How to be interesting

I once read that “to be interesting, you must be interested.” When you give your innate curiosity all the freedom it needs, you naturally gravitate towards topics, ideas, books, videos, and podcasts that excite you, thus becoming a well-educated, interesting person.

But there’s a bigger premise at work here. Being an interesting person shouldn’t be work — i.e., forcing yourself to read a certain number of articles in the New Yorker or keeping track of the books you read each year. When “being interesting” becomes a discipline or a job to be done, the whole effort becomes fake. An artificial play to “look interesting” rather than be interesting. You start operating by an external scorecard rather than by an internal one. And you start caring more about how people perceive you rather than being the thing.

The key is to realize that, at heart, we’re all interesting. We all have original ideas, unique backgrounds, and unorthodox interests. This exists long before we embark on the journey of “becoming interesting by being interested.” In fact, by reading the same books, listening to the same podcasts, and sharing the same ideas on Twitter, we accomplish quite the opposite. We do what the world wants us to do — conform. And thus, lose our originality.

The so-called “interesting people” are people who say what’s on their minds, even if it goes against what’s popular. They express their true selves, share their stories, and try to be who they are at all costs instead of fitting themselves — like a square peg in a round hole — into a particular standard of what the world finds “interesting.”

To be interesting, you don’t need to change yourself.

Instead, you need to:

a) Recognise that you’re already enough;

b) Stop shying your true self away: share your story, speak up your mind, and do things for yourself — not to win society’s approval.

Interestingly enough, “interesting” is selfish.