The Dinner Table Test
Do you want to spend 3 hours with this person?
I’ve always struggled to answer the question of “what type of people do you accept for membership at Maxwell.” It’s a question setup to make us look like assholes. If you say anything remotely complimentary (they’re all super ambitious!) you seem like an elitist who doesn’t want to hang out with anyone who doesn’t meet your “standards.”
It’s also a genuinely hard question to answer — try to do it for yourself: in a sentence or two describe your friend group? Difficult, right? I’m friends with people for a variety of reasons ranging from shared ambition, shared experience (college), shared world view/sense of humor. Why you like someone can be hard to put into words.
But we’ve found one question works well as a starting point: do you want to spend 3 hours at the dinner table with this person?
That can mean this person is so intelligent that they have a ton to talk about. It could mean they are really lovely and a great conversationalist and even if they don’t have THAT much to say they are a good listener and a good asset to the table.
It certainly means they aren’t boring. And they definitely aren’t the type of insecure person who needs to dominate the conversation and hear themselves talk the entire night.
This simple question has been the guiding light for our membership selection process, and I think whatever core question you are asking yourself when trying to vet a new member reveals the soul of your organization — if it’s mainly a nightclub where people don’t ACTUALLY talk to each other, the litmus test might be “does this person improve the LOOK of the club,” and thats how you get a club full of beautiful but vapid members (cough cough Soho House cough cough). In college, the admission criteria to certain societies might be best described as “is he a good drinking buddy.”
For us, we’ve always been crystal clear that we want conversation and connection to be at the center of the club, and asking ourselves if we wanted to spend 3 hours at the dinner table with this person has proven to be a pretty good sorting mechanism.
Think you want to spend 3 hours at the dinner table with us?
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David, Kyle & Joelle
