(There’s quite a bit of preamble in this post before I get to the answer – just scroll down past the hot dogs if you’re too busy for the backstory!)
I have a happy problem.
I have over 10,000 Twitter followers. I’d like to think that I’d like to meet every last one of them.
Unfortunately, I have limited time and attention, and this means I have to prioritize some people over other people.
This is not me making assessments about people’s intrinsic worth – it’s just me trying to do the best I can with limited time and information.
I will readily admit that I’m certainly making suboptimal decisions about who to meet. And I think I’m writing this to help people help me make more optimal decisions.
Here’s the defining question I arrived at later in writing this:
How do I reduce the role that chance plays in me finding out the deep, intimate ways in which I resonate with people?
I recently spent 2 weeks in California’s Bay Area. I think I met ~50-70 people – and I had great 1-1 conversations with ~20 of them. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, drinks, some people even spent time just walking around town with me between appointments. I felt incredibly blessed and nourished by their kindness.
Here’s what slightly bums me out – I wasn’t able to respond to everybody. There are people who DM’ed me asking to meet who I still haven’t responded to yet. And there were a few friends that I had made plans to meet, but somehow forgot about while desperately trying to meet everybody I could!
Hypothetically, if I were much more effective at managing my schedule, I would probably have been able to meet a few more people. But I’m not going to lose sleep over that. I met more people in two weeks than I’ve met in some entire years. I felt electrified by the experience – literally, I felt like my nervous system was being overloaded with all that social stimuli – and I’m still (happily) recovering from it.
I’m writing this post partially because of a thoughtful, vulnerable DM I got from one of my mutuals (someone who follows me + I follow them back). He DM’d me to tell me that he was disappointed that he didn’t get to spend some 1-1 time with me.
We did meet in a group setting, and I enjoyed his company – and he had joked that it seemed like I only made time for people with large Twitter followings. I don’t remember him saying that, but he DM’d to say that, while it felt true, it probably came from a place of disappointment and insecurity. (Which… is quite a sweet thing to say, and quite flattering to hear.) As our conversation went on, I felt myself more drawn to him, and more in agreement with his assessment that we’d probably have had a great 1-1 conversation.
I want to think about this.
It would be accurate to say that I generally prioritized meeting friends who had larger followings. I don’t think I sought out people who were Twitter-famous simply because they were Twitter-famous. I sought out people who I felt compelled to meet, and it seems to me that I feel more compelled to meet people whose thoughts I have interacted with positively – and the more Twitter-famous someone is on my timeline, the likelier it is that I’d have seen their tweets.
I definitely did meet a bunch of Twitter mutuals and even non-mutuals who don’t have huge followings. I think I particularly prioritized meeting women and minorities, for example, to try and hear from people whose voices I felt were underrepresented. I’m personally fascinated by stories of migration and complicated, hyphenated identities, and have always been eager to hear from outsiders of all kinds.
Here’s a fun little snippet of a story – so there was meetup of Twitter friends at Dolores Park, and after a nice time sitting around chatting, we decided to head out for dinner. As often happens with large groups of people trying to move around, the group started fragmenting – and I found myself walking with @avyfain, a mutual who I was casually friendly with. We were the laggards in the first half of the group that started moving, and we were trying to keep our eyes on the second group.
Along the way, I spotted a street hot dog vendor, and decided that I had to have a hot dog. (It was delicious!) I tried to make small talk with the vendor, asking him how long he had been making hot dogs. But the vendor didn’t seem to be comfortable speaking in English.
Avy, witnessing this, then suavely stepped in to translate between us with incredibly fluent Spanish. I was awestruck – there’s no way your Spanish is so good just from being in America! And I learned that Avy’s grandparents were from Europe, and they moved to Costa Rica, where he was born and raised. Instantly, I am fascinated by Avy and I want to know everything about his life. Like me, he’s someone who knows what it’s like to be an outsider at many levels. The rest of our conversation was riveting, and I will definitely be hitting Avy up again the next time I’m in SF – all because I impulsively wanted a hot dog and I witnessed him speak fluent Spanish.
So here’s what this whole post is really about: How do I reduce the role of chance in finding out the deep and intimate ways in which I resonate with people? I do believe that it’s quite likely that there are lots of people whom I’ve missed and overlooked because I didn’t realize that we had some shared interest, something in common. And the idea of that bums me out too. All those missed connections!
I don’t want this post to take on some sort of… self-important tone. I’m just some guy, you know? It just so happens that I sometimes get a higher volume of correspondence than I can manage, and I can be quite the task-avoidant procrastinator. My attention is almost always all over the place, and I don’t really have a lot of control over it.
So. Let’s answer the question directly. How do you get my attention?
Make small asks. Sometimes I get people asking me things that feel very substantial. These are the, “I would be honored if you would appraise my life’s work,” type requests. To be honest, I don’t really like receiving that sorta thing. It makes me feel… stifled? I find myself thinking, “Oh no, this is somebody’s life’s work, I have to be sensitive and careful and not say the wrong thing.” I do try to reply to these things, but I definitely have also… left some people hanging because I didn’t know what to say. It’s way easier to reply to someone who says, “Yo, I thought you’d find this interesting,” – and then I can go “Whoa, that is pretty cool. It reminds me of…” – and now we’re talking! (Here is a thread about asking for help.)
Reference stuff I’ve talked about. Put yourself in my shoes. I have 20 DMs from people. 18 of them are something like, “I’d love to show you around.” And 2 of them are something like, “Hey, I liked your thread about X. I’ve been thinking about X too.” All else held constant, I can be much more certain that, with the last two people, I can actually expect to talk about something. The weird outcome that I want to avoid – which thankfully I haven’t encountered yet – is that I meet someone, and then we just… aren’t able to have a conversation. I’ve heard of this happening to people, and it’s something I’d prefer to avoid.
Have good tweets yourself (and send them to me!). Definitely feel free to send me whichever of your tweets you think I’d like! If you have threads that you think I’d like, even better. The more of your tweets you can get me interested in, the likelier it is that I’d be interested in you. If you write great essays, I’ll be interested in chatting with you. And… if I have to choose between meeting a random friendly person and someone who wrote a great essay, I’d probably go with the great essay writer.
Point me to things that you think I’d be into! If you can find me something that you know I’ll like, and you can introduce me to something that I really like, I’ll really appreciate it + will be much likelier to remember you. And I have a habit of revisiting and re-referencing things I like, so I’ll probably end up sharing those tweets – which has a wonderful way of introducing my friends to each other!
A few small asks and shares over time builds familiarity. I’m literally teaching you how to social engineer me here 😂 But I honestly don’t mind it. Because there isn’t really a way to fake or hack this. I’m looking through the DMs from people I’ve met IRL, and in several cases, it’s really just the sense of familiarity that led me to wanting to meet them.
Figure out what’s compelling about your own story, and make it accessible to others. I’m thinking about Avy again. Some people are almost naturally interesting just by being, but it’s not so obvious for everyone. If you have some sort of “life narrative” post that you can share with me, it’s much, much likelier that I’ll want to meet you. Help me see what we could talk about.
Okay, I’m kinda running out of steam here so I’ll stop here for now. More later! I look forward to meeting many, many more of you. 🤓❤️💪🏾