How to Be an Insider in Any Crowd

What Are They All Talking About?

Has it ever happened to you? Everyone at the party is speaking

gobbledygook. They're all discussing faulty audits, code constraints, or the library market—and you have no idea what they're

talking about. It's because everybody at the party is an accountant, an architect, or a publisher—and you're not.

So you stand there with a pasty smile on your face, not opening your mouth. If you do, you fear the wrong thing will come

out. Paranoia sets in. Everybody will snicker at you. You're an outsider. So you suffer in silence.

In high school I suffered a massive case of Silent Outsider

Syndrome, especially around males. All they wanted to talk about

was cars. I knew nothing about cars. The only time I'd ever set

foot in a "body shop" was to get a suntan.

Well, one fateful day, Mama came home with a gift for me

that transformed my teenage existence from shy to sociable. It was

a book on all the current model cars and their differences over and

under the hood. One reading, and I became fluent in Fords,

Chevys, and Buicks. I no longer hyperventilated when boys said

words like carburetor, alternator, camshaft, or exhaust manifold. I

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didn't need to learn a lot, just enough to ask the right questions to

get the guys talking. When I'd learned to speak "car" with the

boys, it worked wonders for my social life.

Cut to today. We grown-up boys and girls also have our

favorite topics that usually involve our work or our hobbies. When

we're with people in our own field or who share our interests, we

open up like small-town gossips. (Even engineers who have a constant case of cat-got-their-tongue start gabbing about greasy turbines and various projects when they're together.) To outsiders, our

conversation sounds like gobbledygook. But we know precisely

what it's about. It's our own jobbeldygook or hobbydygook.

You fear you'll find yourself in a party of squash players when

you're the type of person who'd rather be in court than on court?

Don't panic hearing words like lobbing and hitting rails roll off the

squash players' tongues. So what if the only experience you've ever

had with squash was the mashed acorn variety on your plate next

to the turkey last Thanksgiving. All you need is the few techniques

that follow.

Just as anglers throw out a dragonfly to get the fish to bite, all

you have to do is throw out the right questions to get people to

open up. Dale Carnegie's adage, "show sincere interest and people

will talk," only goes so far. As they say in poker, "it takes jacks or

better to open." And in conversation, it takes cursory knowledge

or better about their field to get them to really open up. You must

have knowledgeable curiosity, the kind that makes you sound like

you're worth talking to.

In this section, we explore techniques that are "Open Sesames"

to get people gabbing with you like an insider.

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