Here’s an easy hack if you want to talk to someone new: Find something the person is wearing and compliment it. Just a simple “love that bracelet or that’s an awesome shirt” is an easy way to open the conversation. No pressure and no commitment or anything. Makes the other person feel good.
In general, just being interested in the other person will cause them to open up and be more receptive.
Good reading:
You should be like a rocket. Rockets are constantly pinging home to ask if they are on course. They are almost always off course by a little bit so the pings are important to course correct. Every ping back will tell the rocket how to update its course. The rocket constantly receives guidance and corrects problems until it hits its target. On the one hand, it’s easy to point out how many mistakes the rocket makes on its journey and how often it is off course. But if it hits its target then none of that matters if in the end it hits its target.
This is an interesting phenomenon that I know happens in young men’s brains. I doubt it happens to such an extreme with young women, but I will let you be the judge.
I call it the wealth paradox. When you are young, there are so many things you could imagine doing if you had money. Big fancy homes, expensive cars… lots of bling designed to impress other people. This desire for wealth drives people to work hard and accomplish much so they can earn a lot of money to pay for these things. What’s interesting is unless you are very lucky or very good, it will take decades to make the kind of money that allows you to make super extravagant purchases. As those decades pass, the motivations you had in the early days fade and your priorities in life shift.
I like this approach:
If you’re growing a garden you need to pull out the weeds. But flowers will die if all you do is pick weeds. They need sunshine and water. People are the same. You can critique people to help them improve. But you also need to encourage and compliment them.
Seeking perfection usually stalls you out. You want everything to be perfect, so you keep spinning your wheels trying to make things perfect. In this way, perfection can be the enemy or progress. Instead of trying to get it exactly right immediately, you have to realize that just about everything in life is about constant improvement and refinement. You have to start somewhere, so start by gaining some progress however small at the outset and realize that you will improve and work towards perfect over time.
