Many years ago I listened to an audiobook by I think Jim Rohn. It concluded a segment where he said: “Even if you don’t have had a near-death experience, you still experience something in your life worth talking about.”
My response was “Well, I do have had an experience that can be reasonably described as near-death experience but I still have nothing to talk about.” At that point, I admited to myself that my issue wasn’t lack of interesting experiences but a lack of an ability to talk about my experiences.
I would guess that this is also true for the majority of people on LW who don’t feel like they are interesting.
You give dancing as a stereotypical interesting hobby. I don’t think the fact that I was dancing Salsa for 6 1⁄2 years on average 2 times per week made me an interesting conversation partner. It rather provided me with a space for social interaction where I didn’t have to practice telling stories very much.
Jim Rohn advice was that if you experience something worth telling other people about, write it in a notebook. Then when you have a situation where there’s an opportunity to tell the story, tell the story.
The ability to tell stories is a lot more important than the content of the story. If you think you are bad at it and afraid to practice it at complex social interaction, maybe your parents would be happy to hear the story from you. You might call your mother or father and tell them: “Something happened in my life that I want to tell you about. It’s not a big event but I want to tell you about it.” Then you tell them the story. If your parents are typical they very likely appreciate the act of you sharing the story with them, even if you don’t have much skill at telling it.
I was writing about being an interesting person, not being an interesting conversationalist. See the comment I edited in: “I want this article to focus more on being an interesting person, rather than being an interesting conversationalist. Some ideas about conversations slipped in here, but I’ll probably shift them over to the article on conversation when I get around to writing it”
Many people have told me that the think it is cool that I dance, in contrast no-one told me they thought it was cool that I played role playing games, back when I did it, except for people who engaged in that hobby as well. You can definitely get people to value you more by teaching people a few moves of Salsa and I’ve used it to get a few dates on Tinder.
Jim’s advice about telling stories is pretty good, I’ll include it if I write an article about it.
I was writing about being an interesting person, not being an interesting conversationalist.
Could you clarify this distinction? Someone is viewed as interesting if they manage to present an interesting image of themselves, and conversation is one of the main ways in which we do present an image of ourselves to others (other ways including writing, public speaking, and physical appearance/demeanor).
So distinguishing “being an interesting person” from “being an interesting conversationalist” sounds odd to me, since a very large percentage of our interesting-ness comes from being an interesting conversationalist (or some of those other things like being an interesting writer or public speaker, but I’m guessing you wouldn’t include those either?).
I’m guessing you’re defining “interesting” as something like “interesting is having done unusual things”, but even there you only become interesting to others if you’re successful at telling others about those things.
Sorry, but I’m actually not going to clarify this distinction. Getting this distinction right matters very little to me. I’ll put some content in one article and some in the other article based on my own subjective opinion and if someone feels that something better belongs in the other article, well tough luck.
What does that phrase mean to you?
To me it’s interesting means that if you are at a party other people want to talk to you.
When it comes optimizing my own life for myself I don’t focus on being interesting but rather attempt to do meaningful things that are good for me and the world around me.
It means the kind of person that people would want to meet. Being good at discussion is hugely important, but that’s exactly why I want to put it into its own article.
Everybody who reads LW and integrates what they read into their lives is an interesting person provided they can tell stories about it.
If someone asks you what you do with your free time and you tell him that you read LW with is a community about getting rid of biases and fallacies that isn’t interesting.
If you tell him you read LW and there you learned to fix your sleep that’s interesting. If you tell him how you now take Melatonin and have now much more energy in your life that’s a conversation they can remember a year later, provided you tell the story well.
Applied rationality provides for experiences that make good stories, provided you are good at story telling. On the other hand I don’t think my Salsa dancing provides for experiences that make good stories that will likely to be remembered a year down the road.
I went to that extreme that my life was interesting enough to have two reporters with a camera man coming along to film a talk I was given at the Chaos Computer Congress for a Quantified Self documentary and at the same time seeing that I’m not socially interesting and feel like I can’t tell interesting things at the end of 2011.
Having “interesting to journalists” but not “interesting for standard social interaction” covered might be a personal extreme that isn’t true for everybody in LW, but I think most people here are basically interesting and there issues with other people not finding them as interesting as they would like lies in an inability to communicate interesting stories.
Having “interesting to journalists” but not “interesting for standard social interaction” covered might be a personal extreme that isn’t true for everybody in LW,
Second datapoint: I’ve been interviewed by journalists a few times, am terrible at people in general. (A whole half of these would have been dull and pointless interviews if not for my visual impairment. The others I could see happening regardless.)
Many years ago I listened to an audiobook by I think Jim Rohn. It concluded a segment where he said: “Even if you don’t have had a near-death experience, you still experience something in your life worth talking about.”
My response was “Well, I do have had an experience that can be reasonably described as near-death experience but I still have nothing to talk about.” At that point, I admited to myself that my issue wasn’t lack of interesting experiences but a lack of an ability to talk about my experiences. I would guess that this is also true for the majority of people on LW who don’t feel like they are interesting.
You give dancing as a stereotypical interesting hobby. I don’t think the fact that I was dancing Salsa for 6 1⁄2 years on average 2 times per week made me an interesting conversation partner. It rather provided me with a space for social interaction where I didn’t have to practice telling stories very much.
Jim Rohn advice was that if you experience something worth telling other people about, write it in a notebook. Then when you have a situation where there’s an opportunity to tell the story, tell the story. The ability to tell stories is a lot more important than the content of the story. If you think you are bad at it and afraid to practice it at complex social interaction, maybe your parents would be happy to hear the story from you. You might call your mother or father and tell them: “Something happened in my life that I want to tell you about. It’s not a big event but I want to tell you about it.” Then you tell them the story. If your parents are typical they very likely appreciate the act of you sharing the story with them, even if you don’t have much skill at telling it.
I was writing about being an interesting person, not being an interesting conversationalist. See the comment I edited in: “I want this article to focus more on being an interesting person, rather than being an interesting conversationalist. Some ideas about conversations slipped in here, but I’ll probably shift them over to the article on conversation when I get around to writing it”
Many people have told me that the think it is cool that I dance, in contrast no-one told me they thought it was cool that I played role playing games, back when I did it, except for people who engaged in that hobby as well. You can definitely get people to value you more by teaching people a few moves of Salsa and I’ve used it to get a few dates on Tinder.
Jim’s advice about telling stories is pretty good, I’ll include it if I write an article about it.
Could you clarify this distinction? Someone is viewed as interesting if they manage to present an interesting image of themselves, and conversation is one of the main ways in which we do present an image of ourselves to others (other ways including writing, public speaking, and physical appearance/demeanor).
So distinguishing “being an interesting person” from “being an interesting conversationalist” sounds odd to me, since a very large percentage of our interesting-ness comes from being an interesting conversationalist (or some of those other things like being an interesting writer or public speaker, but I’m guessing you wouldn’t include those either?).
I’m guessing you’re defining “interesting” as something like “interesting is having done unusual things”, but even there you only become interesting to others if you’re successful at telling others about those things.
Sorry, but I’m actually not going to clarify this distinction. Getting this distinction right matters very little to me. I’ll put some content in one article and some in the other article based on my own subjective opinion and if someone feels that something better belongs in the other article, well tough luck.
That’s fair. :)
What does that phrase mean to you? To me it’s interesting means that if you are at a party other people want to talk to you.
When it comes optimizing my own life for myself I don’t focus on being interesting but rather attempt to do meaningful things that are good for me and the world around me.
It means the kind of person that people would want to meet. Being good at discussion is hugely important, but that’s exactly why I want to put it into its own article.
Everybody who reads LW and integrates what they read into their lives is an interesting person provided they can tell stories about it.
If someone asks you what you do with your free time and you tell him that you read LW with is a community about getting rid of biases and fallacies that isn’t interesting.
If you tell him you read LW and there you learned to fix your sleep that’s interesting. If you tell him how you now take Melatonin and have now much more energy in your life that’s a conversation they can remember a year later, provided you tell the story well.
Applied rationality provides for experiences that make good stories, provided you are good at story telling. On the other hand I don’t think my Salsa dancing provides for experiences that make good stories that will likely to be remembered a year down the road.
I went to that extreme that my life was interesting enough to have two reporters with a camera man coming along to film a talk I was given at the Chaos Computer Congress for a Quantified Self documentary and at the same time seeing that I’m not socially interesting and feel like I can’t tell interesting things at the end of 2011.
Having “interesting to journalists” but not “interesting for standard social interaction” covered might be a personal extreme that isn’t true for everybody in LW, but I think most people here are basically interesting and there issues with other people not finding them as interesting as they would like lies in an inability to communicate interesting stories.
Second datapoint: I’ve been interviewed by journalists a few times, am terrible at people in general. (A whole half of these would have been dull and pointless interviews if not for my visual impairment. The others I could see happening regardless.)