How to open your reader’s curiosity loop and capture their attention
The little trick to writing engaging content
I spent 25 years tacked away in a box.
5 days in a week I had to crawl through piles of files, sift through mountains of documents, and squint behind a flickering monitor — you know the kind that was grey and black…. they called them CRT monitors.
Bill Gates had just revolutionized how we look at computers.
PCs, white boxes that looked like something out of sci-fi movies, were finding their way into offices.
As an insurance underwriter, I had no need for great conversations. The few times I talked to clients was to shock them to the realities of an insurance contract.
I would ramble speaking legalese telling them about policy conditions, exceptions, and warranties, stuff that didn’t make sense to them.
My face-to-face interactions were horrible, to say the least.
Shy and reclusive I found social gatherings awkward and cumbersome.
Simple questions like “What do you do?” would throw me into a spin. Apparently, not many people knew who an underwriter was and even fewer people knew what an underwriter does.
It always felt that no matter how I answered the question, I would feel inadequate. So I set out on a journey to improve my social skills. One of the things I learned was how to spark the curiosity loop.
Your answers should pique people’s interest
How could my answers pique people’s interest? Was the question I set out to answer
I learned that my answers weren’t supposed to be predictable — “I sell insurance” or “I am an underwriter wasn’t good enough. Instead, my answer had to pique their interest, get them to say “Oh really, tell me more!”
So instead of saying I am an insurance underwriter, I would say something like:
“I help people find peace of mind with documents that turn into gold when disaster strikes.”
That skill helped me later when I started marketing insurance products. It would go on to help me land a job with a multinational bank.
It’s a skill everyone needs to navigate through life’s intricate negotiations.
Getting married, landing a new job, selling products, and writing online all require a level of curiosity.
We are wired for curiosity and creativity. Every time we encounter strange interesting stuff our brains kick into high gear releasing dopamine and serotonin two hormones we are addicted to.
Most People are dopamine junkies, they constantly seek a new fix. And that’s not a bad thing, they are simply seeking natural curiosity. The need to know more. This desire or hunger is only satisfied as we search explore and learn about new things.
As we accumulate knowledge we eventually get to the moment of true epiphany when our creativity is awakened. This leads to many more curious experiences that create the curiosity loop.
That’s your work as a writer. To get hold of your reader’s attention open their curiosity loop, awaken their mind, and make them feel committed to figuring out the rest of the story.
Here is how to Open your reader’s curiosity loop
Write a compelling story.
A story that will gut their emotions
Stories are layers of metaphors, concepts, perspectives, and experiences that take people on a journey.
People want to understand the entire story. They want to know what came before, during, and after any given event.
That desire is how you capture their attention.
Read to discover novel ideas that give new perspectives
Read to get new ideas from books, podcasts, and other deep-knowledge articles. Novelty increases dopamine levels in the brain. New ideas increase curiosity.
Books, audiobooks, podcasts, or articles will give you different perspectives on the things you love talking about.
The feelings that come from education. Learning something new or gaining clarity on some aspect of life raises dopamine levels in the brain.
You create clarity through novel perspectives, metaphors, stories, personal experiences, and other parts of your life that will help others understand your message.
Your job is to “make sense” to a specific group of people. You do this by sharing how certain topics make sense to you.
Write to inspire new thinking
Inspiration is different from motivation, when inspiring, you help people connect the dots on their own, and give them clarity to make their own decisions and change their behavior.
People feel good when they think they came up with the answer themselves.
Entertain them, throw in a joke, meme, or an interesting point of view.
Final thought
Learn from the movies.
Movies have perfected the art of opening the curiosity loop
When you watch a movie, you are entertained through humor, drama, emotional parts of the story, and battles that spark excitement.
