This is my second attempt at writing a post on how to be interesting. I have a full draft of a similar themed post that has remained unpublished for over a year now sitting in the background. The reason I never published that article is because I had an uncanny sense that I’d missed something; that what I was saying didn’t quite stack up.
In that article I explained that being interesting comes down to originality. To be interesting it helps if you come to the conversation knowing something that other people don’t, or having experienced things that others haven’t. And, for the most part I’m right, but I missed something crucial and I just worked out what it was.
Why be interesting?
Why indeed. This is a difficult question to answer, until you look at the inverse of the question;
‘is it okay to be boring?’
The answer to that question is obvious: no. I don’t think I know a single human being that wishes to be boring. In fact, most of the people I know dread the idea that they might be boring. And I fall into that category. I dread the idea of being boring. It scares me, mainly because I know how painful it is to spend time with someone who is. There’s this thing about being boring. We dread having to endure the company of someone who’s boring. We feel like they’re stealing from us: our time, our energy, our will to live (depending on how long you have to speak that that person).
In fact, boring is so scary that one of the vampires in the TV show, What we do in the Shadows, the aptly named Colin Robinson, lives by boring people and sapping them of their life energy.
Nobody wants to be boring. And to not be boring, we have to be interesting.
So, how does one become interesting?
I grew up in a house where interesting was more important than having good table manners. I struggled to be interesting, which meant my table manners had to be impeccable. So much so, that I taught table etiquette at my sister school in the weeks leading up to their formal graduation dinner.
Anyway, being interesting. Growing up, the conversation at our family dinners were expected to be interesting. This created some pressure going into family meals. My strategy was to either do something outrageous at school and share that with the family, read something obscure and talk about it, or lie. Some of the things I did included swimming a 100 metres breaststroke race with a motorcycle helmet on (I came second), stripping butt naked at parties, and stealing random rubbish, like people’s house numbers in the middle of the night.
My sister collected dead people’s false teeth. My sister is interesting.
And, when it came to reading, I would read anything I could get my hands on that I knew none of my friends had read before. Camus, Sartre, Huxley, Yutang etc. I had a friend that read Louis L’Amour. Bastard. My family loved him.
That was what interesting meant to me. Do weird shit and read things nobody else is reading. And for most of my life it was fun doing things to be interesting. Being interesting also influenced many of my career choices: chef, post production TV runner, advertising exec, front of house hotel host etc.
But being original doesn’t make you interesting
My recent epiphany which gave me the courage to write this post (again) was that we all experience the world differently. Our backgrounds, genes, ways of thinking make how we see the world unique. And it’s my kids who’ve taught me this lesson. About a week ago my son is eating chicken. He’s sawing at a thigh fillet – we’re trying to teach him how to use a knife and fork. He stops mid-saw and furrows his brow, “when does a chicken become chicken?” A good question. When does a chicken go from being a bird to being food?
The point being that the we are at our most interesting when we’re just being ourselves, when we share the questions that keep us awake at night, when we confide in others that we have thoughts that others might find abhorrent, when we open up and show people who we really are.
The truth is that we’re already interesting. We don’t have to meet Nobel Laureates or do stand-up comedy for others to find us likeable or our conversations compelling. By just being us we already bring something unusual to the conversation, a different point of view of the world, an unusual set of neurosis to share with other humans who all have their own hidden neurosis.
By knowing who we are and sharing our true selves with others, being thought of as interesting is almost guaranteed.
Great post.
One of my favourite line: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLGKisgE5_M
A quote taken from Bukowski I believe.