Every person I meet can teach me something. I appreciate their value and am excited to learn from them.

This is easy to agree with in general and hard to apply to the specific person boring you at a party.

But people who look like they have nothing to offer usually know one small domain completely — how a machine breaks, what the neighborhood was like in 1988, how to handle a furious customer without flinching. Depth is unevenly distributed and badly signposted.

The barrier is almost never their dullness. It's that we ask questions we already have answers to.

In the next flat conversation, ask one real question and then stay quiet longer than is comfortable. Something usually comes out.