I like to ask, "how do you spend your time" or "what are you good at." I also like to wear a tag that says "I'm interested in XYZ" where XYZ is what I'm interested in.
The set of useful people is much smaller than the set of people you can't make use of, so it's better to cut the bullshit and spend time with the useful. Unless you've got super low standards, or are so non useful yourself that you have to take whatever comes along.
Conferences are about synergy and false synergy binds the docking site that could have docked with real synergy.
Conference makers, I know your printer is slow, but my nametag having what I've declared I'm looking for is far more important than my name.
Not necessarily at conferences, I but I have found the "Wow, that sounds really hard!" tip incredibly useful, especially with people in fields I'm not too familiar with. It's genuinely interesting to hear about other people's jobs. I think this phrase works so well because it grants the other person permission to go beyond the one sentence sound-bite of their job, and tell you about the difficult (and therefore interesting) parts. I think this is the essence of a great small-talk prompt - invite the other person into territory they are familiar and comfortable with so that they can vocalise thoughts they've probably already had but wouldn't just say without prompting. Doing so usually produces enough material that you can then ask another question or say something relevant yourself.
Of course, some people don't need prompting, though it often seems to be the case that the more eager someone is to talk about themselves the less interesting they are, and vice versa.
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 13.8 ms ] threadThe set of useful people is much smaller than the set of people you can't make use of, so it's better to cut the bullshit and spend time with the useful. Unless you've got super low standards, or are so non useful yourself that you have to take whatever comes along.
Conferences are about synergy and false synergy binds the docking site that could have docked with real synergy.
Conference makers, I know your printer is slow, but my nametag having what I've declared I'm looking for is far more important than my name.
Of course, some people don't need prompting, though it often seems to be the case that the more eager someone is to talk about themselves the less interesting they are, and vice versa.