She refused to be bored, chiefly because she wasn’t boring.
The other day I came across a blog post by Russell M. Davies* on “How to be interesting.” It’s written for people in the business world, but it could apply to anyone, really. I entirely agree with him that it’s hard to be interesting if you’re bored with everything:
The way to be interesting is to be interested. You’ve got to find what’s interesting in everything, you’ve got to be good at noticing things, you’ve got to be good at listening. If you find people (and things) interesting, they’ll find you interesting.
Interesting people are good at sharing. You can’t be interested in someone who won’t tell you anything. Being good at sharing is not the same as talking and talking and talking. It means you share your ideas, you let people play with them and you’re good at talking about them without having to talk about yourself.
The marvelous thing about tinterweb is that it’s got great tools for being interested and great tools for sharing.
Among the tools he suggests for becoming more interested: taking a photo every day and posting it to Flickr; weekly blogging; interviewing people and figuring out what’s interesting about them, then podcasting the interviews; eavesdropping on other people’s conversations in coffee shops; collecting things; making things.
I already make things (knitted things, food, doodles, origami cranes made out of Post-It notes), and I already blog. But I like the daily photo idea a lot; I think I might try that. And I could stand to blog a lot more; I’ve missed the link-posting and miscellaneous noting I used to do. One of my projects for this fall is to get back into it, with the goal of being interested.
(Part of my recent blogger’s block stems from a worry that I’m getting boring. Mostly I think that worry means that I’m feeling a lack of what Anne Shirley called “scope for the imagination” in my day-to-day life. I like Davies’ advice in part because it’s about ways to open up scope for the imagination where one hadn’t looked for it before.)
* Not to be confused with Russell T. Davies, producer of my new favorite show.
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