I’ve written this before, but this is a timely revisit. I’ve modified some of the ideas, and I’m really just tee-ing it up to link it in my upcoming article on networking - an oft requested topic actually.
I’ll be covering some more rational (read: ‘palatable’) tips in the next one, but this here’s where my heart lies:
So this one’s a bit of a trade secret. I am a writer at heart. Specifically, a storyteller, and nothing is half as fascinating as the people around us, if we shift our perception just a little bit. I’m the kind of person that can stand in a mall, a subway station, or any kind of crowd, and just listen and be engaged. When the opportunity presents itself (and I make sure it presents itself often), I love talking to strangers.
I used to be extremely nervous about 8 years ago, around people I didn’t know. What broke the shell was a very depressing writer’s block, and I just wanted to brute force my way out of it.
I told myself I’m going to go out and listen to the next conversation I overhear, and write from that - imagining what contexts could have led up to it.
It was shocking how quickly these strangers started to come alive when I let my imagination go to town on them. (I later learned this was also Aaron Sorkin’s method, which he talks about in his MasterClass.)
I never think of them as strangers anymore. Just stories I haven’t read yet.
Three mindset tweaks to my approach that help get me quickly get engaged - and flat out forget nervousness - when I interact with new people:
Create backstory – this one’s a bit simple. Take a look at what they’re wearing. How they carry themselves. Maybe the first few words they’ve spoken. How happy/tired/sad/angry they look. Create scenarios that could have got them to where they are now.
We struggle with talking to new people because we don’t know what to say. If you can create a backstory that’s convincing to you, you’ll have something to say. True, it most likely won’t be accurate. The point is, you still have something to say. You can take a step forward. After actually speaking with them, you can (and should) always change direction, to fall into step beside who they actually are.
Seek out contradictions – If you create a backstory, and you begin talking to them, you’ll notice that you were off the mark, pretty quickly. It’s useful to be alert to just how off the mark you were; to seek out being off the mark.
I personally enjoy the contradictions in personality, because you realize just how much depth there is to the person. A story character will always be two dimensional – in short spurts, such as in movies, it can fool you into believing they’re three dimensional – but real people have so much depth. I’ve met a passionate pacifist who’s a regular deer hunter; a self conscious fashionista who was an insane boxer; a football player who loved gardening. I’m engaged not just because I want to learn more, but also because it directly affects my ability to create engaging characters for stories.
Assess/assign motivations – last, but definitely not least, assign purpose to the person. Reason(s) they do the things they do, the things that keep them moving forward. Modify this as you speak to them.
I could devote thousands of words to each of these, but this should give you the gist.
Talking to strangers is tough because we don’t know what to say, and so we don’t take the step.
If we have this false understanding of them (I discussed this in detail in this previous post), it gives us a reason to approach, and if you can do it well, you’ll genuinely want to know these things about people – want to learn how they got where they are, what kind of personality they have, and why they do the things they do. The Truth of it. This desire begins to happen on autopilot when you begin creating these in your head – when you make a habit out of it.
And, these don’t have to be rational. In fact, they generally SHOULDN’T be.
I make mine fantastic. I once approached and had an engaging conversation with a CEO because I began by thinking of him as the Iron Giant. Yes, from the animated movie. Of course, he was nothing like that, but it gave me a place to start.
This mentality isn’t as unique as you might think. It’s actually a core trait of romanticism. Romantics are always seeking to exercise their creative faculties, and one consistent phenomenon that afflicts them is ‘subjectivized occasionalism’ – a tendency to take any content at all as the occasion for aesthetic interest. Holding contradictions within themselves in a loose harmony is another tendency. I’ll go into this far more indepth in a later post, if there’s interest. If you want a deep dive into romanticism – beyond the conventional understanding of romantics as emotional/idealistic lovers (a superficial understanding I can’t begin to stand) – check out Romanticism Against the Tides of Modernity.
Not necessary for this though.
Important things to keep in mind:
Never assign a ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ to your perception. This creates bias, and will make the perception more personal, which can make it more difficult to undo. You have to remember the version of them you’ve created is definitively fiction, and that’ll allow you to deviate at will when you actually get to know them. That’s another reason to make them outlandishly fantastic. Pretty hard to think of that CEO as actually being the Iron Giant. (And yet… yep, will cover cognitive/narrative dissonance + negative capability in another post)
Never seek to impose your self-wrought perception on them. Remember, you don’t want them to be what you thought of them as. Look for how different they are; and from those differences, perceive who they actually are. This approach works well, because it’s hard to create something from nothing. You have a vivid image of them in your mind, and then see how they deviate from it.
Remember it’s fiction. There was a fallacy I fell into a while back, where I felt my imagined personas were becoming closer and closer to the mark, with who the person actually is. It’s understandable, as practice builds experience builds accuracy.
Sure, In broad strokes, with how often I do it, I hit the general quadrant that they might exist in (̶i̶f̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶ ̶s̶e̶e̶ ̶m̶e̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶p̶e̶r̶s̶o̶n̶,̶ ̶a̶s̶k̶ ̶m̶e̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶d̶o̶ ̶a̶ ̶p̶s̶y̶c̶h̶i̶c̶ ̶r̶e̶a̶d̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶ ̶s̶o̶m̶e̶t̶i̶m̶e̶)̶, but there are many cases when they’ve been the exact opposite as well.
People are complicated. It’s important to remember you’re not being Sherlock Holmes here - NOR ARE YOU TRYING TO BE; I try to make the conceptions fantastic to keep myself far away from that slippery slope.
Besides, why would you want to be accurate? If you could imagine who people are - exactly as they are - why would you ever want to talk to them?
You already know them.
If you’re coming to this from the ‘palatable’ article, kudos to you for chasing this rabbit hole all the way down. Honestly, I hate the term networking, and have held off on writing this because most want some rational, specifically-actionable advice like “send 20 targeted connection requests daily/engage with 5 people’s posts for every post you make.”
There’s not a chance in hell I’m following advice like that for my personal life. I’m not interested in turning the magic of meeting people into a chore, no matter what results it brings. For a brand? sure.
If you’re one of my dear subscribers who’re seeing THIS first - you already know you’re my favorites - you can kick back and reconcile the difference between this ‘artist’ me and the upcoming practical-advice-giving entrepreneur me. And yes, this week is gonna have a flurry of posts, but I’ll go back to my regular 1-2 a week afterwards.
UNLESS YOU WANT MORE (comment):
Share thoughts as always in any case; I haven’t actually met anyone else who does th- wait no, the professor who showed me a living form of romanticism does something similar (I’ll introduce him for sure a bit later on).