You meet someone for the first time. You shake their hand, you exchange names, have a small get to know you conversation about where the other person is from, what they do, etc. At the end of the conversation, what is the person’s name?

9 times out of 10 I can’t remember. Literally I get their name and less than 2 minutes later I’ve forgotten. More realistically it’s probably less than 5 seconds after that I’ve forgotten. My mind is so focused on the next thing and what I’m going to say that I can’t take any info in at the same time.

Even if it’s the second or third time meeting someone, sometimes I’ll ask for their name again, they’ll tell me and by the end of the night I’ve forgotten again.

There is so much power in knowing this one word though. With the power of technology, just knowing the person’s name you can often find social media accounts or can make conversation referencing them. Without that you’re left pretty much hopeless.

Today I had a similar experience when talking to a customer. I was talking to them about automation that we could help them do and parts of it they said had already been automated by another company and they gave me the name. Because I know myself, I wrote down the name immediately and continued on the conversation.

When my COO and myself were talking later, I was mentioning the conversation and couldn’t remember the name of the company they said was already doing what we said we could do. I realized that if I had not written down the name of the company, I would have absolutely no idea how to search them. It was too niche of a thing to just search in something like “faxing healthcare provider systems” or something. I know it would not pop up. By simply knowing 7 letters tied together, I was able to go out and do a ton of research on this company and what they do.

You can think of those small pieces of information almost like a secret code. One that you can use to get to bigger treasure and knowledge.

There can be so much power even in one word. In this example and also in general the power of words.

What words are powerful in your life?