
Advice on meeting new people at conferences - wibosco
https://inkandvolt.com/2017/04/how-to-make-small-talk/
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curosyne
Not necessarily at conferences, I but I have found the "Wow, that sounds
really hard!" tip incredibly useful, especially with people in fields I'm not
too familiar with. It's genuinely interesting to hear about other people's
jobs. I think this phrase works so well because it grants the other person
permission to go beyond the one sentence sound-bite of their job, and tell you
about the difficult (and therefore interesting) parts. I think this is the
essence of a great small-talk prompt - invite the other person into territory
they are familiar and comfortable with so that they can vocalise thoughts
they've probably already had but wouldn't just say without prompting. Doing so
usually produces enough material that you can then ask another question or say
something relevant yourself.

Of course, some people don't need prompting, though it often seems to be the
case that the more eager someone is to talk about themselves the less
interesting they are, and vice versa.

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RichardHeart
I like to ask, "how do you spend your time" or "what are you good at." I also
like to wear a tag that says "I'm interested in XYZ" where XYZ is what I'm
interested in.

The set of useful people is much smaller than the set of people you can't make
use of, so it's better to cut the bullshit and spend time with the useful.
Unless you've got super low standards, or are so non useful yourself that you
have to take whatever comes along.

Conferences are about synergy and false synergy binds the docking site that
could have docked with real synergy.

Conference makers, I know your printer is slow, but my nametag having what
I've declared I'm looking for is far more important than my name.

