Celebrating Touchpoints

If you’ve followed my work at all over the past decade, you’ve likely heard me rant about the unreasonable power of 1-on-1 conversations. At Upduo, we applied that power to teaching and learning, proving and relishing in the research popularized by Bloom’s Two-Sigma Problem, which showed that moving to 1-on-1 teacher-student ratios moved the average learner to the 98th percentile.

In my own life, I apply that power as often as possible. My kids and wife and I have “date days” where we take turns having 1-on-1 speed dates with each other. I block for 1-on-1s with friends and coworkers. If you’re reading this, maybe you and I have spent time together 1-on-1.

In teaching and learning and beyond, one of the most interesting observations I wanted to sit down and celebrate about 1-on-1s is this idea of what we call a touchpoint. In short, a touchpoint is the uniqueness of the conversation between people in a 1-on-1.

It’s incredibly easy for two people to find their touchpoints. 

When two people meet with each other 1-on-1, they begin to use similar words to each other. They begin to match each other’s pacing. You’ll hear them using mutual personal interests to add context to an idea that they’re sharing.

When I have my 1-on-1 with my 3-year-old decide-and-act bold and fearless daughter, we visit 6 places in 15 minutes, try something scary together, and laugh a lot. When I then shift to my 7-year-old needs-to-fully-understand creative and calculating son, I’ll push him to lead and work to satisfy his curiosity, while he tries to get me to wrestle. When I have my 1-on-1 with my wife, we knock out something hard together or knock boots. Can I say that on Medium?

Now, it’ll seem obvious that a relationship between a dad and his 3-year-old daughter, 7-year-old son, and wonderful wife are different from each other, but the touchpoint phenomenon is present in much more seemingly homogenous groups (look it up if the word trips you up). I had (have) three close college friends Naddy, Yobe, and Smigs. Or, as their mom’s called them, Daniel, Mike, and Aaron. They’re great guys, if you know them you’re lucky, and together, our group knew how to have fun together.

But, you might be surprised at how unique each of our touchpoints is. Naddy and I talk on the phone about learning and pride and the mental tricks that make us good at the things we try. I sit down with Yobe in a hometown that we share, we have deep discussions about positive mindsets for navigating hardship and we talk about the systems we’re trying to change. Smigs and I meet spontaneously. We find each other in the world and just do something fun. We sit out late together and share how lucky we both feel for the fun we get to have in our lives. Smigs and I both lost our dads at a similar time, we often talk about that.

Further, when Naddy and Smigs come together, or Yobe and Naddy, or Yobe and Smigs, you get an entire ‘nother touchpoint, with just as much depth and richness. Each one of these is incredible on its own merit and I’d like to take a minute to celebrate them.

Cheers to our touchpoints. All of them.

Spend time 1-on-1 with people you love or want to learn how to love. Spend time 1-on-1 with people who know things you want to know or are curious about things that you know.

This will likely be my last post focused on 1-on-1 for a bit. If you look at the curve above, you’ll notice the purple curve between traditional learning and 1-on-1 titled Mastery Learning.

That’s what I’ll be focusing on for the foreseeable future.

See you out there.