Charisma is just responsiveness
Joyful language-learning + symphonic sentences (Issue #282)
There’s an essay I read a while back, by Sasha Chapin, about what might be the key to the universe (or at least some parts of it): responsiveness.
He begins with a viral video of someone ordering dinner at a halal truck (1.6 million hearts) and uses this as a jumping off point to make an argument about charisma: it’s basically just responsiveness, i.e. picking up what others are putting down. We all want to be liked. And, Chapin argues, we all know how to be liked — it’s just hard, and we don’t always want to put the effort in. “It takes attention and openness,” he writes, “and the confidence to present your character like it’s a fun mask you’re wearing rather than a lesson you’re desperate to teach someone.”
Anyway: Responsiveness. We’ve all felt it — in conversations, or even in writing. Chapin’s example of an email that feels responsive? Derek Sivers, the founder of CD Baby (an early music distributor) chalks up most of his success to a single email, the one you’d get when you bought a CD. I adore this email:
Your CD has been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.
A team of 50 employees inspected your CD and polished it to make sure it was in the best possible condition before mailing.
Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your CD into the finest gold-lined box that money can buy.
We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of Portland waved “Bon Voyage!” to your package, on its way to you, in our private CD Baby jet on this day, Friday, June 6th.
I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. We sure did. Your picture is on our wall as “Customer of the Year.” We’re all exhausted but can’t wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!
It’s just an email, but, like… it’s charming. You can sense a responsive human behind the words. Someone was thinking about this. Someone wanted to give you something that would make you smile. Someone actually cared. Surprisingly rare!
Once you realize how much humans love responsiveness, you kind of can’t unsee it. I was reading this story by a UX designer who fell in love with a Samurai game, for example, and latched onto the way he described the game’s immersive world. “Grass parts as you walk, animals react to your presence, leaves move with every swing of your sword…” Mike Curtis writes. “These subtle environmental responses created a continuous feedback loop that validated my existence in this space.”
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🔥 1 story, 2 sentences
- British-Malaysian mom Ayne shares seven truths about live as an immigrant parent, including this one about simultaneously existing in two time zones: “We define time differently,” she writes, “I am straddling between now and eight hours in the future.” (A-Culturated)
- Ben Snyder uses AI to build a simple game with his kids. They employed Replit and Vercel v0, apps that turn text prompts into functioning apps — and in just four minutes, Replit created Bird Dash (I played it and died immediately). (UX Collective)
- ESL teacher Tom Scullin believes we fundamentally misteach language-learning. It’s an art, not a science, much closer to learning to paint or draw — because you only learn through focusing on expression and play, not perfection.
🪈 Your daily dose of (im)practical wisdom
We read sentences in a single flow of information, like a song played on a wind instrument, but life is layered, like a symphony. A faithful textual simulation of existence would require at least ten synchronous columns of scrolling text — one for emotions, one or two for conscious and subconscious thoughts, five for the main sentences, and so on.—Tao Lin
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