I just realized something.

Nobody wants to be boring.

EDIT BY BoB: You're welcome, everybody!It’s not exactly the done thing to say “I want to be interesting”, but the enthusiastic response to Russell Davies’ article How to Be Interesting suggests that it’s something we aspire to. And with good reason. Over three years before Seth Godin told us in Linchpin that being remarkable (and therefore indispensable) is the key to a successful career, Russell said essentially the same thing:

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.

If you work in the creative industries, this is pretty much a no-brainer, but now that we’re living in the age of the creative economy, when more and more businesses are being urged to think like media companies, it starts to look like a recipe for survival and success in any industry.

So how can we do it? Russell offers some great tips, but I want to draw your attention to the two basic principles that they follow from:

The way to be interesting is to be interested. You’ve got to find what’s interesting in everything, you’ve got to be good at noticing things, you’ve got to be good at listening. If you find people (and things) interesting, they’ll find you interesting.

Interesting people are good at sharing. You can’t be interested in someone who won’t tell you anything. Being good at sharing is not the same as talking and talking and talking. It means you share your ideas, you let people play with them and you’re good at talking about them without having to talk about yourself.

Jonathan Morrow offers more good advice in his own piece titled How to Be Interesting, where he lists 21 techniques writers can use to be more interesting to their audiences. And of course his advice applies to all of us, not just writers. Here’s one of my favourites:

11. Unleash your inner dork: Many blog posts are like miniature textbooks; they’re instructive, well-organized, and put you to sleep with their lack of enthusiasm. If you want to become famous on the web, stop trying to sound like an all-knowing teacher and unleash the “inner dork” inside of you — the part of you that’s so enamored with your topic that everyone else thinks it’s funny… but they pay attention anyway. More on dorkyness here.

Russell and Jon are both very interesting fellows, doing interesting stuff. They’re very different characters, working in different fields, for different audiences. But they share two principles, that are critical to what makes them interesting (and therefore successful):
1. Follow Your Interests

I agree with Russell that “the way to be interesting is to be interested” but I’m going to qualify his advice slightly. I don’t think most of us can “find what’s interesting in everything”. Russell is a confirmed creative generalist, so he probably can, but I think most of us have a more limited range of interests. Which is no bad thing. In fact, I think it’s the key to a lot of happiness and fulfilment in life, let alone simply ‘being interesting’.

Rather than try to find what’s interesting in everything, I suggest we pay attention to the things we genuinely find interesting — no matter how obscure, silly, embarrassing or irrelevant they might appear.

Because when you feel curiosity, interest and fascination, you bring your whole self to whatever you’re doing, you give it your full attention, and you have all the energy and persistence you’ll need to do something amazing.

“It’s a reactive thing, like a Geiger counter; you click whenever you come close to whatever you were built to do.”

Stephen King

I’m not exactly a paragon of interestingness, but I have noticed people are frequently intrigued and occasionally bemused by my own range of interests. I’ve had my share of funny looks on mentioning poetry in a corporate setting. Conversely, some of my fellow poets have been shocked to discover my interest in business. Audiences sit up a little straighter when I mention that I’m a trained hypnotist. A friend once told me she didn’t understand how I could “write such sensitive poems AND be obsessed with football”. The other psychotherapists in my peer vision group think my interest in ‘internet stuff’ is a bit odd. And so on.

It all seems perfectly normal to me. I don’t see why being interested in one thing should mean I’m not interested in another. And apart from the intrinsic interest of each topic or activity, it makes for a pretty creative mix, when you start to find connections between them. Frans Johansson calls this The Medici Effect:

When you step into an intersection of fields, disciplines, or cultures, you can combine existing concepts into a large number of extraordinary new ideas.

To take a genuinely interesting example, Leonardo da Vinci is often revered as a universal genius, equally at home in the arts, sciences and engineering. (He was also a dab hand at organising parties and making mechanical toys, but those accomplishments tend to get glossed over.) But as Donald Sassoon points out in his book Mona Lisa, such a wide range of interests was fairly typical of his era:

In his time … the conventional separation between disciplines had not yet developed. Universalism was an attribute common to all gifted men of the Renaissance, not a unique trait of Leonardo’s…

Leonardo moved easily from science to art and back again. Only in a culture in which there were no rigid boundaries between the two could this take place…

He was in good company. Machiavelli not only wrote his famous treatise on politics (The Prince), but also a history and a play (La Mandragora) still frequently performed. Albrecht Durer studied mathematics and geometry, wrote treatises on measurement in 1525 and on military engineering in 1527, and was a supreme master of woodcut and copper engraving as well as a major painter. Nicola Angelo, unlike Leonardo, managed to excel in four distinct fields: architecture, painting, sculpture and poetry.

These days, we’re in a culture where “the conventional separation between disciplines” is breaking up, or at least becoming more permeable. As Russell says, “The marvelous thing about tinterweb is that it’s got great tools for being interested and great tools for sharing”.

There are plenty of people holding up their hands in horror at the lack of single-minded focus among the ‘butterfly minds’ of today’s Internet generation, but perhaps this is not a hideous modern aberration so much as a return to the world of Leonardo, where it was considered normal, even admirable, to flit from one thing to another. Leonardo’s notebooks are full of half-baked projects, and flying machines that quite literally never got off the ground, but nobody seems to complain too much.

Whatever interests, enthusiasms or idle curiosities drift through your mind, you have the tools to follow them up, learn more about them and connect with people who share them. I suggest you take full advantage.
2. Commit

The word ‘interest’ has its roots in the Latin verb ‘interesse’, meaning ‘matter, make a difference’. And another of its meanings, apart from ‘fascination’, is ‘ to have an interest in’ something, i.e. a stake or investment in it.

Real interest is not passive. Dilettantes are boring because they have many ‘interests’ but don’t do anything with them. Critics are boring because they sit on the sidelines, carping and moaning. Or as Teddy Roosevelt put it in more elevated language:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or whether the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, and comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and short coming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be without those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.

I came across this passage in a book by my friend Raj Setty, who follows it up with a friendly challenge:

Who do people want to follow: someone who was on the field playing or someone sitting on the ringside seat commenting on how to play?

Play!

Upbeat, by Rajesh Setty

These days, we have more than opportunities than ever to play, to get going without waiting or asking for permission. Write a book and publish it yourself. Start a business. Learn an instrument. Run a marathon or climb Everest. Go on a mission to see the entire world. Start a movement.

The internet gives you the tools, the information and the connections you need. If you can’t do it all yourself, there are plenty of places where you can find like-minded people with complementary skills.

Things only get really interesting when you commit to doing something. When you have skin in the game. When you take a risk, do your best to succeed, accept that things will probably go wrong — and do it anyway.

how to be interesting

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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!

I’ve based it on two assumptions:

The way to be interesting is to be interested. You’ve got to find what’s interesting in everything, you’ve got to be good at noticing things, you’ve got to be good at listening. If you find people (and things) interesting, they’ll find you interesting.

Interesting people are good at sharing. You can’t be interested in someone who won’t tell you anything. Being good at sharing is not the same as talking and talking and talking. It means you share your ideas, you let people play with them and you’re good at talking about them without having to talk about yourself.

The marvelous thing about tinterweb is that it’s got great tools for being interested and great tools for sharing. So I’ve used them a lot. It should, of course, be obvious that there are many other ways to be interesting. Some of them don't involve computers at all. These are just 10 things, and if you do them you’ll get more interesting. Or at the very least you’ll start practising the skills of being interesting.

It's sort of didactic, bossy even, but it's supposed to be instructional, rules you can follow. If you do them, and send me evidence that you’ve done them for three months, then I’ll send you a marvelous ‘I’m More Interesting Than I Was Three Months Ago’ certificate.

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1. Take at least one picture everyday. Post it to flickr.

You should carry a camera with you. A phonecam will do. The act of carrying a camera, and always keeping an eye out for a picture to take changes the way you look at the world. It makes you notice more things. It keeps you tuned in.

Posting it to flickr (or other photosharing sites) means that you’re sharing it. It’s in public. This will make you think a little harder about what you shoot and it might draw you into conversation about your pictures.

2. Start a blog. Write at least one sentence every week.

This is pretty easy. If you just did this much I’d be disapppointed. You should write more sentences. Or you should write one true sentence. But I suspect that you won’t be able to limit yourself to just one sentence, I suspect you’ll get bitten and want to do more.

It’s easy to knock blogging as a kind of journalism of the banal but in some ways that’s its strength. Bloggers don’t go out and investigate things (mostly) they’re not in exciting or glamorous places, they’re not given a story, they have to build one out of the everyday lives they lead. And this makes them good at noticing things, things that others might not have seen. And being a blogger, feeling the need to write about stuff makes you pay attention to more things, makes you go out and see more stuff, makes you carry a notebook, keeps you tuned in to the world.

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3. Keep a scrapbook

I’ve talked about this before. It’s good. Do it.

4. Every week, read a magazine you’ve never read before

Interesting people are interested in all sorts of things. That means they explore all kinds of worlds, they go places they wouldn’t expect to like and work out what’s good and interesting there. An easy way to do this is with magazines. Specialist magazines let you explore the solar system of human activities from your armchair. Try it, it’s fantastic.

5. Once a month interview someone for 20 minutes, work out how to make them interesting. Podcast it.

Again, being interesting is about being interested. Interviewing is about making the other person the star; finding out what they know or think that’s interesting. Could be anyone, a friend, a colleague, a stranger, anyone. Find out what’s compelling about them. Interviewing stops you butting in too much and forces you to listen. Good thing to practice. (And it's worth noticing the people who are good at it.) Podcasting is sharing. Sharing is something you must get used to.

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6. Collect something

It could be anything. It could be pictures of things. But become an expert in something unexpected and unregarded. Develop a passion. Learn how to communicate that to other people without scaring them off. Find the other few people who share your interest. Learn how to be useful in that community.

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7. 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)

Take little dips in other people’s lives. Listen to their speech patterns and their concerns. Try and get them down on paper. (Don’t let them see. Try not to get beaten up.) Don’t force it, don’t hop from table to table in search of better eavesdropping, just bask in the conversations that come your way.

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8. 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

If you want to work in a creative business (and before long most businesses will be creative businesses) you’ll have to get used to having a point of view on artistic stuff. Even if it’s not very artistic. You’ll have to be comfortable with expressing an opinion on things you don’t know how to make or do, like music or writing. You get better at that through practice. And through sharing what you’ve written.

9. Make something

Do something with your hands. Create something from nothing. It could be knots, it could be whittling, Lego, cake or knitting. Take some time to get outside your head. Ideally, make something you have no idea how to do. Get something from Make and try it, assuming you’ll screw it up the first time. People love people who can make things. Making’s the new thinking. Share your things on the your blog, or, if you’re brilliant maybe you can share them on etsy.

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10. Read:

Understanding Comics - Scott McCloud
The Mezzanine - Nicholson Baker
The Visual Display Of Quantitative Information - Edward Tufte

All these books are good for their own reasons but they’re also good examples of people who are really interested in stuff that others think of as banal and who explain it in a way that makes you share their passion. That's good.

And that's it.

Anyone got any others?

How to Be Interesting Without Saying a Word
How to Be Interesting Without Saying a Word

Have you ever looked at someone and just felt that they were an interesting person? I’m sure we all have sensed a person to be interesting at some time in our lives. These people did not even need to say a word to spark this tickle of curiosity within us. There is a list of characteristics about these people that I have learned to cultivate in myself that I’m going to share with you in this article – so that you can be more interesting without having to say a word.

We know there are two aspects to communication: verbal and non-verbal communication. Because these interesting people do not say a word to make you curious about them, their interesting characteristics come from good non-verbal communication, also known as body language. Non-verbal communication gives you the power to be interesting, amongst many other benefits.

A lot of lies and misleading information has been made about body language’s impact on communication. One such example comes from Albert Mehrabian, a psychologist at the University of California in Los Angeles, who created the “7%-38%-55% Rule”. It is a communication rule defining what factors give meaning to our words. The rule says 7% of meaning is in the spoken words, 38% of meaning is in how we say the words, and 55% of meaning is in facial expressions. As I’ve revealed in the 15 greatest communication myths, this communication rule cannot be applied to all situations, as Mehrabian says that this rule applies only when someone is discussing their likes and dislikes. Nonetheless, Mehrabian does emphasize that body language is always a strong influence in communication.

Knowing the power of body language, you will be able to control your non-verbal communication to communicate the messages you want others to receive. If you want to appear attractive, then your body language has the power to communicate that. If you want to appear lazy, boring, or unattractive, then you adjust your body language accordingly and others will immediately begin judging you as lazy, boring, or unattractive. Your body language has the power to influence and communicate what you want – in our case, how to be interesting.

I have learned three body language tricks to make myself appear more interesting. These techniques are simple, but they are powerful and may take a bit of practice until you become unconsciously competent with them. People will see you as more interesting and charismatic once you use them. Here are the three most powerful non-verbal skills you can put on yourself that will instantly make you more interesting, rapidly improve your attractiveness, make you more approachable, and quickly explode your confidence like never before with such ease:

Gooey Eyes

As I type this, it’s ironic that I’m listening to a song called “Open Your Eyes” by DJ Tiesto while the next song to be played is “Iris” by Goo Goo Dolls (normally, I don’t listen to lyrical music because it steals my point of focus). Eyes have always been important to humans. Without eyes, human communication relies on sounds. Without good eye contact, communication can be destroyed.

Most people’s understanding of good eye contact is to ensure you keep looking at the person, but there are eye contact techniques like the gooey eyes techniques that you can use to improve your body language and make yourself more interesting without having to say a word. The other person will see your great eye contact and instantly infer from your body language that you are no ordinary person. Excellent eye contact is powerful in giving the message that you are an interesting person.

Generally, the technique involves making more eye contact with the person that you want to perceived by as being more interesting. It is a slow, deliberate movement to make people like you. The imagery you want to have – and where it gets the “gooey eyes” name from – is visualizing your eye contact with the person like a sticky toffee being peeled off a surface. Look at the person as per normal, but keep the eye contact going a little longer than you normally would. Just before you turn your head down, to the side, or to someone else’s eyes to break the eye contact, maintain eye contact for a bit longer by peeling your gooey eyes off the person as you turn your head. Peel your eyes off the person like a sticky toffee being lifted from the surface.
Peel your eyes off the person like a sticky toffee being lifted from the surface.

Gooey eyes makes you interesting because your head is shifting somewhere else, but your eyes are momentarily focused on the person you are talking with. It shows the person you are confident enough to make strong contact, a dominant trait, as you go about what you are doing. The technique also communicates that the person has something about them that other people do not see. You are breaking the eye contact as normal yet you continue to visually absorb them because they are interesting to you.

Gooey eyes contain several different levels of intensity depending on the person and the situation. Generally, women to women and men to women can have very strong eye contact. When someone makes strong eye contact with a woman in a conversation, their conversational intimacy heightens. The woman instantly feels more interested in the person.

Women interact with others to feel intimacy and strong eye contact is associated with intimacy. Take a look at the time women spend on the phone. They can take hours talking about what happened in one day. Now think about how long a man-to-man phone call takes. We will often punch in the numbers and be off the phone within 1 minute. I’ve had so many man-to-man calls that have lasted less than 30 seconds. We are very objective based. I can’t imagine us guys asking each other, “Oh, so what are your feelings about…?”

If you are a guy and want to appear attractive to a lady, make an effort to never look away from her until she loses eye contact with you. Using this technique will display explosive amounts of confidence – a very attractive quality – to the lady. When you and a woman see one another, make strong eye contact in addition to applying the gooey eyes technique as you look away. Women love slow, meaningful body language. You will catch her attention, show confidence, and be far more interesting to her. Use these techniques while keeping in mind that if she doesn’t know you, be sure to not eye her down without talking to her at sometime otherwise you risk being seen as a creepy stalker.

You do need to be careful in some cultures and situations with strong eye contact because it can be interpreted as threatening and aggressive. Previously I would have said that for a man-to-man interaction a guy needs to soften the gooey eyes technique, but you can make strong eye contact without appearing aggressive in most cultures. You can be dominant without being domineering. If you are a guy, on average aim to make eye contact about 70% of the time with another guy – and when you look away, visualize your eyes peeling off the guy like a sticky toffee. You won’t come off as aggressive or shy, but you will find a median that shows you are a “someone” who is interesting.

One last point I would like to make about gooey eyes is to avoid overusing the technique with a person. If you keep peeling your eyes off the person like a sticky toffee, you risk being seen as weird.

Overall, applying gooey eyes and improving your eye contact will give off many messages beyond making you appear more interesting. You will look like you are a “someone” as people will feel and see your radiating confidence. Use the technique and you will give off messages that come from a powerful person.

Illuminating Smile

In Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, he discusses the importance of smiling. Most of us are well aware of a good smile’s influence, yet many people wonder how a good smile is done. You need to learn the “how” and not just the “what”.

A good smile is contagious because it makes the smiling person, and the witnesses, feel good. Research has isolated a smile from other influencing variables to discover that seeing only a smile makes you feel better. Likewise, seeing a person frown makes you feel worse. It is a magical brain-to-brain connection that links humans in an almost mystical way. You can make people feel good, make yourself feel good, and make yourself look good by cultivating an illuminating smile.

Why is it that some people have a cold turkey smile that doesn’t radiate into other people? On the other hand, some people light-up your heart with a beautiful smile? How can you achieve an illuminating smile that lights up the room?

You don’t have to be born with a great smile. The face is comprised of muscles that you simply need to control to develop an illuminating smile. You can carve a great smile from your face.

A cold turkey smile begins with the smiling person not truly feeling happy or excited. This incongruence shows in the facial muscles. If you can build positive emotions inside yourself, a true smile will show on the outside. It also helps to fabricate a smile by just smiling as research shows you feel better even when your smile is fake. Stimulating the emotions to create an illuminating smile is important.

A cold turkey smile is simply an on and off switch, while an illuminating smile will slowly increase its intensity until illuminated. I call this the illuminating smile because your smile will be like a volume switch gradually being turned until at full power. Your illuminating smile is like a dimming light that has varying intensity: it can light up the room at its highest level (a big smile), it can be off (a normal face), and it can be anywhere between.
…your smile will be like a volume switch gradually being turned until at full power.

To use the technique, after one second of good eye contact with someone, “turn up” your smile. Increase the dimming switch to gradually brighten your smile. Begin with a little smile, slowly increasing it over two seconds until it becomes a big smile. So, from the initial eye contact to your largest smile will total about three seconds.

Practice your smiling in front of a mirror. Make the initial eye contact, wait a second, and then gradually increase your smile to illuminate the room. You will see for yourself how genuine and interesting your smile really is. I do advise you to lock the door to the room in case someone sees you practicing your smile. It’s weird to see, but wonderful to do.

An illuminating smile will appear genuine because you do not instantly flick on your smile upon eye contact. Rather, you wait a second or two, begin smiling, and increase your smile’s size over about two more seconds. An illuminating smile gives you the ability to appear genuine, will light-up the room, and make you an interesting person before you even speak a word.

Capitalizing Posture

An excellent posture rings a giant bell to everyone that you are a “someone” who is interesting. It tells everyone you are not an average person. In the man-to-woman context, a woman instantly is able to see which guys she feels are interesting by observing how they walk. A guy with an excellent posture switches all her right buttons and makes her interested.

I have called this third technique of being interesting without saying a word “capitalizing posture” for several reasons. Firstly, successful people use their assets better than someone who is not successful. Seeing we all have a posture with the potential to become a great asset, you can capitalize on your posture. Capitalize on one of your greatest assets: your posture.

Secondly, a good posture is often associated with being tall, high status, strong confidence, and power. A capitalizing posture will be like buildings in a capital city. This doesn’t mean you need to be like a giant (me :) ) to have good posture. Far from it. It is about focusing on being erect and using your posture the best you can. It’s time to put an end to having a posture that is more like The Leaning Tower of Pisa than a strong, stable structure.

There are several techniques you can use to grow your greatest body language asset. I have heard so many complex techniques to adjust your posture, but I have discovered one amazingly simple technique that I have previously kept a secret to myself. Here it is: all you need to do is lift your chest up. That’s it! Your head will rise, your neck will straighten, your shoulders will drop back, and your back will straighten – all by lifting your chest! This is a capitalizing posture.

If you ever feel compressed throughout the day, like you might be now as you sit down at the computer reading this article, lift your chest up like Tarzan. While I recommend you breathe through your stomach (technically you can’t because your lungs aren’t there, but your stomach should expand), I want you to take a deep breath in the top of your lungs to lift your chest and stretch your posture into a taller position. Try the capitalizing posture technique right now. You can do it on your computer chair. It only takes a second to do.

Learn From Others

So far I’ve shared three techniques with you that I’ve cultivated in my body language to make myself appear more interesting without saying a word, yet there is a fourth technique that can allow you to gather further body language tips. It is a powerful exercise that will forever improve your non-verbal communication – guaranteed. I say it will forever improve your body language, in any everyday activity, because it is an ongoing lesson.

The technique involves observing other people’s body language to notice what works and why it works – as well as what doesn’t work and why it doesn’t work. You can do this exercise right now thanks to the Internet. Go on YouTube and find a video of someone who you look up to and who is notably famous. Don’t get distracted by watching the plethora of available videos! Do the exercise!

If you have found a video of this person you are after, turn all sound off, watch the video, and observe his or her body language. Take note of what makes the person interesting. What is good about their body language? For me, I love basketball so I chose Michael Jordan. I noticed Jordan has almost a trademark limp in his walk. It’s a notable limp. He rises on his toes as he walks. This gives him a unique body language characteristic that people remember him for. I learned that I don’t need to mold myself into a robotic being with “perfect” body language as uniqueness can make you interesting.

Once you’ve watched a video of a person you like, find a video of an everyday person. Again, watch this video with the sound off. Observe this person’s body language and compare the difference to the body language of the person you admire. It is not guaranteed, but the person who is notably more successful will appear more interesting than the everyday person due to their differences in body language. Ask yourself what parts of their body language could be improved. Begin using the body language lessons you have learned.

Another and more original version of this technique involves watching people throughout the day in diverse areas of life. For example, you can go into a busy area with many people like a shopping center and observe people’s diverse body language. Watch people who have poor eye contact when they talk to others, customer service staff that don’t smile, or people who walk with a pitiable posture. These people will generally be of a lower social class. Now watch those who you think are in a higher social class. They will appear more interesting because they will hold their heads up straight, make good eye contact, will likely smile, and have excellent posture. Observe what works and why you think it works, then use it.

Observing these situations deepens your understanding of how powerful gooey eyes, an illuminating smile, and a capitalizing posture is in making you interesting and powerful. Practice these techniques in a mirror or the next time you socialize and see for yourself how they instantly make you a more interesting person without saying a word.

Thoughts On How To Be More Interesting

The title says it all. I'll say this in one of the more basic/obvious articles, but I think there's still some goodness in it.
Being interesting is about introducing people to new things

If I had to come up with a personal definition of what makes someone interesting, it's that they have knowledge that other people would want to have, but don't yet. It doesn't have to be straight-up facts either. It could be things such as: little pieces of trivia, ideas, tastes, concepts, philosophies, perspectives, or world views. You can probably think of a time where you met someone with a unique job or lifestyle and you were eager to pick their brain and take in all their stories and little anecdotes. Or you likely know someone who looks at things just a little differently and you enjoy hearing his little opinions about the world. Or, you could know someone with unique style and tastes. This person's taste indirectly introduces you to new things, and you're drawn towards it.
If you want to be more interesting be the real deal and live a fun life

Being more interesting isn't about sitting around at home an hour before meeting your friends for dinner and cramming some fun-facts into your head to bring up later. It's about living a varied life and really becoming the kind of person who has new things they can introduce to people. In high-school I could definitely have been interesting about video games, and maybe had a thing or two to say about movies or skepticism, but that was largely it. I was quite one-dimensional and narrowly focused.

Now I can go on about all kinds of things. I know about a wider range of topics, I've traveled, I've gotten in some situations worth telling stories about, and I've developed some unique little philosophies on life. Mainly I just have more life experience. There are lots of areas where I have info that other people would want to hear about. At some point I realized that I wasn't going to be wowing many people if all I could talk about was the latest trick to quickly level up your characters in some game.

So try to fill your brain up with a lot of knowledge and experience. This is hardly a chore to do, though you may need to make a conscious decision to not devote all your time to your handful of natural interests at the expense of everything else. Read widely. If a festival comes to your city, check it out and be able to report on it, instead of staying in. Listen to other interesting people. Seek out new places in your town. Try new things. Expose yourself to new ideas. Listen to new music. Watch new movies. Form your own opinions. Don't just do the same things week after week. Do this enough, and for a long enough time, and you really will be an interesting person. At this point all you have to do is open your mouth and count on that what you have to say will be good.
Learn to present what you have to say in an engaging manner

Being interesting is as much about how you say something as what you have to say. Two people could have the same basic story, but one person may present it as an endless, rambling anecdote. The second might package it as a short, hilarious little routine. An interesting person can take a mundane topic, like what happened at work that day, and turn into a snappy monologue. An uninteresting person can be talking about something engaging and suck the life out of it.

There are certain things that people have asked me about several times, and that I know I'll have to discuss again. I've learned to have a neat little story ready to go for them. Like I went skydiving a few years ago. Not everyone cares, but if the topics comes up and someone asks me about it, I've got a mini-speech prepared. I'd like to think it's pretty interesting...

For any other topic, if I have to speak about something I put at least some effort into editing out the crap and presenting it an interesting light. I'll try to inject my humor and views into what I have to say. I guess it's almost a type of performance talent that improves with practice.

Another part of this presentation aspect of being interesting is the overall package you present to people. If you come off as someone worth listening to, then people will be more likely to hear what you have to say. If you seem like someone who's better off being ignored, then people may not give the interesting things you have to say a chance.
Develop an instinct for the things people want to hear about

This is connected to the points above. There's no point in saying something if the other person doesn't care about it. You've got to know your audience to a degree and tailor your conversation to what they'd prefer to hear about. Like say your grandma asks you about how college is going. You may be interesting by going into detail about the subjects you're taking. If your parents ask, you may concentrate on the people you're meeting and how you're fitting in, because you can tell that's what they primarily want to know about. You may tell your home-town buddies drinking stories.

You also have to gauge how much information someone wants. Say someone says something that reminds you of a story you have. You may realize you have to cut it down to thirty seconds, otherwise people's attention will wander.
Being interesting is about fostering your uniqueness

You can hardly be interesting if you have the same things to say as everyone else. It comes from adding that unique perspective that only you can offer. Your opinion about a political issue may be flavored by a handful of history books you read. Another person's view may be influenced by a certain job they had. Maybe another person has some firsthand insider knowledge about the issue. They're all bringing something to the discussion that only they can, and that the other participants (hopefully) want to be filled in on.

If my friends and I are sitting around and talking, there are lots of things that only I can add to the conversation. I can add them because I've spent some time doing my own thing and delving into areas that interested me. In the process I've acquired novel knowledge, perspectives, and experiences.

Don't underestimate how interesting certain quirky or intellectual aspects of you can be either. A lot of the time people won't care about them, but I've impressed people with my knowledge of some pretty esoteric topics. You never know, the person you're talking to my be a closet science-buff and want nothing more than to hear about what you did your Biology thesis on. It could be another little piece that stacks the interaction in your favor.
Don't feel you're entitled to be seen as interesting just because you have certain knowledge

I'll throw this one in there because I've known people who are really knowledgeable about things like politics, philosophy, and international issues. I could tell they were a bit bitter because they thought they had this strength 'on paper' but no one seemed to care. I guess in a way these topics are the 'right' things to be interested in, but if it doesn't pan out in real life you can't really complain. Just adapt to the circumstances and talk about something else.