“What do you do?”

That’s my go-to question after meeting someone for the first time. The thrill of making a new connection is one of my great loves. When meeting someone, I’m looking to make a connection between who they are / what they do for work / what they do for fun / what they read / where they’re from / who they know / with something rattling around my brain. People we both know (thanks Linkedin and Facebook) and ideas or stories I can relate to something they’ve said are especially exciting.

Just yesterday, I was at an event and had several good connection thrills.
Christine Fanchiang‘s (of The Space Research Company) talk about her work at on human performance factors in space immediately reminded me of Amanda Hendrix‘s (WOW, Amanda rates a wikipedia page!) great book about colonizing Saturn’s moon Titan “Beyond Earth”. I’ve mentioned them to each other, hopefully they can connect too! Another person of note there I wanted to meet was shown by Linkedin to share a common good friend, and that was a wonderful icebreaker.

I’m looking to build a deeper connection that signals to me (and hopefully them) that we’re part of the same tribe. I used to look for “the other”, to try to exclude them from “my tribe”, and that just led to trouble. The excitement of making these connections helps me walk up to someone new and say “Hi I’m Jamie, what do you do?”