Everybody in here already knows each other.
That is what it looks like from the doorway. It is almost never true. Here is what is actually going on in that room, and the game plan I wish somebody had handed me back when I was the one standing at the edge of it.
The arithmetic you do in the doorway
You are standing just inside the door doing arithmetic. I know that arithmetic well, because I did it for most of my life.
It goes like this. Those two are laughing at something. That one just shouted something across the room at that one. Somebody already knows where the tools live. Somebody already has a nickname. Therefore this is a group, therefore the group is finished, therefore I am late.
Every single step of that is a reasonable thing to think and the conclusion is wrong, and it is wrong in a particular way that is worth understanding. You are looking at the results of time and reading them as a relationship you have been left out of.
It is not a closed group. It is an open room with a history.
Here is the short version. That room is not a group that formed without you. It is a pile of people who each walked in on their own, on different nights, most of them doing the same arithmetic you are doing right now, several of them quite recently.
You do not get in by being interesting. You get in by being there again, and by making the first move roughly ten times more often than feels fair.
None of what follows is about why adult friendship got hard in the first place. That part is structural, it is not about you at all, and I put it in its own letter. This one is the tactics.
···What that group actually is, from the inside
Let me take the room apart for you, because from the doorway it looks like one object and it is nothing like one object.
Pick whichever table intimidated you most. Of the people sitting at it: two of them know each other from here and nowhere else, and would not recognize each other in a grocery store. One has been coming for three weeks. One is quieter than you are and is privately relieved that somebody else is doing the talking. One is having a rough night and is hiding in their pot on purpose. And at least one of them, I would put money on this, still thinks of themselves as the new person.
Nobody inside a room feels as inside it as they look from outside it.
Now the inside jokes, because that is the detail that does the most damage from the doorway.
An inside joke feels like proof of a history you cannot enter. It is not. An inside joke is what happens when several people are in the same place while something stupid occurs, and the only qualification for the next one is being present when it happens.
An inside joke is not a wall. It is a receipt.
Which means the strategy people reach for, quietly learning the references so you can nod along, is the one strategy that cannot work. You cannot study your way in. You can only be there on the night the next one gets made, and the next one is coming soon, because a room full of people making the same mistakes near each other manufactures these things weekly.
I have watched somebody go from total stranger to being the subject of one of those jokes in about a month. They did not do anything clever. They dropped something spectacularly, laughed at themselves louder than anybody else did, and came back the next week.
Why I take this personally
I should tell you why I care about this, and then I will get practical.
I have spent a great deal of my life on the outside of rooms that were already going. Nothing dramatic. Just the person at the edge, reading the room, waiting for a gap in the conversation that was going to feel natural to step into, and then driving home having said four sentences and feeling faintly ridiculous about the whole evening.
And the thing I got wrong, for years and years, was believing the gap would eventually arrive on its own. That if I was pleasant enough and patient enough and easy enough to have around, the room would at some point turn around and make space for me.
I spent years on the outside of rooms that were already going, waiting for a natural gap to step into and assuming that if I was pleasant enough the room would eventually turn around and make space.
Nobody is going to turn around. Not out of unkindness. They are busy.
What finally changed it was accepting a deal that is genuinely unfair. If I wanted in, I was going to have to do about ninety percent of the moving, and I was going to have to do it several times before anything came back, and I was not going to get any credit for it.
What changed it was accepting an unfair deal. If I wanted in, I had to do about ninety percent of the moving, several times, with no credit for it.
The room will not meet you halfway. It will, however, meet you.
That is the good news hiding inside the unfair deal. The bar is not charm, and it is not being funny, and it is not having anything interesting to say. The bar is initiative, applied more than once. That is a thing a shy person can absolutely do, and it is the thing an outgoing person who only comes once a month cannot.
It took me an unreasonable number of years to work out that the room was never closed. I just kept waiting to be invited into something that does not issue invitations.
The game plan
So here it is. Everything I know, roughly in the order I would do it.
Bring somebody you already know, if you possibly can. One familiar person in the room is worth every tactic below put together, and there are five weeks a year where any member can bring anybody in for nothing, no pass and no arranging. If that is available to you, do that and skip the rest of this list.
Be early, and be busy when they arrive. Doors open fifteen minutes before class, and that quarter of an hour is worth more than the whole rest of the evening put together. Not because early is virtuous, but because arriving first means people walk in on you rather than the other way round, and that is a completely different evening.
Learn three names a night and say them out loud. There is a stand with a name on it at every station, which means somebody has handed you the answers to the test. Saying a person’s name back to them is the single fastest way to stop being a stranger, and almost nobody does it.
Say the awkward thing first. I do not know one single person in here. Say it in the first ten minutes, out loud, to anybody. It lands better than anything clever you could come up with, because it quietly gives everybody else permission to admit the same thing.
Be the one who helps. Pass a tool. Hold a bat. Refill somebody’s water. Adults do not bond over topics, they bond over tasks, and doing one small useful thing for somebody skips about a month of small talk.
Make your compliments specific. That is nice ends a conversation. How did you get that rim so even starts one, because a specific compliment is a question wearing a hat and nobody alive can resist answering it.
Ask somebody to teach you something. This is the highest percentage move on the list and it is not close. People warm to you the instant they get to be useful, and every potter in that building has one trick they are quietly proud of.
Do the boring part near people. Clean up slowly, next to somebody. The unglamorous end of the evening, hands busy, nothing being taught, is where more actual conversation happens than in the whole middle of the class.
Say yes to the studio thing. The contest. The show and tell shelf. The class photo. Signing the wall. Every one of them is a cheap way to stop being a face and start being a name, and none of them require you to be good at anything.
Go twice in a row before you judge anything. Recognition has a half life. Two weeks back to back builds more than five weeks scattered across two months, and it is not a close contest.
Then stop keeping score. Give it two months before you form an opinion about whether it is working. You are not auditing a vendor.
The other five are in the Comprehensive version: ask somebody to teach you something, do the clean up next to a person rather than alone, say yes to the contest and the photo and the wall, go twice in a row before you judge anything, and then stop keeping score for two months.
Pick three of those. Not ten. Three, at your next class.
Four or five of them are going to cost you a jolt of adrenaline, and I would rather say that out loud than pretend otherwise. The useful part is how short the jolt is. The whole price is about twenty seconds, every time, and then it is over.
What the middle of it feels like
I want to tell you what this feels like while it is working, because the feeling is misleading and people quit on the feeling.
You will have a night where you talk to nobody. You will get in the car and it will feel like information about you. It is not information about you. It is a Tuesday, and everybody in that room has had one.
You will say something that lands slightly wrong and then think about it in bed. Everybody else forgot it before they got to the parking lot. I have never once in my life had somebody bring up the awkward thing I said, and I have said a great many of them.
You will be forgotten and re-met. Somebody will introduce themselves to you for a second time, which stings for about four seconds and means nothing at all in a building with a lot of faces in it. Introduce yourself back and use their name.
And then one night, with no ceremony at all, you will walk in and somebody will already be talking to you before your coat is off.
And if some of that has already happened to you, and the conclusion you drew was that the room had quietly decided something about you, please go and read the letter about that conclusion before you decide anything else. It is the most expensive mistake anybody makes in here.
The night it finally works, nothing will happen. That is exactly what it looks like.
The three ways people get this wrong
More than anything else on this page, the thing I want from you is time. Not effort, time. The tactics only work because they get repeated, and there is no version of this that goes faster than it goes.
So let me name the three ways I watch people lose at this, because none of them is being shy.
Auditing. Deciding at night three whether it is working. You are not a consultant reviewing a service, and nothing has had time to happen yet. Put the clipboard down.
Coming irregularly. Four visits spread across three months gets you four first nights in a row. The same four visits in four consecutive weeks gets you known. Identical cost, completely different outcome.
Waiting to be picked. The one I did for years. There is no committee. Nobody is going to come and tell you that you are in, and the moment you stop waiting for that is the moment this starts working.
Nobody is coming to tell you that you are in. There is no such announcement.
So the challenge is simple, and I would like you to actually take it. Three moves off that list, next class. Then again the week after. Then judge it in two months rather than in two weeks.
The last thing
The thing I would most like you to walk out of this letter with is not a tactic. It is a correction.
The room is not finished. It is not a completed thing you are arriving too late for. It is being built every single week by whoever happens to be standing in it, which right now includes several people who feel exactly as outside of it as you do, and who would be quietly delighted if you spoke first.
The room is not finished. It is built every week by whoever is standing in it, which right now includes several people who feel as outside it as you do and would be delighted if you spoke first.
The inside joke you will one day be inside of has not been made yet.
Nobody had to make space for me in the end. I just kept turning up until I was one of the people the space was made of, and I promise you that is a much lower bar than the one you have been holding yourself to.
DanDan Pearce, founder of The Clay HoleDraper, Utah
P.S. If you have not had your first night yet, the single best move available to you is bringing somebody you already know, and Free Week exists precisely so you never have to ask permission to do it.
P.P.S. There is a thirty five pound dog in this building called Mud whose entire unpaid job appears to be finding the person standing on their own. Let him. Twenty minutes of scratching a dog’s ears with your back to the room is a completely legitimate way to spend a first night, and it puts you in a conversation about twice as often as standing there alone does.
If you want more of this: You Are Allowed to Be the Weird One is the other half of this letter, because walking in as a flattened version of yourself gets you into the room and then into the wrong friendships.
And if you want to know who works here: every face and what the shirt colors mean, so you know who to ask for what.
Both come out as plain text with nothing hidden behind a tap.