What happens if you throw a party and nobody shows? What happens if you plan a second-year elective course and no one shows? After forty-five years of teaching, why does the thought enter my mind at the beginning of every semester? Why would I fear that no one will show up for my classes? They always have and will continue to do so. At least that is what forty years of experience would suggest.

Why 700 Sundays? Ten years ago, my wife and I went to the old opera house in Boston to see Billy Crystal in a one-act play tell his life story. Crystal titled the show 700 Sundays. That was the number of Sundays he had with his father before his father passed away when Crystal was fifteen years old. Through acting and old photos, Crystal shared with the audience his youthful experiences in Long Island and his observations watching his father as a musician. Billie Holiday and other artists would sit around their living room and play their instruments and sing. Crystal would draw attention to himself by mimicking the musicians and telling little kid jokes. The evening at the theater was mesmerizing.

However, I will never forget how we ended up in the first row right in front of the stage. We had bought less expensive seats. We were sitting in the back row of the theater, close to the lighting and stage managers. Three minutes before the show was to begin, an usher asked us if we would be interested in moving up to the first row. Some decisions are easier to make than others. We quickly got up and followed the usher down the theater aisle. Right before we sat down, the usher told us, “Mr. Crystal wants every seat filled in the first ten rows of the theater so that he doesn’t fret about attendance, about whether or not the theater is full. He can only see up to the first ten rows. That’s where he focuses. He can see the faces of the audience. So he doesn’t want any empty seats.”

Could it be that someone as famous as Crystal, someone who has emceed the Academy Awards seven times, still has mind chatter that revolves around whether he “has it”? How can that be? Isn’t Billy Crystal more secure than that? How much positive reinforcement does he need to feel good about himself? I began to reflect on whether he too lives with an either/or mentality. At some point, you would assume that he has to understand that he has made it big in his field.

Perhaps my anxieties about whether I can measure up to the best teachers have to do with defining who I am by the external feedback I receive—it’s something a lot of professionals do. Perhaps Robert Kegan of Harvard School of Education had it right when he underscored that a stage of adult development called the “interpersonal stage” is defined by how many individuals we convince each day how competent we are. That is how success gets defined. And it’s a dangerous game to play. It’s a game that by and large can’t be won long term.

Rather than Billy Crystal being focused on the one thousand people in the audience that night or that his show had five sold-out dates in Boston, he apparently was worried about his own mind chatter during the show when he saw two empty seats. We know that humans have an easier time focusing on negative experiences than on positive ones.

Negative emotions can be accessed faster and experienced more acutely. Plan a celebratory dinner and arrive to find out you will be seated forty-five minutes late. Head to the restroom to find it dirty. Be seated next to a kitchen door. Months later as you recall this experience, you realize that even though the food met your expectations, you can only remember those unexpected moments.

Kegan suggests that if we use external criteria to define success or happiness, we will come up short, given the powerful influence of our negative-remembering reflex. Perhaps Crystal remembers that one night in Boston when there were two empty seats for his performance. Everything gets distilled and reduced to one reflection or observation. The technical term for this cognitive process is asymmetric effect with a negative bias. It holds us captive in everyday life.

Junot Díaz and the Cambridge Public Library

Junot Díaz won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. He was honored for his ability to write about the common man in uncommon situations. He also claimed a MacArthur Genius Award in 2015. He speaks to standing-room-only crowds frequently. He holds an audience captive. His use of tone, pacing, and body language make attendees at his talks never want to leave. In his writing courses at MIT, the small group of students are at once enraptured, intimidated, and praying they don’t meet faculty expectations—by what they say in class and more important, what they write for it. They hold their collective breaths as he returns their papers after grading. While Díaz dresses unassumingly, his countenance is riveting. He wears his expertise and status well.

Two years ago, my wife was invited to hear Díaz speak to the city workers of Cambridge in the auditorium of the public library. Five minutes before he was to begin speaking, there were no more than fifteen individuals in the audience. When the designated hour struck, there may have been twenty-five people in an auditorium that could hold three hundred.

I was one member of the audience. I was tracking the speaker out of the corner of my eye trying not to stare. I wanted to see how he was going to adapt not only the presentation to the relatively small audience but how his attitude and the tone of his talk would be affected. Would he be angry that his time had been wasted? Would he talk down to us? Would we as an audience be worthy of his efforts and ask questions that were worthy of him?

At five past noon Díaz was introduced by one of the Cambridge Library librarians. The introduction was short and to the point. The author had basically an hour to fill. I realized that Díaz had begun his connection with the audience before the allotted time began. I noticed that he introduced himself to a number of the attendess. He asked them questions about where they were from, what their work was, and what they liked reading. By the time he was in front of the group, he had already begun to make a connection.

Díaz pulled out his iPhone and began reading from his most current book. He read for five minutes. He then asked the audience why they thought this meant so much to him. Why did he choose to read this passage at this moment? The discussion felt more like friends chatting in a living room. It was warm and intimate and very conversational. I realized that being able to adapt to a particular space and time was key to what Díaz was doing at that very moment and also what I tried to do intuitively.

Inner and Outer Space

I obsess about having the right size of room for whatever audience I’m addressing. I am like Crystal in that I want every seat taken. I always call the registrar well before the first day of class and ask the number of students and the number of seats in the classroom. If I’m teaching a seminar, the table and number of chairs at the table are important. Each place at the table should feel special. All eighty-two students who take the course on leadership need to feel like the course was in demand. It needs to feel intimate. The same holds true for larger audiences.

The larger the audience, the more intimate the stories need to be. I must focus on the details, describing the shade of the moon, the reflection off the water. Drawing the audience in is the key. I might even speak more quietly so that students need to lean in to hear me. I see the fort I would build in the den of my house on Stephens Street in Southeast Portland. I remember how safe and secure I felt being in the fort that might barely contain three eight-year-olds. But I felt safe. I felt like I was protected from the outside world. That is the feeling I want to project inside a classroom, where I can invite students into a lab focused on understanding the human dimension in great detail. No doubt, space is important to many teachers, but it is especially crucial to my teaching style and goals.