What Thirty-Eight Years of Showing Up Teaches You About People

Thirty-eight years is long enough that we no longer trust our first impression of anybody, which is, we think, the main thing thirty-eight years buys you.

Here is what happens. You walk into a house. You form an opinion in roughly four seconds, because everyone does. Then you sit down, and you stay longer than the four seconds required, and the opinion falls apart. The person you thought was difficult is frightened. The person you thought was cold is exhausted. The couple you assumed disagreed about everything actually disagree about one thing, and it is not the house.

Almost nobody is arguing about what they say they are arguing about. This is true in real estate and, as far as we can tell, everywhere else.

People tell you the truth in the second hour

Not the first. The first hour is the résumé version: the timeline, the number, the reasonable-sounding reason. The second hour is where somebody mentions the parent who is getting older, or the job that ended, or the fact that they have wanted to leave for four years and only said so out loud last month.

You cannot rush the second hour. You also cannot fake being interested in it. The only technique we have ever found is to stop talking and let a silence sit there long enough to be slightly uncomfortable. People fill it. What they fill it with is usually the actual story.

Change is almost never one decision

Outsiders think moving is a decision. It is more often the visible edge of a long series of small ones — a conversation in a car, a bad winter, a grandchild, a promotion, a diagnosis, a Tuesday. By the time anyone calls us, most of the deciding has already happened. Our job at that point is closer to witness than advisor.

The correction we keep making

Every few years we catch ourselves assuming we know what a person wants because we have met someone who looked like them before. We have been wrong enough times to have stopped enjoying being right.

That is the whole lesson, if there is one. Thirty-eight years does not make you a better predictor of people. It makes you slower to predict them, which turns out to be the same thing as being better at it.