Do Interesting: Notice. Collect. Share

If you and I were sitting together and able to do this exercise in person – wouldn’t that be great? – I’d simply ask you to take a walk outside and bring me back three things. They could literally be three things you bring back into the room with you or they might just be something you see that you come back to tell me about. So you might bring me

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I think what I tend to notice a lot are the conceptual connections between things and ideas that may otherwise go unnoticed. Whether it’s a big news story or a faint signal, I tend to see connections between that and something else — an event, or an idea or a happening that is seemingly unrelated. I’m trying to draw threads between, for instance, e

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Being curious is important to me. Not only because it is how I get ideas for essays. It feels to me like everyone has something unrepeatable to bring into the world. And we can manifest it by going in our direction of maximal interestingness. The pattern we make as our curiosity pulls us hither and thither like a dog chasing a smell across a field—... See more

You can make your work — and the world — more interesting by practising three things: — Noticing — if you pay more attention to the world, it starts to look more interesting — Collecting — if you bang together the things you’ve noticed, they get more interesting again — Sharing — if you get good at sharing all that stuff with people, it gets even b

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