Now that I’m using Reading Refresh to keep myself up to date on books I’ve read in the past, I thought I’d share some of them as they came back up. Today is Priya Parker’s “The Art of Gathering“. This book is also available as a free flashcard deck on Ripple Recall.
As you may know, we host quite a few events here in the Atlanta area, including our second annual conference coming this October. With those events, I’ve been working hard to make them a little better every time, and Priya’s book has been a huge help.
Here are a few things that really stood out to me.
Don’t be a chill host
She says that “chill is selfishness disguised as kindness“. If you’re chill, the event can drift off the rails, perhaps even in small ways that you don’t notice. Going further, she says:
“But exercising your authority once and early on in a gathering is as effective as exercising your body once and early on in your life. It isn’t enough just to set a purpose, direction, and ground rules. All these things require enforcement. And if you don’t enforce them, others will step in and enforce their own purposes, directions, and ground rules.”
Don’t start with logistics
Logistics can be important, but they have a time and a place. When an event is about to begin, and everyone gets quiet to hear what you have to say, pointing out where the bathrooms are is an awful place to begin. She says:
“Every gathering, to be sure, has logistical demands. People need to know where the bathroom is. People need to know where lunch can be found. There are often last-minute changes to announce. But people do not need to know this information at the very first moment of your gathering. It’s not that you don’t need time for logistics and the like. Just don’t start with them. Open cold.”
Taking it a step further:
“Your opening needs to be a kind of pleasant shock therapy. It should grab people. And in grabbing them, it should both awe the guests and honor them. It must plant in them the paradoxical feeling of being totally welcomed and deeply grateful to be there.”
Have a clean ending
As she says in the book “Too many of our gatherings don’t end. They simply stop.” Letting an event meander to an end isn’t the way to go, but a clean ending will leave people more excited about the next one.
I’ll take it a step further and say “end on time“. I recently went to a “Lunch With a Leader” event nearby a few times, who promoted the time ending “promptly at 1:00“. Both times, they literally ended at 1:00 on the nose. That’s worth something.
It’s easy for an event to run too long. In fact, that’s the default. If you aren’t intentional about your time, it will quickly get away from you. One thing I was proud of with our conference last year is that it ran right on time. We had one talk that started one minute late due to a minor technical hiccup, and that was it. It wasn’t easy, but it was worth it.
There are a lot of ways to improve the events you host, and Priya’s book is a great insight into them. I encourage you to check it out for yourself, and then you can use Ripple Recall if you want to study the lessons a bit more.
For a quick summary of the book, here is a brief 4 minute overview video:
