Comment by SeanAnderson

The irony of this piece being enjoyable to read and feeling very relatable isn't lost upon me :)

It's fascinating to think about how much goes on inside each person's mind!

One thing this article reminded me of is a conversation I had with an old roommate of mine. I always considered her an absolute sorceress when it came to dealing with people.

Anyway, I forget how her and I got onto the conversation, but she asked me, "Before you say something to someone - do you ever play out the conversation in your mind?" and, of course, I said, "Yeah. I'll practice what I'm going to say and think a bit about how it'll land." and she countered with, "Do you ever take it one step further? By responding to yourself as if you were the person you're speaking to and then formulating your response to their anticipated response?" And my answer was an emphatic, "Fuck no. Are you crazy? Do you do that in real-time mid-conversation??"

Of course, my roommate's approach wasn't something she used all the time, but the entire notion was foreign to me because the number of branching outcomes seemed large enough as to not be valuable to explore. I'm not psychic - why bother trying to formulate a response to a response not yet verbalized? And yet, if it were low enough effort and I had good enough confidence in the outcome, I could completely see the value in anticipating responses and trying to approximate the ideal N+1 response. It shocked me that someone I considered naturally talented in this space had also become comfortable taking on a mental exercise that I'd entirely written off as too effortful.

FWIW, I still don't follow her approach and am reasonably happy with my conversational skills, but the revelation really made me take a step back and consider how much potential depth there is in areas I considered shallow.