The Art of Gathering Quotes

“Your opening needs to be a kind of pleasant shock therapy. It should grab people. And in grabbing them, it should both awe the guests and honor them. It must plant in them the paradoxical feeling of being totally welcomed and deeply grateful to be there.”
― Priya Parker, The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters

“In a world of infinite choices, choosing one thing is the revolutionary act. Imposing that restriction is actually liberating.”
― Priya Parker, The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters

“Reverse engineer an outcome: Think of what you want to be different because you gathered, and work backward from that outcome.”
― Priya Parker, The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters

“Ichi-go ichi-e. The master told me it roughly translates to “one meeting, one moment in your life that will never happen again.” She explained further: “We could meet again, but you have to praise this moment because in one year, we’ll have a new experience, and we will be different people and will be bringing new experiences with us, because we are also changed.”
― Priya Parker, The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters

“none of us shows up as a blank slate to anything.”
― Priya Parker, The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters

“Barack Obama's aunt once told him, 'If everyone is family, no one is family.' It is blood that makes a tribe, a border that makes a nation. The same is true of gatherings. So here is a corollary to his aunt's saying: If everyone is invited, no one is invited—in the sense of being truly held by the group. By closing the door, you create the room.”
― Priya Parker, The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters

“In a group, if everybody thinks about the other person’s needs, everyone’s needs are actually fulfilled in the end. But if you only think about yourself, you are breaking that contract.” She”
― Priya Parker, The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters

“Gatherings crackle and flourish when real thought goes into them, when (often invisible) structure is baked into them, and when a host has the curiosity, willingness, and generosity of spirit to try.”
― Priya Parker, The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters

“A CATEGORY IS NOT A PURPOSE”
― Priya Parker, The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters

“Why is this night different from all other nights?” Before you gather, ask yourself: Why is this gathering different from all my other gatherings? Why is it different from other people’s gatherings of the same general type? What is this that other gatherings aren’t”
― Priya Parker, The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters

“the first step in convening people meaningfully: committing to a bold, sharp purpose.”
― Priya Parker, The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters

“Specificity sharpens the gathering because people can see themselves in it”
― Priya Parker, The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters

“What is the purpose of the justice system we want to see? And what would a court look like if it were built according to that purpose?”
― Priya Parker, The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters

“People have to take chances in order to do something extraordinary.”
― Priya Parker, The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters

“But exercising your authority once and early on in a gathering is as effective as exercising your body once and early on in your life. It isn’t enough just to set a purpose, direction, and ground rules. All these things require enforcement. And if you don’t enforce them, others will step in and enforce their own purposes, directions, and ground rules.”
― Priya Parker, The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters

“Take the reasons you think you are gathering—because it’s our departmental Monday-morning meeting; because it’s a family tradition to barbecue at the lake—and keep drilling below them. Ask why you’re doing it. Every time you get to another, deeper reason, ask why again. Keep asking why until you hit a belief or value.”
― Priya Parker, The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters

“So how, you might ask, do I exclude generously? This issue comes up a lot when I’m organizing large, complicated meetings for clients. These are some of the questions I ask them:
Who not only fits but also helps fulfill the gathering’s purpose?
Who threatens the purpose?
Who, despite being irrelevant to the purpose, do you feel obliged to
invite?
When my clients answer the first two questions, they begin to grasp their gathering’s true purpose. Obviously people who fit and fulfill your gathering’s purpose need to be there. And, though this one is harder, people who manifestly threaten the purpose are easy to justify excluding. (That doesn’t mean they always end up being excluded. Politeness and habit often defeat the facilitator. But the hosts still know deep down who shouldn’t be there.)
It is the third question where purpose begins to be tested. Someone threatens a gathering’s purpose? You can see why to keep him out. But what’s wrong with someone who’s irrelevant to the purpose? What’s wrong with inviting Bob? Every gathering has its Bobs. Bob in marketing. Bob your friend’s girlfriend’s brother. Bob your visiting aunt. Bob is perfectly pleasant and doesn’t actively sabotage your gathering. Most Bobs are grateful to be included. They sometimes bring extra effort or an extra bottle of wine. You’ve probably been a Bob. I certainly have. The crux of excluding thoughtfully and intentionally is mustering the courage to keep away your Bobs. It is to shift your perception so that you understand that people who aren’t fulfilling the purpose of your gathering are detracting from it, even if they do nothing to detract from it. This is because once they are actually in your presence, you (and other considerate guests) will want to welcome and include them, which takes time and attention away from what (and who) you’re actually there for. Particularly in smaller gatherings, every single person affects the dynamics of a group. Excluding well and purposefully is reframing who and what you are being generous to—your guests and your purpose.”
― Priya Parker, The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters

“find a way to honor that person instead of their job description.”
― Priya Parker, The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters

“If you need some inspiration to push back against those sponsors, consider the case of George Lucas. When he was filming the original Star Wars, he wanted a bold launch for his movie. The Directors Guild of America protested. Most films at the time started by naming the writer and director in the opening title sequence—in this case, thanking the film’s creators rather than its sponsors. It was how things were done. Despite the protests of the Directors Guild, Lucas decided to forgo opening credits entirely. The result was one of the most memorable beginnings in movie history. And he paid for it—the Directors Guild fined him $250,000 for his daring. His loyalty was to his audience’s experience, and he was willing to sacrifice for it. You should be, too.”
― Priya Parker, The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters

“It is, in the words of Alana Massey’s essay “Against Chill,” a “laid-back attitude, an absence of neurosis.” It “presides over the funeral of reasonable expectations.” It “takes and never gives.”
― Priya Parker, The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters

“But here is what the skilled gatherer must know: in trying not to offend, you fail to protect the gathering itself and the people in it.”
― Priya Parker, The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters

“Borrowing from my CAN group’s use of “crucible moments,” we asked the group to share a story, a moment, or an experience from their life that “changed the way you view the world.” Then we added the clincher: It had to be a story that no one else at the gathering knew.”
― Priya Parker, The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters

“It wasn’t always the big-tent groups, being everything to everyone, that most attracted people. It was often the groups that were narrower and more specific. “The more specific the Meetup, the more likelihood for success,” Scott Heiferman, its cofounder and CEO, told me.”
― Priya Parker, The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters

“Gatherings that are willing to be alienating—which is different from being alienating—have a better chance to dazzle.”
― Priya Parker, The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters

“When we don’t examine the deeper assumptions behind why we gather, we end up skipping too quickly to replicating old, staid formats of gathering.”
― Priya Parker, The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters

“When Gergen hosts a panel and Q&A time comes, he often instructs the audience: “If you would, identify yourself, be fairly succinct, and remember that a question ends with a question mark.” When an audience member inevitably begins making a long statement, Gergen interrupts repeatedly if need be: “Can you put that into a question? . . . Can you put that into a question? . . . Is this leading to a question?” It may seem to some that he is being mean, but in”
― Priya Parker, The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters

“This book festival...grew to attract thousands of visitors every year. Now they felt like they needed a new purpose. The festival’s continuing existence felt assured. What was it for? What could it do? How could it make itself count?
The festival’s leadership reached out to me for advice on these questions. What kind of purpose could be their next great animating force? Someone had the idea that the festival’s purpose could be about stitching together the community. Books were, of course, the medium. But couldn’t an ambitious festival set itself the challenge of making the city more connected? Couldn’t it help turn strong readers into good citizens? That seemed to me a promising direction—a specific, unique, disputable lodestar for a book festival that could guide its construction...We began to brainstorm.
I proposed an idea: Instead of starting each session with the books and authors themselves, why not kick things off with a two-minute exercise in which audience members can meaningfully, if briefly, connect with one another? The host could ask three city- or book-related questions, and then ask each member of the audience to turn to a stranger to discuss one of them. What brought you to this city—whether birth or circumstance?
What is a book that really affected you as a child? What do you think would make us a better city? Starting a session with these questions would help the audience become aware of one another. It would also break the norm of not speaking to a stranger, and perhaps encourage this kind of behavior to continue as people left the session. And it would activate a group identity—the city’s book lovers—that, in the absence of such questions, tends to stay dormant.
As soon as this idea was mentioned, someone in the group sounded a worry. “But I wouldn’t want to take away time from the authors,” the person said. There it was—the real, if unspoken, purpose rousing from its slumber and insisting on its continued primacy. Everyone liked the idea of “book festival as community glue” in theory. But at the first sign of needing to compromise on another thing in order to honor this new something, alarm bells rang. The group wasn’t ready to make the purpose of the book festival the stitching of community if it meant changing the structure of the sessions, or taking time away from something else. Their purpose, whether or not they admitted it, was the promotion of books and reading and the honoring of authors. It bothered them to make an author wait two minutes for citizens to bond. The book festival was doing what many of us do: shaping a gathering according to various unstated motivations, and making half-hearted gestures toward loftier goals.”
― Priya Parker, The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters

“Amy Cunningham, a funeral director in NY, ends a service, she purposefully tries to connect the grief of the family with that of mourners everywhere. She told me that she often ends her service by saying - 'May the source of peace grant you peace and grant peace to all who morn'. She connects this individual suffering to the larger existence of suffering in the world. Thereby making it both smaller and bigger.”
― Priya Parker, The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters

“Conversation Menu” that led the pairs through six “courses” of talk. Under the heading of “Starters” were questions like “How have your priorities changed over the years?” and “How have your background and experience limited or favoured you?” Under “Soups” was an invitation to ask, “Which parts of your life have been a waste of time?” Under “Fish”: “What have you rebelled against in the past and what are you rebelling against now?” Under “Salads”: “What are the limits of your compassion?”
― Priya Parker, The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters

“Why are you having a neighborhood potluck? Because we like potlucks, and we have one every year. Why do you have one every year? Because we like to get our neighbors together at the beginning of the summer. Why do you like to get your neighbors together at the beginning of the summer? I guess, if you really think about it, it’s a way of marking the time and reconnecting after the hectic school year. Aha. And why is that important? Because when we have more time in the summer to be together, it’s when we remember what community is, and it helps us forge the bonds that make this a great place to live. Aha. And safer. Aha. And a place that embodies the values we want our children to grow up with, like that strangers aren’t scary. Aha. Now we’re getting somewhere.”
― Priya Parker, The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters