Finishing other people’s sentences isn’t connection. It’s a race nobody else entered.

Guessing the end of somebody’s sentence hands you your prediction instead of their actual thought, and the two differ more often than you would expect. It also communicates something you did not intend, which is that the conversation is moving too slowly for you. People notice the speed even when the guess turns out to be right.

Try leaving two seconds of silence after someone stops talking this week. It will feel much longer than it is. What tends to arrive in that gap is the part they had not quite worked out, which is usually the part worth hearing.