Most conversations with strangers die of the first question. Not because strangers are closed. Because the opener usually asks them to report, and reporting is boring for both sides. The questions worth asking ask them to choose, to remember, or to want something. Those three doors open almost every human being.
Here is the compact catalog, seven of them, earned one conversation at a time.
First: what is keeping you busy these days, in a good way? The phrase in a good way does all the work. It filters out the polite complaint and aims the person at the thing they chose. People light up inside four seconds when you ask about their chosen work instead of their assigned one.
Second: what did you change your mind about this year? This one respects the person's intelligence. Only someone who thinks deserves to answer it, and being handed a question that assumes you think is a small, rare compliment. The answers range from small to enormous, and both sizes are interesting.
Third: what is the best thing you have eaten recently, and where did it find you? Food questions are universal keys, but the second half is what unlocks the story. Where did it find you turns a menu review into a memory, and memories have people in them.
Fourth: who taught you the thing you are best at? This question hands the person a legacy to talk about. Watch what happens: the answer is almost never about the skill. It is about a person, a room, an afternoon. The skill was just the door the teaching walked through.
Fifth: what would you do with one free month and no obligations? The fantasy question. It sounds small talk; it is not. It maps a person's unsprung wants, and unsprung wants are the truest ones people carry. You will learn more from this answer than from any résumé.
Sixth: what do you wish someone had told you at twenty? This one goes deep politely. It asks for one sentence of hard-won sense, and nearly everyone has one ready, waiting for someone to ask. The trick is to receive it like a gift, not like an answer.
Seventh, the closer, and my favorite: what are you working on that nobody has asked you about yet? Everyone carries an unasked-about project. A language, a garden, a manuscript, a repair, a plan. Asking about it is a small act of seeing, and being seen in that particular way is rarer than praise.
Notice what all seven have in common. Not one asks the stranger to summarize themselves. Each one asks them to open a single drawer. Small door, specific key, and behind it: a person.
The catalog works in the other direction too. Hand these to yourself and answer honestly, one per evening, and you will have a stranger's-eye view of your own life inside a week. Some of the answers will want to become plans.
So the question I will turn on you, reader, is the eighth one, the one I keep for people I intend to keep talking to: which question would you add to the seven, and which one did you flinch at?