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Being the first follower: starting a dinner party series

11 tweets · January 2023 · 99 likes · 2 retweets · read on Twitter

So! Inspired by @prigoose & @__drewface running weekly dinner parties in NYC, I've just started running dinner parties in SF! I'm being "first follower" here—I want to inspire many more people to copy me copying them. 1st one to visit them in NYC then do so gets this lil flower:

context of the "first follower" phrase sometimes it takes someone else following someone else's lead for other people to even realize they are leading

David Perell @david_perell ·

This video is a masterclass in psychology. The first person to do something always looks weird. People laugh. Then somebody else joins. Then the crowds come in and the person who started the whole thing goes from looking like a goon to looking like a genius.

[video]

the tweet that inspired me:

Andrew Rose @__drewface ·

guys, i've been hosting dinner parties every sunday for over 1 year now 🎉

......amplified by this other tweet, since I have network state aspirations 😅

Richard D. Bartlett @RichDecibels ·

guy who has never hosted a dinner party: I should start a network state

I've sort of run events before but all kind of half-assed, and I've found food & other details stressful to think about or offloaded it onto other friends. so I decided to start by just copying their playbook very closely. I can iterate once I've got some momentum 🌀

this tweet below was about as much as they'd said publicly about how they ran the events, but I messaged Priya and got a ton of other info from her

Andrew Rose @__drewface ·

@LukasRosenstock yes and no. The most important thing is "don't quit", so we're intentionally lazy and simple, otherwise we wouldn't be able to keep it up. That being said: we have a loose theme each dinner, capacity is capped at 30, gender ratio is loosely managed, we do lightning talks

a bunch of stuff that she hadn't even thought to say emerged when I asked questions about things that were sort of obvious to her but were still non-obvious to me (eg "don't order the food to be ready at the start of the calendar event")

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

🎶 from this point of view 🎵 it's kinda obvious... that this point of view 🎶 isn't obvious from other points of view

I collected & distilled @Prigoose's & @__drewface's approach to dinner parties onto my roamblog, so anyone can check it out and get a kind of starting template roamresearch.com/#/app/malcolmo…

so! this thread is my challenge to you, if you wish to accept it (I'm not expecting it'll make sense for everyone to accept it, for lots of reasons) start running your own series of dinner parties. check out my link. schedule one for next weekend & invite your friends!

and if you're in NYC soon, visiting from elsewhere, and you go by the Fractal Sunday Dinners and get inspired to run your own somewhere else, perhaps you'll gain possession of that lil paper flower... ...until YOU inspire someone else in turn! 🤩

here's a pic of chilling near the end of tonight. it was lovely! small, totally unstructured. we didn't do lightning talks or anything this time, just chilling, meeting each other, talking. some spontaneous poetry reading. an attendee shared her own decade of dinner party exp!