Russel Davies,
account planning guru at large, recently wrote a great posts titled
“How to Be Interesting”. He brings up a good point by stating “being
interesting” is core to the future of the creative business person.
Being a firm believer that good ideas can come from anywhere, I think
the crux of this thought is to keep yourself interested and exercise
curiosity to inspire creative thinking. The 10 suggestions are below
and one thing I would add to the list is to:

11. Purchase at least one album a month.
Music may be the one element that inspires and resonates with people
throughout cultures and generations, other than Maslow’s Hierarchy of
Needs of course. Appreciating a diverse spectrum of music can provoke
new thoughts and ideas you may not get from your normal audio
pleasures. The new Chin Up Chin Up , The Knife, Talking Back Sunday, Hot Chip  and MSTRKRFT
are couple things Operatives at our office have picked up recently at the office.
Although I do have to admit a deep dark secret and I will not name
names. I have been hearing Justin Timberlake blasting from speakers
recently, everyone has their guilty pleasures.

Full Post below

How to Be Interesting
“While I was at the U of O
I kept going on about how the core skill of any future creative
business person will be ‘being interesting’. People will employ and
want to work with (and want to be with) interesting people.And since
I’d spent quite a lot of time telling them all the things they should
stop doing I’d thought I’d try and teach something useful. Since I
don’t actually know anything useful I had to make something up. Which
is below. It takes about 10 minutes to teach but it’ll take a lifetime
for people to work out if it works or not, and by then I’ll be long
gone. Ha!

I’ve based it on two assumptions:

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 the web is that it’s got great tools for
being interested and great tools for sharing. So I’ve used them a lot.
It should, of course, be obvious that there are many other ways to be
interesting. Some of them don’t involve computers at all. These are
just 10 things, and if you do them you’ll get more interesting. Or at
the very least you’ll start practising the skills of being interesting.

1. Take at least one picture everyday. Post it to flickr.
You should carry a camera with you. A phonecam will do.
The act of carrying a camera, and always keeping an eye out for a
picture to take changes the way you look at the world. It makes you
notice more things. It keeps you tuned in.

Posting it to flickr (or other photosharing sites) means that you’re
sharing it. It’s in public. This will make you think a little harder
about what you shoot and it might draw you into conversation about your
pictures.

2. Start a blog. Write at least one sentence every week.
This is pretty easy. If you just did this much I’d be disapppointed. You should write more sentences. Or you should write one true sentence. But I suspect that you won’t be able to limit yourself to just one sentence, I suspect you’ll get bitten and want to do more.

It’s easy to knock blogging as a kind of journalism of the banal but
in some ways that’s its strength. Bloggers don’t go out and investigate
things (mostly) they’re not in exciting or glamorous places, they’re
not given a story, they have to build one out of the everyday lives
they lead. And this makes them good at noticing things, things that
others might not have seen. And being a blogger, feeling the need to
write about stuff makes you pay attention to more things, makes you go
out and see more stuff, makes you carry a notebook, keeps you tuned in
to the world.

3. Every week, read a magazine you’ve never read before
Interesting people are interested in all sorts of things. That means
they explore all kinds of worlds, they go places they wouldn’t expect
to like and work out what’s good and interesting there. An easy way to
do this is with magazines. Specialist magazines let you explore the
solar system of human activities from your armchair. Try it, it’s
fantastic.

 

4. Once a week sit in a coffee-shop or cafe for an hour and
listen to other people’s conversations. Take notes. Blog about it.
(Carefully)
Take little dips in other people’s lives. Listen to their speech
patterns and their concerns. Try and get them down on paper. (Don’t let
them see. Try not to get beaten up.) Don’t force it, don’t hop from
table to table in search of better eavesdropping, just bask in the
conversations that come your way.

5. Once a month interview someone for 20 minutes, work out how to make them interesting. Podcast it.
Again, being interesting is about being interested. Interviewing is
about making the other person the star; finding out what they know or
think that’s interesting. Could be anyone, a friend, a colleague, a
stranger, anyone. Find out what’s compelling about them. Interviewing
stops you butting in too much and forces you to listen. Good thing to
practice. (And it’s worth noticing the people who are good at it.) Podcasting is sharing. Sharing is something you must get used to.

6. Collect something
It could be anything. It could be pictures of things.
But become an expert in something unexpected and unregarded. Develop a
passion. Learn how to communicate that to other people without scaring
them off. Find the other few people who share your interest. Learn how
to be useful in that community.

7. Keep a scrapbook
I’ve talked about this before. It’s good. Do it.

8. Every month write 50 words about one piece of visual art,
one piece of writing, one piece of music and one piece of film or TV.
Do other art forms if you can. Blog about it
If you want to work in a creative business (and before long most
businesses will be creative businesses) you’ll have to get used to
having a point of view on artistic stuff. Even if it’s not very
artistic. You’ll have to be comfortable with expressing an opinion on
things you don’t know how to make or do, like music or writing. You get
better at that through practice. And through sharing what you’ve
written.

9. Make something
Do something with your hands. Create something from nothing. It could be knots, it could be whittling, Lego, cake or knitting. Take some time to get outside your head. Ideally, make something you have no idea how to do. Get something from Make
and try it, assuming you’ll screw it up the first time. People love
people who can make things. Making’s the new thinking. Share your
things on the your blog, or, if you’re brilliant maybe you can share
them on etsy.

10. Read:
Understanding Comics - Scott McCloud
The Mezzanine - Nicholson Baker
The Visual Display Of Quantitative Information - Edward Tufte

All these books are good for their own reasons but they’re also good
examples of people who are really interested in stuff that others think
of as banal and who explain it in a way that makes you share their
passion. That’s good.“

Similar Posts

• Matter Boxes of Stuff
• Ze Frank on Creativity
• Veer: My Favorite “Junk” Mail
• A Case for Texting
• 40 Things You’d Like to Say at Work