My dad also had the belief that every situation was an opportunity for connection, and he mastered the art of learning from strangers.
I remember standing with him in a lot of lines. We’d go to the bank or I’d go with him to get the oil changed. There were more lines back then, more waiting. And no matter where we were, my dad always struck up a conversation with anybody around him to sort of break them out of the monotony. He’d get the bank teller laughing or have a three-minute sidebar with the waitress about the local sports team. If you wanted to talk stocks, my dad would talk stocks. If you wanted to talk movies, my dad would talk movies. If you wanted to talk about Margaret Thatcher, car maintenance, or gold prices, my dad would talk about those, too.
He always found some quick connection between himself and a stranger. Usually he made a little guess. “Saving for college?” he’d ask. Or “Watching your kids?” or whatever it was. If they were game to play, then one nod led to two and I watched him time after time, year after year, turn those connections into little moments of beauty that brought out the best in people.
One of my most passionate projects today is my podcast 3 Books. I get to chat with my heroes about books! I’ve sat down with Judy Blume and talked about why books need more sex scenes, with Mitch Albom about what matters in life after you’ve found meaning and purpose, and with David Sedaris about what drives the deep-seeded desire many of us have to always want more. I should be nervous having these chats. And I am! But I also know that every time I sit down, I am less nervous because I had a few decades of experience watching my dad.
I also watched his relentlessly curious mind share information that wasn’t well known and ask for information back. It was a game he always played. It was like Trust Tradesies. He saw the machinations of industry and the economy all around him and always wondered why, how much, and could we?
So he’d say to the lady running the diner, “Rent at a restaurant like this is what, $8 a square foot? My niece pays $10 down the street, but she’s on a corner.” And then when she’d tell him what she paid, he’d do the math with me. “Look at the ceiling tiles. They’re two feet by four feet. Count them across and down. What did you get? Right, so it’s 1,600 square feet total, and at around $8 a square foot, that means they pay $13,000 a year for rent, right?”
He’d keep going, playing with the numbers, always simple math, always in service of a larger point. “They probably have to serve fifty lunches a day to make money,” he’d say. “That’s a lot of meatloaf! That’s hard work. I don’t think we could do it.”
Always, always ask.
Never, never stop.