The One Question To Ask Someone New (If You Want To Know Who Really They Are)

Not everybody you meet does something, but everyone has passion — and you may be able to help them talk openly about the things they love or aspire to.

I learned this in my early 20s, awkwardly, by asking someone at a party what she did for a living. What I didn’t know was that she was laid off from her dream job only a few hours earlier.

That moment led me to reflect on what I — and most people — mean by asking someone what they do. Around the world we are steeped in our work and it defines much (sometimes most) of who we are. After sleep, it’s the most time you’ll spend doing anything on this planet is working.

In the European Journal of Cultural Studies, Renyi Hong suggests that passion “should be recognized as always relationally intertwined with the broader culture of work.” It’s more both/and than we give it credit for.

Hong continues, “In this way, passion for work can avoid solely being a source of therapeutic transformation or an individualistic form of empowerment.”

Had I asked the “what do you do?” question 24 hours earlier, I would’ve been regaled with stories of a profession of passion. Instead, I experienced a healthy dose of foot-in-mouth syndrome. But the exchange was a huge learning moment about how I might refashion such conversations.

“What are you passionate about?”

When you meet a new person, ask them that question instead. And think about this inquiry in more corners of your life than just work.

Sure, it’s a fine question when you meet someone at a conference or networking event, but think about how interesting the conversation would be if you did this sitting next to someone at a baseball game or at a parent-teacher night for your kids.

More often than not, the response will be something like, Oh, wow, nobody’s ever asked me that — interesting! Well, I really love to…

I’ve used this little conversational quirk for nearly 20 years, and the responses are always fun. At a minimum, it encourages a forwardness into the uncharted-yet-welcome territory, if for no other reason than it gets your new conversational counterpart thinking outside of their pre-set mental box.

Give it a shot. You may be surprised at how open your new person might be, and they may be equally surprised, too.