Here’s what I’ve found to be useful:

1) Shrink the group

The best group conversations typically happen (I claim) in groups of 3 to 5. If your group is bigger than that, you can split it into smaller groups (e.g., by engaging with the people closest to you). With 7, it’s hard to get a word in or stay on any thread.

2) Introduce a topic

If the group seems to be bored, an easy way to steer the conversation is to wait for a lull and then say, “I’d be curious to hear what the people in this group think about…” and then raise a topic that’s likely to be very interesting and relevant to folks there.

3) Invite an exceptional conversationalist

Some people are very good at keeping everyone engaged. If you can, bring someone like that along who can make the discussions more interesting for everyone. Socially skilled extroverts who really care about others having fun are a good bet.

4) Leave out or inform the obliviously over-talkative

Some people talk a lot but don’t pay attention to whether others are interested (e.g., extroverts who are narcissistic or who lack strong social perception). Just one can ruin a large group conversation (even if they’re fine in other settings). When they are well-meaning and are likely to take the feedback well, you can point out this tendency and hope they improve. If they are unlikely to want to hear the feedback or unlikely to take it well, you could simply not invite them to events focused on group conversation.

5) Encourage interesting introverts

Some people have very interesting things to share but are quiet in group settings due to shyness or not wanting to draw attention to themselves. Involve them by asking for their perspective or directing questions to them (if you think they wouldn’t mind).

6) Keep things on track

Sometimes, a group conversation will be interesting, but then, suddenly, it gets derailed by someone’s stray comment that leads the group in a random direction. Consider jumping in to make a comment or ask a question related to the prior thread to return to the more interesting topic.

I hope some of these ideas help you improve your next group conversation or dinner party!

This piece was first written on November 3, 2024, and first appeared on my website on November 7, 2024.

Note: here, I use the term “success” merely in terms of achievement, career success, or high levels of expertise, NOT in terms of happiness, living a good life, morality, having strong social bonds, etc. There is nothing wrong with not wanting to be successful in the way this post focuses on. But if you DO want “success” in the sense in which it is used in this post (or you are interested in being able to predict it in others), you may find some of the models here useful.

I’m also interested to know: which model (below) do you find most useful for thinking about success, and which one of these factors (used in the models) do you think is currently most limiting your success?

1. Noise theory:

success = luck

2. Genetic determinism:

success = (innate) aptitude + luck

Note: whenever I use “luck,” I mean random factors not already accounted for in the other factors in the model. So in the case above, “luck” means luck other than the random chance of what your aptitude is.

3. Traditional right:

success = aptitude + surrounding culture + hard work

4. Social justice left:

success = privilege + luck

5. Economic left:

success = social/economic class you’re born into + luck

6. Cynical theory:

success = some combination of self-promotion, bullshitting, social skills, good-lookingness, starting resources, and luck

7. Gladwell: 

success = whoever practiced for 10,000 hours + luck

8. Dweck: 

success = aptitude + growth mindset + luck

9. Duckworth: 

success = aptitude + growth mindset + grit + luck

10. Seligman: 

success = skill * effort * self-promotion * luck

11. Psychometrics: 

success = IQ + conscientiousness + low neuroticism + luck

12. Ericsson: 

success = luck + hours spent doing “deliberate practice” (i.e., with specific goals and tight performance feedback loops, while analyzing mistakes and dividing skills into micro-skills that can be practiced independently, ideally all done under the supervision of expert coaches)

13. My mega model:

success at a fixed goal = luck^a

* (resources+opportunities)^b

* (community/collaborator quality and supportiveness)^c

* (innate aptitude at relevant skills)^d

* intelligence^e

* rationality^f

* (creativity and resourcefulness)^g

* (social skills)^h

* (hours of deliberate practice)^i

* (unitary or obsessive focus on the goal)^j

* (conscientiousness and self-control)^k

* (physical or mental health)^l

* confidence^m

* (ambition and agency/self-directedness)^n

* (self-promotion skill and effort)^o

* courage^p

* (goal/task-specific factors)^q

* (efficiency and prioritization)^r

Each exponent a, b, c, …, r is a different number from 0 to 1. Note that each of these traits is selected because I believe, on average, having more of them improves the chance of success – that’s why I exclude negative exponents. Furthermore, I’m claiming that these factors, on average, each have diminishing marginal returns. That’s why the exponents are each less than 1 (making a concave function).

The values of the exponents vary depending on the field and type of skill. For instance, in some areas, courage is a minor factor (in which case the courage exponent, n, would be close to 0, and in other fields, courage is essential, in which case n would be close to 1). So, in other words: success is a PRODUCT of roughly 18 factors, and how much each factor matters depends on what you’re trying to do.

Note that this is designed so that if you have literally 0 of any factor, then the level of success is automatically 0 (since 0 times any number is 0). For instance, if you have literally no physical health, you are, presumably, dead, and if you have literally no ambition, presumably you just sit around all day or do the minimum you need to eat.

It’s worth noting that the factors above are not completely statistically or causally independent in reality (becoming higher in one may make you higher in another, on average). But I think the enormous extra complexity of trying to account for these dependencies probably is not worth it in practice.

How do you improve your odds of success?

A lot of times, when people are extremely successful, I think it’s because they avoid being TOO low in any of the factors, and they have one or two factors where they are exceptionally high. Many factors are “bounded” ones: for instance, you can’t work more than 24 hours per day. So it’s impossible to work more than 3x the amount the average person does. But there are some “unbounded” factors where you can potentially be WAY higher than the average person (e.g., “creativity”), which can drive the success score very high (as long as no other factor is close enough to zero to drag it back down). Hence, this model leads to an approach for thinking about how to be more successful (if that’s something you care about).

Put simply, success often flows from not being TOO weak on really important factors and having one or two really strong (and relevant) strengths.

Getting into more detail, here is a process you might use to consider how to increase your odds of great success:

1. For the goal/task you’re trying to succeed at, figure out which of the above factors matter substantially (which maps onto trying to – very roughly – figure out the exponents for each factor).

2. If your strong/weak factors are not a good fit for the goal, consider changing the goal to better play to your strengths, or consider teaming up with someone (e.g., a co-founder) to compensate for your weaknesses.

3. Once you have settled on a goal, identify any especially low factors (relevant to that goal) that are driving your potential for success down, and think about how you can improve at those. Due to multiplicative effects, very low factors can really drag down your potential for success. For instance, if you have severe mental health challenges that interfere with your day-to-day tasks, working on that first can be a great idea (even if you’re just optimizing for success).

4. Identify your strongest factors (that are relevant to that goal) and think about how you might improve at them or hone them to get them VERY high. You can also figure out how to make even more use of these great strengths of yours to achieve good outcomes. Often, one of the most effective things we can focus on is leaning into our greatest strengths (for instance, by designing a path towards our goals that leverages them or working to enhance them even more). This is especially the case once we’ve gotten barriers to success out of the way (i.e., we’ve worked on improving our especially low factors).

A question for you: right now, which of the factors listed above is the one that is most significantly limiting your success?

This piece was first written on September 12, 2021 and first appeared on this site on March 25, 2022.

I first became aware of this distinction during a conversation with friends, where we stumbled on the realization that we are very different from each other in this way. I am almost never aware of my face, whereas one of my friends is aware of it most of the time when other people are around. Whoa!

We ran a little study on this quality, and it turns out people really do report being very different from each other on this trait. To learn more, I then ran a larger study, where I recruited 200 people in the U.S. via our Positly.com study recruitment platform. 

In response to the question – “In face-to-face conversation, do you find yourself visualizing, noticing, or paying attention to what your facial expressions must look like to the other person?” – I found that 45% said “Yes” and 55% said “No.” A nearly even split!

To get a more nuanced perspective, I also asked people to say what percent of the time (in a typical face-to-face conversation) they find themself visualizing, noticing, or paying attention to what their facial expressions must look like to the other person.

Initially, I got a bimodal distribution for this trait (i.e., with two pretty distinct groups, a relative rarity in this sort of psych study), but then Eric Jorgenson (a personality researcher) ran a replication of the study and found a different distribution. I then replicated the bimodal distribution again in a second study, which temporarily left us both confused! Working together to understand why we were getting different results, we figured out (thanks to Eric’s excellent detective work) that my bimodal distribution had to do with me using a slider to ask the question (with the slider starting in the middle position, and requiring the user to move it at least a little before the participant could move on – though oddly in other slider studies I’ve run (e.g., involving personality and overconfidence) this “dip in the middle” effect was NOT observed, so it may be very context-specific). In any event, we finally got to the bottom of this. A big thank you to Eric for replicating my work and for working together with me on figuring out what’s going on in the spirit of collaboration and the search for actual truth!

As you can see in the attached graphic, which shows the results of my initial study and three studies conducted by Eric, there is a wide range of values that people report on this trait of “how often they are aware of their facial expressions in typical face-to-face conversation.”

All four studies show that the most commonly-reported values are in the 0%-10% range (so, being aware infrequently or not at all), yet a substantial number of people reported having facial awareness 50%-80% of the time in conversation! As someone who is almost never aware of my facial expression, I find this pretty shocking!

It makes me wonder: how many other major differences in mental behaviors or perception are there that we are totally unaware of? It’s really common for us to just assume other people work the way we do.

For instance, people with synesthesia (who experience a mixing of the senses, such as perceiving a color associated with each word) often go many years before realizing they are different from other people. They don’t necessarily think to mention that the word tiger is green to them (not the animal tiger, which is clearly not green, but the word “tiger” itself), just as we may never think to mention that we do (or don’t) have an awareness of what our own face is like during conversation!

There is also a famous example that, while many people can form visual images in their mind, some people can’t! You can see why it would be easy for those who can’t to assume that the idea of “visualizing” is just some sort of metaphor since if you’ve never formed a visual image in your mind, the idea that others can do so might strike you as unfathomable!

I also find it interesting to wonder: if everyone in the world were born blind, except for one person born with sight, would this person be able to explain what they were experiencing to everyone else? Would they be taken seriously? Getting even more speculative: could there be those who “see” among us who haven’t thought to mention that they can “see” (whatever seeing means in this metaphor)? Would we believe them if they did mention it?

By the way, here are the hypotheses (for why we found different distributions) that Eric and I considered and rejected together before figuring out what was going on:

– perhaps my first result was just a statistical fluke: nope, my larger replication of the original also found the bimodal distribution

– perhaps it’s because I asked a “yes/no” version before the “give a %” version: nope, Eric tested this, and it didn’t matter

– perhaps because I asked people to explain their answer before they gave a percentage: nope, I tested this, and it didn’t matter

– perhaps because the sliders start in the middle of the scale (and require being moved before the participant can progress to the next question), causing a bias towards not selecting middle options? At first, we thought nope (because I looked at three other studies using sliders, and none showed a bias away from middle options), but Eric was able to prove that – in this particular context – this is actually the cause of the differences we found!

EXTRA INFORMATION:

If you’re curious, here is what the people who gave the highest and the lowest percentages (for how often they are aware of their own facial expressions) said about their responses:

Explanations from people who gave the highest percentages for how often they are aware of their own facial expressions in conversation:

– I am aware of the impressions that I make on people I am talking with.

– I never have to tell my true feelings about a subject or idea when talking to someone. I am known to show all on my face. Everyone knows that I do.

– I tend to let my feelings show in my facial expressions. When I’m bored, I might not want to show that, so I constantly check myself.

– Meaning that when I am face to face with another person, I would like to make sure that my body language is sending off the right signals, such as positive vibes.

– I watch lips as they talk.

– I’m really self-conscious, so I’m very aware of what my facial expressions are at any given moment unless I’m taken by surprise. I don’t want to appear rude or unattractive.

– When I am talking to someone, I always look at their face and see if I can read their expression. That tells me how well they receive the information that I gave them.

– I like to keep in mind what facial expressions I am making because I realize that is important in my communication with the other person. The expressions I make are often indicators of my true feelings, so I must be able to reflect these adequately and communicate properly with my face in addition to my words.

– I pay attention to their expressions, so it’s only natural that I pay attention to my own as well.

– I want to present a positive impression on everyone I meet.

– I pay attention to be sure my expression is communicating what I want it to for the context of the conversation. Smile for friendly/welcoming; frown for a negative conversation or a mix as the conversation unfolds.

– I usually want the person to know what I’m thinking and rely on facial expressions to show them.

– I try to not express what I think with my facial features, if it may be construed as rude or confrontational.

– I often wonder how I look when I talk to people, if I am showing interest or being overly intense. I am very self-conscious and have low self-esteem, which is why I think I do this.

– I am constantly aware of the expression my face is making and cautious that it doesn’t cause miscommunication.

Explanations from people who gave the lowest percentages for how often they are aware of their own facial expressions in conversation:

– I never really paid attention to my facial expressions and focused more on the conversation with the other person.

– I don’t care how I look to anyone.

– I don’t really think about what my face looks like to the other person though I have often wondered what I looked like (past tense) when I was talking with someone or giving a presentation

– I am really focusing on how the other person is responding to what I am saying. That way, I can tell if we are on the same page.

– I am more interested in focusing on the other person and their facial expressions.

– Never thought about it until you mentioned it.

– It is something I never thought about, so I never visualized how my face would look during a conversation

– That’s just not what I think about. I think about what I’m saying and listening to the other person.

– Talking to other people is a challenge for me as it is. If I worried about myself, I’d never be able to talk to anyone ever again.

– I don’t even think about what my face looks like while talking to someone; I focus on the other person and the conversations

– I don’t make odd faces when speaking to people or do anything that would cause me to think I was doing something noticeable or involuntary that would affect someone’s perception of me.

– No, I don’t think about my face. I watch their face.

– It never occurs to me in a conversation with someone else to try to imagine how my facial expressions appear to them. I tend to focus entirely on (a) listening to what they are saying and (b) responding to them and/or asking them questions.

– I just never think of that while I’m in a face-to-face conversation.

– I don’t care what my facial expressions look like.

(Typos were corrected in the above responses for readability.)

This essay was first written on November 10, 2018, and first appeared on this site on October 7, 2022.