Claim
An opener only has to be answerable
The reason your openers fail is that you are trying to make them good. A good opener is a performance, and a performance asks a stranger to evaluate it before he can respond to it. That is work you have just handed him.
An opener has one job, which is to be easy to answer. Boring is a feature. "How do you know Sam?" is boring and it works, because the answer is already loaded in the other person and needs nothing from him but retrieval.
The interesting part of a conversation is supposed to arrive around minute four, from both of you, out of something neither of you planned. Nothing you say in the first thirty seconds gets you there faster. It only has to avoid blocking the road.
Action
Where to stand
Three things before you say anything.
- Get within about four feet, at an angle rather than square on. Square on is an interview, shoulder to shoulder is a queue, and the useful position sits between them.
- Be in his sightline before you speak. A voice arriving from outside the visual field makes people startle and then recover, and you spend your first line on the recovery.
- Put your drink, phone and coat somewhere. A man holding three objects has no hands and no attention left over.
None of that is presence. It removes three of the reasons a conversation dies before the first sentence, which is all you need from a doorway.
Action
When there is no shared context
"How do you know Sam?" works because a host exists. Most conversations do not come with one, and this is the case men find hardest.
Use the thing the two of you are standing in. The queue. The machine that is broken. The talk that just finished. The dog. It is not a topic, it is a reason to speak, and once two sentences have gone back and forth the requirement disappears.
"Have you done this class before?" works because it is about the room and it is answerable either way.
What does not work is a compliment on something personal, or an observation so clever it needs explaining. Both ask him to respond to you rather than to the situation, in the first four seconds, before anybody has agreed to a conversation at all.
Evidence
Epley and Schroeder, on a train
Epley and Schroeder (2014) sent Chicago commuters onto trains and buses with instructions. One group was told to talk to a stranger, one to sit in solitude, one to do whatever they normally do. Then they asked a separate set of commuters to predict how each condition would feel.
The predictions and the results pointed opposite ways. People expected the conversation condition to be the worst one. The commuters who actually did it reported a better trip than the ones who sat alone. The forecasters also expected most strangers to refuse. In the field, refusal was rare.
That is the same shape as the liking gap. Your forecast of a social interaction is not a neutral instrument, and it errs in a known direction. Two independent findings now say so.
Action
Names
Say it back within two seconds of hearing it. Not as a memory trick. Say it back because that is the moment you find out you did not catch it, while asking again is still free.
Then use it once inside the first minute, out loud, in a sentence. Once. A name repeated four times reads as a technique, which it is.
If you have lost it, ask again immediately: "Sorry, your name again?" The cost of asking at second forty is nothing. The cost at minute twelve is a conversation spent managing a gap instead of listening, and the cost at the end is that you cannot introduce him to anybody, which is the one thing a name is actually for.
Caution
The rehearsed entrance
A man who has practiced his opener delivers it and then stops, because he prepared one sentence and the conversation asked for two. The pause that follows is worse than a fumbled start, and he reads it as proof that he is bad at this.
If you are going to prepare anything, prepare the second question rather than the first. Better: prepare nothing, and accept that the first fifteen seconds of every conversation you have for the rest of your life will be slightly awkward, including for the man across from you, who is also starting cold and has no more idea what happens next than you do.
Aside
Openers barely matter
The uncomfortable part of today is that the whole subject is overweighted. Almost no conversation is decided in its first thirty seconds. They are decided in the middle, by whether either person asked a real question and whether either one listened to the answer, which is Days 3 and 4.
I have given you the entry moves anyway, for one reason: a man with no entry never reaches the middle. The opener is not important. It is load-bearing, which is a different thing, and the order of this course reflects it. Get the door open in the cheapest way available and spend your attention on what happens after.