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I know from personal experience what it's like to spend a few minutes passionately pouring your heart out about something that fascinates you to someone only to find out they were barely listening. I will either hear someone out or try to stop them before they get too far if I know I'm just not going to be interested in it.
Because there's hearing about people's passions and then there's being too polite to tell a guy to shut the fuck up about your little ring you got that's going to help you with archery that you've been talking about for half an hour because we're trying to play D&D here. (Years later and I'm still annoyed I didn't try to bring that monologue to an end 20 minutes earlier).
EDIT: I just realized those two paragraphs are unrelated. My personal experience was me doing the same thing to someone else and realizing (in much, much less than half an hour) that it wasn't worth my time.
Yeah, I’ll always remember from olden days pouring my heart about computers and the internet, before they were everywhere, and the crowd listened in what I thought was rapt attention. I even related Unix (at the time) to PCs, which they may be more familiar with …. Then at the end the only comment was “I thought you said ‘feces’.”
I’ll always remember when I was still new-ish to the Boston area, talking to visiting family about all the great things the city has to offer, including connecting various sights to actual history. It was a special Fourth of July weekend, and I may have been overly passionate connecting history of both culture and technology to one of the more interesting tourist attractions, to see the USS Constitution “sail” on its turnaround cruise through Boston Harbor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Constitution). Afterwards, my ex-mother-in-law commented “it didn’t make sense to me why they would take a piece of paper out of the National Archives in DC and put it on a boat”
Way too many of us have strong memories where our passions went awry, so are much more cautious about sharing them up with others unless we know they have similar interests. People suck
I will love listening to your passion, and will do my best to ask leading questions to encourage you to go into it, to see that excitement in your face and voice, and in the hope I learn something, but I’ve been burned too seriously too many times to be very open about sharing mine
It's not really what you say, it's how you say it. There are people who can make zoning regulation interesting, and then you have people who are talking about a shooting they survived boring.
I've always thought about talking in a way that respects people's time: just give them a brief statement. If they care, you can deliver deeper. And even then, you should have checkpoints when you are talking. If they say damn that's crazy, I'm like yea...