Push and pull. Tension and release. Revealing and withholding. Give and take. Conversation is an artform that thrives on contradiction and on dichotomies. You need ones and zeroes. Yin and yang. Not too much of any one thing at any one time. Balance.
Human beings are pattern-seeking creatures.
Pattern-seeking is hard-wired into our brains. It’s what allowed us to evolve as far as we have: noticing what makes one thing like another thing, causes and effects. It was about survival.
We can tap into this gift of evolution in conversation. The first step is to recognize that your conversation partner has the same human brain as you do. It’s activated by humor, yes, but it’s also activated by intrigue. Mystery. It wants a puzzle to solve.
Recall what I said earlier about how coming on too strong can actually be the death of a conversation. This chapter is about learning to be the puzzle, not giving everything away in one fell swoop.
But right now, let’s take a moment to appreciate how far you’ve come. You’re solidly outside of the realm of NPC dialogue. You’re engaging with real issues. You’re figuring out how to survive and thrive in the non-NPC realm. You’ve already ascended out of Level 0.
You are doing the work.
You’re learning. You’re destroying the script in real time. This is important. You should be proud of yourself.
And now, let’s talk about mystery. I told you that we have pattern-seeking brains. You already knew this, even if that knowledge wasn’t conscious. It’s the reason you can make sense of this book. You’re able to follow along because you understand how each idea flows naturally from the last. You enjoy sitting back and being told things, but you also like to figure some things out for yourself. I’m well aware of this, and it’s why I’ve avoided being overly prescriptive in my lessons thus far. I’ve given you examples of “things to say,” but I avoid telling you what to do.
In other words, I’m not oversharing.
Oversharing is an NPC behavior.
It’s a behavior for NPCs who think they are PCs. It’s about talking for the sake of saying words rather than for the sake of conversation. It’s how NPCs get away with staying at Level 0 all their lives, and it’s what makes them feel like they’re actually doing something down there. But you and I both know that they’re just talking and talking, not really saying anything.
Oversharing is also possible in the non-NPC levels of conversation. It’s tempting, especially as you get the hang of ascending the vibe ladder, breaching topics of conversation that you may not have breached with anyone yet.
The temptation when you reach higher levels of conversation is to beat the dead horse until it’s deader than death itself. You’ll want to explain in detail every single bad thing that has happened to you and what you think it means for the person you are today. You’ll want to say everything you’ve ever wondered about the universe. You’ll want to ask your conversation partner the same things, and you’ll find yourself spiraling endlessly down rabbit holes in one level, rather than moving fluidly up and down the ladder, following the sparks that emerge naturally from a lively conversation. If you succumb to the temptation, you’ll be anchored down into one reality, and you’ll become obsessed—because, let’s admit it, it feels good to just let loose and yap sometimes. But that’s not what we’re here to do.
The kind of conversation that I’m encouraging you to have is made possible with the breadcrumb technique. This technique is about giving people just enough information to activate their pattern-seeking brains—to make them think, “Hmm, I wonder how this piece of information factors into everything else they’ve told me.” It’s about baiting their questions rather than giving them the answers before they’ve even had a chance to wonder about it. You want to make sure that you’re having a conversation and not delivering a lecture.
I would be bitterly remiss if I did not make the following point: in any given conversation, your words should account for no more than half of the words spoken. In a perfect conversation, the equilibrium will settle around 50-50, with each person talking and sharing exactly the same amount.
Oversharing is an easy way to disrupt this equilibrium. Before you know it, the equilibrium will be 60-40, then 70-30, and soon you’ll be approaching the 100 mark. You’ll find that you haven’t stopped talking in five minutes, and you’ll notice that your conversation partner’s eyes have taken on a certain glazed-over quality that wasn’t there before. By the time you reach this point in conversation, it’s likely that you’ve passed the point of no return. The conversation will be alive only because you’re forcing it to be so.
You’ll have hooked it up to a ventilator, and the ventilator will be filling up your conversation partner with the hot air that you release from your mouth.
Oversharing is the conversational equivalent of holding someone hostage—especially if what you’re sharing is trauma. If you start talking about how your dog died when you were a kid and how you never really recovered, you prevent your conversation partner from contributing anything of their own. If you reveal everything about how it’s affected you, there will be no room for mystery, and therefore no room for your conversation partner to be curious.
Of course, it’s more than okay to talk about the difficulties you’ve faced in life. This is a hallmark of Level 2 conversation. We all go through hard times, and talking about them with other people is one of the ways that we grow stronger after those hard times are over. I don’t want to discourage you from undertaking conversations like this. I do want to discourage you from telling the whole story in one fell swoop. I want you to pay close attention to the equilibrium, ensuring that it is as close to 50-50 as possible at all times.
I also want you to trust in the magic of conversation.
Trust in your interlocutor’s pattern-seeking brain.
If the pattern is interesting to them, they will explore it, and you can sit back and let it unfold naturally. If the pattern is not interesting, then it’s good that you didn’t reveal it all to them, isn’t it?
At this point, I need to address the matter of ego. If you’re hell-bent on the fact that your dog’s dying altered the trajectory of your life, and that everyone should care about it, then you’re already missing the point of conversation.
The point is not for you to be understood.
Let me repeat that. The point of conversation is not for you to be understood. The point is to find a common wavelength with your conversation partner and to trust in the fact that occupying that wavelength together will lead to more profound insights and discoveries than you could ever find by oversharing.
In conversation, it is of critical importance that you keep a close eye on your ego. Do you find that it wants to be understood more? Try to let go of that feeling. Do you find that you’re waiting for your conversation partner to stop talking so you can get a joke or comment in, so your conversation partner will think you’re funny or smart? Curb that feeling.
Put your ego away.
Let it go. Worry not about how you are being perceived. That’s ego world. And ego world is not the place where good conversation lives. Ego world is the world of oversharing, not a place for shared unraveling of conversation.
Conversation is about two people, not one person. It’s not about rehashing the same things that have been bouncing around in your mind exactly as they’ve been bouncing around. It’s about dropping breadcrumbs of those things, seeing if your conversation partner is activated by them, and following the breadcrumb trail only as far as your partner wants. It’s about giving just enough to make your conversation partner lean in, and not too much that you swing the balance too far away from that 50-50 equilibrium.
Finally, I want to warn you about a problem that is now sweeping the NPC world, which is the desire to be mysterious for mystery’s sake. This is a desire that is also rooted in ego. The desire to be seen as mysterious is not what I’m trying to instill in you. This isn’t a trendy character trait that I want you to develop so you can look cool. This is simply a tool. It’s a tool that we can use in good conversation, a tool that is already used in good literature, a tool that is used every day by our pattern-seeking brains to further the trajectory of our evolution.
We need mystery because it keeps us alive.
Because it shows us the way. It activates us. It makes us curious. It makes us hungry for conversation.
Mystery can be perverted, as I have just suggested to you, and just one of a number of tools that can be used for evil rather than good. Let us now explore the darker side of conversation.
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