I’m not going to make you dig all the way to the bottom to get the nugget of gold.
If you want to be the most interesting person in the room, listen carefully. It starts and ends with this:
To Be Interesting, Be Interested.
Now that you have the answer, let’s show our work and figure out how we arrive at this hallowed destination.
Be Interested in the World Around You
Curiosity is sexy. Why?
Because curious people go out and discover. They have adventures and stories worth sharing.
Think back to the most interesting people you know. Most often, these people are characterized by having done a lot of things spread across a wide breadth of fields. They compulsively chase new stimuli, and in the process, they become wickedly interesting.
By exercising a student’s mindset of constant learning, and a child’s mindset of constant exploration, these individuals achieve mastery of themselves and the world around them that makes them pulse with an aura of interest.
You need to pulse, my friend.
Step One: Go do interesting things.
Be Interested in the People Around You
Here’s possibly the most important aspect of becoming the most interesting person in the room.
It doesn’t matter how interesting you are if, at the end of the day, you are self-absorbed and obsessed with proving to the world how cool and interesting you are.
Truly, nobody inherently cares that you wrestled tigers in Siberia, smoked peyote with the Dalai Lama on Everest’s highest peak, and negotiated a cease-fire between mysterious intergalactic beings bent on world domination.
Don’t dump your resume of accomplishments on me and expect me to care.
I don’t.
And guess what?
Nobody else does either.
Why?
Because, before we give two hoots about you, we need to feel that you give two hoots about us. Sure, this might seem a self-centered perspective, but humans are, by their very nature, a self-centered bunch.
We are the most important, and therefore, the most interesting things in our world.
There is nothing you can do or say that will make me think otherwise. And it’s the same for every two legged, hairless ape crab-walking across the globe.
Now that’s not to say that I will never be interested in you, but we’ve gotta cover some common ground beforehand.
So, let’s loop this back to my original point:
To Be Interesting, Be Interested.
Showing interest (and not just feigned, sycophantic ass-kissing interest) in the person across from you is the most sure-fire way to leave a positive impression.
There’s an art to this, because it’s both creepy and counterproductive to the task at hand if you just grill your conversational partner with questions. This holds true regardless of whether you’re on a date, hanging with a friend, or talking to your boss.
Nobody likes to be grilled.
Then again, we all like being given the opportunity to talk about our favorite topic: Ourselves.
There’s a trick to walking the tight-rope between giving somebody the 3rd degree versus engaging in an actually stimulating conversation.
I’ll give you a hint: One single word in that previous sentence holds the key to unlocking the world of being interesting.
No, not tight-rope. I count that as two words (even with the hyphen).
That’s right, the word was:
To be interesting, you must engage with the other person.
That means you don’t just rattle off question-after-question.
Of the people I work with on Building Rapport, this is by far one the most common mistake I see.
Asking a ton of questions doesn’t necessarily make you seem interested.
Often, we can find ourselves in the trap of just waiting for our next opportunity to ask a follow up question, for surely if I can keep you talking, the more you’ll like me.
Right?
Wrong.
This is a deadly conversational sin almost on par with hogging the entire conversation to talk about yourself.
(Nobody needs to tell you why that’s a bad idea, right? We all understand hogging conversations doesn’t make you interesting, it makes you unbearable.)
Well, it works the same with question asking. Grilling people does not make you more interesting. It makes you stressful.
Okay, so if we’re supposed to show interest in our conversational partner by getting them to talk about themselves, but we aren’t supposed to grill them with questions, what are we to do?
Where is the path out of this horrid conversational forest?
Here’s the trick:
Ask your question, wait for the answer, and then follow it up with a statement (preferably a statement referring back to your own personal experiences).
Upon reaching the end of your statement, you can loop it back into a question, or just leave the statement open ended, and give the other person the opportunity to take the initiative.
Once more, here’s the pattern:
- Ask Question
- Actively Listen
- Respond with Statement
- Repeat
This pattern is the entire key to engaging with another person.
When executed correctly, the conversation is infinitely more engaging for both parties, as there is an equal trade of information occurring.
Remember, whether it’s you or them, there is nothing worse than one person dominating an entire conversation.
The person speaking the most is not necessarily the most interesting.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking you need to talk more.
In fact, as a general rule, it’s a good idea to talk less, listen more. By doing so, you can guide the conversation in interesting directions.
Recall the last truly interesting conversation you had. In most cases, it wasn’t a conversation about any singular topic, but rather, it drew interesting corollaries across a multitude of topics.
A conversation that began with birds, morphed into a conversation about drinking wine on the beach of a French villa, which lead into a conversation about the time so-and-so got mugged in Thailand, which lead into a conversation about how the decrease in grafitti in New York subway cars in the 1980s and 90s lead to a significant decrease in the rise of crime overall.
Now, of course, this conversation couldn’t have occurred if you had no conversational ammunition to throw at it. That is, don’t be as dull as a blunted nail.
So, to bring it full circle, let’s reemphasize the point we started with:
To Be Interesting, Be Interested.
Remember, this extends to the person standing across from you, but also to your own life and the pursuit of interesting experiences.
Go out and explore. See the world. Experience a myriad of interesting moments.
Then come back, ready to share, but remember that no matter how many bulls you chased in Pamplona, to the person standing across from you, you are, at best, only the second most interesting person in the world.
And you know what? That’s okay.
Go into the conversation agreeing with that person, let the conversational tide whisk you away, and I bet you’ll walk away having had a better time for it.
At the end of the day, if the other person enjoys the conversation as much as you, then guess what?
For that brief moment in time, to that single person, you were the most interesting person in the room.
