LIE No. 13 | 11.21.18

One year ago today, I emailed a man named Doug Haller, who’d mistakenly been copying Matt on emails for years instead of his son of the same name. It was a perfect ending to the saga known as The Other Hallers. It was the start of something else entirely, too.
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I love to set goals for myself—the weirder, the better. So last Thanksgiving, following this delightfully entertaining exchange with a total stranger named Doug, I decided I’d try to meet someone new + interesting every day. Then, within 6 months—whether or not we’d kept in touch—I’d drop them a line, be it via email, text, snail mail, social media or even the Uber app.
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Spoiler: I didn’t encounter interesting people every day. Child, please. Some days I didn’t even encounter people at all. People can be exhausting. But I never tired of the random ritual of reaching out.
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I wrote my 126th letter this morning. Going in, I imagined I’d have loads of Other Hallers-esque stories. The reality is most would bore you to tears. Some might make you laugh, others might surprise you and a few might even break your heart. The shortest one was two sentences, the longest was 8 pages. Some I never sent. Some resulted in new business, others in new friends.
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It taught me a lot about the profound—and vast—influence people can have on us. How they come and go; how some stick around while others are forgettable. It forced me to pay more attention to the roles people play, or don’t play, in our lives. Mostly, I’ve learned a lot about myself—my preconceptions, my biases, my expectations.
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Look, this was a bit extreme, even for me. I thought I was in pursuit of preventing boredom; turns out, it was connectedness I was chasing. h/t to this Pink Floyd lyric the universe punched me in the face with for helping me realize that: “Strangers passing in the street. By chance two separate glances meet, and I am you and what I see is me.”