Once a month, scramble your life. Do something you'd
never dream of doing. Participate in a sport, go to an
exhibition, hear a lecture on something totally out of
your experience. You get 80 percent of the right lingo
and insider questions from just one exposure.Think about it! Suppose at a dinner party, the table conversation turns to scuba diving. If you, too, had done your one-timeonly dive, you'd ask your diving dinner companion if he likes night
diving or whether he prefers diving on wrecks or reefs. (He'll never
148 How to Talk to Anyone
Technique #38
Scramble Therapy
Once a month, scramble your life. Do something you'd
never dream of doing. Participate in a sport, go to an
exhibition, hear a lecture on something totally out of
your experience. You get 80 percent of the right lingo
and insider questions from just one exposure.
04 (143-170B) part four 8/14/03 9:18 AM Page 148
believe it when you tell him the deepest water you've ever submerged yourself in is your own bathtub.)
Then you turn to the bungee jumper seated on your left and
ask him, "Do you prefer chest-waist jumps or ankle jumps?" If the
conversation then changes to tennis, or martial arts, or chess, or
coin collecting, or even bird-watching, you can keep up and keep
the conversation going. What a guy! What a gal!