What I Learned From Being An A**hole

So I was recently invited to a party by my agent here in Hollywood to celebrate Bastille Day. I don't know if you've ever celebrated it. If you're watching this from France, I imagine you have. Outside of France, I'm not sure I hadn't ever celebrated this day before, but as soon as I heard about it, I thought, Bastille Day. This is incredible, because I'd just been reading about the revolution in France. I was reading Thomas Jefferson's book by John Meacham while I was reading that book. And then I read about Thomas Paine because Thomas Paine's common sense inspired Thomas Jefferson. Thomas Paine was one of the revolutionaries who was in France at the time, writing about the French Revolution and arguing with Edmund Burke over whether the French Revolution was a good thing or whether it was a travesty. So when I heard Bastille Day, I was like, oh, this is great. I imagine myself, like, walking into the party in a suit. Someone hands me a martini on the way in, says, did you really side with Burke or Payne in the argument? And I go, oh, well, Payne, and let me tell you why. And then we have this great intellectual conversation, and then more people gather. It's like a circle that gathers around us. More people join because it's just so fascinating. This is what really happened. I walk over to the drink stand where my agent is standing, and I start talking about Bastille. In fact, I congratulate him on having such a unique day of celebration that I wouldn't normally see in la. I start talking about the French Revolution, and after a few seconds, he looks at me and he goes, wow, this is impressive. You know so much about this. And then he hands me a tequila, and he looks over at one of his colleagues, and he says, bill, come over here. Matt's a dating coach. You need his advice. I look down, I see a Bud Light in my hand with a tequila in the other hand. And I realize this is not the night that I thought there was a moment where I was playing the violin for myself, where I thought, why? Why am I not in the company of people who want to talk more about these types of things? And then I realized that I was an ass. Just because I'd read a book on something that I was currently interested in that I couldn't even claim to have been interested in a year ago. It doesn't mean that that's the subject we should all talk about. I thought, why am I. Why has this been really frustrating for me tonight in conversation? And I'm sure you've had the same thing where there are topics that are interesting to you at that point in time and you wish that people would take an interest in them. You. You walk away and you think, oh, those people were so boring. None of them wanted to talk about what I wanted to talk about. There's a particular irony about the fact that I showed up to the party complaining that everyone else wasn't curious enough to talk about the French rev when I'm the one who has zero curiosity in any other subject than the French Revolution on that night. There are two ways to have conversation. One way is to talk about what you know and are interested in. That relies on a couple of things. It relies A, on you being around curious people, which you cannot always guarantee. In fact, I find you can rarely guarantee. And B, it doesn't rely on you just knowing about a subject or about a certain thing. It relies on you knowing how to make that thing interesting. There's a difference between knowing something and being able to really sell that knowledge and talk about the most interesting thing about it. Do you want to know one of the really interesting things about Thomas Jefferson? For example, he signed the Declaration of Independence with John Adams. Both of them died on July 4, 50 years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence on the exact same same day. How insane is that? So if you're going to talk about your own subject, you better be able to make it interesting. That's something I was not capable of that night. The second way of having conversation is to find out what they know about. What can they teach me? Where are they in their element? They could have been waiting tables for the last 10 years. It doesn't matter. Ask them about that. They know plenty more about serving people in a restaurant than you do. Find out what they know about it. What type of customers are the most annoying? What do you like most in your job? How do you get a better tip than anyone else? What's secret? The find out about what they know. They could have been in prison. It doesn't matter. Find out prison life. You don't know as much about that as they do. Maybe, maybe you do. Who knows? That's what's going to make you interesting to them, because they'll go, oh, he's into me. He's interested, he's curious. And of course, it gives them a chance to flaunt what they know. By the way, the big advantage of this also is that you're learning about areas. Ironically, I came to see it. Almost like reading when we read a book. We read to learn. Well, when we go and meet people we should go to to learn. Now, sometimes when you read a book, you realize you already know everything in that book. That's great. That means you can actually talk about it with the person in front of you. If you read a book and you don't know any of that stuff, great. You just learnt a ton of stuff. If you read that book and it disagrees with everything that you normally say, great. Now, in person, if that person is like that, you have a debate with them. The other way we should treat them like a book is to give people a little patience. When we read a book, we don't find out all of the best stuff. Very often in the first 10 pages, we have to read a little more. Sometimes the best stuff is halfway through the book or three quarters of the way through. Have a little patience. Get past the first few pages. Very often, that's just the warm up. Get into the meat of it. But you'll only find that if you keep asking questions and you keep trying to discover what is inside. All of these things are good things. Conversation doesn't need to be boring if either we can sell our information that we have or we can discover the information that they have. Start treating conversations like you're reading a book. I'm not just telling this to you, I'm telling this to myself. I need to go out there and do this more and learn from my mistake and my arrogance on this one night. I'll see you soon. I'm gonna show up to this party. I'm gonna go in a suit. As they. As I walk through the door, someone's gonna hand me a martini. I'm gonna sip it. They're gonna say, is that dry enough, sir? I'll say, that's plenty. Thank you, Jeeves. I'll keep walking. I'm.