For nearly the entire second semester of my freshman year of high school, my buddy Ted Harding and I had a daily contest. Each morning, we’d walk the campus for 20 minutes and see who could get more people to say “Hi” or otherwise greet us in some way.
Ted was a sophomore, so in addition to being a pretty likeable guy (he was two years away from being named homecoming king), he also had a big head start in the high school social circles. My only available strategy to compete with Ted was pretty obvious. I couldn’t just say hello to the people I knew and had been going to school with since kindergarten. I had to broaden the reach of my hellos to people I knew only by name.
Saying hi to people you’ve never spoken to before is slightly less awkward when you come up with something else to say. So I’d broaden the greeting, often—but not always—to include something about the greet-ee.
“Drew! Saw the write-up in the paper about your game on Tuesday. Congrats.”
“Hey, Sandra, can you tell that I’m diagramming sentences in my head right now? Mr. Lloyd would be impressed.”
“Dave, I must say, you find a way to make a Hawaiian shirt work in November. Lookin’ good.”
Ted’s technique was different, by the way. He greeted people by first and last name, like “Hey, Dave Johnson!” It certainly worked well for him.
Like most things at that time in my life, my fifteen-year-old mind put almost no thought into this. That mentality, plus my inherent competitive streak, overcame any fear of seeming weird, creepy, or desperate for attention. If someone ignored me, there was no time to wallow in embarrassment and let Ted increase his lead. Best to just forge ahead to the next hello.
I don’t think Ted or I kept tallies of our total wins. But I won some and I lost some. And by the end of that semester, there were 30 or 40 new people who said hello to me every time I saw them on campus, most of whom I probably never would have exchanged words with throughout high school. Some actually went on to become real friends of mine, while many just stayed in the daily greeting category. But while it started as a silly teenage game, I couldn’t argue with the long-term results of that contest.
And it didn’t just work in high school.
When I moved to New York in 1999 to work at The Princeton Review headquarters—a city and a company in which I knew almost nobody, I’d take a walk through the building once a day and say hi to pretty much anyone I ran into in the halls. Once a day for thirty days. And pretty soon, I knew most of the 150 people in the company. Just saying “Hi” worked as well at 29 as it did at 15. If Ted had worked in the building with me, I like to think I could have given him a run for his money.
One of the best parts about going to college is how friendly everyone is for at least the first few weeks—as new college freshmen, every person you meet is a fellow new kid looking to make friends. But before and pretty much every time after then, making new friends starts with making new acquaintances. And one party has to make the effort.
Why not make the effort? What’s the worst that could happen?
If you need a push, pretend that Ted just challenged you to a contest. Once you start, you’ll realize that it’s not difficult at all to just say “Hi.”