Russell Davies talks about how to be interesting:
While I was at the U of O I kept going on about how the core skill of any future creative business person will be ‘being interesting’. People will employ and want to work with (and want to be with) interesting people.
And since I’d spent quite a lot of time telling them all the things they should stop doing I’d thought I’d try and teach something useful. Since I don’t actually know anything useful I had to make something up. Which is below. It takes about 10 minutes to teach but it’ll take a lifetime for people to work out if it works or not, and by then I’ll be long gone. Ha!
A quick summary: first, be interested, and share. Then …
- Take at least one picture everyday. Post it to flickr.
- Start a blog. Write at least one sentence every week.
- Keep a scrapbook
- Every week, read a magazine you’ve never read before
- Once a month interview someone for 20 minutes, work out how to make them interesting. Podcast it.
- Collect something
- Once a week sit in a coffee-shop or cafe for an hour and listen to other people’s conversations. Take notes. Blog about it. (Carefully)
- Every month write 50 words about one piece of visual art, one piece of writing, one piece of music and one piece of film or TV. Do other art forms if you can. Blog about it
- Make something
- Read
The only caveat I’d have to this list is that if I had to do them all, I’d be so busy being interesting that I’d have no time for anything else.
So I’ll take the list in moderation. But it is a great list.