Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Talking to strangers at the gym

thienantran.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

431–440 of 810 posts

Re: Talking to strangers at the gym

#431

Post by asdfman123 »

alexmuresan wrote: post #98
mtlynch wrote: post #80

One of the things I like about this is that OP is giving people genuine compliments without any particular agenda. It reminds me of one of my favorite parts of How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie, where he tells a story about complimenting someone, and a student asks what he was hoping to gain from offering the compliment. Carnegie is incensed: > I was waiting in line to register a letter in the…

I avoided this book for a long time. for some reason I got it in my head that it's a sort of red pilled book that teaches you how to manipulate people. I know it's very shallow on my side, but I somehow crystallized this opinion based on a few acquaintances that claimed to read it and instead that they include the name of a person they just met in every sentence because it made that person like them more. Your commen…

It's unfortunate that we treat all books like that as suspect. The goal isn't to manipulate people, but to connect with them! Give them what they want for a more mutually beneficial end result.

People are forgetting how to socialize but being social is more or less a straightforward formula. Sometimes people need a guide. It's not evil or manipulative.

Re: Talking to strangers at the gym

#432

Post by rafabulsing »

alecco wrote: post #402
mtlynch wrote: post #80

One of the things I like about this is that OP is giving people genuine compliments without any particular agenda. It reminds me of one of my favorite parts of How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie, where he tells a story about complimenting someone, and a student asks what he was hoping to gain from offering the compliment. Carnegie is incensed: > I was waiting in line to register a letter in the…

> One of the things I like about this is that OP is giving people genuine compliments without any particular agenda. IMHO that is as fake as a car salesman. Mature, cultured people will say thank you and think " what a nuisance ". I prefer being open about my motives. Smart people appreciate truth over compliments. And if the dumb/immature get offended, good riddance. I used to be a big fan of HtWFaIP, but eventually…

That's an interesting take. Care to say more about HtWFaIP being unhealthy?

Re: Talking to strangers at the gym

#433

Post by asdfman123 »

senkora wrote: post #425
Aurornis wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> without any particular agenda. This is a very important part of learning how to have real conversations with people. There is too much bad advice about using tricks or hacks to try to start friendly conversations with people. It’s refreshing to see someone learning that a key to healthy conversation is having selfless motives. Something surprising about How to Win Friends and Influence People is that it’s not as ma…

I once heard "creepiness" defined as "becoming invested in advance in a particular outcome to a social interaction". In that sense, trying tricks in order to have a "successful conversation" will always fail so long as you are emotionally invested in advance in the conversation being "successful". It's far better to be genuine and accept that you have only so much control over how things will go.

It's ok to sort of passively want things, everyone does, but the real problem is when you try to try to subtly force an outcome that isn't natural. That's when people get uncomfortable.

If a stranger is light and friendly and asks to hang out, no problem. If they start getting subtly frustrated about your response, your spider sense goes off.

Re: Talking to strangers at the gym

#434

Post by nozzlegear »

drivers99 wrote: post #226
planet36 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And "Remember their name".

I remember the book saying something like "a person's name is the most beautiful sound in the world to them." The book may say to say their name back to them (I don't remember right now), but that's not what I took away from it. It reminded me of when people would make fun of my name (first and/or last) or bring up someone famous who has the same first ("Donald Duck") or last name ("are you related Joan Rivers?"), or…

My full first name is Joshua, but when I was a kid everyone would just call me Josh. That was until 5th grade, when another Josh joined my class, and whose last name just happened to come right before mine in the roll call. I loathed that he "stole" my name and (in my head) made me sound like the repeat, so from that point on I decided that I would be Joshua because it sounded "fancier" to me. Years later, my choir teacher would sing that old "Joshua fought the battle of Jericho" song whenever he passed me in the hallways, which always made me laugh.

Re: Talking to strangers at the gym

#435

Post by butlike »

dfxm12 wrote: post #236
crazygringo wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it's not. What's next, do you think parents providing for their children is an agenda, merely so the parents can feel good about that glowing feeling about being a good parent?

Yes it is, and the narrator told us so. There's no need to put words in my mouth; I agree with the narrator that you can want to do a good thing for many reasons. In this case, the narrator tells us why he did what he did.

Feels good to do good, as they say.

Re: Talking to strangers at the gym

#436

Post by asdfman123 »

nasir wrote: post #27

Around 15 years ago I took on the challenge to start a conversation with random people to break through this barrier and train this muscle. What I started with was to chit chat with those I had already established an interaction. For example at the Starbucks I would say something to barista. Those interactions were short but broke the ice. Later I went for random people in the street and that was quite awkward. There…

> The main pattern I follow is to break the pattern and make a joke, be sarcastic respectfully or give a compliment

I'm having to learn this about online dating too. My online dates traditionally don't go anywhere because typically they've been about just exchanging information, which is frankly boring to both parties.

You have to (gently) riff and tease a bit or it's not going to go anywhere. If you're talking about your jobs, nothing is going to happen. Establishing that rapport is everything.

Re: Talking to strangers at the gym

#437

Post by butlike »

dlivingston wrote: post #114
brushfoot wrote: post #47

Wonderful! There's a lot of advice online about how essentially evil it is to talk to strangers: They're busy, they have headphones in, they might think you're hitting on them (God forbid; nothing could be more evil than attraction). Ignore it. It often as not boils down to fear and neuroticism from terminally online introverts (and sometimes plain old misanthropists) raised in a hyper-individualist culture and glued…

I find it so bitterly ironic that the people whose opinions we read the most of - the terminally online Redditors and tweeters - are exactly the kind of people we should not be listening to. Like you alluded to, the terminally online people who post the most tend to be those with neuroticism, isolation, severe anxiety, etc. There's a famous Reddit post about this I can't seem to find - "Everyone Online Is Insane" or…

What's great about neurotic online personalities is that they're all contained within the little box on your lap or in your pocket. You turn it off and they all go away...

Re: Talking to strangers at the gym

#438

Post by intrasight »

jeffbee wrote: post #170
nasir wrote: post #27

Around 15 years ago I took on the challenge to start a conversation with random people to break through this barrier and train this muscle. What I started with was to chit chat with those I had already established an interaction. For example at the Starbucks I would say something to barista. Those interactions were short but broke the ice. Later I went for random people in the street and that was quite awkward. There…

Being able and willing to talk to strangers unlocks the eventuality that you will one day start chatting with a person who also does that and it will be like the small talk singularity. Once a man approached me and complemented my bicycle, and I engaged with him, and since we were both waiting at the same breakfast counter without anyone else, we sat down at a table and had breakfast together, and an hour later I cou…

Happened to me out on a group training run five years ago. She and I are now engaged and will be getting married in July.

When I still had a personal Reddit account, I would be on the dating and relationship subs and promote the idea to do something every week where you see the same people. even better do two or three such things every week. That's what I did, and I quickly went from zero local friends to dozens.

The gym is a fine place to do that but only if you're doing classes where there's an expectation that people will be socializing. I made some of my best friends in such gym classes including my current best friend. She indirectly introduced me to my fiancé because she suggested I join a running club to train.

Re: Talking to strangers at the gym

#439

Post by fragmede »

GolfPopper wrote: post #384
helterskelter wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hah. I'm ADHD and I used to be terrible about remembering people's names -- like, their names didn't even register and I couldn't tell you what it was 30 seconds later. It wasn't that I didn't care about the person, it was just that their name would never stick. Anyway, I finally made enough people feel bad and embarrassed myself enough that I started compensating and made a point to remember basically everybody's na…

As someone with very similar issues with names, how did you start remembering names?

Make up a mnemonic that makes fun of them in a really horrible way and don't tell them it. The more offensive, the better it will stick in your brain because it's so bad.

Re: Talking to strangers at the gym

#440

Post by asdfman123 »

wordpressed wrote: post #316
nasir wrote: post #27

Around 15 years ago I took on the challenge to start a conversation with random people to break through this barrier and train this muscle. What I started with was to chit chat with those I had already established an interaction. For example at the Starbucks I would say something to barista. Those interactions were short but broke the ice. Later I went for random people in the street and that was quite awkward. There…

I'm not saying this is you, but i've also ran into a lot of those people, almost always men, often in their late 30s or 40s, going around talking to everyone cracking jokes and thinking they're the live of the party, while everyone else is just silently annoyed by them.

It's always a matter of finding the happy medium. Don't be completely drab, don't be goofy, be balanced.
Post reply on HN