I am not someone who enjoys meetings. I guess nobody really is.
We all have our horror stories: the three-hour session with no clear agenda, the one person who somehow talks the entire time, the meeting that could have been an email.
But when the pandemic pushed everything online, something unexpected happened to me. I started to actually appreciate the format, not the meetings themselves, but the structure that came with them.
A hard start time. A hard end time. And on the free Zoom plan, a 20-minute cutoff that felt less like a limitation and more like a gift.
There was no room for small talk, no polite weather talk before getting to the point. You showed up, you said what you came to say, and then the video turned off whether you were ready or not.
That constraint made me better at meetings. It also made me realize something I had not expected: being forced into discomfort made the conversations more honest. And that honesty, it turns out, is where the real connection actually lives.
Asking for the thing you actually want
A few months ago, I connected with a writer on LinkedIn.
After reading some of his posts, I reached out and suggested a Zoom call. He was a writer; I am an architect.
No obvious overlap, but I was curious about how he worked, specifically how someone who writes as much as he does actually does it. What is the process? What happens when the writing stops coming? How long does a first draft take?
I went into the call knowing I had 20 minutes, which meant I could not start with the weather. As soon as we were both on screen, I introduced myself and told him exactly why I had asked for the call. I wanted to know his writing secrets.
The first thing he did was gently correct the word “secrets.” He told me he did not have any secrets, but he could tell me what he does. Fair enough.
He talked through his routine: writing early in the morning, no editing during the first draft, research taking up a significant chunk of time, and then a point where the piece, in his words, “writes itself.” I am still waiting for that last part to happen to me.
Once that question was out of the way, I asked a second one, and this one felt more uncomfortable. I asked if he would be willing to review a blog post I had written.
There was a pause. It felt long. I briefly wished I could take back what I said. The possible responses ran through my head: too busy, not really my thing, that’s a strange ask from someone I just met.
But he came back and said yes, he could do it, just not until the end of the month because of his schedule. It was so much better than what I had braced for.
Here is what struck me afterward: if I had kept the conversation safe, I would have left that call with nothing except a pleasant exchange with a stranger.
The uncomfortable ask was the only reason anything meaningful came from it.
Saying the honest thing, even when you have just met someone
A few weeks later, I had coffee with someone I had never met before, another architect.
At some point in the conversation, she described her former boss as “tough,” and then gave me an example: after weeks of overtime on a project, the boss refused to let her take time off because she did not have enough seniority. I disagreed with the boss’s reasoning, but I also disagreed with the word she chose to describe it.
I told her “tough” was NOT the right word. She seemed surprised at my correction, and then asked what word I would use instead. I said “mean.” She paused, then laughed, and said I was right.
That small correction, which felt slightly risky to make in a first meeting, opened something up. The conversation shifted. We both started talking more honestly about the early years of our careers, the parts that are not often discussed in professional settings because they are uncomfortable to admit.
By the end of the coffee, we were sharing things that usually take months of knowing someone to get to.
What surprised me was not that she was open to it, but also how quickly the conversation deepened once one honest thing was said.
It did not require a long relationship or a careful warm-up. It just required someone going first.
Being ready when it comes back the other way
If you are going to have honest conversations, you also have to be willing to be on the receiving end of one.
This part is easy to overlook. It is one thing to ask the uncomfortable question or make the honest comment; it is another to sit there without flinching when someone does it to you.
One of my oldest friends once told me that being genuine requires thick skin, because not everyone is ready for it and some people will push back. Then he added that I would probably be fine, since I have “thick enough skin.”
I have never fully decided if that was a compliment or a very specific kind of insult. But the fact that it came from someone who has known me for decades made it somehow differently than it would from a stranger.
The point he was making, even if he wrapped it in a slightly ambiguous package, is that genuine connection has a cost.
You can get it wrong. The other person might not be ready for it. The conversation might get awkward in a way that does not recover. That is a real possibility, and it is worth being honest with yourself about whether you are prepared for that outcome before you open the door.
But when it works, and it does work, the conversation that comes out of it is the kind you actually remember.
Final thought
Most of the advice about professional networking is about making people feel comfortable. Ease into it. Build rapport. Do not be too forward. These are not bad instincts, but I think they can become a way of avoiding the conversations that might actually matter.
At the coffee meeting I almost did not take, a stranger and I ended up talking more honestly about our careers than I have with people I have known for years. At a Zoom call with a 20-minute clock running, I asked a writer I had never met to read my work, and he said yes. Neither of those things would have happened if I had stayed in the comfortable zone.
So the next time a conversation starts to feel slightly uncomfortable, it might be worth pausing before you redirect it. That feeling is not always a warning. Sometimes it is a signal that you are close to something real.
And if it all goes sideways, well, there is always the 20-minute free Zoom plan to save you.:-)
Life Outside of Design Studio 