Making Normal Conversations Better

Put another way, if you want to have a successful conversation with someone, you don’t have to ask them about their worst memories or how they prepare for telephone calls. You just have to ask them to describe how they feel about their life—rather than the facts of their life—and then ask lots of follow-ups.

So why don’t people talk more? Epley continued his research and came up with an answer to the mystery: We don’t start conversations because we’re bad at predicting how much we’ll enjoy them. We underestimate how much others want to talk; we underestimate how much we will learn; we underestimate how quickly other people will want to go deep and get