The man who resoles your boots has been doing it for forty years. When you hand them over, he turns them in his hands for a moment, presses a thumb into the heel, and says something you do not quite catch about the welt. Most of the time we nod, take the ticket and go. But if you ask him what he meant, what he saw when he pressed the heel, how he can tell, the shop changes. He sets the boot down. He shows you the stitching. Ten minutes later you understand something you had walked past your whole life, and he has had the best conversation of his afternoon.

A city of experts

Almost everyone you meet knows one thing thoroughly. The woman who cuts your hair can tell you how hair behaves in humidity and what happens to it after a summer at the beach. The fisherman on the dock knows how the water changes with the wind. Your neighbor who works nights at the hospital knows what an emergency room is like at four in the morning, the hour that does not appear on any television show. The mechanic, the baker, the crossing guard, the woman who has kept bees in her yard for fifteen years: each of them is carrying a body of knowledge that took years to build and that almost no one ever asks about.

We miss it for an ordinary reason. We meet people in their roles. The barber is there to cut hair, the cashier to ring up groceries, and the polite thing seems to be to let them do the job and move on. Our conversations stay on the surface, at the weather and the weekend, and we leave knowing exactly as much as we arrived with.

There is a quieter reason as well. Many of us were taught that asking questions exposes what we do not know, and that it is better to nod along than to look uninformed. But the person behind the counter already knows you are not a cobbler. Admitting it costs you nothing, and it is the only way in.

Why the question works

Ask someone how their work works, and something happens to their face. Talking about what we know well is one of the more reliably pleasant things a person can do. Brain-imaging research has found that talking about ourselves and our own experience engages the same reward circuitry that responds to food and money, and in experiments people have even given up small amounts of money for the chance to do it. A question about someone's craft is an invitation to that pleasure, and an unusually respectful one, because it treats them as the expert they are.

It also works on the asker. A 2017 set of studies on conversation found that people who asked more questions, and follow-up questions in particular, were liked more by the people they talked with. The follow-up mattered most, because it is the proof that you were listening. Curiosity, it turns out, is one of the most attractive things you can bring into a room.

And then there is what you learn. A good question about someone's work hands you the inside of something: the reason bread is scored before baking, how a crossing guard reads traffic, what a beekeeper listens for when she opens a hive. The world gets more detailed. Things you passed without seeing begin to have workings, and the workings have people behind them.

How to ask so they tell you the good part

Not every question opens the door. What do you do is a sorting question; it gets a job title. The questions that work are specific and ask about judgment and texture, the parts that took years to learn.

Ask how they can tell. How do you know when it is ready? How can you tell a good one from a bad one? What were you looking at just then? These go straight to the expertise, the thing they see that you do not.

Ask what most people get wrong. Every trade has a list of misunderstandings the public holds about it, and most practitioners are delighted to correct them. What do customers always assume? What do people never realize about this job?

Ask what changed. How is it different from when you started? What is harder now, and what is easier? Long experience has a history in it, and people enjoy telling it.

Ask about the best day. What is the part you still like? This one often surprises both of you, because people rarely get asked what they love about their work, only what they do.

Then follow up. The first answer is the summary. The good part is usually in the second. Really? Why is that? What happens if you do not? A single follow-up turns a polite exchange into an actual conversation.

Reading the room

Curiosity has manners. A line of customers behind you is not the time for ten questions, and someone at the end of a double shift may not want to explain anything. Ask once, lightly, and let the answer tell you whether there is room for more. Many of the best conversations of this kind happen in quiet moments: the slow hour at the hardware store, the long wait at the tailor, a neighbor leaning on the fence on a Saturday. And never ask in order to be seen asking. People can tell interest from technique, and only the first one opens anything.

It helps, too, to be willing to give something back. Say what you found surprising. Tell them it changed how you will look at the thing. That small return is what makes the exchange feel like a gift on both sides rather than an interview.

What it gives you

Do this for a season and two things happen. The first is that your town starts to look different. The shoe repair shop, the bakery, the boatyard and the hospital stop being backdrops and become places where people know things, some of which they have told you. You feel more at home, because home is partly a matter of knowing how the place works and who makes it work.

The second is subtler. A habit of asking people about what they know well is a habit of assuming that other people have something to teach you. It is a small, practical form of respect, and it tends to come back. People remember the person who asked them a real question. They are glad to see you next time.

This week, pick one person you see often and know only by their role. Ask them one honest question about how their work works, and then ask what they mean by the answer. Then listen to the good part.