Beyond "How are you?" - A tiny tool to help dissolve friction

I want to share something small with you today.

Sometime today, you'll have conversations with people you know whether it’s colleagues, friends, or family. Most of those conversations will follow the usual scripts. “How are you?” “Good, you.” “Yeah, busy.”

The scripts are efficient but they're also where most of what people are actually carrying stays hidden.

However, there's one question I've found, over many years of being in difficult rooms, that breaks through the scripts faster than almost any other. It's not clever and it doesn't feel risky, but it produces real answers, almost every time:

"What's been on your mind the most recently?"*

Try it today. Three times with three different people.

Not as a follow-up to "how are you" but as a real question. What I think you'll notice is that most people, given a real question, will answer it within thirty seconds, often with something they've been waiting to say to someone for weeks. The three people you ask today will become slightly less mysterious to you by the end of the day and the version of them that lives in your head will get a small but real update.

This is one of the smallest, most repeatable techniques linked to the book I've just finished. The Zero-Sum Illusion (out later this year) argues that most of the friction we carry, be it at work, in relationships, in public life, comes from operating with outdated mental images of the people around us. The book is a practical guide to dismantling that pattern: the inner work of catching yourself in it, the relational work of understanding the people you're in friction with, and the structural work of building outcomes neither side could have built alone.

When you ask the question today, I'd love to know what surprised you. Was it the answers people gave? The speed they gave them at? Or something about yourself, in the moment you asked? Reply and tell me, I read everything that comes in.

- Grant

* If you’re looking for alternative ways to ask a similar question, you could try “What's taking up most of your mental energy right now?”, "What's consuming most of your focus at the moment?", or even "What's looping in your head lately?"

​

​​​