Topics to probe when talking to others about aspects of their work. Ranked by priority.

• the pleasure of independence

the first time you drove on your own, you never wanted to stop. / you like getting up very early before anyone else is around, when you can follow your own projects in peace and quiet. / for you, growing up has been all about getting away from people who can control you. / you like being alone; boredom rarely troubles you. / you recoil from guided tours and tour groups. / you were extremely excited when you read a story about a guy who quit his job in a bank and started a company importing avocados from Western Africa. / you really like coming to your own opinion about the merits of a book or a work of art and it doesn't much bother you if other people regard you as eccentric. / you've been accused at times of not being a team player, and there's a degree of truth in criticism. / an evening on your own is never a challenge. It gives you a chance to plot and to think. It annoys you how some people always just want to chatter.

• the pleasure of order

when you were doing homework you really liked making your writing clear; if you had to rub out a mistake in pencil you were very careful that the rubbing out wasn't visible. You hated making mistakes in ink and experimented with pasting extra little bits of paper on top of a mistake so as to preserve an overall look of neatness. / you were fascinated by the cutlery drawer; you loved the fact that each thing had a special place. It bothered you a lot when your sister didn't care and dropped a spoon nonchalantly into the fork section. / you hate it when people say 'filing' in a sneering way. / you like arranging sets of colouring pencils according to the colour spectrum, although there always seem to be some problems; does yellow shade into white or light green.

• the pleasure of understanding

one time when you were 11 a friend said she was jealous of her sister, and you were entranced by the way this idea could make sense of why someone often got angry with someone else / you love to lay down your thoughts on paper. Your mind becomes clearer and your anxiety levels decrease. Some people drink or go jogging to relax. You like to reflect. / at school you felt cheated when the maths teacher said she couldn't tell you at the moment why this way of tackling a problem actually worked; all you needed to know was that it did. / you like it when a news report goes behind the scenes and explains why a compromise was reached, or why a party made a U-turn on its housing policy; it stops being a mystery (you dislike people who like mysteries) and starts to makes sense / you often feel people leave things unresolved: they don't explain properly, and they don't seem curious about the multiple possible explanations about why people act as they do / you like it when mass of seemingly conflicting facts can be given a coherent explanation. There's usually an underlying, much simpler and clearer, pattern waiting to be discovered.