A coat-check line is five minutes of forced proximity with no music competing for attention, which makes it better for a real conversation than most of the party. Larry’s SuperModel rule applies immediately: phone stays in your pocket, hands stay free, and you actually look at the person next to you. The line works because nobody expects to be pitched there, so a normal, specific question lands better than it would on the dance floor or by the bar.
Ask about the thing that got them into the room, not the weather or the wait. People answer real questions honestly when they are standing still. Tip the coat-check attendant on the way in, not just the way out. Larry’s karma rule treats this as tracked and returned, sometimes as a faster retrieval on your way out. Keep a pen visible, even in a coat-check line. Larry’s point about the pen is that it signals you take notes on what people say, which most people never do.
If the conversation is good, do not try to finish it in line. Get the name and one detail, then let the coats separate you naturally. The person ahead of you in line just spent the whole party being pitched. A coat-check line is often the first calm five minutes they have had all night.
Larry treats small, low-stakes windows like this as practice for the room itself, since the same posture and the same short questions work at scale. A line moving slowly is not dead time. Larry’s instinct is to treat every minute of forced waiting as a minute somebody else is wasting.
Do not force it if the person next to you is clearly done talking for the night. Reading that and backing off is its own kind of SuperModel discipline. Walk out with your coat and one new name worth following up on, and the wait was the most efficient five minutes of the evening.
Details: Watch Larry in the small moments
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