Talking to Strangers - Malcolm Gladwell

Talking to Strangers was a recommendation after a networking meal with one party who certainly oversold her reach and abilities. I was, of course, the freierit who fell exactly for the tricks described in this book. Before I get further into the lessons I want to remember for future reference, I would also like to mention how extraordinary I find Malcolm Gladwell, and how I do believe his unique background and appearance have allowed him access to see the world from the margins. He is of Jamaican descent without looking or sounding detectably black or African American and without a noticeably non-standard American name. Yet the intimacy with the issues, and I imagine the comments and conversations he has heard behind what others assumed were their closed doors, can only be accessed with someone who has lived a first person experience and worries for their families in a first person way.

The first is the default to truth. The irony of this fault of mine, or the freirit mistakes I make, is that this was a learned skill, a deliberately learned default setting. I doubted everything and was constantly doubted, and also had an inherent distrust and need to cut down others’ achievements. I didn’t want to live that way anymore, and so I decided to default to truth, that I would rather lose out and be proven wrong, than to continue living my life attacking others and building zero bridges. I know what that life is. But now I am in a situation in which I need to figure out what I choose to see, what story I choose to craft, where I place myself within those stories, and what values it communicates to me about other people and the world. All minds, and certainly my mind, are powerful tools. I suppose the personal conclusion is that I have calibrated too far into trust, and that I will not be able to grow into my next stages unless I recalibrate. This was an incredibly helpful insight to learn and one of the greatest life and business areas I stand to grow from in the upcoming years.

He describes the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) in which the 43 distinctive movements of the face are assigned a number. Friends is easy to understand because their faces always correspond to their internal emotion, what Gladwell names transparency. This is the system and the language I have always lacked for the miscommunications I get due to my face. The correspondence between what people expect and my actual emotions is too low. Eventually I learned to adapt by addressing it, since my face and my eyes are saying something. But whether across cultural lines, I have never been a person whose face corresponded at a normal percentage rate to what I actually felt on the inside. I appreciate that Gladwell actually goes through judges’ rate of accuracy, and traces that it varies. Liars acting like liars and honest people acting like honest people are detectable. But when a liar acts like an honest person, or when an honest person acts like a liar, the rates plummet. 

On a topic level, I am grateful that Gladwell address through statistics and studies many of the issues that are modern and personal to my life, like rape and sexual misconduct among university students, or police brutality. Whether we want to admit it or not, all of these instances do affect us, and take some of us with them. 

I am borrowing text for future reference on drinking. “Now it is possible for you to believe that you are actually funny. When you are drunk, your understanding of your true self changes.

“This is the crucial implication of drunkenness as myopia. The old disinhibition idea implied that what was revealed when someone got drunk was a kind of stripped-down, muddying effects of social nicety and propriety. You got the real you. As the ancient saying goes, In vino writes: ‘In wine there is truth.’

“But that’s backward. The kinds of conflicts that normally keep our impulses in check are a crucial part of how we form our character. All of us construct our personality by managing the conflict between immediate, near considerations and more complicated, longer-term considerations. That is what it means to be ethical or productive or responsible. The good parent is someone who is willing to temper their own immediate selfish needs (to be left alone, to be allowed to sleep) with longer-term goals (to raise a good child). When alcohol peels away those longer-term constrains on our behavior, it obliterates our true self.

… “Alcohol isn’t an agent of revelation. It is an agent of transformation.”

The tests of brain function under stress are interesting, especially in the light of all the widespread mental health work that is popular at the moment. If stress can affect our fundamental functioning that much, then this explains a lot of childhood, and even dog, misbehavior. It should give me more forgiveness for the long journey that I am taking to a set of behavior and reactions that I respect more.

Coupling, for me, will be the reminder that Sylvia Plath may not have killed herself in the same way or at the same time if it weren’t appealing and easy. We want to write inevitability into stories, I think as an emotional appeasement, but this is absolutely challenged by this proof of coupling. 

The police chapter was helpful in explaining the philosophy and training behind the attempts. They are guilty before proven innocent, and this implicit bias splits the treatment. I think of it often when I see police cars, which is to behave as perfectly normally and as according to the norms expected of a person with my physical appearance in a vehicle that conveys the status mine does, and to stay on the right side of their judgement, which has been codified and trained into them, and is continually reinforced. 

Thank you, Malcolm Gladwell, for an informative book that made me question myself and the outside world, while providing me levers to improve both, I hope.