A few days ago I posted my thoughts on some advice I'd seen recently about hosting dinner parties. However, I think there is also something long-winded about all of those details. I wonder if simply understanding the goal would make the specifics obvious to most planners. Would a host committed to the guest experience need a reminder regarding the danger of making everyone wait several hours for food? The suggestion regarding wine, which is meant to protect against the possibility of running out of alcohol, is the kind of detail that is second nature to partying college students. Speaking more generally, part of me always suspects that relying on specific recommendations betrays a failure to understand the broader objective. If so much of any advice might occur naturally to those who understand the larger goal, then it raises the question - instead of getting into the details, why not just help people learn the main goal?
I think one possibility is that helping people understand the goal doesn't mean they can create a plan for executing the goal. It would be like telling someone to climb a mountain without giving them any instruction for locating the right trail. To return to the context of the dinner party, I think some hosts already know that they are supposed to offer a good guest experience yet can't translate that goal into concrete ways to improve the guest experience. For them, understanding the larger goal doesn't help because they can't define all the little steps that are necessary for reaching the goal. When I think about not just dinner parties but any situation where a host had some responsibility for creating a good guest experience, I struggle to come up with examples of someone acting in bad faith - that is, a host who didn't accept the responsibility of creating a good experience. From my perspective, pretty much every host tries to make a good experience for the guests. However, I also know that merely trying was no guarantee of a good outcome - the hosts with bad outcomes tried, too. My conclusion is that a lot of people are out there hosting with a bit of a blind spot in terms of understanding what it means to create a good guest experience.
I guess that leads me to my real advice for hosting dinner parties, which despite my prior post is in some ways the only thing I actually consider good advice regarding this topic:
Don't assume you are good at hosting dinner parties, or for that matter good at anything
I'll remind you again that I have no experience at hosting. Despite that shortcoming, I'm more than comfortable offering this advice. Something I've noticed about people who do things well is that they are always trying to get better at the things they already do well. Why would hosting a dinner party be an exception? One way to get better is demonstrated by the existence of the previous post - find strong reading materials and write down the stuff you want to remember. I've read a lot of books over the years with this exact idea in mind, building my knowledge and wisdom through each new reading experience.
But another way that I've found helpful is to ask people what they know about the skill. My perspective on this method has shifted over time. When I was younger, I felt that research, studying, and reading were the best ways to improve my abilities. As one example, when I first became a manager at work I taught myself the job by reading dozens of books. But a few months ago when I started onboarding our first new team member since the transition to remote work, I decided to contact around twenty or thirty people and ask them for advice. I don't think I would have considered this approach in the past - instead, I would have looked for reading materials from the experts. I think if I had to host a dinner party tonight I would do something along those lines, perhaps contacting my guests and asking them what would make for a good party. In my mind this speaks to what differentiates inexperience from experience. The inexperienced person seeks out expert materials because they have no idea what constitutes good advice, so expertise reassures them regarding the quality of the advice. The experienced person trusts themselves to evaluate the quality of all advice, so they are comfortable collecting input from a wide range of sources before identifying the best and most relevant of that advice.
This approach tends to produce a couple of interesting results. First, you get some useful advice in the form of reminders, which helps you improve your consistency in considering all the obvious details. You also get some input into process adjustments, which generally means small corrections at a detail level about the things you already know or do. The most helpful type of response might be the surprises, since these tend to be the things you would never have considered on your own. Some may surprise you with their definition of a good dinner party, helping you incorporate their different perspectives into your planning, while others may offer useful personal details such as certain dietary restrictions or preferences. In fact, surprise might be the most underrated feature of good advice - unsurprising advice seems redundant because you might have thought of it on your own, but surprising advice is priceless because you could have gone the rest of your life without considering it.
The biggest surprise of all takes a little longer to come around, usually well after the end of the dinner party - since you asked them for advice, your guests will remember that you are the sort of person who wants to get better. This applies in any situation where you ask someone for their advice - the fact of being asked subtly changes their perception of you. Over time, this new perspective also changes how they interact with you. It might mean that they continue offering you suggestions related to your original question, or maybe they take a generalized approach and simply share interesting information for your benefit. The key is that since they now know you want to get better, there is a higher possibility that they will seek you out when they think of a way for you to get better. It's also possible that they seek you out for advice. The whole thing ends up being a bit of a self-perpetuating cycle, defined by a mutual interest in coaching and learning from each other, and such cycles are among the most significant reasons why certain types of people seem to be constantly improving their skills, capabilities, or knowledge. Establishing this type of relationship with others is unlikely to be the reason why you initially sought out the advice, but I do think it's why you should always seek out advice.
