Ask Better Questions to Have Fascinating Friendships

Good morning, Live Better than a Billionaire-a-Holics!

Are you feeling motivated this morning? I certainly hope so.

I was surprised last week when Zev Saftlas of EmpoweringMessages.com sent me an e-mail asking me the following questions:

1. What is your favorite film?

2. What did you want to be when you were growing up?

3. What is the hardest lesson you've had to learn?

4. How would you spend your ideal day?

5. Is there something that not many people know about you?

6. If you had to be an animal, what would you be?

Zev sent these questions as a way to get to know his e-letter subscribers better and offered to share his own answers with anyone who responded.

My answers have led to a lively correspondence since then.

Having had this experience, I suggested to Zev that he send out more questions. He's now considering making an e-book out of the experience.

From this I came away thinking about how the way we get to know others isn't well designed to create new, fascinating friendships.

Think about the typical suburban cocktail party where you don't know very many people. You ask people where they live, what they do for a living, what company they work for, how many children they have and where they grew up. Unless there's some area of major overlap, you have just set yourself up for another boring conversation. Perhaps the purpose is to drive you to another person as soon as possible . . . so you will mingle . . . while creating some energy in the room.

I then thought about my conversations with reporters. Those chats usually begin with, "What's new?" That question always sets me back. I have to think about when I last talked to the reporter, what we talked about and what we didn't, and then scratch up what's new since then. By that time I'm feeling worn out . . . and it's hard to make the conversation interesting for either of us.

I remembered then that at Renaissance Weekends, a brief biography is sent out to all the participants before the event occurs. We read all of these biographies and quickly pick out people we would like to meet and talk to. We even know what we would like to talk about.

But imagine instead that no one has sent out such helpful information in advance. You would like to have fascinating friendships . . . or at least fascinating conversations. How might you use questions to do that?

Here are some questions that may get you started. I've included my answers to help give some flavor to the questions:

1. What is the best vacation you've ever taken?

For me, it was a trip around the world that I took with my wife while she was pregnant with our younger daughter. It was in 1986 and we picked our time to maximize the view of Haley's comet from the southern hemisphere. The best view we had was from a beach in Fiji one beautiful night. We also attended an opera in the Sydney Opera House, enjoyed koalas and kangaroos there, and went on to enjoy breakfasts on our hotel balcony at dawn in Athens where we could see the Acropolis. It was during a time when Americans weren't traveling because of terrorist threats so we had all the best sights to ourselves.

2. Who is the most fascinating person you've ever met?

For me, that's Peter Drucker. He has a way of asking me questions that make me see the world in a whole new way. I first met him in the early 1970s when he addressed a large room full of people at New York University. After his address, he took questions from the room. I asked him, "What one measure should companies emphasize to improve their stock prices?" He replied, "There is no one measure that is any good. You should use them all and invent more." That was the beginning of my pioneering professional work in developing a management process for stock-price improvement and eventually creating the 2,000 percent solution process. Every conversation with Peter has been worth about 10 years in school.

3. What is the most spiritual experience you've ever had?

I have a hard time answering this question because I've had so many remarkable ones. The most indelible memory is of when I was 13 years old. I was competing in a track meet and desperately wanted to win. I could see that four of the competitors were better than I was. I was also doing poorly that day. Just before my last attempt I asked God to let me win and promised Him that I would follow His way if He would grant me that wish. In my final attempt, I made the longest jump of my life . . . and won the event. I felt like I was floating weightlessly as I jumped, as though God had taken away gravity just for that moment. I've been dedicated to following His way since then.

4. What is the most surprising experience of your life?

That's easy. My wife and I took our older daughter and our younger son for a cruise in the Galapagos Islands. I had always been fascinated by the Galapagos and wanted to see them. I had read that the animals there have no fear because they have no predators. But nothing had prepared me for the experience of being able to stand next to nursing animal mothers who ignored me, copulating birds who kept at it while I was inches away, and lizards who walked between my legs like I wasn't there. Ultimately, I was most blown away by finding cactus plants whose "thorns" were more like mohair and felt silky to the touch rather than prickly. I suddenly realized that the world didn't need to be "dog eat dog" and full of defensiveness and aggressiveness. We create all of those conditions by preying on one another.

5. What is the most instructive novel you've read?

This is a hard one for me because I read so many. But the one that I remember the clearest (although I have not read it in over 50 years) is Gone with the Wind. Although the book is hardly great literature, I found Scarlett O'Hara's impulsive choices to be fascinating for the way that they cast her fate. Her many experiences provide lots of moral lessons for me about choosing better than she did.

6. What do you most like to talk about?

For me, that's easy. I love to talk about writing with other writers and aspiring writers.

Send me your favorite questions, please! I'll add them to my list.

Donald W. Mitchell, Your Dream Concierge

Copyright 2005 Donald W. Mitchell