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archerships
1. Make a personal goal of being more interesting. Write this goal down, in your own words. Be specific about what this means to you. Come up with a plan. Write the plan down also. Goals are “SMART”. Specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-limited, with a date for completion. My SMART goal: “By January 1, 2011, be so interesting that I have 5,000 friends on Facebook who will give me at least 100 Likes or comments each day to my 10 or more links, photos, and Status updates.” Also, “Be recognized, formally as informally, as being an interesting and interested host for an ongoing salon discussion about any and all topics, in which FB friends feel safe to be themselves, and find themselves appreciated as much or more than other places in their lives and work.”
2. Think of how your skill at “being interesting” will go through the four levels of competence: unconscious incompetence, conscious incompetence, conscious competence, and unconscious competence. Recognize that you and most people don’t really know what they don’t know about being interesting. Humility is the beginning of wisdom. And being more interesting.
3. Unconscious incompetence: Recognize that you don’t know what you don’t know about being interesting. Ask people to tell you what specifically that you say or write that is or was interesting, and what wasn’t interesting. Record yourself in the engaged in the act of talking, with audio or video. If you have an iPhone, recording yourself speaking is easy using Facetime. You can download the Dragon Naturally Speaking app on iPhone or PC and make a transcript of what you say. Look at it the transcript after 24 hours or more (for greater detachment, and circle what you found interesting. Say that. Leave out the boring parts. Try to minimize repetition of catch phrases, which can become like nervous ticks.
4. Conscious incompetence. I used to live with a Harvard architect named Susan Gill, back when I lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We decided to be more interesting, and agreed that if either of us said something was boring, we’d say, right away, “Boring”, which we found ourselves shortening to “B!” It was sort of painful for a few days (which felt like months) hearing each other say, “B!” “B!” “B!” However, it shocked us how much of what we said was, objectively, boring. This is one of the most amazing exercises I’ve experienced for achieving the state of “conscious incompetence” about being boring, which is almost halfway towards “unconscious competence” about being interesting.
5. Conscious competence. Learn from the master practitioners of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) how to “model the strategies” of masters. Make lists of the most interesting people you personally know. Get a book of great speeches (such as Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History by William Safire) and read them out loud, developing an “ear” for grand themes. John Sutton once told me, “Great people talk about great themes. Medium people talk about places and event. Small people talk, generally poorly, about other people”. Develop confidence in speaking about how to uplift and improve the human condition – freedom, truth, justice, peace, success, learning, longevity – all are the sorts of themes that can enlist the attention of ever larger audiences.
6. Unconscious competence. It takes 21 days to make a new habit. Keep seeking to add new habits every 21 days. For instance, make a vow not to say anything negative about other people (unless you get paid to do so as part of your job) for 21 days. Hopefully you can continue this habit. Come up with a new good habit related to being interesting each three week period, generally one at a time unless you are unusually good at installing new habits.
7. Get a journal and track your progress in being interesting. Write down at least ten things a day that you did or said or write or observed or heard that you felt, or others felt (both are valid), were interesting.
8. Go on Facebook and find at least ten things a day to “Like”. Aim to put up at least ten things a day that others like. Try not to put up things that other people won’t “Like”. You will find that the more other people’s things that you “Like” (as long as you are AUTHENTIC, and not just a Like-spammer), especially if you add a comment that TELLS your FB friend WHY you like something or, better, what exactly you found interesting.
9. Ask people to write certain things. I have found myself asking people to write FB Notes (which are “perennial” and remain, rather than just rolling away and disappearing) about things that are interesting. I think FB would be much more interesting if friends “catch each other doing something right”, only catch each other “being interesting”, and POUNCE on it, like a cat with a mouse toy, and ask for more.
10. Say or write, “Tell me more!” when someone says or writes something interesting.
11. This is pretty cliché, but it’s still true: if you want to be interesting, be interested. However, people have BS detectors, and can spot inauthenticity. Don’t “Like” something if you don’t really like it. By giving dishonest signals, you aren’t serving anyone. It does mean searching a little more for things to like, but you can sometimes find something that can change the quality of your life, and then share that, so search away.
12. Invest in things and places and people who are interesting. Think of the most interesting people you personally know, and spend time with them; the most interesting places, and put them into your goals, even years out, and go there; the most interesting things, and buy or rent or borrow or observe them. Ask: what percentage of your discretionary income (if any) you spend on things are really interesting. Increase this over time.
13. If you have a choice between staying in and watching TV, or going out on an adventure, try to develop a “bias for weird adventures” and go out into the night and find weird stuff to get mixed up in.
14. Facebook is like London: “(W)hen a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford."— Samuel Johnson. Be like Facebook. Or London.
15. Be kind, especially to children or animals. Part of being interesting in sustainable, meaningful way is being kind. Kindness makes a heart connection. Heart connections are sustainable over years.
16. Mean people end up not being interesting. I don’t understand the attraction of Rush Limbaugh, Howard Stern, Glenn Beck, or others who engage in mean-spirited criticism, even if they say things that are provocative, and get people angry. Just because someone can make you angry doesn’t mean they are interesting. Meanness is an endocrine system connection, especially adrenaline, and ends up being exhausting, and boring.
17. Have a PMA. Tell people right up front that you have a PMA and value a PMA in others, like Meagan Rasmussen does (uniquely, of all my 4,500 FB friends) right under her profile picture in the summary box. Cultivating a Positive Mental Attitude (PMA) takes effort and practice, just like being interesting. You can be interesting by being negative, but you also end up being more isolated, alone, and surrounded by other negative people.
18. Keep in mind that there are people so fragile that one bad experience can make them give up and commit suicide. Yes, not exactly the most logically consistent thing to follow cultivating a PMA. However, part of the reason to be interesting, kind, positive, and optimistic (next point) is that no one will end up killing themselves because you caused them to feel so terrible that they ended it all.
19. Be optimistic. If you aren’t sure how to do this, read Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist, and buy copies and give them away or loan them to friends who will read them.
20. Be future-interested. In general, people who are negative and talkative are focused on the past, and all the problems of the past. I know thousands of people who are excited and interested about the future. Jason Silva is a good example. He posts cool stuff all day, and showed me via his Facebook posts that a new way to live is to serve as a “curator” of content, in his case, about the future. Every day news comes out of a scientific, technological, organizational or corporate, government or social innovation. There’s a breakthrough at least every week. If you are interested in the future, you see these things, and can bring them to the attention of your FB friends. This is the modern equivalent of being a hunter-gatherer in the information age, and is just as important as meat and herbs used to be.
(End of part 1 of 5).
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Date: 2010-10-05 01:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-05 02:36 am (UTC)102. Link back instead of replicating.
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Date: 2010-10-05 02:56 am (UTC)102. There is nothing to link back to, as his original post is friends only. (It's replicated with permission.)
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Date: 2010-10-05 02:49 am (UTC)The author creates a Russell-style paradox with respect to himself.
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Date: 2010-10-05 04:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-05 06:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-05 06:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-05 06:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-05 07:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-05 08:43 pm (UTC)But some of the advice is really sound, nonetheless (#12, 15, 16, and 18 is touching, anyway.) And (thankfully) applicable in the world outside of Facebook, as well.