Someone's Kid Just Threw Up

You’re sitting in the Zoom waiting room. The candidate is ten minutes late. Then fifteen. Then twenty.

Your phone is the only thing in the room with anything to say, and it’s not saying it.

The story your brain wants to write is short and tidy. They’re flaky. They don’t respect your time. They got a better offer and didn’t have the decency to cancel. You can already feel the email you might send, the friend you might vent to, the small hardening that happens inside you when you decide a stranger has wronged you.

But you don’t actually know.

Maybe their kid just threw up on the carpet. Maybe their phone fell between the car seat and their hands are too big to grab it. Maybe their mother called from a hospital. Maybe they typed the meeting into their calendar for tomorrow, not today, and right now they’re at a coffee shop feeling responsible and prepared and entirely wrong.

You don’t know which movie is playing on the other end. You only know the part of yours where the chair is empty.

The same thing happens when a piece of content goes out and nothing happens. No comments. No shares. The little dashboard sits there like a houseplant nobody waters. The temptation is to blame the audience. They didn’t get it. They’re not paying attention. They were too busy looking at someone’s vacation photos.

That posture is comfortable because it puts you at the center of every story. The audience either showed up for you or failed you. The candidate either honored you or wronged you. The customer either bought or rejected. You become the sun. Everyone else is a planet that either orbited correctly or didn’t.

Here is the quietly true thing about marketing, leadership, and most of human life: you are not the sun.

Most of the time you are a small thing happening on the edge of someone else’s enormous day. Their kid is sick. Their dog is old. Their grief is a year old this week. Their mortgage just went up. They got your email but they were standing in line at the pharmacy. They wanted to respond but felt embarrassed about how long they had taken to respond.

The discipline is to hold the silence loosely. To leave it unexplained until it explains itself. To do the next useful thing instead of the next angry thing.

The leaders who burn out fastest are the ones who insist on filling in the blanks. They write the story before the facts arrive, and then they spend the rest of the week defending that story when the facts contradict it.

The leaders who last hold the blank space open. They send the follow-up. They check on the teammate. They re-read the email with a kinder eye. They wait.

Once you know the truth, you act on the truth. Simple as that.

If the candidate ghosted you on purpose, fine, you act accordingly. If the campaign actually missed the mark, you fix the campaign. But you don’t get to act on the story you invented at minute fifteen of the waiting room. That story is almost always a worse version of what actually happened, because it’s a story written by your most insecure self with no editor in the room.

There’s a small grace in this, and it runs both ways.

Somewhere out there, someone is sitting in their own waiting room wondering why you didn’t reply to their email. They don’t know what’s happening on your end either.

Stay Positive & Admittedly, I Still Catch Myself Writing The Worst Version First Sometimes, Too