People Are Interesting

by Paul Grimsley

How often do you hear someone tell you that they are really not that interesting, and that they live a boring life? Or when you look at someone how often do you make a snap judgment that they likely haven’t done anything of note.

By listening to people and asking questions at the right point you can uncover those huge metaphorical icebergs that are floating beneath the surface. People aren’t used to being listened to, or they are used to being told that the thing they are trying to communicate is something they have said a million times.

Walk through your neighborhood and try and look at it with new eyes as a regular exercise and you may start to see things that had escaped your notice for a long time. Peoples lives are not that dissimilar — the overly familiar can become almost invisible.

People make the same mistake with children — supposing that their perhaps underdeveloped communication speaks to a lack of depth in their interior life. We have bought into this notion that children are push-button automatons, and that viewpoint extends into our treatment of the people we meet on the streets.

Pause for a moment and consider the imagination that is on tap to a child, and the hours that can be occupied with play, and then try and explain how there is not a lot of thought going on. Look at an older person and consider how many years they have been alive and all the places they may have been, all the people they may have met, and all the events that they may have lived through — and then try and explain how that could possibly be boring. Pick a spot on your street and roll back the calendar through history and given the age of the planet that is a fair chunk of time, and then explain how nothing has ever happened where you live.

Salesmen will often sit down and believe that they understand everything about a person and they haven’t even listened to them — they are interested in their sale, but they are not interested in the person that they are selling something to.

For someone to become interested in what you are selling you would need to be offering them something that spoke to their needs, and how could you possibly do that if you know nothing about them.

Some places have guidelines on what you can build, so that you have to familiarize yourself with what is expected from any building project in the area. You have to get interested in the locale in order for them to be interested in allowing you to go ahead and build.

You are building something with a person when you sit down and decide to sell them. The person wants you to understand who they are so the relationship you are building checks the boxes they have. If you show that you are interested in this then they are going to become interested in your solutions.

Asking questions and listening is vital. Your willingness to do that depends on your degree of interest. This should be easy to generate, because, as said, people are interesting.