Here’s an old joke: There are two kinds of people in the world, the kind that divide the kinds of people in the world into two categories and the kind that don’t.
Well, it’s not really a joke joke. It’s more wry, which is what you call something that isn’t really funny. But dividing people into two large, often opposing categories is an irresistible human habit.
For instance, in Exodus 16, when Moses is leading the Israelites into the desert, within the first week of what’s about to be 40 years, his followers start to complain and moan and say that it was better back in Egypt under the pharaoh.
In life, I guess, you’re either Moses doing your best or one of those Israelites complaining about everything and making yourself miserable. It’s one or the other, and honestly, I’m more often the latter.
“In every relationship,” someone once told me, “you’re either a Jeffrey or an Ina,” which is a pretty niche either/or category. Jeffrey is Jeffrey Garten, the Yale economist and writer. Ina is Ina Garten, the cookbook writer and food television personality known as the “Barefoot Contessa.” In her shows, Ina is always roasting delicious chicken and making indulgent desserts for Jeffrey, and Jeffrey is always coming home from somewhere and walking in the door smelling a delicious dinner. The key to being Jeffrey is appreciation. He really loves walking into the house and smelling Ina’s perfect roast chicken, and he is unfailingly — on screen, anyway — deeply and vocally appreciative.
Look, we’re all Inas, at some points in our lives. There are times when we’re the providers and hosts and heartwarmers and chicken roasters. What we forget, a lot of the time, is how to be a Jeffrey when the time calls for it. Being Jeffrey is just as important.
“In our marriage,” a friend of mine once said, “I am R2-D2 and my spouse is C-3PO.”
I think what my friend meant is that, in Star Wars, R2-D2 is the optimistic robot who beeps and rolls ahead and gets into scrapes and bad situations and that C-3PO is the prissy, nervous robot who worries about stormtroopers and the rules and if it’s going to be too hot. R2-D2 doesn’t bring the Purell and doesn’t plan ahead, which drives C-3PO nuts, but what can you do? You’re either one or the other.
It’s important to remember that the only way R2-D2 can be R2-D2 is because there’s a C-3PO around to take care of him and pull him out of danger. Just like if there was no Ina, then Jeffrey would be a sad and hungry economist. And if there was no Jeffrey, then Ina would feel lost and unappreciated.
I sat in on a business school class once, and the professor was explaining how a company can destroy itself by relentlessly pursuing a strategy that delivers repeated failures without ever rethinking its strategy or its mission.
It’s like Wile E. Coyote, she said, from the old Looney Tunes cartoons. The coyote relentlessly hunted the Road Runner, using all sorts of different and novel strategies, to disastrous results but never stopped to wonder if maybe he was in the wrong business entirely. And Road Runner was perfectly happy to rely on the Coyote’s bad judgment in order to stay alive. Neither one of them prospered, though. Neither one of them got rich. We like to think that if it’s a choice between being the Road Runner or the Coyote, it’s better to be the Road Runner. But maybe it’s better to be someone different altogether. Sometimes the answer to either/or is neither.
Or both. Moses led a whole lot of people out of Egypt, and mostly, they were ungrateful jerks about it, but then, maybe that’s just the way it is: You do stuff for other people and all they notice is the bad stuff. You chase the Road Runner, and he never once thanks you for being a fun and spirited opponent and giving shape and meaning to his days. Like a lot of us, all Wile E. Coyote really needed was a Jeffrey.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer and a co-founder of Ricochet.com.
