4 Easy Steps To Make Conversations With Strangers Less Awkward
How to make conversations feel as comfortable as your pajamas.
Which tool is responsible for the most progress in our species? Is it microprocessors? Artificial Intelligence? Or the internet?
Each of these answers is right, but they’re incomplete. Microprocessors, AI, the internet, and every tool you can think of is a means for the real tool that has helped humankind progress in leaps and bounds: collaboration.
Collaboration was what put humans on the moon. It’s what enables humans to address humongous challenges like hunger, poverty, and the pandemic. And meaningful conversations are the scaffolding of collaboration.
Deep, constructive conversations turn strangers into friends, unite people to work for causes they’re passionate about, and lay the foundation for relationships that can last a lifetime. Such moments to hold stimulating conversations present themselves each time we meet a new person.
Sadly, they also often get missed. Over the past 100 years, almost every aspect — transport, computation, entertainment — has changed beyond recognition. But our conversations with strangers, like our schooling system, remain essentially the same. We often get asked the same safe yet dull questions…
