Small Talk Creates Big Opportunity | FRIDAY FIELD NOTES

Okay, you don't need to be interesting, you need to be interested.

If you can be interested in other people, you will be interesting.

That's where guys get it wrong.

"I have to be interesting, and then people will like me." No, they'll like you less because you're obnoxious and pretentious and kind of full of yourself.

But if you go into an interaction with curiosity and trying to figure out who they are, and asking about challenges, and struggles, and who their favorite sports teams are, and why they moved to Central Texas, and what brought them there, why they moved away from Central Texas, those are two different games.

Guys, as you know, most of us hate small talk.

Um, we think it's, it's weak.

[laughs] We think it's beneath us.

We think it's a waste of time or breath.

For, for guys maybe even who, you know, don't have anything real or significant to say.

So what we often do as men is we skip it.

You know, we'll go into that meeting, uh, and go straight for the jugular, straight to the agenda, straight to the ask, straight for the kill.

Or maybe we'll stand behind a woman in the grocery store line, and we'll come up with a thousand different things that we can say to this woman, and we say none of it because it just doesn't feel that important.

Or at least it doesn't feel important enough to justify flapping our gums about it.

But here's the reality, is that when you don't engage in small talk, it's costing you.

And I used to be on the other side of the fence, like, "I don't wanna small talk.

I don't wanna waste time.

I don't wanna talk about the weather, or the sports, or the traffic, or whatever.

I don't wanna do that." But what I want you to know as I share this concept with you over the next, I don't know, 15 or 20 minutes, is that small talk is never about the words that you're sharing.

Okay? The, the guy in a business meeting who spends, even if it's just 90 seconds on, "How was your flight today? How was the, how was the flight in? How was the drive in?" Before he gets into that pitch isn't wasting a bunch of time.