I’ve spent my life arriving somewhere new
Third culture kid… third, or fifth or eighth, depending how you count. Which means I learned early that connection isn’t something you inherit. It’s something you build, deliberately, from nothing, every single time.
I got good at the questions that skip past the small talk, because I never had years to get to know someone. I had a season, sometimes two. That’s not a hardship story. It’s a training ground.
What it trained me to notice is the half-second before an answer.
Someone gets asked how they are, and there’s a moment (very short, but it’s there) where a truer answer is available to them. Then they say good, busy, you know how it is, and the moment closes. When you’re always arriving, you don’t get to wait for that gap to open on its own. You learn to reach into it.
And what I found in there, over and over, is that almost nobody is unwilling to say the true thing.
They just weren’t asked twice.
That noticing eventually became a career.
By day I’m a Strategic Intelligence Manager at Swarovski, a formal way of saying I spend my time working out why people want what they want. I have an MBA from IESE and a long-standing obsession with sociology, psychology, and the research on how humans actually behave, as opposed to how we say we do.
But the thing I care about most is this. A study in what happens between two people when someone finally asks properly.
Not the questions that change the world. The ones that make someone feel important.
I’ve watched people meet as strangers and leave as something else entirely, in under an hour, with nothing but attention and the right follow-up. It happens faster than I expect, every time. And people are far more grateful to be asked than they ever let on.
Now here’s the part I got wrong for years
I used to think depth was a matter of gravity.
Lower the voice. Make it serious. Signal clearly that this is A Real Conversation now. Create the safe container, and people will open.
It almost never works. People armour up the moment they sense weight arriving. You can watch it happen… the shoulders, the slight lean back, the answer that’s suddenly very well-constructed.
What actually works is play.
Watch a child ask an adult something outrageous. What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done? Are you scared of dying? And watch the adult answer; properly, delighted, at length. Nobody takes offence, because it’s obviously a game. The question arrives with no agenda attached to it.
And an agenda is what people defend against. Not the question.
This is the thing I keep finding, and it’s the closest I have to a thesis: openness isn’t something you can request. Ask someone to be vulnerable and you’ll get a performance of vulnerability, which is the most closed thing there is. Openness is a byproduct. It happens when someone briefly forgets to manage the impression they’re making and forgetting requires fun.
So every question I use has some mischief in it. What do you sing in the shower. Who do you become at 2am. What’s your secret mission. They’re light enough to say out loud at a dinner table without anyone bracing.
And then, about three seconds later, they aren’t light at all.
That gap between how a question sounds and where it lands is the entire mechanism. It’s also why the show is called Just a follow up question… The word just is doing all the work. It’s what someone says right before they ask the thing that actually matters. The lightness is the permission slip.
What this is going to be
I’m building this in public, mostly because I want to find out if I’m right.
The premise underneath all of it is simple: the point of life is to enjoy it. And you can tell when someone is — they glow. What I want to know is the mechanics of it. Which questions open a person and which ones close them. Whether it works differently with a stranger than with someone you’ve loved for twenty years. What happens in the pause. Why some rooms open and others never do.
So here you’ll get the field notes. The questions and what they did. Stories people send me — from queues, kitchens, long drives, dinner tables. What the research says about why we’re all so consistently wrong about each other. And where the experiment fails, which I suspect will be the most useful part.
I’m not a researcher and I won’t pretend to be one. I’m someone who has spent a lot of life walking into rooms where I knew nobody, and got very good at the way in.