Pretend you’re at a party with a close friend of yours. They’re the only person you know there so of course they excuse themselves to go to the bathroom, leaving you standing there with a complete stranger in a you’re just now realizing how boring your shoes are kind of awkwardness.

Grasping at straws for common ground you talk about your backgrounds, and would you believe it you both went to the same small liberal arts school out in rural Nowhere. And you were only 2 years apart! After a few rounds of the name game you come to realize that you both have a very close mutual friend. What a small world! This random encounter has been flipped on its head at this newly found common ground and you spend the rest of the night deep in conversation.

Playing the name game is a thing we do because we intuitively realize it takes little effort and there can be a lot of reward. The merit of that one realized connection is enough to make you swing and miss with countless other people.

A while back I saw Steve Krouse say this on twitter , “Books are like GPS satellites - you only need a couple to triangulate if you’d be friends with someone”. And it hasn’t left my head since. I love to read, I’d say it’s my primary hobby. I love talking to people about books they’ve read to hear their thoughts and recommendations. But I didn’t recognize just how valuable it can be in creating common ground between people.

Books – better than any other medium in my opinion – can provide a window into how someone else thinks. They give us a higher dimension to communicate through and improve our understanding of one another. This exercise of triangulation might have its downsides I’m not seeing, but I think more often than not it can provide a good signal.

The books I’d offer up as part of this exercise and the briefest explanation I can give as to why:

• Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahnaman
  • I find Behavior Economics to be fascinating, humans are fallible creatures.
• Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Incerto
  • They’re all good but specifically Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan offer valuable lessons in cutting through the traps people fall for when dealing with numbers.
• Range by David Epstein
  • Breadth vs depth, which is more important
• Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat by Samin Nosrat
  • Fundamentals are important in any domain
• East of Eden by John Steinbeck
  • What I believe it means to be human boiled down to a single word
• Factfulness by Hans Rosling
  • I think this book contains the best lessons on “how to think about data” I’ve encountered

Would love to hear other people’s lists, so feel free to send them my way.

A Quick Tangent on Interviewing

Another area I could see this exercise being applicable is in job interviews¹. I think it’s realistic to say it’s pretty much impossible to get a full understanding of who someone is inside of a 30-60 minute interview(Assuming that there wasn’t any sort of referral). Even if you are asking perfect questions, it might not matter, because you are not interviewing the person who will work for you. You are interviewing the most sanitized, curated version of this person.

If I’m asked in an interview whether I come to a complete stop if I’m at a deserted intersection, I’m going to answer in whatever way I think is most likely to endear myself to the interviewer. My answer changes depending on whether the interview is for becoming Head Counsel of an accounting firm versus being the Head of Sales at a startup.

Asking someone for 3-5 recommendations of books they enjoy could be a way to get a signal on who they are.

Obviously there’s nothing stopping them from feeding you books they think you will like(maybe it would help to limit it to books outside of whatever domain you’re interviewing for). Most of what you hear is gonna be noise, but there’s potential that this question could return a lot of signal.

What if one of the books someone gives you overlaps with one of the books you would say? Drill down on that! Spend as much time as possible digging into their thoughts on it, do you have the same takeaways on central themes? Can you disagree on certain points and change the way each other thinks? To me that’s orders of magnitude more valuable than anything you can hope to extract from whatever lessons someone learned from a mistake they once made.

[1] Practically all my experience in this arena comes as the Interviewee, so take everything I’m saying with a pillar of salt