our work personally, because we care about our jobs, and may even (for better or for worse) measure some of our self-worth and success in life on how well we do professionally. We take business personally. We can debate how healthy that is, but it’s the reality regardless.
So it’s important to recognize that the folks you’re doing business with likely think of business as personal, too. Approach them personably. Be human in your interactions. If it works in life, it works at work.