Today I was reminded of what life is like when school work isn’t consuming my every waking moment, and some of my non waking moments (having a nightmare about a web design/CSS problem is a rather unsettling way to wake up). I spent a good portion of today engaged in good conversation with good friends, it it felt very refreshing. Over a late breakfast with two of my friends we touched on cool classes, business ideas, and religion. One of the ideas that came out of our conversation had to do with a recent article in business week about young entrepreneurs. Chuck Branding (25) is working on a business that helps people buy cars by doing all the legwork with finding a dealership and negotiating the price. The most interesting thing to me about his business was that 15% of his customers are "single women who are intimidated by car dealers".
I brought up this fact with my two breakfast companions, both female, and was surprised to hear them say that they would never buy a car without a male there too. I consider both of my friends to be independent, strong women, so I was a little surprised that this was the case, but I think this speaks to a real problem with the car buying process and a place where there’s room for a lot of improvement. And it also reminded me of the importance of seeing the world through other people’s eyes whose perspectives differ from my own – whether that be because of gender, race, nationality, whatever.
The other conversation I had today was with my roommate, and we spoke mostly of relationships with other people – what affects the quality of those relationships and the kind of people we most like to cultivate interactions with. Early in the conversation, I said that I felt there was a sort of x-factor in people that I couldn’t put my finger on, but that it was some rare trait/combination of traits that make someone really interesting to me. My roommate pressed me to try to define this x factor, and over the course of our conversation we came to the following conclusion:
The people that we cultivate relationships with, the people we find most interesting and most pleasurable to be around are those people that allow us to feel comfortable enough with them to share our true selves. These are the people who we share our most personal thoughts with because we know that they are worthy of the trust entailed in sharing those thoughts.
There were many other musings from my day of conversation, but I’ll save those for another post.
