Do Interesting: Notice. Collect. Share. (Do Books Book 36)

the best people at that job are always the ones that can get interested in any problem, no matter how tedious it seems on the surface. They don’t get drawn to the obviously cool problems — sport, tech, fashion, purpose — they get stuck into things that seem a bit boring — insurance, infrastructure, finance, logistics — and they find what’s interest

What you want is a soft openness — to be attentive to the things you’re doing but not single-minded, because then you’re missing other opportunities.

There’s a certain magic in collecting your own set of secrets about the world.

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.

It’s not just photos. Do something once, it’s great. Do it twice, you add connections and time. Keep doing it and those effects multiply. And then, if you do something adjacent, you get a whole heap of benefits. You see the parallels, you get to compare and contrast. But, even more magically, if you’re also doing something else entirely, suddenly y

Virginia Woolf described her ideal diary: I should like it to resemble some deep old desk or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously

‘Windows have a way of limiting what one sees and, at the same time, intensifying the vision.’

Nobody reads advertising. People read what interests them, and sometimes it’s an ad.

I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. Joan Didion

Yes, sometimes the final thought will pop up as you stand in a shower or sit under an apple tree. But interesting ideas normally come from the slow accumulation of related thoughts, questions and ponderings.