Two Conversations and Then You Can Leave

You're out at a social event or a networking morning, you've got a coffee, and you've just done the sum. It's twenty five past nine. The thing is billed as finishing at eleven. If you go before half past ten it'll look like you left early, and if you go at half past ten you'll have to walk out past the people who are still talking, so realistically you're here until eleven, which is another hour and a half of this.

You do that sum in every room you walk into. You've probably never given it a name, because it doesn't feel like a thought. It feels like checking the time.

I want to talk about that sum, because it costs you more than the conversations do.

Ask almost any woman what she finds tiring about a morning like that and she'll say the talking. Making conversation with strangers, thinking of the next question, being interesting to order for two hours. That's the account everybody gives, and it doesn't hold up. You talk to people all week. You've run meetings, handled a difficult client, sat with somebody upset and found the right thing to say. Conversation isn't the skill you're missing.

What's different about this particular morning is that there's no finishing line in it, so there's no moment at which you're allowed to stop.

An open ended obligation is a different job from a long one. Tell me a thing will take two hours and what I'm doing in them, and I can spend two hours. What nobody can do comfortably is spend an unknown amount of effort towards an unknown standard, with no way of knowing whether enough has been done. That's the state you're in from the moment you walk in, and holding it is what empties you out. It runs underneath every conversation you have, which is why you can't enjoy the conversation you're in. Half of you is in it. The other half is doing the arithmetic. Is this enough, how many more, can I go yet, what will it look like if I go now.

By eleven you've been invigilating yourself for ninety minutes, which is a much harder way to spend a morning and gets none of the credit for it.

So here's the whole of this week, and it's smaller than you want it to be.

Decide the number before you go. Two conversations. Not two contacts, not two leads, not two people to follow up with on Monday. Two proper conversations, meaning you found out what somebody does, they found out what you do, and it went on for longer than a minute. When the second one finishes you're done. You pick up your bag and go, at whatever time that happens to be, and there's no further sum to do.

Two, and then you can leave.

Not because anybody gave you permission. Because you've done enough. What keeps you there until eleven isn't a rule that anybody in that room wrote down. It's a standard you brought in with you, it has no number on it, and a standard with no number can never be met. Give it a number and it becomes a thing you can finish.

Whichever door brought you to this, the move underneath it is the same, and I want to say that plainly, because it doesn't look the same from the inside.

If it's your body, the number stops you having to ask whether you'll last. A morning of unknown length has to be got through, so you spend it monitoring. A morning with two in it has an end that belongs to you, and you can take it at any point without that counting as a retreat or needing an explanation on the way out.

If it's the room, the number changes the job from be good at networking, which has no finish that anybody can name, into have two conversations, which you can finish by twenty to ten and then stop carrying.

If it's being seen, the number caps how long you're on for. Twice, with a known ending each time, instead of a whole morning of being available to be looked at.

The shape is the same all three times. An open ended demand turned into one you can count, with the ending in your hands instead of the room's. What you're counting changes. Nothing else does.

Last week I asked you to go in early rather than sitting outside until the room filled up. The two fit together better than you'd expect. Arrive at twenty five past and the first conversation more or less happens to you, because there are five people in there and one of them is walking over to say hello. You're one down before the morning has started, you can be gone by ten, and nobody in that room will have any idea you were counting.

Now the objection, and it's a fair one. Is two not rather thin? You've given up a morning and paid for the parking. Shouldn't you be trying to meet everybody?

You've been trying to meet everybody for years. I'd ask you what it has produced, because my guess is a lot of standing about at the edge, a fairly early exit, and a particular sort of conversation with yourself in the car afterwards. Two conversations properly had is more than most people carry out of a room. Nearly everybody there will speak to more people than that and won't be able to name one of them by Friday.

There's one more part, and it's the part that gets skipped, so I'll be blunt. The bar is that the two conversations happened. Not that they went well, not that anything came of them, not that you enjoyed a single minute of it. You went, you had two, you left. That's a pass. Set the bar anywhere above that and you've let the open ended standard back in through the side door, and you'll be doing the sum again by half past nine.

So pick the next thing in your diary and decide today, while you're somewhere calm and nothing is at stake, that the number is two. Write it on the back of your hand if that's what it takes, because you won't be able to decide it in the room. In the room the sum takes over.

Two conversations and then you can leave. You don't have to enjoy it, and you don't owe that room the rest of your morning.

Next Sunday we start somewhere new, with the things you've stopped doing without ever deciding to.

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