Seth Godin with another pithy post:
Interesting and Interested . . . it helps to be both. These are the two ways you earn attention.
If it’s so obvious, why is it so difficult?
Everybody wants to be interesting, to have people listen intently to their thoughts, to have them yearn for their advice, laugh at their jokes, revel in their successes and commiserate in their failures.
But the only way to be interesting is to be successful. The only way to be successful is to be interested.
Your success can come in any field, be it business, art, literature, gardening, mechanics, welding, whatever. All that matters is that you accomplish something, that you succeed at something. And the only way to accomplish something is to be interested enough to put in the long hours it takes to become proficient, then to become good, then to become great. Then you’ll be interesting, because you’ll have something to offer.
If Michael Jordan hadn’t gone on to become the greatest basketball player of all time, no one would care that he got cut from his high school team. If that’s where the story stopped, if that’s the height of his accomplishments, he wouldn’t be interesting. The success made him interesting, and it only came because he was interested in the game, interested in being good enough to make that high school team, then good enough to be a college player, then a star, then the greatest.
You can’t choose to be interesting overnight. The only choice you have is to be interested.
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