Interesting Quote

Author Jim Collins notes,

One day early in my faculty teaching career — I think it was 1988 or 1989 — [my mentor John] Gardner sat me down. “It occurs to me, Jim, that you spend too much time trying to be interesting,” he said. “Why don’t you invest more time being interested?”

If you want to have an interesting dinner conversation, be interested. If you want to have interesting things to write, be interested. If you want to meet interesting people, be interested in the people you meet — their lives, their history, their story. Where are they from? How did they get here? What have they learned? By practicing the art of being interested, the majority of people can become fascinating teachers; nearly everyone has an interesting story to tell.

I just read that over at Ramit Sethi's Blog. I think that it is a cool way of looking at things so I wanted to toss it out here. It seems like lots of people get caught up with trying to be interesting, but have a hard time actually pulling it off. I can remember many times where I or my friends wanted to "do something interesting tonight". According to this quote all we had to do was be interested. It seems like it might be an oversimplification to say "all you have to do is be interested", but it is definitely a good point of view.