When I was super young, I used to think my dad (who everyone I met seemed to think was extremely funny) had a huge repitoire of hilarious stories, but after a few years I noticed him repeating them and realized he just had a few specific ones that he would re-use with new people, like you mentioned. As someone who tends to be pretty slow to learn how to navigate new social situations, it was eye-opening when I recognized this was something I could do. What's amusing to me at this point is that I'm still not sure he fully realizes that this is something he does sometimes, because he'll still sometimes try to whip out one of the stories when talking to me and then genuinely be surprised when I remind him of some very minor detail about it that he forgot to mention this time he told it.

Jeremy Vine once wrote a story about Boris Johnson which I thought was the pinnacle of this. It was published on his Facebook page and I've since lost the link, so you're going to have to read it on Reddit where someone has posted the whole thing again.

It is uproariously funny and very relevant.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ukpolitics/comments/c1korj/jeremy_v...

It tells the tale of how the man who was going to become Prime Minister of the United Kingdom used to play the improviser and ex tempore comedian, in a practiced and automatic way.

  > “Oh just preparing my off-the-cuff remarks for tomorrow”

  | "Shower thoughts only work, when you put in the work." You have to actually spend time trying to brainstorm something, trying to think of something, and at the end of it you'll've made no progress and be discouraged. But then randomly, later, in the shower, doing something completely unrelated, the idea hits. 

I think we would be naive to assume quick responses are a good measure of one's intelligence[1]. I know this is common, but I think it is missing the same thing that quick responses also tend to miss: depth. You can be fast and deep, but more often people are fast and wrong[2]. More complex the topic the easier it is to be unaware of how wrong.

[0] https://youtu.be/9FL7IZavt1I?t=93

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45242293

[2] https://0x0.st/KcAU.png

[Edit] I wanted to add that I found this method highly effective during my PhD. It requires a balance of churning the wheels and walking away. Progress is invisible until the finish line is in sight, so you need to spend time pushing even if it looks like you are getting nowhere. But at the same time, you need to walk away. If you keep pushing you'll never have that time for those random thoughts. There's a laundry list of famous physicist[3] who used to "only work" for a few hours a day and then do things like go on long walks or play tennis. I think that fits into this model. It seems to be a critical aspect for any creative work. Honestly, I would find that the most common mistake I would make is sitting at my desk for too long. It results in a narrowing of focus. There's a lot of times we want that narrowing, but there's also plenty of times we want to think more broadly. I think this is very true for programming in general. I can sympathize with managers who look at people doing these things and interpret them as being unproductive. But I think the reality is that productivity is just a really hard thing to measure when you're not a machine stamping out well defined widgets. I think this ends up with us just making fewer "widgets" and of lower quality. I mean it isn't like you can measure quality by anything as simple as the number of lines of code or number of Jira tickets knocked off. Hell, if you are too narrow your solutions are probably creating more tickets than you're knocking off! But that's completely invisible, only measurable post hoc, and even then quite difficult to measure (if not impossible).

We often talk about current "titans" and all of them boast their long hours and "dedication." People like Elon suggesting 120hrs or the growing 996 paradigm. But I'm unconvinced this really checks out. If anything, it appears much more common that Nobel scientists worked fewer hours, not more. We're all not working on Nobel level work, but it does beg the question of what the most effective strategy actually is. Certainly we can't conclude longer hours at the desk yields better output. We can't counterfactually conclude that Dirac would have been even greater had he spent 16 hrs a day working rather than a handful. "More hours" just seems to be a naive oversimplification, highly related to these "shower thoughts"

[3] Dirac is a famous example, who colleagues would also jokingly use the unit "Dirac" in reference to "one word per hour". Notoriously "slow" thinker, but a surefire candidate for one of the smartest humans to ever exist. Poincare famously worked 10am till noon then 5pm till 7pm. Darwin followed a similar model.

I once had the opportunity at a comedy festival to see John Mulaney’s same set twice, and it’s pretty wild to see with your own eyes.

Do you have any advice for accumulating and sharing relevant anecdotes? I struggle with sharing anecdotes that have an "Aesop", or directly relatable point, even if I've lived such experiences.

As as over-thinker myself something I didn't appreciate until too late in life is the necessity of practice.

If you want to be able to hit a ball it doesn't matter how much thought you put into it - the learning is all about programming your lower instinctive brain and it only has the input device of repetition. This brain level has the ability to work at much lower latency - which is critical for reactive physical tasks.

I suspect it is the same here. You can certainly learn to speak using different levels of your brain as well. Case in point public speaking - the reason this is hard is generally you have to trust your mouth on automatic mode to follow behind and using the thinking part of your brain to better plan (or remember) ahead to build a narrative path.

There are body language cues that show you are thinking. Try looking up (like you're looking into your brain).

For me is has been quite the opposite. Im a top performing senior/staff engineer. But always struggle to get through coding interviews.

> they really don’t expect you to make jokes or entertain them

Oh, but they do, if you want to have future conversations with them. As a slow thinker with the same social issues as OP, trust me, they do. Nobody wants to keep talking to someone they consider boring, and first impressions are still the most important impressions.