How to Avoid Working with Idiots

David Ogilvy once said,

"The consumer isn't a moron. She's your wife."

It's one of my favorite quotes because it manages to be funny, provocative, and useful all at the same time. Like most good observations, it isn't really about the thing it's supposedly about. It's not actually about consumers. It's about people. More specifically, it's about the dangerous habit of assuming that people who don't think like us must not be thinking at all.

If you've worked with clients long enough, you've met one.

The client who asks for your advice and then debates every piece of it.

The client who disappears for weeks and suddenly needs an answer immediately.

The client who keeps asking the same question no matter how many times you've answered it.

The client who seems incapable of understanding what appears painfully obvious to you.

I've met those people too.

I've vented about them. I've told stories about them. I've sat across from friends and coworkers and done what people in sales have been doing since the invention of sales: complained about clients.

The funny thing is that it always feels productive in the moment. Somebody tells a story. Everybody laughs. Someone tops it with an even better story. We all feel understood. We all feel justified.

I've come to think of it as junk food for salespeople.

It tastes great.

It just doesn't make you any better.

In fact, I suspect it makes us worse.

Because every minute we spend talking about how irrational someone else is, we spend one less minute trying to understand why they're behaving the way they are. And while understanding another person doesn't guarantee success, I've found it dramatically improves the odds.

Over the years I've worked in advertising, publishing, software, media, and real estate. I've been on the client side of the table. I've been on the sales side of the table. I've been on the account management side. I've been the person buying. I've been the person selling. I've been the person creating the strategy and the person being pitched the strategy.

And the older I get, the less interested I become in whether someone is difficult and the more interested I become in what they're optimizing for.

Because most people are optimizing for something. The client who asks the same question five times is often optimizing for certainty. The client who wants an answer immediately after disappearing for three weeks is often optimizing for relief. The client who debates every recommendation is often optimizing for control. The client who seems disengaged may simply be optimizing for everything else going on in their life.

The behavior may be frustrating. But it's part of earning your keep. And, once you understand what problem someone is trying to solve, the behavior often starts making a lot more sense.

I learned that lesson standing on a porch in St. Roch talking about YouTube.

For forty-five minutes. In record humidity. During my lunch break. I hadn’t eaten.

The seller's name was Wayne.

Wayne is smart. He's successful. He's built businesses. He's the kind of person many people would enjoy spending an afternoon with. We were standing outside his raised basement home, one very humid summer afternoon, discussing the sale when he began referencing financial experts. Then another one. Then another one. Then another one.

At some point I realized we'd been talking about YouTube finance personalities for nearly an hour.

Did I know this guy?

What did I think of that prediction?

Had I listened to this podcast?

What was my take on interest rates?

The strange part is that I wasn't annoyed with Wayne. I was annoyed with the situation. Actually, annoyed isn't quite right.

I was bored.

And then, to my surprise, I felt a little inadequate. Because I didn't know half the people he was referencing. Because I wasn't especially interested in knowing them. Because I couldn't understand why he thought this was my language.

Wayne wasn't doing anything wrong. He was being Wayne. In fact, one of my favorite things about Wayne is that he was remarkably honest about who he was. To this day he's our only four-star review. Not because we failed him. Wayne simply believes nobody deserves a perfect score. Honestly, that's a very Wayne thing to believe.

But standing on that porch, I found myself wondering why this wasn't the first conversation like this I'd had. 

There had been other Waynes.

Different names.

Different houses.

Same conversation.

And while some of them were enjoyable enough, I rarely found myself energized by them. Which was confusing because I had spent years building content that should have attracted exactly these people. 

Eventually I called my coach, Jan Copeland, to complain.

Jan listened patiently and then pointed out something that was immediately irritating because it was true. I was calling them in.

I was calling them in.

The thing about receiving good coaching is that it often sounds obvious five minutes after you hear it. Before that, it tends to sound deeply unfair. What Jan pointed out was that the world wasn't responding to who I was. It was responding to who I appeared to be.

At the time, I was producing detailed market reports. Interest rate updates. Economic commentary. Financial analysis. Charts. Graphs. Forecasts. The work wasn't fake. I genuinely understood it. Before real estate, I'd spent years around organizations like The Wall Street Journal and Morgan Stanley. I could absolutely hold those conversations.

The problem was that I had accidentally convinced the world they were my favorite conversations. So of course finance bros were calling me.

I had essentially built a giant bat signal for them.

Or, as I later described it to a friend, I was a fintech social media bro wearing a bra and lipstick. And the signal was working exactly as designed.

The realization bothered me because it wasn't just about finance.

Finance happened to be the example. It was the thing I noticed first because it was showing up over and over again. But once I saw it, I started noticing it everywhere.

The people showing up in our lives are often responding to a version of us we've chosen to amplify.

Sometimes intentionally.

Sometimes accidentally.

For years, I had been telling the world I was a finance person. Not directly. I never said that. I said I had worked for Morgan Stanley and The Wall Street Journal and let them made the leap. But my content screamed finance person.

And people came to trust me on financial matters. 

The funny thing is that I actually do enjoy finance. I enjoy economics. I enjoy understanding markets. I enjoy data. I enjoy patterns. I enjoy trying to understand why people do what they do.

What I don't enjoy is spending all day discussing interest rates. And that distinction took me a surprisingly long time to understand.

Around that same time, I found myself thinking about a story I used to tell when I was teaching workshops on storytelling. I'd ask a room full of executives a simple question. Why is the sky blue?

Why is the sky blue? A lesson in perspectives.

It surprises no one who follows me or my writing that I was the type of child who asked “why?” Or that I asked it all the time. So one day standing barefoot in the grass of our front yard I asked my father ‘’why is the sky blue?’’

My father loved applied mathematics so much he majored in physics. He became a fighter pilot. At one point he aligned satellites for NORAD. Later he became a high school physics teacher.

When I asked him why the sky was blue, he explained the curvature of the earth, light waves, water particles, and atmospheric conditions. If you gave my father enough time, he'd probably draw diagrams.

I gave up and went and asked Mom instead.

My mother had a different answer. My mother loves musical theatre. She taught life sciences. She researches family trees for fun. She loves stories. She loves people. She loves understanding where things came from and how they connect.

When I asked her why the sky was blue, she said:

"It's magic."

The older I get, the more convinced I become that both of them were right. Somewhere between those two answers is where my brain lives. Science and magic. Data and story. Art and strategy. Facts and meaning.

What matters to me.

And why it matters.

I don't care about housing data because it's data. I care about what the data says about people. What it means for them today and tomorrow. What we can learn from yesterday.

I don't care about architecture because it's architecture. I care about why one person walks into a room and immediately feels at home while someone else wants to leave.

I don't care about marketing because it's marketing. I care about why some stories spread and why some change hearts and minds and others simply disappear.

Looking back, I think that's why Chris and Wayne felt so different to me even though, on paper, they should have been remarkably similar. Who’s Chris? Fair question. Follow me.

Chris was a journalist and a world traveler. He spent time backpacking through developing nations and filing stories from internet cafes with questionable Wi-Fi. We could start with economics and somehow end up talking about culture, cities, history, philosophy, or human behavior.

Finance was the doorway. It just wasn't the room we stayed in.

Wayne wasn't wrong. Chris wasn't right. Both ironically lived in St. Roch. 

But Chris and Wayne were simply interested in different perspectives around the same things. And, perhaps more importantly, I was interested in different things too.

The problem wasn't that I had attracted the wrong people. The problem was that I hadn't yet figured out how to describe the right version of myself. 

Once I did, something interesting happened.

The work got easier.

Not because clients became easier. Not because difficult situations disappeared. Not because everyone suddenly agreed with me.

The work got easier because I was spending more time with people I genuinely enjoyed being around. People who liked talking about neighborhoods. People who liked old houses. People who liked history. People who liked culture. People who got excited about architecture. People who enjoyed geeking out over strategy.

People who wanted an advantage, but also wanted a story.

People who cared about where they lived and why.

In other words, my people.

And that's when I realized something that would eventually become one of the most important lessons of my career. The goal isn't to find perfect clients. The goal is to understand people well enough to recognize what they're actually looking for.

So how do you avoid working with idiots?

I don't think you do.

I think you get honest.

Honest about who you are. Honest about what you enjoy. Honest about what energizes you. Honest about the kinds of people you naturally connect with and the kinds of conversations you'd happily have for hours.

Because whether you realize it or not, you're sending a signal.

Maybe yours is a bat signal. Maybe it's a frog signal.

Mine turns out to be something closer to a unicorn.

A little strategy. A little storytelling. A little history. A little architecture. A little psychology. A little data. A little magic. Once I got honest about that, I started finding more of my people.

Not perfect people. Not easier people. Just people I understood better and who understood me better in return. And it turns out that makes all the difference.

The client isn't a moron.

She's your wife.

Or your husband.

Or your mom.

Or your friend.

Or your Realtor.

Most of the time they're just a person responding to the signals they're getting.

The better we get at sending the right ones, the easier it becomes to find the people we were meant to work with all along.

---

Celebrated for her next-level creative approach to real estate, Elisa Cool Murphy is the author of Prepped to Sell: What Works Even When the Market Doesn't. She is an award-winning, top-performing real estate broker in New Orleans and the founder and owner of Cool Murphy Real Estate.

You can learn more about her here.

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