Comment by nuclearsugar
5 days ago
Indeed I've had a similar realization and it's a very helpful reminder. Also every time I go to a meetup, I remind myself: to be interesting, you must be interested.
5 days ago
Indeed I've had a similar realization and it's a very helpful reminder. Also every time I go to a meetup, I remind myself: to be interesting, you must be interested.
> to be interesting, you must be interested.
I think thats the crux of it, most people respond positively when others are interested in them. As long as its genuine, asking about, or be interested in, others goes a really long way.
It helps to know a thing or two, about a wide range of topics, for this reason.
Take for instance someone telling you about their career. "I'm a software developer".
You can express interest with a response like "Oh, thats cool, what made you go into that line of work?" but thats a very generic, shallow response.
If you know a thing or two about software, for example, you can ask more interesting questions that show your interest in them, and your knowledge of the space. "Woh cool, how is AI coding impacting your life?"
Suddenly, it seems like you're much more interesting yourself, AND you're interested in them.
The tricky part nowadays is everyone has very niche interests. It's harder than ever to really have a breadth of knowledge that is broadly applicable. This was easier before the internet, before travel, before telecommunication. When your community was your community and news traveled slowly, it was a lot easier to learn about what impacted others.
I love being asked "what made you go into that line of work?" because I can answer with "mostly the money" (which is a very honest answer yet socially somewhat inappropriate), and their reaction to my answer immediately gives me a signal into whether we're going to be close or not.
Some people act so shocked when you tell them you did something because it would make you richer and not because an angel came to you in a dream and whispered in your ear to save the disenfranchised underclass (and all the cats) by writing code, or whatever's the current faux na pas reason to pursue a vocation these days.
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I agree with your point, but as a software developer I’d much prefer the generic response in your example.
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Interestingly, this is what the book "How to Win Friends and Influence Others" gets at. While it's ostensibly a sales book, the very basis is how to be genuinely nice to people so they want to talk to you and be around you. And from those relationships come sales opportunities.
As another person for whom relation stuff does not come naturally, this was incredibly helpful because little pieces of advise really do work, because they really are nice things to do/say.
A favorite example of mine, when starting to talk to someone who probably already doesn't care for you is to find something -- anything -- that it's clear they like or chose, which you also happen to like, and pay it a genuine positive complement. And perhaps talk about it a little bit.
I've heard a lot of negativity around this book, and haven't read it yet. Did you feel like it was positive in the sense of genuine niceness, or negative in the sense of trying to be manipulative, etc.?
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> most people respond positively when others are interested in them.
To be fair, most people are uninteresting.
Maybe the goal should be to be okay with being ordinary.
TRYING to be interesting (or interested) is just tiresome.
Also, you don't have to be interested in each other: Find a shared interest.
And it doesn't have to be anything special; you could find joy together in the mundane:
Petting cats, watching the rain, taking a walk through the woods without saying anything..
Are you conflating normal interest in another's well being with Einstein like outlierness?
I can find "interesting" (based on a boring reading from a dictionary) the unknown days events of a friend even if while knowing the person was not engaged in breaking down understanding of reality.
It's not the person or their todo list that's interesting but awareness of a cognitive disconnect of not knowing what their todo list was that day.
Depends on how we define interesting. Interesting in itself is pretty overrated imo, I don't need you to be some artist who lives in the streets and is addicted to heroin - I mean that's really interesting but not something I want in my life. Be boring - have a 9-5 job like me. But be agreeable, be interested in me as well from time to time and we can relate. Whether we truly hit it off is not about how interesting I am to you or you are to me I think.
Normal people are interesting.
Ordinary people can be interesting though.
If you meet someone who is completely and utterly uninteresting, that in itself is interesting.
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Being interested is also a lot more easy than to be interesting. The latter really depends on the eye of the beholder. Whereas I make it a game to find out what is interesting about the person across from me. Sometimes I strike gold, sometimes it's a dumpsterfire and we implicitly agree never to talk again. But once you strike gold and meet people you genuinely are really interested in, you get addicted.