The Most Interesting Man in the World

There are people who are talented orators, who can weave a fine yarn out of any small thing that’s happened to them. There are also those folks who can continually fill the air with chatter, cracking jokes and making small talk out of anything. These folks always seem to have something interesting to say, a charismatic way to attain an audience with even the slightest bit of substance. When they speak, they themselves seem interesting.

But I’m neither of those types of speakers. I’m more of a matter-of-fact kind of orator. When I do tell stories of my experiences, they tend to be dry and straightforward; a distillation of the story into the most important parts and facts. I don’t possess much flair for the dramatic, but stay firmly grounded in the brief reality of what happened. And mostly, when I think of things to say, I often chose not to actually say them because they seem to me so uninteresting.

So, with my limited capacity to pique people’s attention through sensational storytelling and my absence of readily making small talk, I seek to have an arsenal of things to chat about that are inherently intriguing to the listener. If the oration can’t gain people’s interest, then at least the content should. And I do want to be seen as an interesting person; I want to be the type of person with many different and unique experiences to share with others. For me, traveling around and trying out different ways of life has greatly added to that arsenal of small talk subjects (though that is an externality of what I have done, and not a primary motivation for it; my inherent curiosity of trying new things and seeking new experiences are done for intrinsic reasons alone). With my tendency to talk about things that have actually happened to me, I can now use as conversation starters (for example) my months in Australia living out of a van and picking fruit, or what its like to serve as a deckhand aboard a historic sailing vessel, or what it’s like to complete a 19-day, 1,200-mile bike ride. I can easily ramble on about all the trips I’ve taken in the outdoors and all the places I’ve gone and the things I’ve seen. To a lot of people, I’d assume, this stuff would be interesting. And I, in turn, would appear to be an interesting person for doing it.

However, eventually all this stuff too begins to seem mundane. After all, I’ve done it all and experienced it already, so it can’t be too extraordinary. Let’s talk about something even more interesting, that is to say, something I haven’t done yet. The things other people have done still seem even more interesting than myself.

And so goes the cycle. The past experiences I’ve had have been retold enough times by me that all the novelty and the inherent interest they have to me has worn off. This even includes experiences that people would describe as ‘once in a lifetime,’ such as my fruit-picking foray in Australia or the five months I spent on a western American road trip. To me, in retrospect, those experiences have become such a commonplace occurrence in my personal narrative that they cease to be extraordinary. Do I commonly forget that others still might think of these things as interesting? Perhaps. But no matter how much stuff I do that others would find fascinating, I never feel like it’s enough. I never think that I am yet that pinnacle achievement of an interesting person. So I continually seek to do more interesting stuff and become an even more inherently interesting person.

I’d like to think of myself as an interesting person who others would like to converse with, but my reserved nature often limits my inclination to engage. Trying to make myself more interesting, to have more cannon fodder to chat about, seems to be a coping mechanism to be more pro-social. I love conversing with people, and I can be quite gregarious at times as well, but small talk has always been something I have struggled with. I know that presentation is important, and a lot of great ideas and stories get overlooked because they are not presented in the most engaging sales pitch. But my standard is that I want the content to speak for itself. My philosophy is that if people are going to listen to me, it’s going to be because I have interesting things to say, not because I merely say mundane things in a charismatic way. It’s the stories I have to share that are the things to be treasured, not merely the way I present them.

Even though small talk and engaging in conversations is difficult for me, there comes a point in some conversations where I reach a state of flow, when conversing and sharing details becomes not only easy but also enjoyable. It is in these moments when I’m not on the outside trying to appear as an interesting person; it is when the subject of discussion itself becomes the uniting factor between the conversers. Discussing things, even mundane things, in-depth seems to be more of my forte. I find it extremely enjoyable when my conversation partners, instead of just hearing the sensational part of the story, stick around to ask deeper, more probing questions about the experience. The conversation grows from there. I can dig through the archives of my past lived experiences, and can readily list off a bevy of facts and details to share about things that I am interested in. My conversation partner, interested in the same subject, will happily engage in the listening and conversing process. My theory is that as long as there are people who are interested in the same things I am passionate about, who are active and courageous listeners, then I will always have a supply of people with whom to be conversation partners. That doesn’t mean that I always have to talk about things that are inherently interesting, or to present things in a nauseatingly engaging manner. Sometimes it can be the subject, or the art of conversation itself, that speaks for itself through you.