Don’t try to be interesting. DO interesting
Interesting isn’t a personality type, it’s a set of habits and a way of seeing the world. Russell Davies shares more in this excerpt from Do Interesting.
I’ve been circling the idea of ‘interestingness’ for the last 30 years.
Some years ago, I was invited to go to the University of Oregon and teach the advertising students something. Since they were all writers and art directors and I wasn’t, I was a bit stumped about what I could tell them. So I tried to consider what might be more generally useful to them in their careers. And thinking about all the most inspiring people I’d come across, I settled on ‘How To Be Interesting’.
‘Do these specific things’, I wanted to say, ‘and you will be interesting.’
It sort of worked, so I wrote it up as a blog post. And since it was the early days of blogging, it went modestly viral and I became a minor expert on interestingness. That original blog post is still there. It’s dated, but I stick by the opening thoughts I wrote back then:
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.
I’ve pursued these kinds of habits myself and I think they’ve helped me. I’ve not had a very linear career but it’s been, well, interesting.
As far as I’m aware, I’m the only person who’s won the top award for advertising strategy (APG Gold) and advertising creativity (D&AD Black Pencil). I’ve done PowerPoint in the Number 10 cabinet meeting room. I’ve written years’ worth of weekly and monthly columns for famous magazines. I led the marketing team for the fastest growing company in Europe. I’ve written two books: one about PowerPoint, one about cafés. I’ve had my art shown in the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition (with my friend Ben). I’ve had my sound art transmitted to the whole of Edinburgh. My family have featured on the front of the Visit Wales brochure. I started a walking football team. Vanity Fair magazine wrote about a ‘salon’ I hosted which led to a new art movement (it was really just some people having breakfast). I’ve made programmes for Radio 4, I’ve won a prize for blogging and I’ve written a Dimbleby Lecture.
And I started a series of conferences called Interesting. Short talks by enthusiasts about interesting things. They’ve been happening all over the world now for more than 15 years. Hundreds of people have spoken, thousands have been interested. It’s made me realise that there’s something pure and fun and magical about just asking, ‘What do you find interesting?’
But I’ve always found ‘How To Be Interesting’ an awkward way of framing things. It’s pretty arrogant. It’s like saying I can tell you how to be beautiful.
People have asked me to talk about it and I’ve done occasional workshops but I always do them sheepishly. I sail past the opening slide and say, ‘The secret to being interesting is being interested,’ and then just ignore it. But in writing my new book, Do Interesting, I’ve realised that’s not really what I mean.
I was interviewing Tom Whitwell. He’s an objectively interesting man. He invents strange electronic musical instruments. He writes fascinating lists on the internet. Professionally, he helps businesses solve big complex business problems. And when we talked, he said that the best people at that job are always the ones that can get interested in any problem, no matter how tedious it seems on the surface. They don’t get drawn to the obviously cool problems — sport, tech, fashion, purpose — they get stuck into things that seem a bit boring — insurance, infrastructure, finance, logistics — and they find what’s interesting about them.
This sparked with me. That’s what I’ve done my whole career. I’ve ended up doing interesting projects because I can see the possibilities in stuff no one else wants to do. And then, if you do the job properly, you make it interesting to other people.
So that’s the ‘interestingness’ of the book.
It’s not about making yourself interesting. It’s about making the world interesting. And that means developing skills and habits around ideas, creativity and communication.
It’s a tiny superpower. It gives you a lift. And it’s a tiny spice. It makes everything tastier.
More probable magic
There are two schools of thought when it comes to creativity:
1. It’s a magical, intuitive, mysterious process that can’t be forced. You just have to wait for the muse to strike you. It might help if you sip absinthe or are French.
Or:
2. Inspiration is for amateurs. It’s a job like any other. You just need to show up and do the work. Put the hours in. Develop the habits. Churn it out.
I lean towards the latter view because it’s more optimistic. You’re not just waiting on fate.
Sometimes you just want someone to tell you what to do. When the toilet’s backing up and there’s sewage all over the bathroom, you don’t want someone explaining the intricacies of fluid dynamics, you want to know where to stick the plunger.
Some people will scoff at that and tell you that human creativity involves something mysterious and ineffable we can’t deliberately access.
That’s true. We can’t make ideas happen. But we can make them much more likely, we can make the magic more probable. That’s what we’re doing here.
That means making a bit of an effort. Not as much as you might think. But some effort. Some energy.
I’m telling you this so you can’t say you’ve not been warned. But the fact that you’re reading this suggests you’re willing to put in the appropriate amount of work. We’re not talking about the effort required to self-build a house or start keeping bees. It’s more akin to starting a small, gentle hobby.
But it’s not nothing.
The best way to manage that effort is to get yourself some habits.
First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you’re inspired or not.
— Octavia E. Butler
Listen to Octavia Butler. If you’re ever going to do something vaguely creative (and that’s what I’m talking about here, things that are vaguely creative) then you’ll need to develop some habits.
Ideas mostly come from the slow, quiet accumulation of seemingly banal and obvious habits. It’s just doing the right things to make sure your mind and your life are brimming with hearty compost.
If, occasionally, you have a moment of magic, that will be why. Because of the habits. And you don’t have to do them every day. Just dailyish. (The idea of dailyishness came from Dan Harris’s podcast about meditation).
Don’t make a religion of these habits. Don’t worry about maintaining a streak. That’ll just cause despair and abandonment when one day you inevitably fail.
Just fit them in with your life. You don’t need to worry about your creative rituals on the day you give birth.
Don’t hunt for diamonds. Get fascinated by pebbles.
The world is already more interesting than anyone can possibly imagine. You just need to pay attention.
That doesn’t mean transforming into some kind of hippy loon. You don’t have to skip around singing ‘hullo clouds, hullo sky’. Neither do you need to be undiscriminating. This is not about pretending that everything is great.
It just means developing some habits that will help you tune in rather than out. And not randomly, not like a gigantic hoover sucking up everything in its path, but in a way that reflects your peculiarities and interests. Tuning the world so you see things that no one else does.
Here’s a few exercises to get you started…
Remember it now
A little while ago a notebook brand called ‘Field Notes’ became all the rage with designers and digital people. On the covers they said: ‘I’m not writing it down to remember it later, I’m writing it down to remember it now’.
That’s the essence of all this. I write in a notebook every day. But I almost never go back and look at what I wrote. Writing in a notebook is about transferring things from the world to your brain, not to your notebook.
Your notebook is a lens for looking at the world, not a box to keep it in.
Designer and futurist Anab Jain uses photos in a similar way: [I take] lots and lots of photos. I have no idea how I’m going to archive them or organise them. But a lot of the time I’m taking photographs not to save and archive them in any specific way, but as a way of remembering and acknowledging the noticing.
DO #1: Get yourself a little notebook. Write in it dailyish for a week. Or take a photo.
Compound interest for creativity
Little acts of attention are good in themselves but the real magic is in the repetition.
A tiny creative act, repeated, gets powerful, quickly.
Look at a tree. Take a photo. Could be a good photo. Might not be. It’s just a tree. Take a photo the next day. It’ll be different. Different light. Different weather. Different mood. Now you’re not just noticing the tree, you’re noticing the differences.
Do that for a week and you start to see more. Do it over a year, and you see the seasons. Do it for ten years and you’ll see climate change.
Repetition over time gives us access to new visions. Things we couldn’t see before.
James Bridle is a writer and artist once described as a ‘sifter, collator and hacker of increasingly opaque technologies’. He experiments with this kind of thing a lot:
I was trying to understand plants for a long time, to get to know them, and one way people show how lively and interesting plants are is to use time-lapse photography.
At ten or twenty times the speed, it’s easy to see how much plants actually move, how much individuality and personality they have, which isn’t apparent at human timescales of perception. So I decided to make some time-lapses myself, and what I realised was that while the resulting little movies were nice, just like all those other ones on the internet and David Attenborough shows, that wasn’t the point of what I did. I didn’t speed up the plants: I slowed myself down to their speed.
That’s what you actually have to do when you make time-lapses: you have to spend the actual time doing it, and you become aware of that time, you embody it, and you understand something different as a result. You actually get to know the plants, which was my intent, and is not achieved by just watching someone else do the thing.
Means, not ends, as Aldous Huxley always insisted; it’s the doing that’s interesting, it’s the focus of that attention that makes everything else fluoresce.
This principle applies to all sorts of things.
It’s not just photos. Do something once, it’s great. Do it twice, you add connections and time.
Keep doing it and those effects multiply. And then, if you do something adjacent, you get a whole heap of benefits.
You see the parallels, you get to compare and contrast. But, even more magically, if you’re also doing something else entirely, suddenly you’ll see that there are unexpected and unpredictable contrasts and comparisons.
But, more importantly, you do something to yourself. As James says, it’s the doing that’s important, not the output. It’s where you put your attention.
DO #2: Pick somewhere you go regularly. Find something you see all the time. Take a picture every time you pass by. Start to notice the changes. Do it 12 times.
russell davies is a writer, communicator and strategist. He’s spent 30 years figuring out what happens when organisations and services meet the internet.
In his spare time, he’s been a blogger, a columnist for Wired, he’s made a BBC programme about the ‘Internet of Things’, he’s organised the Interesting conferences and written books about PowerPoint and great British cafés.
His ‘art’ has featured at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition and the Old Lock Up Gallery, Cromford. His new book Do Interesting: Notice. Collect. Share. is published by The Do Book Company on Sept 7th (UK) and Oct 24th (US). Available to pre-order now.
Extract from Do Interesting: Notice. Collect. Share by Russell Davies. Text copyright © Russell Davies 2023. Published by The Do Book Co.
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