Always Talk To Strangers
Lots of students turn up here at 大象传媒 Scotland looking for career advice. The majority want to become journalists. In a bygone era we would have simply set the hounds on them, but not in these days of Corporate Social Responsibility. Now I鈥檓 expected to waste half an hour of my valuable staring-into-space time giving them 鈥渁 steer in the right direction鈥. I鈥檓 sure most of them would prefer the hounds.
My advice for would-be journalists could be summed up thus: find stories. Of course I have to spin this out for thirty minutes so I also tell them they must ignore everything their parents ever taught them鈥ell, maybe not everything. I mean, running with scissors is still a no-no, but forget that stuff about not talking to strangers. Strangers, you see, have stories to tell. You just have to get them talking and then 鈥 and this is the hardest part 鈥 you have to listen to what they鈥檙e saying.
At this point in my spiel I often have to click my fingers and wave a banana in the air to make sure the student in still paying attention. That鈥檚 when I share my very own trick of the trade. It鈥檚 a technique I developed after spending four years studying Sigmund Freud鈥檚 , followed by ten more years messing about on the internet. Freud, you will recall, believed that information from our sub-conscious mind could be revealed in our dreams or in slips of the tongue during everyday conversation. Now forget Freudian slips and imagine that every word said in a conversation was being transcribed immediately onto a web-page and that certain key-words became hyper-links into other pages of information. Hyper-links into the sub-conscious perhaps?
Are you still paying attention or do I need to fetch a bigger banana? No? Good.
So now imagine we鈥檝e just met and are having the following innocuous conversation:
Me: Are you planning a holiday next year?
You: Not sure鈥t depends if we can afford it. Of course the kids would love to go to Disneyland but I don鈥檛 like flying.
Now, in the space of seven seconds, I鈥檝e discovered three things about you; you worry about money, you鈥檙e a parent and you are scared of flying. You鈥檙e also coming across as a bit of whiner, but we鈥檒l let that go for the moment. Instead I鈥檒l use my next question to click on one of your verbal hyper-links.
Me: Why don鈥檛 you like flying?
You: Well鈥 was once in a hi-jack situation and鈥
And, hey presto, we have a story. That was easy wasn鈥檛 it? Maybe I should have clicked on one of your other links.
Me: How much would that Disneyland holiday cost?
You: Thousands鈥ut I鈥檓 thinking of robbing a bank next week鈥
You see鈥t never fails. But let鈥檚 prove it.
Me: So how many kids do you have?
You: Three hundred鈥 was part of a strange medical experiment in the sixties鈥
Well as any good Shrink would say, our time together is over, but for homework I want you to practise this technique on the next odd bod you meet in the Post Office queue or on the train.
If you're very lucky, it won't be me.
