Here’s how to be interesting: follow your interests.
You can see that by looking at the opposite: the corporate drone who works for money doing what they’re not interested in.
There’s someone who isn’t interesting.
All things have a cost. You can have what you want, such as to be interesting, if you’re willing to pay the cost.
And maybe you aren’t willing to pay the cost. That’s always an option.
I’m not religious myself, but I like the Serenity Prayer:
Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
courage to change the things I can,
and wisdom to know the difference.
What’s the cost of following your interests?
Well, here’s one: some people will think you’re weird.
Let me tell you about 1’s and 10’s.
Imagine I asked a bunch of people to rate me by how much they wanted to get to know me, to spend time with me.
I could take a conservative approach and work towards being likable by everyone, and not perturbing anyone.
I might start out with some 4’s, 5’s and 6’s. Not too exciting but not too strange either. Perhaps with diligence and effort and practice constructing a pleasant social facade I could raise that, so that I started getting some 7’s.
Or, alternatively, I could be myself. I could follow my interests. I could share who I am and what I’m interested in.
And then I’d become interesting, to those who might share some of those interests. Now I can start getting some 8’s, 9’s, and 10’s.
And others would find me uninteresting, weird, strange, not what they’re looking for. They’d start to give me some 3’s, 2’s, 1’s.
The cost of getting some 10’s is to get some 1’s.
And that’s not a cost you need to pay if you don’t want to. You don’t have to be interesting. If you don’t want the 1’s, simply be unexceptional.
It is I admit strange to get 1’s, for people to take time out of their lives to tell me how awful I am. (Like, don’t they have anything better to do?) And if I were only getting 1’s, then I might worry 🙂 But as long as I honestly don’t think I’m doing anything wrong, then when I get a 1 I can think, “Yup, there’s the 1.” Just to be expected. That’s the cost of being interesting.
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