When someone says that an important business meeting should start with small talk they usually mean that it should start with open curiosity before proceeding to active curiosity.
When I was in my late teens and early 20s I spent almost no time in open curiosity (basically because I was very bad at it, and like many young men I was driven to achieve mastery in something quickly, which entails getting better at the things I was already good at). Now that I am in my 50s I find myself avoiding active curiosity most of the time when the stakes are high (!) because I have noticed that I make more serious mistakes if I don’t force myself to avoid active curiosity most of the time that I spend thinking about the things that matter to me the most (with the result that most of my hours of active curiosity are devoted to tangential concerns, e.g., improvements to my personal software environment, e.g., learning a little linear algebra, both of which a tangential concerns in my particular life). There are reasons to believe that my mind would work much better and that I would be able to stay actively curious a much larger fraction of the time I spend on my core concerns (without my finding in retrospect that I was making worse decisions) if I had established the habit in my teens and 20s to interleave my intervals of active curiosity with long intervals of open curiosity.
Years ago IIRC I came across a web page that claimed that the people running MIT were publicly seeking an explanation for why the careers of successful MIT grads tend to peter out later in life relative to the careers of successful grads of Harvard. It is possible that the explanation includes the fact that hard science and engineering require the practitioner to spend more of their time in active curiosity or “focused attention” than other high-powered careers do. (The things I spend my teens and 20s being actively curious about were mostly computing and math.)
Note that the flow state is usually highly pleasurable (which is why people spend so much time talking about it on the public internet) and that if you are in the flow state, switching from active curiosity to open curiosity will cause an abrupt cessation of the pleasure.
When someone says that an important business meeting should start with small talk they usually mean that it should start with open curiosity before proceeding to active curiosity.
When I was in my late teens and early 20s I spent almost no time in open curiosity (basically because I was very bad at it, and like many young men I was driven to achieve mastery in something quickly, which entails getting better at the things I was already good at). Now that I am in my 50s I find myself avoiding active curiosity most of the time when the stakes are high (!) because I have noticed that I make more serious mistakes if I don’t force myself to avoid active curiosity most of the time that I spend thinking about the things that matter to me the most (with the result that most of my hours of active curiosity are devoted to tangential concerns, e.g., improvements to my personal software environment, e.g., learning a little linear algebra, both of which a tangential concerns in my particular life). There are reasons to believe that my mind would work much better and that I would be able to stay actively curious a much larger fraction of the time I spend on my core concerns (without my finding in retrospect that I was making worse decisions) if I had established the habit in my teens and 20s to interleave my intervals of active curiosity with long intervals of open curiosity.
Years ago IIRC I came across a web page that claimed that the people running MIT were publicly seeking an explanation for why the careers of successful MIT grads tend to peter out later in life relative to the careers of successful grads of Harvard. It is possible that the explanation includes the fact that hard science and engineering require the practitioner to spend more of their time in active curiosity or “focused attention” than other high-powered careers do. (The things I spend my teens and 20s being actively curious about were mostly computing and math.)
Note that the flow state is usually highly pleasurable (which is why people spend so much time talking about it on the public internet) and that if you are in the flow state, switching from active curiosity to open curiosity will cause an abrupt cessation of the pleasure.