How to Be More Interesting

The fear of being boring is one of the quiet epidemics of adult life, and the usual remedies make it worse. People collect anecdotes, rehearse opinions, memorise facts about wine. Then they deploy them and watch the conversation go politely flat, because a performed interesting person is exhausting in a way that a genuinely dull one is not.

What actually distinguishes people we find interesting is not delivery. It is input. They have recently done something slightly unusual — taken a class, read outside their field, visited a strange museum, learnt to solder, spent an afternoon with someone twenty years older — and so they have something in their head other than work and the news. You cannot be interesting from an empty room. Nobody is fascinating about a week in which nothing happened.

This is good news, because input is the one part that is entirely within reach. It requires no charisma and no wit. One new thing a fortnight, chosen for curiosity rather than usefulness, produces within a year a person with an unpredictable range of reference — someone who knows how bees make decisions, or why medieval bread was that colour, or what it feels like to be spectacularly bad at pottery in a room of strangers.

The second half is the willingness to be specific. Boring conversation is not caused by boring lives but by generalisation. Fine, busy, good thanks, the usual — these are not answers, they are seals. The same evening described specifically is instantly alive: I spent forty minutes trying to get a stubborn drawer open and lost. Detail is interesting almost regardless of subject, and abstraction is dull almost regardless of subject.

Third, and least comfortable, interesting people say the slightly odd true thing. Most of us edit toward the acceptable middle, sanding off the strange preference, the unfashionable enthusiasm, the opinion that might invite an argument. What survives the sanding is a person who is agreeable and forgettable. The odd true thing — that you dislike a beloved film, that you have a theory about supermarket layouts, that you cried at a documentary about cranes — is the thing anyone will remember.

The unexpected part is how much of this is generosity rather than display. The most magnetic people in most rooms are not talking about themselves; they are visibly curious, they ask second questions, and they treat other people's obsessions as worth an hour. Being interested is nearly indistinguishable, from the outside, from being interesting — and unlike wit, it can simply be decided upon on the way in.