Meet a new person every day for a full year

Research shows our social circles peak around age 25 and shrink from there. Robert Putnam, the Harvard political scientist, argues that what’s gone missing isn’t friendship but bridging social capital — the loose, arm’s-length connections that link us to communities beyond our own. “Bonding social capital constitutes a kind of sociological superglue,” he writes, “whereas bridging social capital provides a sociological WD-40.”

In 2022, I set out to meet one completely new person every single day for the entire year. I discovered the adjacent possible in relationships, a term borrowed from the evolutionary biologist Stuart Kauffman: the space just beyond the cutting edge of what’s already around you. My hypothesis was that meeting more people would expand my margins — not by increasing possibilities directly, but by increasing the likelihood of them.

How I Did It

I kept a Google Sheet with a simple binary: each day was either a wham (success) or a whiff (miss). The dopamine reward of turning a white box green proved more useful than expected.

For it to count as a wham, the conversation had to meet five criteria:

1. An exchange of names and at least one personal detail
2. Discussion beyond surface answers — not just pleasantries
3. Weather could be an icebreaker but didn’t count on its own
4. “What do you do?” didn’t count, but follow-on questions did
5. Conversations that centered solely on a dog did not count

What I Learned

The biggest discovery wasn’t a technique. It was a mindset shift about vulnerability. Early on I controlled conversations tightly through questions. I eventually found that offering something of myself first — a name, a fact, an admission — gave the stranger something to grab onto. Real conversation requires a co-equal ride. You don’t know where it’s going to go. That’s the point.

The people I met ranged from a teenage boy named Joseph, panhandling outside a Target for bus fare to the youth shelter, to Mohammed, a Moroccan lawyer driving Lyft. I gathered dozens of business cards in a Rolodex. I don’t call most of them, but that isn’t the point. We have context for one another now. As Mark Granovetter showed in 1973, weak ties often deliver more than strong ones.