YouSaid · the spoken record

Priya Parker

lines on the record: 57
first: 2019-05-21
most recent: 2019-05-21
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“You know, I spoke about a lot of my own challenges and like these various Bible studies, so he knew where I was coming from. And to me, that was a moment of deep kindness because he took a lot of risks. I think tattoos are probably against the code. There's probably a lot of people on the board that would be against those beliefs. But he saw a child that was confused. And he, to me, offered a moment of kindness that helped me.”
2019-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Priya Parker – The Art of Gathering - [Invest Like the Best, EP.132] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I was just seemed to have different interpretations of everything, including the Bible and Christianity, but was one of the strongest leaders in the camp and considered himself a very strong Christian. I saw this like a little image of a tattoo kind of poke out of his sleeve. And I could just see a little bit of it, but it was like really brightly colored. And I thought, that's interesting. I thought this was a Christian camp. And I asked him, and I said, what is your tattoo of? And he looked at me and I could see that he like hesitated. And then he looked at me and he just moved it to the side and it had two of Shiva, a Hindu god. And I was like shocked and also felt this deep peace. And I looked at him and he looked at me and he winked. And he said something like, don't worry. It's all there. And I just thought that for me and he.”
2019-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Priya Parker – The Art of Gathering - [Invest Like the Best, EP.132] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lovely question, and I'm having a number of different things come up, so I'll go with one that I haven't thought of in a while. It was a very simple moment. I mentioned the top of this conversation that I'm biracial and I'm also bicultural and bi-religious. And I grew up in these two households that believe radically different things, and many of their beliefs were in tension with one another. And one side was evangelical Christian and the other side was kind of Hindu, Buddhist, theosophist, agnostic. And it was a real source of tension. And I felt kind of at the center of that tension. I went to the summer camp. It was a Christian summer camp when I was, my parents had joined custody, so it was like during my father's time of the year. And it was a canoe camp in West Virginia. And I had complicated relationship to the kind of exclusive elements of Christianity. And at one moment, a camp counselor who I loved.”
2019-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Priya Parker – The Art of Gathering - [Invest Like the Best, EP.132] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're part of it, and there is proof. So, what if this other world and experience do I want to take and make a risk today and raise my hand in a certain way or walk up and speak to that boy or like to stand up for myself in a certain way or to breathe even though I'm feeling really nervous versus just going back into my old patterns? So one of the elements of any type of gathering is how and what do you want people to consciously take with them? And ideally transform into the other gatherings they go to.”
2019-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Priya Parker – The Art of Gathering - [Invest Like the Best, EP.132] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mondays in a row. She hosted a two hour session in her basement called Circle of Friends, and she'd teach us all sorts of stuff that she learned from participatory development to meditation to breathing to using our voice in specific ways, to connecting with what we actually wanted versus what the norms said that we should be, all of these different elements. And at the last class, she gave each of us a little bracelet. And they're kind of cool. They look like modern art, very simple. I think she probably came to the dollar store. And we all got one and didn't, I didn't think anything of it. And we left. And the next morning at school, almost all of the girls were wearing them. And it was this kind of through line of this thread that even when we walk back into high school and up until that moment, no one really knew we were doing this. It created this physical symbol that like, huh, wait, what's going on here? And it kind of gave, at least for me, kind of courage to remember like there was this other world.”
2019-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Priya Parker – The Art of Gathering - [Invest Like the Best, EP.132] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When Barba shared the story about her mother, it reminded me of what Steve said about what it was like on a Peace Corps. And when I really think about what I'll most remember about tonight is we all have complicated relationships to home. Allowing to take, and it can be in a minute or 30 seconds to almost think of like as if you're a narrator creating the last scene of a film, like what's the last image you want people to walk away with? And then the final thing is exit people. So walk them to the door. Don't let themselves out and allow them to cross back out of the threshold. An example I give also from the book, my mother's a cultural anthropologist. So I grew up with all sorts of unusual gatherings that she would design for me. And when I was a teenager, she realized that I and a number of my female friends were really struggling with kind of like, what does it mean to be a woman? What does it mean to be an adolescent girl? What does it mean to be a woman in this country? What are we ashamed about? All of this stuff. And so she made up this gathering for six.”
2019-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Priya Parker – The Art of Gathering - [Invest Like the Best, EP.132] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The second thing is to help the group make meaning. So, one of the things is, well, after a gathering, everybody will make meaning on their own, regardless of what happens. We go out, what did I think of that? What were my favorite memories? After a wedding, the next morning you debrief, you know, at breakfast. And not just what happened, but like what meaning do we make of it? And the best gatherers realized they want to help make some of that meaning before people leave. And you can do in a couple of different ways. One is particularly after a conference or time you have people longer together to spend the last five percent asking people what is one insight you're taking from this not necessarily focusing on action what is one thing that you learned from this and helping people say aloud and process themselves but also to help each other witness what actually transpired here a second thing is as a host to remind people to kind of flick at the memory of what did transpire here like we began like this and one of my favorite parts of the evening was”
2019-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Priya Parker – The Art of Gathering - [Invest Like the Best, EP.132] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Larger part of our culture, which I think kind of don't want things to end, or we find them awkward, or we're not sure how to do it. And so many of our gatherings don't end. They stop. So there's a conference. You know the ending time is at 3 p.m. It's 2.50. It's 2.55. And all of a sudden, it's like about time to go over. Someone gets up there and says, thank you for coming. Or it's a party and all of a sudden it's midnight and everyone kind of like leaves suddenly. So a couple of things. One is issue a last call. So in the same way that bars have like last call, borrow from that and do some kind of signal that helps people understand that like this is starting to come to a close in conferences that can be something more formal, actually announcing this is the last session. But I know business executives who will have their assistant on purpose knock five minutes before the end of the meeting and say your next meeting's in five. And then, you know, and it's a last call. And part of that is it allows us to begin to close up.”
2019-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Priya Parker – The Art of Gathering - [Invest Like the Best, EP.132] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My final chapter is called Accept that There is an end. And I spent time with two Buddhist monks who do a lot of end of life ritual making for families who basically are, you know, avoiding the reality of death of a loved one. And I asked them, why are so many of our endings so bad? And they said, because we tend to avoid the endings. We don't like endings culturally. And the example they gave is they have a six-month program where students come together to actually learn about how to do end-of-life care. And no matter what, every time there's a consistent participation all through the six months, and then all of a sudden for the final class, you know, multiple students all of a sudden have urgent knitting to do or they have a kid's baseball game or, you know, even in a class about how to name and close things, people don't want to be there. And so I love this example in part because it pertains to this large.”
2019-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Priya Parker – The Art of Gathering - [Invest Like the Best, EP.132] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is structured, very structured dialogue where they share a very specific example and question and problem that they're having in their startup. They're letting us look under the hood and they're basically saying like, what should we do? And it's helpful to the entrepreneurs. It's helpful to everybody else because it models like courageous conversation and saying like, hey, maybe people actually want to help me when I show that this isn't working versus how fabulous I am. And they upend the norms of what it is okay to share at what is quote unquote a networking night. And people end up actually quote unquote networking much more meaningfully through this two hour structure than kind of walking around vaguely talking about the 30 second script you've practiced to get somebody to be interested to give you 30 more seconds to explain what you do.”
2019-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Priya Parker – The Art of Gathering - [Invest Like the Best, EP.132] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Basically, counterbalance the norms of everybody listening to the VC in the room, or even from a gender perspective or an age perspective, like ignoring the young person and trusting the gray hairs or vice versa, you know, in Silicon Valley. It's sort of like the age discrimination either way. Second is if somebody already said what you want to say, like don't say it again, just say plus one. So it's again, it's like pushing conversation forward. There's two other rules, but they have a very specific process that's moderate. Oh, you can't talk about work. And there's a purposely a 30-minute social time ahead of time. And I went and it's, you know, I live in New York City. This was in New York. And it was really awkward meeting people and realizing like you can't say anything about work. And so we had to literally, somebody said, now you can talk about Disney World. And so we literally talked about Disney World because we were so unpracticed and not talking about work. And it was really fun and funny. And then they moderate. So two entrepreneurs come. They sit at the top, the hot seat. You each get 45 minutes.”
2019-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Priya Parker – The Art of Gathering - [Invest Like the Best, EP.132] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That pushes forward a purpose is controversy that helps groups of people face the things that we typically avoid or simply talk about what's actually going on. One of the gatherings I love is called House of Genius. They are two founders who went to conference after conference. They're entrepreneurs and realized that at all of these conferences and networking nights, everybody would talk about how great everything was going. Oh, Series A, Series B, we're so great. We have so many clients, we have so many products, and they'd be like, well, then why are you here? If you don't need anybody, why are you here? Like, clearly it's not going that well. But the norm was basically the stump speech to show your best side because everybody could be an investor. You never know who so. And it was very transactional. And so they inverted the norms to be that if you want to come to our gathering, which they called House of Genius, we only come if you actually need help. They are now, it's like a two-hour evening event.”
2019-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Priya Parker – The Art of Gathering - [Invest Like the Best, EP.132] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The cake or the broccoli, the cake or the kale, those are two goods that are in competition with each other, which is like health and indulgence. And one of the things that he said is if you go to a dinner party and someone's like or whatever, a conference and someone says, hey, like, how is your, how is your vacation? He says, oh, I was in Hawaii. It was amazing. The sun was perfect. Like I reconnected with my spouse. It was great. And everyone's like, great, good for you. Versus if you're on a vacation, you know, you come back from Hawaii. How was it? You would never believe what happened. Our plane got hijacked. It's like, what? Right. And so, and so part of this entire thing with gatherings is it's not to be inauthentic. And I think there's parts of experience design that are much more about creating absurd experiences for people. I'm really much more interested, and this goes back to purpose, of helping people have what I call good controversy. So it's controversial.”
2019-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Priya Parker – The Art of Gathering - [Invest Like the Best, EP.132] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of experienced designers use that as a metaphor. And I think the frame that's helpful for the everyday gatherer is the idea that you're taking people on a journey and at some level journeys are interesting when there's some level of conflict. So, you know, in all like stories are interesting because they require conflict. I mean, when there's conflict. And somebody I interviewed runs these experiences for companies called, I think they're called character camps. And what he does is he helps companies and brands get to the core of what they are about. And he said to me, and the example he gave to me in terms of how he gets companies to understand what they're about is that his thesis is every company has like a core conflict between two goods that are actually in tension with one another. And he said, so for example, if you're going up to a buffet line and you're debating whether to get”
2019-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Priya Parker – The Art of Gathering - [Invest Like the Best, EP.132] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wedding on the second floor, crash it and give a toast to the bride, or take a selfie in a guest's bathtub or use the freight elevator. And they're different. And none of them are immoral. They're not necessarily legal, but they're definitely breaking social norms. And I think this thing is totally fascinating. And she every time she asks, every time she designs an experience, she asks these four questions. First, what is this group avoiding? Second, what is the gift in helping them face it? Third, what is the risk in helping them face it? And fourth is the gift worth the risk. And her graduate work is called patterns of transformation. And she highlights, I think her graduate work, she looks at sex parties, wild water rafting, and funerals, and looks at why some are transformative. Her thesis is, it all comes down to risk.”
2019-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Priya Parker – The Art of Gathering - [Invest Like the Best, EP.132] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, and I would say a couple other things is I don't think it's always necessarily that it's the outlier and you're looking at the fringes. I think part of it is it's just knocking people off of their scripts. So at some level, most people think they might be at the center of the bell curve or the, but that's only when we're walking in terms of the scripts that we assume that we should be playing in a specific gathering. And I think one of the things that helps, you know, there's a woman whose work I admire who's in the book named Ida Benedito. And she's an underground experience designer. She creates these gatherings to help people navigate their relationship with risk. And she does it like physically. So one of the gatherings she and her business partner used to do, I think this still happens, called the Timothy Convention. So it's every year at the Waldorf Astoria. It's a fake convention. A hundred people show up dressed in black tie, men and women, and they're given a prompt of a list of 20 prompts that kind of increase with risk. And there's everything from there's a”
2019-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Priya Parker – The Art of Gathering - [Invest Like the Best, EP.132] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You put in in your client list. Three weeks ago, Carolyn Caldweire at TED opening speaker at TED basically says you think you are connecting the world to Facebook. You think you are connecting the world, but you are the handmaidens of authoritarianism. So what does it mean to serve Facebook right now? And how do you navigate those questions within your field? Those are relevant interesting questions.”
2019-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Priya Parker – The Art of Gathering - [Invest Like the Best, EP.132] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And right then, like the entire audience, the entire room can deeply relate to not necessarily that exact example, but the many paradoxes and the many moral trade-offs and the, frankly, in that moment difficulty of freelancing. And all of a sudden immediately there was relevance. There was intimacy. There was heat. There was sort of moral provocation. And I think the moments in a gathering are when you can get people to feel safe enough to share what's really going on as it relates to a purpose. So again, that question wasn't gratuitous. This is a group of designers that are trying to figure out what's the future of the field, how do I, and what do I say yes to and no to, what kind of work do I take on in a moment of time where the most prestigious clients 10 or 15 years ago are now becoming the most problematic seven years ago for most independent freelancers or companies partnering with Facebook or having Facebook as a client was the first logo.”
2019-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Priya Parker – The Art of Gathering - [Invest Like the Best, EP.132] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With and probably half the room. Self perception, right? I talked about earlier we have many selves, and some of those selves conflict, right? Our moral self and my desperate self or practical self. And so then I said, if you're willing to talk about, you don't have to tell us the exact example, but what was the narrative? What was the justification? What was the story you told yourself as to why you took the work anyway? And then people stood up and shared. One man said I was ill in the hospital and an old client called up and said, hey, I have some work for you, but it was a cigarette company. It was a tobacco company. And he said, and I believe that I was at the end of my wave. I didn't know if I'd ever get work again. But my mother died of lung cancer.”
2019-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Priya Parker – The Art of Gathering - [Invest Like the Best, EP.132] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of vulnerability, a showing of oneself. And then the other was heat. And heat could be burning relevance. It could be taboo. It could be risk. But the moments that had people just basically sit up and pay attention, whether it was because of the format or because of the content were moments where either someone was saying something that they would typically hide for various reasons and were actually showing an honest face to it. Or they were saying something that had risk in it. I'll give an example. I was recently in Chicago for a large design conference. And I asked this question of those like maybe 3,000 people in the room. I asked this question, if you've ever taken on client work that you philosophically disagreed with. If you ever took on client work that you either philosophically or morally disagreed with.”
2019-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Priya Parker – The Art of Gathering - [Invest Like the Best, EP.132] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An empty sandwich First, think about what's the actual structure that you want to use over the course of that middle. If it's a conference, what are the various formats that are going to be interesting to people? In a conference, not everything should be a panel, for example. Think very deeply about what are the different types of ways you can get people to meaningfully exchange information. And some of the most interesting experiments are on unconferences where participants come up with the agenda live in person and host the conversation they want to have, or night markets where intellectual night markets or all types of various structures. So think creatively about your structure. But then the other thing, just more principally in terms of the middle part, is two elements that we would see again and again in our dialogue groups was that the moments that would peak and the moments that would lead to transformation were usually were one of two things. One was what I would call broadly intimate.”
2019-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Priya Parker – The Art of Gathering - [Invest Like the Best, EP.132] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is a real example a worn out mom's hootenny. Those are two very, they're the same night, but a very different ethos of what am I actually going to expect as I arrive. I was invited to a house party and the PS said, keep Yo Park Slope strollers at home. And it was a reference to Brooklyn and it basically said in this funny tonal way, no kids. This is going to be a rave. And use your invitation to prime people in the language and what you call it and the stories that you tell as to what is the context of this event, what is the meaning, and how do we want you to show up. It's a lot harder to get to spring something on people when they walk in the door than for all of this kind of ramp up to the moment that they walk in.”
2019-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Priya Parker – The Art of Gathering - [Invest Like the Best, EP.132] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would just pause and say the beginning really starts the opening moment of a gathering is the moment of discovery. It's not the moment people walk in the door. And it's the moment that a guest receives the invitation. And the invitation might be a paperless post invitation. It might be a phone call. It might be a flyer on a tree in a park. So it's the moment that they discover that there's a future promise for a happening and that they could go to it. And you as a host are hosting that guest up until the moment they walk in. And a huge amount people often ask me, how do you get people to be vulnerable at a gathering? And I'll say, well, first, you need to make sure that it matches your purpose. And we can get into the middle. This is more about the middle of the gathering. But second, you need to prime them ahead of time. And invitations think very deeply about your invitation and don't worry so much about the logistics of it in terms of telling people the date, time and place. Give your gathering a name, a dinner party versus...”
2019-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Priya Parker – The Art of Gathering - [Invest Like the Best, EP.132] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Alone. And he said, your father didn't understand. He thought he was a global citizen. He thought he could be anywhere. He could belong to anything. He said, what your father didn't understand is if everybody is family, nobody is family. And part of what I think is so powerful about gatherings is I'm separating gathering from community building. I think communities sometimes have gatherings. And I think gatherings can result in a feeling of community. But when I'm talking about the word gathering, I use it as anytime three or more people come together for a purpose with a beginning, middle, and end. And so if you're excluding based on purpose one time, it doesn't mean that you're excluding those people forever. It's asking the question, what is a need in my life or in this work right now that by bringing a specific group of people together, we might be able to address.”
2019-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Priya Parker – The Art of Gathering - [Invest Like the Best, EP.132] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everybody is family, nobody is family. And I think this is what you brought up to me some of the most interesting territory of this entire conversation, which is historically around the world, but I'll stick to the US context, the people who have continued to say over and over again that community building is line drawing, that you can't have a nation without a border, that if everybody is in, nobody is out, that you can't have an us without a them, have largely been associated with, you know, I would say evil, whether it's World War II, whether it's the Holocaust, whether it's the history of race in this country, whether, you know, and yet sociologically, community building is line drawing. Barack Obama's aunt said to him, he wrote about this in Dreams of My Father, literally that she was explaining her perspective to Barack of his father, of why he, in her mind, died.”
2019-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Priya Parker – The Art of Gathering - [Invest Like the Best, EP.132] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this was just one person. And it's like, well, if there's four people in the room plus us, six. And then there's just one person, seven, who's already an outsider. Once they're in the room, you're going to be polite and inclusive and then tired the conversation changes. The focus changes. Who you have to include changes? The percentage of time you spend on each person changes. It's her birthday. So of course, you know, so then that you also, it's odd to not acknowledge them. And so I like this example and part because it's so simple. It's stripped away. There was a clear purpose I think most people understand why you would want a set of parents to meet ahead of a time of a wedding before you're going to have complicated conversations around financial stuff. Like there is a very specific reasons you want people to get together. And I think part of gathering more purposefully is to learn to say no in a way that's not personal. And then in the future, when you invite people, they know that you actually really want them there. And a huge part of”
2019-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Priya Parker – The Art of Gathering - [Invest Like the Best, EP.132] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And she wanted to come. And originally, they said, and I saw this coming. I said, she's going to be in town. Like, is this going to be a problem? They said, no, no, no. She has friends in town, you know, whatever it is. Then the friends left early, right? It's always the last minute stuff. And they called and said she'd like to come. And we in that moment had to basically decide, do we hold our ground or do we let them be nice and inclusive and let her come? And I think probably to many people's shock, including my poor aunts, we said no. Please don't have her come.”
2019-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Priya Parker – The Art of Gathering - [Invest Like the Best, EP.132] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Still let people come, we dilute the gathering. I'll give another very simple example. When my husband and I were getting married, we wanted to get together. My parents and his parents, my parents are divorced and they're both remarried. So it's one set of my parents, my father's stepmother, for tea. And at the last minute, and it was early in our relationship, they hadn't met very many times and we didn't live in their city. So it was a very rare opportunity. And at the last minute, a visiting aunt happened to be staying with my parents. And it happened to be her birthday, right?”
2019-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Priya Parker – The Art of Gathering - [Invest Like the Best, EP.132] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A student came to the bar and wanted in. He heard there was a buzz around this bar, it was a really cool place, like he wanted to see the students. And some of the people in the bar were kind of excited that like, wow, look at the attention we're getting, right? Like, let's let them in and show off who we are. And the bouncer said, no, you're not allowed in. And he was shocked, particularly in a town that really respected authority. And he said, no, no, no. Like, let me talk to the manager. And the manager was Basam, the father, and he came out and he said, there must be some mistake. I'm the vice mayor of the town. I'd like to come see your bar. And he said, no. This is a student's only bar. And he held the line. And that day they actually became a student-only bar when they enforced who couldn't be there. And similarly, I think we tend to over include, I'm as guilty of this as most. Sometimes out of guilt, sometimes out of obligation, sometimes because we don't know how to say no. But when we gather and we don't want to know why we're gathering, but two, if we do and we...”
2019-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Priya Parker – The Art of Gathering - [Invest Like the Best, EP.132] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One example I love because I think who we invite is often the proxy battle around purpose. So weddings, for example, when you start arguing about whether or not your father's colleague versus your long-lost college buddy should come, you're actually arguing about like who is this for first? Is this about you all or is this about us? But one of the characters in my book, Nora Abu State, her father is somebody who really intrigues me. He was Egyptian, an Egyptian immigrant and in the 50s immigrated to a small town in Germany and he started the first student only bar. And at the time, it was this novel idea. And they did things like drink beer out of beer bottles rather than pouring to the cup, which at the time was considered very forward and brash. And it was a interesting idea in and of itself, right? Student-only bar, but it consummated its purpose when one day the vice mayor of the town came not.”
2019-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Priya Parker – The Art of Gathering - [Invest Like the Best, EP.132] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We assume that the other side is totally one way, even though we know even within our own family there are fights. And so this is a long way of saying, I think gathering is opportunities to create collective identity, but the collective identity doesn't mean that the individuals all have to be the same.”
2019-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Priya Parker – The Art of Gathering - [Invest Like the Best, EP.132] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And what I mean by that is rather than saying, okay, yeah, we're all humans, create a conversation, create a type of experience where you start realizing that, yeah, he's Muslim or yeah, he's Jewish, but he also plays a guitar in a band like me. Or yeah, she's a banker and she's a runner. And I was in Occupy Wall Street, but we both have adopted a cross trans racial lines. And one of the things in dialogue in my work is realizing that you can actually create much more meaningful connection when you're not trying to get somebody to dissolve one part of their identity, but you help everybody see that we all have multiple parts and some of our parts are in conflict with each other. The most interesting moments are Chrisa Tippett, the radio hosts, has this line that I love. She says, we assume a monolith in the other, that we know not to be true in our own sides.”
2019-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Priya Parker – The Art of Gathering - [Invest Like the Best, EP.132] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I think that we each have individual identities and then a group over time has a collective identity. And the first thing I'll say is when you're bringing people together across difference, we tend to assume that the best way to help them connect is to stamp out their differences, to basically pretend that you're all the same. But actually what is much more powerful and much more honoring of all the individuals is rather than make everybody the same, you want to complicate each individual.”
2019-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Priya Parker – The Art of Gathering - [Invest Like the Best, EP.132] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Still, a good, such and such if you ate meat. And that was like this really strong dividing line between these two different generations. And the year that they were planning, the biggest dividing line was whether or not for the first time in like 22 years there would be a meat table. And from the perspective of the next generation, someone said to me, I know that they are expanding their ability to understand what it means to hold this identity because they are letting the next generation cordon off but have a meat table. That's really interesting. Most of us are like meat, really meat or vegetarian? Why do you care what? But in specific context, what you eat, how you pray, what you wear actually has deep significance and changings with generations over time. So in a type of a family reunion, when you start putting a line in the sand of whether this year, this is about honoring the past generation versus this year is figuring out how to build the glue of the next generation. Those should look like very different.”
2019-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Priya Parker – The Art of Gathering - [Invest Like the Best, EP.132] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That gives you a lot of information. Who do we want to absolutely be there? One of the people I interviewed for the book was the founder of The Moth, George Dawes Green, and he had a family reunion he spoke about with like over 100 people gathering in upstate New York. And if you know that your goal is to let the next generation of cousins meet, you're going to spend one a lot more time making sure that that last generation, which is most likely to ignore the invitation, is going to come to come. So how do you get them to come? Maybe you get them to host it. Maybe you will say you can do whatever you want with all of us for two days. That's a really interesting different invitation than coming up, come, come and do whatever grandma wants us to do. I was working with another group that's multi-generation ethnic group. And in that specific context, the next generation, and they had kind of reunions every year. And these are 3,000 people getting together at a time. And one of the biggest lines of difference was whether or not it was, if you were...”
2019-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Priya Parker – The Art of Gathering - [Invest Like the Best, EP.132] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. So, first, if your purpose sounds like an activity, it's probably an activity, not a purpose. So if it's a family reunion and the purpose of our time together is to play a lot of games. So then ask, so why are you playing a lot of games to have fun together? Even that, it's like, well, why do you want to have fun together? And that's the point people look at me like, I'm crazy. It's like, no, really. Like, why do you want to have fun together? Because we believe that family is important. And when we're worried that the glue is starting to weaken across the next generation, okay, that's interesting. So then if you move to the activity and you move actually to the need behind the activity, all of a sudden you no longer are attached to the activity. It goes to the conversation we're having before we started about Paul Graham's keep your identity small. So the deeper you can figure out the purpose of your gathering, the less attached you become to the form. So for a family read,”
2019-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Priya Parker – The Art of Gathering - [Invest Like the Best, EP.132] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Helps as many people as possible participate but answer in a way where within 30 seconds they've actually said something profound.”
2019-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Priya Parker – The Art of Gathering - [Invest Like the Best, EP.132] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A group of 300 people, okay, you can now ask the group anything you want. So people will be in like a huge circle or be in rows. And I give the reins over and I'll give them instructions. I'll say ask it and no question that everybody understands what you mean. So they'll say something like, if it could be simple, like if you are looking for a job stand and that's people might stand or not stand, but they may say something like if you are thinking about potentially entering into a new field stand. And I'll pause and I'll say, well, why is that meaningful? How do you make it more specific? How do you make it hearable? And one of the things that most of us aren't trained to do is how do we actually have meaningful conversations when it's not just three or four people in a room? How do you have a meaningful conversation where 400 people can participate? And part of it is understanding how to ask questions, understanding how to limit its time and a good moderator or host.”
2019-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Priya Parker – The Art of Gathering - [Invest Like the Best, EP.132] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I think that's part of it. And I think it depends on the size of the group. So in some cases, basically you and I and every individual has like, you ask a question and there's a thousand ways one could answer it. And so I think part of what rules do, particularly in larger groups. So rules are particularly helpful in groups of, I'd say 22, 1,000, but let's call it 20 to 300, which is the size of most kind of conferences or work get together. And if you think about how do you have a meaningful conversation in a room of 50 to 200 people, it's with some amount of guidance. And most people don't have the training to ask a question of a group to make it actually understandable to most people. So I'll give an example. I run these art of gathering experiences across the country where as part of the experience to train large groups of people in kind of thinking about hosting gatherings differently, at one point in the experience, I'll say to”
2019-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Priya Parker – The Art of Gathering - [Invest Like the Best, EP.132] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you have the random woman or man in the back first talking all about how wonderful they are and then continuing to basically give a comment on the head of state on the stage that everyone actually wants to hear from because Gergen has already said questions end in question marks, the audience starts laughing because he's primed them and he's actually set a rule and everybody starts realizing that this person is breaking the norm. And so powerful hosts in social or work gatherings are ones that create rules and terms that help everybody get to the purpose. They're not arbitrary. They help us realize that when people get together, we actually need somebody who if you're going to set rules that help for the enforce the purpose, there's somebody there and ideally the host that's going to enforce them in ways that protect the rest of the group.”
2019-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Priya Parker – The Art of Gathering - [Invest Like the Best, EP.132] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Say, okay, we're not going to do QA, but we're going to boy, girl, boy girl. And if a girl or a woman didn't have a question, he would just wait. And sometimes, you know, for 30 seconds, 45 seconds until people started laughing uncomfortably and finally a hand would go up. And to me, this is such an interesting use of an understanding of what you can do as a host to, in that case, counter balance a hierarchy that he thought was not useful. Another example is a moderator who I really respect, David Gergan. He's known more as a political commentator. But if you've ever seen him host a town hall or any kind of conference, which he does a lot, he at the end of the panel, he'll look to the audience and he'll say, now we're going to ask questions. I want you to limit the questions, your questions to 10 to 30 seconds. And questions end with a question mark. And everyone laughs. But because he says that, then...”
2019-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Priya Parker – The Art of Gathering - [Invest Like the Best, EP.132] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ways to connect with one another, to protect one another from each other, and to temporarily equalize whatever the dynamics are in the room among participants will perpetuate. So an example I love at the highest level is President Barack Obama when he, towards the end of his administration, his term, he, at least what I heard is he found a study that was making the rounds at the time that basically said that men tend to ask more questions in Q&As and they get disproportionately called on. And so he started this experiment to see if he could use his authority in those moments to counterbalance that trend, that this is not a good trend for question askers, this is not a good trend for the types of questions that get asked. And this is not a good trend for gender participation. So he made a simple rule at all of his press conferences and then all of his public Q&As, whether he's Indiana speaking to labor union or whether he was at a high school, he'd say, after he spoke, he'd”
2019-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Priya Parker – The Art of Gathering - [Invest Like the Best, EP.132] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Many of the gatherings that we go to, particularly the social gatherings, I mean, my experience has broadly been social gatherings are under controlled and corporate gatherings are overcontrolled. And in social gatherings, whether it's a dinner party or whether it's a, you know, neighborhood potluck, one of the things that ends up happening is we assume that we should be chill. So I'm okay, you're okay. Like, let people be, let them do whatever they want. I'm not the controlling type. You know, all of these things that we hear all of the time. And it actually makes her very bad gatherings. And in part because when you bring people together as a host, if you say, come over or come to this spot in the park at some time, people are looking to you to navigate and kind of host the experience. And when we don't actually guide our guests to find”
2019-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Priya Parker – The Art of Gathering - [Invest Like the Best, EP.132] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or networking nights. And even with the example of a networking night, let's host a networking night to let people meet each other. Well, if you only land there and don't actually ask what the purpose of the networking night is, you probably will follow a certain form, which is everybody's wandering around. There's a bar on the back and you're, you know, stuffing business cards in front of, you know, into each other's pockets and looking at each other's shoulders, wondering if there's a better conversation. I could be having somewhere else. It's like this extreme experiment in FOMO slash feeling badly about yourself. But it's also diluted because if you don't actually ask, what is the purpose of this networking night? Is it to deepen relationships and trust between people who already somewhat know each other? Is it to introduce potential business partners? Is it to introduce new clients? Is it to raise a new round of capital from people who may not know your product? The answer to those questions should look like very different nights.”
2019-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Priya Parker – The Art of Gathering - [Invest Like the Best, EP.132] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We tend to confuse category with purpose. And what I mean by that is the more obvious seeming the purpose is birthday party, networking night, board meeting, wedding, the more likely we are to skip over it. And the more likely we are to follow a specific form. So if you say, you know, what's the purpose of a wedding? People might look at you kind of funny and be like, to get married, or what's the purpose of the board meeting? To get the board together. And because we don't ask actually the second or third layer questions of, well, why do you want to get the board together? Or why do you want to get married with people around you? Why don't you just go to City Hall? We tend to not actually know why we're doing something and we tend to just follow scripts or follow the routine of what we think something should feel like. So I'll give an example from like a work context. People often want to host conferences.”
2019-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Priya Parker – The Art of Gathering - [Invest Like the Best, EP.132] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of win your audience over. I mean, every gathering to me is a battle for legitimacy. Do we deserve to use your attention”
2019-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Priya Parker – The Art of Gathering - [Invest Like the Best, EP.132] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I'm really excited to be here. And I think we are here to, and you know, and go on and on and just explain the process. But instead, we started with an embodiment of the problem and a naming. And we use language that was jarring, but also very real and worked in that context. And studies show that the first 5% and the last 5% of an audience's experience is the moment where their attention is the highest. And one peak moment. And by starting with logistics or announcements or clearing our throat, it's not just nitpicking. It's actually the moments where you have the biggest opportunity to capture people. And it's the moments where people are wondering, how's this going to go? What are the norms here? Is this interesting? Should I be here? Should I get on my phone? Should I be doing my email on the side? And you basically have three to five percent of that opening experience to both set the pathway for the rest of the time, but also.”
2019-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Priya Parker – The Art of Gathering - [Invest Like the Best, EP.132] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Make something that could be profound at its absolute best banal. So going back to this simple example of this launching of this race organization at UVA, we could have gotten up there and said, thank you so much for coming. We'll just go for about an hour, so don't worry. You're going to be able to get to Alderman on time. There's a few people in the backseat. Do you mind actually coming forward a little? Okay, great, great. Well, so my name is Priya Parker. This is also like...”
2019-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Priya Parker – The Art of Gathering - [Invest Like the Best, EP.132] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I have a chapter called Never Start a Funeral with Logistics, and it comes from a real story with a mentor of mine. We were all in the church, and it was pregnant with emotion multiple generations of his followers around the room and the minister came on stage and said, took a breath and we all took a breath with him, ready to emote. And he said, now before we start, I just want to let you know that the family would like to have you join them in the community center down the street. Now, it's down the street and there actually isn't any parking. So if you could find a parent, and he just went on and on and on, and I was thinking, are you kidding me? Right. He lost the moment. And of course, the rest of the funeral is beautiful, but why it matters is because these opening moments are the moments of greatest expectation. And every gathering is an opportunity to create a temporary world. And when you start with logistics, you basically”
2019-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Priya Parker – The Art of Gathering - [Invest Like the Best, EP.132] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stepping forward and stepping back and just saying things that they'd heard or seen at UVA. And I can't remember it exactly, but it'd be things like, first, as basic as in the names of a book, like, why are all the black kids sitting together in the cafeteria? Two, how come we have parties at the same time and the white parties can go on till three in the morning and every single black party the same night gets broken up by the police by 11? Two, why can't I walk African American man and a Indian woman step forward and said my girlfriend and I get looks walking down the hallway? Like human, but just very relative and relevant to what everybody in the room had heard. And it was a way of kind of realizing that you can name something at the outgoing of a gathering that completely builds the legitimacy for what you're saying you actually need. And I remember that was a powerful lesson because within two and a half minutes, we'd made the case for why we actually needed this thing.”
2019-05-21 · Invest Like the Best · Priya Parker – The Art of Gathering - [Invest Like the Best, EP.132] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source