Why small talk isn't a waste of time — it's your biggest competitive advantage

I once spent a day in a Munich beer hall. My regular waiter seated me next to a stranger because there was no room left. And so there I was, sitting next to Thomas.

Thomas and I talked. About watches. About family. About everything that comes to mind when you're sharing a beer with a stranger. None of it had a business purpose. It was pure small talk. The thing most people consider a waste of time.

Then it turned out: Thomas works at a large corporation I'd been wanting to partner with. But that evening it didn't matter. We just kept talking about watches and life.

Many months later, I needed a contact at that corporation. And because I'd noted a few details from our conversation in my app — things I'd long forgotten myself, since it was just a quick chat in a beer hall — I could message Thomas and reference exactly those details. The conversation starter was effortless. And that beer-hall coincidence turned into a real business relationship.

A study by psychologists Nicholas Epley and Juliana Schroeder (2014, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology) shows that people systematically underestimate how positively conversations with strangers go. Subjects who struck up conversations on public transport reported significantly better moods — and overestimated beforehand how awkward the conversation would be.

An even crazier story: six years ago I met someone at an event who had absolutely nothing to do with my line of work. But we both had a thing for watches. And that was enough.

We kept in sporadic contact. An email about a new model here, a link to an article there. No business, no networking with an ulterior motive. Just two people who share an interest.

And then, six years later, that person suddenly became my point of contact at a partner company. We'd already built a complete relationship full of trust — purely over watches. And that made the collaboration enormously easier, because we didn't have to start from zero.

Sociologist Ronald Burt described the concept of 'structural holes' in 2004 — gaps between different social groups. People who bridge these gaps (so-called brokers) demonstrably have more access to new ideas, promotions, and business opportunities. Small talk with strangers is one of the most effective ways to become a broker — because it creates connections beyond your own circle.

Small talk isn't a waste of time. Small talk is an investment that sometimes pays off immediately and sometimes only after six years. But the return is almost always higher than a cold LinkedIn message.

The problem is: we forget small talk. The conversation in the beer hall, the detail about the watch, the name of the child — it all vanishes because we never capture it. And then months later we know we met someone interesting. But not who it was or what we talked about.

The trick isn't to do more small talk. The trick is to take 30 seconds after the conversation to note down the two or three details that make all the difference. Because small talk can lead to big things — if you remember.