38. Predicting Conversations

I’ve got a client who immediately says “hi how are you?” the moment he’s within ear shot. It’s completely predictable one hundred percent of the time. Clearly it’s a habit, and it didn’t take long for me to pick up on it. Therefore, I now pre plan my response to the question. My typical response to the question is “excellent!” because I’m not fond of saying “good how are you?”, but that’s not my point. My point is this: We are often in a spot to make very reasonable, very precise predictions of what questions we’re going to be faced with on a day to day basis, so it would do us some good to have some forethought.

It’s not as if everywhere we go we’ll encounter a new mystery to solve. Yes, natural variation is inevitable, and there are always new things to observe, but the places we regularly find ourselves in are fairly predictable.