The big idea: why we should spend more time talking to strangers

So, if talking to strangers seems daunting to you, it might help to think that by doing so, you could give someone the gift of being seen.

Think about your new acquaintances and contacts. True, we don’t all have a continual stream of new people running through our lives, but the average person meets, electronically and physically, five times more people in a year than our parents did in similar job functions. Imagine which of your new contacts would appreciate your new social currency

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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

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