Operating in the Gray Area
The gray area — a place where it is tough to judge what is right or wrong. A place where nobody but yourself is telling you what time to wake up, how long to work and what work to go after.
The gray area sounds scary and lonely but when compared to other options like — attaching your financial and emotional support to one group of people or organization — that is scary too!
Working for any organization is scary. The organization does not operate on emotions or care about your financial stability. You are more dependent on the them, than they are on you. You think you are safe but you are more in the gray than the entrepreneur who walks out his or her front door every morning hunting for the next dollar to make by creating value for someone else. Any day, your organization could change and you are left in the gray.
People who can work in the gray area are tough to hire. If you are the hiring manager at a big company — you want the stable 9–5 AM employee who will show up to the family Christmas party every year. You want a lifer. Someone that will commute 2-hours to work for you and stay in your office doors for 10 hours. These people have trouble working in the gray area because they need to be told where to go to work and what time to work every day and who to submit their expense receipts too. They can’t handle gray.
It comes down to discipline. As humans, we are made to work. We wake up each day wanting to better than we did the day before. No company’s performance management plan motivates someone to work harder than the day before.
When we align our work with a mission bigger than us, good things start to happen. At Sumato Coffee , our mission is to reimagine coffee in the workplace and home with freshly roasted coffee beans. Look anyplace you go and you will see coffee beans that are old and stale. Our mission is to provide freshly roasted coffee beans to people so they can have the greatest coffee available where they do their most meaningful work, at work. My job is to continue to make it easy for people to buy and quickly ship freshly roasted coffee beans to your door. Any work our team does is focused on making our process faster and less expensive to our customers.

Like an artist — your best work comes at odd times. Same goes with operating in the gray. Oftentimes — the gray area is waiting for you to shine your light on it. The gray does not work on your time schedule, the gray does not care about your next appointment, the gray does not care when new customer orders arrive and the leads do not show up when you think you have predicted them to show up. Get used to the gray.
When you have discipline, things are not gray. You are not emotionally or financially dependent on one organization and have to worry when that one organization goes away. You wake up early and work on your game. You are clueless that you are in the gray and the world is about to explode.
Operating in the gray does not have set hours of work so it is up to you to find times to create and times to react but also not be so rigid your business suffers. Pick up the phone if the moment arises. Right now, I am up early sipping on a fresh pour-over brew creating content. I had to be disciplined enough to wake up earlier than most people and do my thing. But guess what? I will soon go into reaction mode. Check emails, phone calls come in. People coming at me. Create, react, create, react….repeat and be ready for the gray.
Life works in the gray. Life does not obey your schedule. Everyday if you are not getting knocked down then you are not pushing yourself. You are fooling yourself and behaving in a risky manner if you are tying all your emotional or financial happiness into one group of people. Get in the gray.
