Field Guides
Each Open + Curious field guide picks up a single idea and follows it across several conversations, tracing a thread that only becomes visible when the pieces are laid side by side. Where a field note explores one moment from one conversation, a field guide lays out the larger territory — a book-chapter-sized essay that produces an insight none of the individual exchanges could reach on their own.
How Connection Actually Works
We think we know what connection requires. Be warm. Be open. Be interested. Cast a wide net. Follow up. Build rapport. The advice is everywhere, and it all sounds reasonable, and almost none of it describes what actually happens when two people genuinely connect in conversation.
What actually happens is stranger, less comfortable, and far more interesting than any networking guide suggests. Genuine connection doesn’t come from where we expect. It doesn’t scale the way we assume. It can’t be engineered with the tools we reach for instinctively. And the very habits we develop to pursue connection — broadening our message, calculating our generosity, measuring our relationships by utility, engineering rapport through technique — turn out to be the habits most likely to prevent it.
This essay follows a single thread through four different facets of that phenomenon, drawn from four different conversations with four different people who each caught something true about how connection works. Each one illuminates a piece of the territory. What emerges when you lay them side by side is something like a map — not of how to connect, but of how connection actually works when we stop trying to force it into the shapes we expect.