Transcription
When you see somebody you want to meet, be bold. Walk up to them and start a conversation. No fear! The world is cruel to overly shy men, but it rewards the courageous.
It's insane that the modern school system doesn't teach people how to walk up and start a conversation with a stranger. Half the benefits in life—half of the things you want out of life: health, wealth, love, happiness—come from walking up to a stranger with courage, being bold, and starting a conversation.
Now, you know, I was lucky. I didn't grow up with my dad; he went to prison when I was born. But one of the few things from the little time I spent with my dad was that I learned he was completely bold. The best opener for a conversation? You know what it is? It's called "assuming the sale." Just assume they want to talk to you and start kind of mid-sentence. That's what my dad would do. He was a 100 out of 100 on extraversion; I'm like a 60 out of 100.
But whether you're a 1 or a 99, listen closely: the best way to break into a new conversation with a stranger is to see somebody you want to meet, assume they want to talk to you, and just kind of start mid-sentence on whatever is going on around you.
You're at Starbucks, you see a woman you find beautiful, or you see a business potential contact. You're at some party. I did a big house party at my house; all these business people were there, and I noticed people don't walk up to each other. I said, "What are you doing? Networking is not showing up at an event and showing your face. Networking is talking to strangers and building connections that you can grow later on."
You're only going to do so much at the beginning. The goal of your first walk up to a stranger—the goal I call that a "walk up"—is to get their contact info for future conversation.
I'm in Brazil right now, and when I got on the plane there in business class, there was Adriana Lima, the supermodel, and her husband. I was like, "I'd like to talk to them." I just walked up, kind of assumed the sale. I was like, "Ah, you know, just talk about the airplane." It doesn't have to be complicated. Assume they want to talk to you.
Don't be abnormal. Don't be strange. Don't do any weird icebreakers that you see people teaching—all this weird stuff. Just be a normal man. Common sense: just walk up and be like, "Hey, it's going to be a long trip." It was an 11-hour flight from LA. Just pause and assume they want to talk to you.
Ninety-nine percent of the time, people will go, "Yeah, I don't know. I'm going to try to sleep." Just start mid-conversation; that's what my dad would do.
Now, a couple of rules: I think it's different if you're a man. I'm going to speak to men because that's my experience. When you walk up to a woman, one thing I would tell you is that humans and mammals—not even just Homo sapiens—show aggression by looking straight into the eyes.
Some people will tell you when you want to meet somebody, "Just walk straight up to them, shake their hand, and look them in the eyes." I think it's bad advice. What I've had the best results with is just kind of, when you walk up to people like Adriana Lima, you just kind of look straight forward and be like, "Oh, it's going to be a long flight."
Now, a man-to-man interaction: I even like it with men too. Men also assume you're aggressive if you walk straight up to a dude who's a stranger. If it's a warm introduction, then yes, you can look straight in the eyes. But for a cold approach with a stranger you want to network with, talk to, or date, it's better, in my experience, to not give them that intense glare.
That's how gorillas and lions operate. I saw a video of a trainer making a mistake and staring straight at a lion, and the lion attacked him. They said his number one mistake was that mammals consider a strong glare on a stranger to be a sign of aggression.
Smile! Especially if it's a man talking to a woman. You know, you smile; that's showing that you're there. Remember, it's all in the unconscious mind. Consciously, they're not going to think, "Oh, you're there to attack," but we have primitive minds.
So, rule number one: assume the sale. Walk up, kind of start mid-conversation on something relevant that's happening right there.
Number two: don't have an aggressive stare, glare, or tone of voice. I see guys—I had a friend who was always trying to meet women. He used his tone of voice; I know what he was trying to do—he was trying to be sarcastic and funny. But 99% of the time, women saw it as hostile. Women are programmed to assume a strange male is dangerous, and other men are generally programmed to assume that you are challenging their tribe, their pack, if they're that alpha.
So, that's why I said just mid-conversation, boom, talk about what's right there.
Then, the third thing: be interesting quickly. The opening can be just kind of casual, like, "Oh, it's going to be a long flight." But, for example, when I was talking to Adriana Lima and her husband, I was talking about how I'm headed to my farm after Brazil. A lot of people find that interesting, and he was like, "Oh, that's interesting."
You strike up a conversation to prolong it. It needs to be a longer conversation, if that makes sense. It shouldn't be too short. It shouldn't just be, "Oh, what do you think of the weather?" It needs to go a tad bit deeper.
So, let's say I see a woman at Starbucks. I could comment on the necklace: "Oh, my grandma had a necklace like that." You could reverse the order; it doesn't really matter. You can start with a quote-unquote interesting opener and then switch to talking about the surroundings, or you can do it vice versa.
But the point of rule number three is you need to get interesting quickly, or else that opening where you assume the sale starts to lose its power.
Okay, so if you're at a business networking thing—like I did a party at my house; I had like 500 people in the backyard—I actually opened up the game room, so there were people in there playing pool. If I see somebody I want to talk to, a business dude, I'm walking up to him like, "You know, talk about pool, man. I haven't played pool in a while."
Not looking in straight lines, break the ice. The second I get in there, I might bring up something interesting like, "Yeah, I just came back from Sweden doing some business in Stockholm. Good to be back in the LA warmth." Boom, pause.
Number four is to make sure you pause and give them time to talk so that the conversation's not one-sided. I've seen people get so nervous about the first three things that they forget the fourth one: pause. Take a breath. Let there be silence.
Don't be afraid of the silence. Some people are afraid of silence, so they always have to pipe up. But some people are slower to speak; it's just a personality trait—nothing wrong with that.
So often, I see when people are new to walking up and talking to strangers, they go wrong. They do the first three things right, but if people don't respond in a millisecond, they're just rattling off again. All of a sudden, you come off as kind of this crazy, frenetic stranger.
I've had people do that. In fact, that's, I would say, number four: pausing. That's the number one mistake people make with me.
When they come to my business networking events in my backyard, I do like a big event every other month with 300 to 500 people there. Some of them just start talking non-stop, and I'm like, "Dude, do you want to have a conversation, or are you trying to pitch me on something?"
Don't pitch too early unless it's somebody you're never going to meet again. Even then, it doesn't work.
So, with me, remember the unintended positive consequence: when you pause and you're okay with the silence, you're coming off as projecting confidence. You're owning the room.
That pause lets them talk. When you own that room, you project through silence that you're okay with the silence. You're projecting a very high level of confidence to the unconscious mind of all the people around you.
Someone who has to fill the void with a word is essentially insecure, and you don't want to project that.
So, these are the four powerful ways to approach strangers. Now, this video will do you no good if you don't put it into action. The secret to life is to be a learning machine and put it into action the same day.
Whenever you learn something new that's intriguing, if you found this video intriguing, now your job is to take it from just head knowledge into kinesthetic action. Then you'll remember it forever.
So just try walking up to a stranger. Do it in a non-intimidating way. Walk up to, like, I see people go up to, "I'm going to practice on the most beautiful woman," or "I'm going to practice on the billionaire." No! Don't practice on the most challenging. Practice on just a random person: Starbucks, bus stop, Uber driver, gym—somebody next to you at the gym. It's okay to talk.
Sometimes, male or female, just talk. If you accomplish what I set out in this video, my intention for this video, if you accomplish the ability to talk to strangers, you're literally 50% of everything you want out of life.
Health? You want to get healthier? Well, people say your network is your net worth, but your network's also your health. You want to get in the best shape of your life? Find somebody at the gym, cold approach them, start a conversation, start working out with them, start watching how they eat.
Health is 50% of the battle. Who you surround yourself with matters. Learn how to talk to strangers.
Wealth? Well, we already know this. Jim Collins wrote a book, "Good to Great." He said the number one thing that makes people wealthy—the number one thing that makes businesses hyper-valuable, trillion-dollar valuations—is that the founders talk to strangers.
Steve Jobs cold-called the owner of Hewlett-Packard when he was like 13 or 14 years old and said, "Can I come to your house and buy a part for a computer I'm building?" He struck up a conversation and built a mentorship relationship with one of the biggest billionaires in tech when he was just a teenager.
So, wealth and love: in general, look, dating sites are great. It's the modern way people are using Tinder and Hinge and all that. But you wouldn't want that to be 100% of your way of finding a potential mate to have children with. You also want to be able to approach somebody that just strikes your fancy at a party, at Starbucks. You should be able to approach.
So, love is increased friendship. You should strike up new friendships. You move to a new city, you visit a new place—find a new friend.
Happiness? Well, there's a great book on this by Matt Lieberman, a Harvard guy who's at UCLA now. He did all these fMRI studies and wrote a book called "Social." He said, at the end of the day, his biggest finding is that our brain is completely programmed for social life.
Meaning, without social life, it is impossible to be healthy. I'm sorry, it's impossible to be healthy and happy. It's impossible! We create our own happiness through membership in a tribe.
Robin Dunbar, the famous anthropologist, said humans are built for social connections. They looked at the neural connections and pathways and said about 150 people in your tribe. So, that's not just going to be your best friend; that's not just going to be your close family.
That's going to be extended family and extended friendships—a network, a tribe, so to speak, of 150 is the healthiest social life. Obviously, you're not going to spend as much time with friend number 149, but you need that large of a network.
You don't need 10,000 friends, but you need about 150 people that you know their name, and they know your name, and they care about you, and you care about them. They can be acquaintances, be friends you talk to twice a year; it doesn't matter. You need that network.
If you're not doing that, you can meditate all you want. You can do all the yoga you want. You can do all the Buddhism you want. You're not going to find bliss and happiness without what I call the genetic imperative: a tribe, a group of people.
From your childhood and life, especially in modern urban life, there's not naturally this tribe. I lived with the Amish for two and a half years; they have their tribe of 50 people. I lived in a couple of different communities, and they break into what they call districts. Each district has about 150 adults, and if you take the kids, they have a lot of kids.
So, a district, a church district, they all meet on Sunday. They meet in each other's houses. If you count the people over 12 years old, there'll be about 150 people.
Tribes understood this, and we've forgotten this in the modern world. Hence the rise of anxiety—generalized anxiety. People feel like something's wrong in their life but can't figure out what it is. Yeah, it's social life.
How do you build a social life in a big city? Well, most people are strangers. You're not living like the Amish on a small farm where you're growing up with people you knew from childhood.
So, that's why if you were Amish, you wouldn't need this video because there are no strangers around you. But if you live in a modern world, you need to be able to approach strangers so that you can slowly but surely build this tribe.
If you do that, you basically double your chances of winning at everything. Learn the skill, re-watch this video.
By the way, I have a simple... I'll put my phone number below. I carry two phones with me: a personal phone and a business phone. If you want to text me, I have some advanced training on social skills, love, dating—especially for men.
I've got a system called the 13 theses, and it's related to this, but it's more specific on how an entrepreneur dude can find love. Women can do the course too; it's my 13 hypotheses on social life, love, and dating for a man.
So, just text me. Text me the word from this video: "stranger." Just text me the word "stranger," and I'll send you some free presentations you can watch. I'll put some stuff in there for you.
Just text me; you can WhatsApp me; that's even better. Okay, this is an actual business phone. This number below is my actual number. I carry two phones with me at all times, so I'll see it. Sometimes my assistant will answer and stuff; I don't answer everyone, but I scan through it every day.
So just write "stranger" so that I know you came from this video on how to approach strangers, and I'll send you some good stuff for free. I'll just text you back. I've got some paid training and courses, so if you're super interested, start with some of the free stuff that I'm going to do.
This is the skill that I've had a magic wand. I would wave it over all the people I loved, and if I had a wand that would suck at this, I'd wave it over all my enemies. This is how you would curse your enemies: may you not know how to do these four things in this video. May you lose in life.
Because I'm telling you, you can be good at a lot of stuff, but if you're not good at talking to strangers, you will miss out on potential. And the crazy thing is, you won't even know it.
Some people are going to write comments below, "Oh, Tai's, you know, yeah, it's important, but Tai is overweighting this." No, because you don't know who you missed out on already. You don't know what you don't know.
That's why I said, if you look at actual science by a scientist like Jim Collins, he's documented clearly, for example, in the realm of wealth, that what was the game changer for Steve Jobs, Zuckerberg, Elon Musk was the people that they found along the way. It wasn't an invention.
You see great inventors like Tesla—the original Serbian guy—he was one of the greatest inventors of all time. He was better than Thomas Edison, but he was so shy. There's a famous, sad story about him on his deathbed in the 1940s or 50s.
He was basically somebody who wasn't taught social skills, and so all of these great things that mankind still uses—some of Tesla's inventions—we still use this stuff, but he got no credit. He died alone, I think childless, loveless, and poor.
So, that's the crazy thing. You might be like, "I have a lot of skill," but you better get that social skill up too. The primary social skill is not that you don't need to be trained to talk to your close friends. Everybody—even the most introverted person—is good at talking to their close friends or close family.
The actual skill to push yourself on is how do I walk up in a bold way without freezing up on somebody that I don't know? Even if you know, two out of ten times, 20% of the time, you'll get rejected. But if you do it the way I'm talking about, you rarely get rejected because you're not aggressive, you're not weird, you're not talking too much.
You're talking about what's right around there. You get interesting quickly. You're not staring at them in the eyes in an intimidating way. This way, it works.
So, text me the word "stranger," and I'll send you some important stuff. Okay, good luck out there! Now, leave me a comment below: what did I miss? What's the fifth thing you should know about approaching strangers?