The Overlooked Trick to Becoming a Genuinely Interested Person

How to be less boring by borrowing from a journalist’s toolkit.

Journalists know a thing or two about curiosity that most of us miss.

When I was younger, I assumed the people who lit up a room were just… built differently, like they were born with stories in their back pocket, a sharper take on everything, wickedly cool charisma, and a way of talking that made people want to be around them. But somewhere along the way, I realized that most of those people weren’t performing.

They were just paying attention.

They noticed things the rest of us skimmed right past.

And if that sounds like something you’d want for yourself, if you’re trying to show up in conversations with more curiosity and less autopilot, be more interested in others and interesting to others, then there’s one group of people worth studying…

Journalists.

And not just the ones anchoring the nightly news. I mean independent voices on podcasts and Substack, the YouTubers who can take a random thread of life and somehow spin it into something you feel in your chest.