Owning the specific habit of turning every conversation into an opportunity
I have started keeping a running list of pitches I have made to people who did not ask for them, delivered at parties, on trains, in the queue for the loo at parties, and I think it is time I owned this particular tendency rather than continuing to pretend it is a recent development.
The unsolicited pitch problem
Somewhere along the way I developed the genuine belief that any conversation, however brief, however unrelated to my actual professional life, could reasonably become an opportunity to explain what I am currently working on, and I have delivered this explanation to people who had every reasonable expectation of a considerably shorter interaction.
I am not proud of this exactly, but I am also not entirely ashamed of it either. It has, on at least two genuinely memorable occasions, led somewhere useful, which I use as ongoing justification for a habit that otherwise has no defensible justification whatsoever.
The queue for the loo incident
The loo queue pitch remains, to this day, the most audacious entry on my list, delivered to a complete stranger over the course of roughly four minutes of shared waiting, and I still think about her expression, somewhere between mild alarm and genuine, if reluctant, interest.
She did not, in the end, become a client or a collaborator or anything at all really. But she did laugh, eventually, and told me I had at minimum earned points for commitment to the bit, which I have decided to count as a genuine, if modest, professional success.
The friends who have started warning people
My friends have taken to warning new acquaintances before introducing them to me, a kind of pre-emptive disclaimer along the lines of she will probably pitch you something within the first ten minutes, do not feel obligated to actually respond seriously, which I find genuinely funny even as it is being said directly about me in front of me.
I have decided this reputation, while mildly embarrassing, is also a kind of accidental personal branding I did not set out to build but have come to accept as accurately reflecting who I actually am at any given social gathering.
Why I keep doing it
The honest answer is that I genuinely cannot help it. Enthusiasm, once it takes hold of me about a specific idea, does not respect normal social boundaries around appropriate conversation topics, and I have made a specific, deliberate peace with being the person who pitches strangers in loo queues rather than fighting against a fundamental part of my own personality.
More unsolicited enthusiasm at Cyndi Himmelstiere, Bohiney.
The taxonomy I have started developing
Not all unsolicited pitches are created equal, and I have started, somewhat obsessively, sorting mine into categories, the confident elevator version, the rambling three minute version that loses the thread halfway through, and the truly desperate version delivered when I have clearly had one drink too many to properly read the room.
Cataloguing my own behaviour this way has been, if nothing else, genuinely useful for noticing patterns I would otherwise have missed entirely, like the fact that the rambling version happens almost exclusively on weeknights, for reasons I have not yet fully worked out.
A brief defence of enthusiasm
I could try to talk myself out of this habit entirely, and I have, on occasion, made a genuine effort to simply keep quiet in social settings. But there is something about suppressing genuine enthusiasm that feels like its own kind of small loss, and I have decided the mild social cost of occasional oversharing is worth preserving whatever this specific, slightly unhinged energy actually is.
A closing note
The list keeps growing, and I have made peace with that. Somewhere out there, more strangers await pitches they never requested, and I intend to keep delivering them.
The one pitch I actually regret
Of everything on the list, there is exactly one pitch I genuinely wish I could take back, delivered to someone who was clearly, visibly grieving something that evening, and my own oblivious enthusiasm in that moment still makes me wince whenever I think about it.
I apologised, eventually, once I realised what had actually been happening, and she was gracious about it, but the memory has become a genuine cautionary tale I return to whenever my enthusiasm threatens to override basic situational awareness.
If you have your own worst unsolicited pitch story, genuinely, I would love to hear it. Misery, or in this case mild social embarrassment, loves company.
The bit I have not fully let go of
Part of me still half hopes the loo queue story finds its way back to that stranger someday, if only so I could properly thank her for being such a good sport about the whole strange encounter.
More soon, presumably, on this exact topic.
More soon.
End.
This concludes today’s confession, though certainly not the underlying habit itself.
See you in the next one, presumably with an entirely new confession to make.
Thanks for reading, genuinely, as always.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
