In the early 2000s, I left my job as a marketing manager to focus on writing. It was at that time a new activity for me and I was interested in learning how to sell more effectively through creative means.
I eventually realized that my creative energy was focused in a rather peculiar way — on my laptop, I would spend hours writing every day.
I would pick a theme and pursue writing around that theme for several hours each day. Sometimes I would write for hours after my wife and I enjoyed watching a movie together.
At that time, I didn’t have the slightest idea how this obsession would eventually take a business partner.
One day, I happened to be traveling through London and met up with an old friend who was part of a creative collective there. We started chatting, and the more we talked, the more we started bonding over our common interest in writing.
Over the next few months, we started traveling around Europe together, meeting up with new contacts and discussing the latest in creative things to do.
Soon enough, we were exchanging ideas on a near-daily basis and were progressing along the way to having established a fairly strong connection.
At that point, I realized that by chatting with this friend, I could save myself a lot of time, effort, and money. I could also use the momentum from these conversations to eventually sell some of my work.
So over the coming months, instead of going to our normal café date, I decided to go out for a stroll after work, and we continued doing this every week until we realized that we had a few key insights.
Here are the top lessons that I learned, and if you apply them to your life, you’ll definitely find yourself on the path to profit.
6 Tips to Make Your Conversations Evolving
“Persuasion is the art of making others like you by making them like you yourself.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald
When I first started this strategy, I wasn’t aware of it. I was just trying to make my conversations fun and interesting.
In the past, I had spent a lot of time in therapy trying to get over my mother’s mental illness. So the idea of becoming more engaging and interesting to people I met was something that I was trying to do.
The problem was that I was doing it from a place of boredom and avoidance. I was afraid of being boring and boring was something my mom’s mental illness made me do.
So instead of working on my own conversations, I decided to see if I could get some help with the boring conversations in my current relationship.
6 tips to make your conversations evolving
So how did this insight help me?
As I mentioned, a few months ago I realized that I was bored with a significant amount of the conversations in my current relationship.
After a while, I realized that the people I was meeting didn’t seem to mind, nor did they engage with me in a way that I would have liked.
So I started working on the boring conversations. I focused on conversations that I wasn’t particularly interested in or that presented no challenge. I started writing down my thoughts and told myself that it was boring if there wasn’t anything interesting happening.
And as I did that, I started to create more and more of my conversations. This meant that I no longer just talked to people about their work or their day, but I started asking questions about their day and their work.
These questions helped me to see what interests them and what interests me. They revealed things about each other’s personalities that I didn’t know.
And as a result, the conversations that we had started to come alive. We found out that we both disliked the same kind of pizza, and we started talking to each other about it. We found out that we liked different kinds of music, and we started listening to each other’s taste in music.
I found out that I have a crush on someone, and he didn’t know. And he met me because I asked him about his crush.
And what an interesting experience it was to discover that out of the ten people I met that day, he was the only one who responded to my unsolicited crush.
Afterward, we went on a walk and I found out that he is in the military and I was there to support him and his family. So it turned out that the person I met that day was actually someone that I would actually be very happy to have a relationship with.
There’s no need to be that boring. Just be who you are and let the other person be who they are as well.
The best meetings are the unexpected
“Art is the attempt to observe the possible in the real.” — Unknown
One of the most interesting insights I’ve found in life is that we often anticipate the worst.