Check Before Re-Using Speech That Worked Long Ago
As the years go by, each of us builds up an ever-growing stock of memories, associations, references, songs, jokes, and anecdotes. When we tell other people any one of these for the very first time, it might indeed have quite a good effect—they laugh at your joke, or they’re gratified by your complement, or your question lands just as you intended it. The story you tell feels apt, relevant, and beneficial. Nicely done! Now, this post is about the way these bits of conversation can sometimes turn out to have a shorter shelf-life than you might assume. And while this pitfall may seem obvious, I’ve never seen anyone mention it, so here goes.
Precisely because it was so well received the first time around, that same piece of discourse gets added into long-term storage, as part of your growing social repertoire. But it turns out that making new use of tried-and-true material years later can be a bit risky. Suppose a new situation—a meeting, a date, a party, an interview, etc.—presents itself that has some feature in common with that old one where your stored stuff worked so well. Let’s say, the joke you told two years ago amused some people from the very same overseas country to whose other citizens you’re talking now. Or you once deeply moved an elder person with a story about your childhood, and now here’s another octogenarian, so you figure the same story ought to prove just as successful today. Some feature of your audience, or of the situation, is familiar enough to trigger a specific piece of material that proved to be scintillating in the past.
It might be just as charming or poignant now as it was back then. But think twice before you wheel it out and redeploy it. Why? Because the slightest congruity between past and present can be powerfully tempting: surely this is a chance to validate old good stuff, to prove to yourself the value of what you’ve accumulated, and to be good-with-people without having to make a renewed effort. This temptation can cause you to overlook the important new factors that distinguish this moment from its distant precursor, and these new people from the ones you knew before, and this social context from the one that’s long gone. It can make you forget what you’ve learned, even if you’ve learned it well: all the political shifts, changes in social mores, gender dynamics, and codes of interpersonal presentation that the culture has seen in the meanwhile. Even apart from that issue of long-term cultural change, individuals are always distinct; these particular Australians are not the same ones you dealt with last week.
The old story, or joke, or comparison, might indeed be a delightful contribution once again, despite the passage of time. But very often indeed, it’s worth slowing down for a moment beforehand, to silently check-in with yourself about just how appropriate such a repetition is likely to be. The world changes every day, and each person you meet is different from the rest. You, too, have changed, and you can indeed thrive without those extra scraps of continuity you might be tempted to snatch from Time’s hand. “Be yourself” is still very good advice—but this self need not be exactly the same as yesterday’s.