Somewhere along the way, we decided the easiest way to understand people was to split them in two. You’re either creative or analytical. Ambitious or content. Maker or taker. Live to work or work to live. These little divisions make for great LinkedIn posts, but not so great life advice.
I recall walking through a hotel lobby that was hosting some business conference. The lobby was full of men in suits and women in smart business attire, holding cocktails chest-high like shields as they talked about, well, whatever business people talk about when they get together. I noticed something interesting as I stood in the midst of things — me in my jeans and black T-shirt, the official wardrobe of the struggling artist. I was there on someone else’s dime to do an interview. But I’ve learned in these situations that if you just move with confidence, no one really knows you’re completely out of place.
I stood at the front desk and watched the groups. The thing that struck me was that most people in the group weren’t paying attention to their group. Sure, they would say a few words to their gathering, but their eyes were always darting around the lobby, looking for the “better” conversation with the more important people. No one was present in their group.
I got my room key and was about to head to the elevator, but the room dynamics were so interesting I decided to linger. While moving through the blobs and clots of people, I heard two things that have stuck with me for a long time. One was a piece of a conversation between an older, military-looking guy and a younger woman. The woman was saying, “I know, it’s a big chance, but my husband really wants kids,” to which the man replied, “Well, you need to decide — do you live to work or work to live?”
That struck me as a completely insane response to the woman’s situation. What did that have to do with having a child? The next snippet I caught was from a guy in his early thirties, sharp suit, glass of white wine, holding court with what I imagined were interns of some sort. As I passed, I heard him say, “Are you a maker or a taker?” Years later, I would speak those same words as Ebenezer Scrooge, talking to two charitable sisters.
In general, that was the tone of the lobby — business folks doling out business sense to other business people looking for the magic bullet, the lifting phrase, the quick insight that would… what? I have no idea. But everyone was looking for it, talking about it, and drinking heavily. No one I eavesdropped on mentioned work/life balance.
Cut to today. I’m sitting at my desk, fingers eager to start this blog, and I read a headline: Ring founder Jamie Siminoff says work/life balance is a myth. Siminoff was rejected on Shark Tank. He then renamed his little invention “Ring,” returned to the market, and became a billionaire. So I figure he knows — right?
So were those business folks back in that Boston hotel lobby right? Are we just makers or takers? Do we have only two choices — live to work or work to live? Is work/life balance actually a myth?
Maybe those questions never go away because they’re comforting in their simplicity.
We like binaries. They make the world feel easier to sort — the ambitious and the complacent, the driven and the lazy, the makers and the takers. But in reality, most of us live in the messy middle. And that middle is where the real work happens.
The Binary Problem
Somewhere along the way, we decided the easiest way to understand people was to split them in two. You’re either creative or analytical. Ambitious or content. Maker or taker. Live to work or work to live. These little divisions make for great LinkedIn posts, but not so great life advice.
We like binaries because they make life feel easier to explain. It’s cleaner that way. You don’t have to wrestle with the gray areas or admit you don’t always know what drives you. If you call yourself a “maker,” you get to feel like the scrappy one, the person who’s out there doing the work, earning it. If you lean toward “taker,” you can say you’re just being smart about it, using what’s already out there. Both sound reasonable enough. Both miss the point.
If I’m honest, that line between the two barely exists. Most of the “makers” I’ve met are also taking something, attention, validation, maybe just the feeling that what they’re doing matters. And most of the “takers” are making, in their own way. They’re building safety. Building reputation. Trying not to be left behind. None of it fits cleanly into a label. Once you look past the slogans, it’s just people, messy, mixed-up, doing what they can to make life make sense.
That hotel lobby was full of it. Every group was running the same conversation in a different suit. Everyone deciding what side they were: the hustlers, the visionaries, the people trying to sound like both. You could feel the energy of it, like everyone was auditioning for a role they didn’t really believe in.
That’s what happens when you buy into the either/or story. Curiosity gets swapped out for competition. Nobody listens; they just wait for their turn to sound certain. The label becomes the whole thing. And at some point, you stop noticing you’re just saying what you think you’re supposed to say.
The Missing Middle
Between the makers and the takers, there’s a third group that rarely gets talked about. They don’t fit the headline categories. They’re not chasing attention, and they’re not looking for shortcuts. They build the connections that make both sides possible.
They’re the middle. The people who translate vision into reality and turn ideas into systems. The ones who give shape to things that would otherwise stay abstract. They understand that every big move depends on a network of smaller ones. That nothing grows in isolation.
In healthy ecosystems, the middle is where the energy circulates. It’s the root system under the forest floor, invisible but essential. Every maker relies on it. Every taker benefits from it. Yet we’ve built a culture that celebrates the leaves and ignores the roots.
The people in the middle think differently. They see work not as a competition but as an exchange, as effort moving through a system. They know progress doesn’t come from choosing sides. It comes from balance, timing, and the willingness to keep things connected when everyone else is pulling apart.
People in that middle space rarely get noticed. They’re just doing the work that holds everything together. Take them out, and things don’t break all at once; they just start to come apart. Projects lose direction. The spark fades a little. Before long, it’s all motion with no meaning.
The Myth of Pure Making
We talk a lot about makers, as if creation happens in a vacuum. It sounds noble. The self-made person. The late nights, the grit, the story that ends with a standing ovation. But anyone who has ever built something that lasts knows it’s never that clean.
Even the strongest idea needs an ecosystem around it. Tools. Timing. People who believe in it enough to push it forward when the maker is too tired to care. The myth of pure making ignores all that. It pretends success is a solo climb when in reality it’s a long chain of shared effort.
Take Jamie Siminoff, the founder of Ring. He was the guy who got rejected on Shark Tank. Changed the name of his product, kept building, and eventually sold his company for a fortune. The story gets told like a lone victory, one man against the odds. But look closer, and it’s not a story of isolation at all. It’s a story about networks, timing, and people who kept the idea alive with him.
Every big win looks like it belongs to one person. It rarely does. There are always people in the background shaping it, testing it, opening doors, and carrying pieces of it forward. That’s the part we rarely celebrate. The middle makes the making possible.
If the myth of pure making were true, every talented person with a good idea would succeed. They don’t. What makes the difference isn’t brilliance. It’s connection. The ability to plug into something larger than yourself and let that system multiply your effort.
The Human Cost of Extremes
The problem with living at either end of the spectrum is that it starts to eat at you. Makers burn out chasing the next breakthrough. Takers burn out pretending they don’t care. Both end up measuring their worth against everyone around them and wondering why it never feels like enough.
I think about that hotel lobby sometimes. The noise, the laughter that wasn’t really laughter, the way everyone kept scanning the room for something better. It looked like networking, but it felt like survival. Everyone trying to prove they were on the right side of the conversation.
That’s what the extremes do. They keep you moving but never let you arrive. You can’t rest because rest looks like weakness. You can’t slow down because slowing down feels like losing ground. You start to confuse motion with meaning.
Some people call that ambition. Maybe it is. But there’s a cost to living like that, and it’s usually paid quietly. It’s in the people who stop creating because they’re tired of competing. It’s in the teams that forget why they started. It’s in the work that looks impressive from the outside but feels hollow to the people who made it.
The Takeaway
People love to sort the world into makers and takers. It keeps things simple. But real work doesn’t live at either end. It happens somewhere in the middle, in the messy part where ideas bump into each other and start to take shape.
The people who get that aren’t chasing balance or perfection. They’re just trying to stay connected. They’re building systems that give back instead of draining them. Work that holds up because it’s tied to something larger than their own effort.
If the hotel lobby were a snapshot of what happens when everyone is looking for the next better thing, then the middle is what happens when people finally stop looking and start building together. That’s where the real progress lives. It’s quiet, steady, and almost invisible until you step back and see what it’s holding up.
At ThoughtLab, this is what we help brands do. We help them move out of the extremes and into that middle space where strategy, creativity, and connection actually work together. When you build your brand like an ecosystem, everything you make supports everything else.
