How to be interesting as F*ck

Success Notes · article · 2026-05-19 Reader 🖥️

practical · persuasive essay / numbered listicle with a prescriptive 'practical move' after each item — Substack self-help piece. Each of 7 points follows the same template: assertion, one celebrated-person anecdote as illustration, a quote from a historical/literary figure, and a one-line behavioral prescription. No data, study, or argument beyond authority-by-anecdote.

Structure

Key terms

• performing vs. being
  The habitual social posture of monitoring how one comes across and optimizing for inoffensiveness/appropriateness, contrasted with speaking and acting from one's actual, unfiltered reaction.
• range (as used here)
  Accumulated breadth across unrelated domains, valued specifically for producing cross-domain analogies ('this is exactly the same problem the Venetian Republic had') rather than for its own sake.

Propositions

• explicitBeing interesting is not a personality type, charisma, a dramatic backstory, or trivia — it is a set of specific, learnable behaviors that run counter to normal social conditioning.
• explicitMost people are boring because they have trained themselves to be inoffensive, safe, and agreeable, which makes them invisible.
• explicitSaying what you actually think, rather than what lands well, gives a person 'texture' and makes them memorable (illustrated via Feynman's bongo-playing, safecracking, and refusal to fake understanding).conf: medium
• explicitMost people's opinions are tribal affiliations rather than independently reasoned positions, and the willingness to publicly update a belief ('I used to believe X, now I'm not sure because of Y') is rare and magnetic.conf: medium
• explicitDeep, obsessive knowledge of one narrow and unusual subject teaches transferable careful thinking, giving a person's speech on unrelated topics more 'weight' and 'friction.'conf: low
• explicitMost people, while listening, are already composing their reply rather than actually attending to what was said; asking a genuine follow-up question is a rare signal of having actually heard someone.conf: medium
• explicitCross-domain breadth ('range') produces novel analogies and connections that people confined to one world cannot make, and saying things nobody else is saying is close to the simplest definition of 'interesting.'conf: medium
• explicitInteresting people actively notice their surroundings — register, feel friction, let things mean something to them — rather than passively consuming and outsourcing 'noticing' to other people while calling it staying informed.conf: medium
• explicitUnderneath all the other behaviors, the necessary condition for being interesting is full, unguarded presence — not managing one's impression, not half-elsewhere — and this is fundamentally an act of generosity toward the other person, not a performance technique.conf: medium
• implicitBeing interesting is a matter of individual choice and effort ('the practical move') rather than being significantly constrained by temperament, social position, or context.conf: low

Arguments

Narratives

• Richard Feynman's bongo-playing, safecracking hobby, and refusal to fake understanding of physics he hadn't truly grasped.
  → illustrates 'stop performing, start being' — texture from unfiltered authenticity
• Barbara Tuchman's historical finding that governments persist in catastrophic decisions because of 'officialdom' — the need to preserve credibility by not updating publicly.
  → supplies a borrowed vocabulary term ('officialdom') and analogical support for the claim that most people's opinions calcify rather than update
• Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks mixing anatomy, river maps, grocery lists and architecture on the same pages.
  → illustrates depth/range compounding into a distinctive mind
• George Saunders's observation that writers place the interesting thing at the end of a sentence and immediately move on instead of dwelling on it.
  → analogy for failing to ask the follow-up question in conversation
• Michael Lewis's years as a bond trader before becoming a journalist, which produced Liar's Poker, The Big Short, and Moneyball.
  → illustrates how cross-domain range produces a distinctive frame and 'stories nobody else is telling'
• Marilynne Robinson's explanation that her Iowa-set novels are slow and quiet because she actually looked at small towns and found them inexhaustible, while most people drive through and see nothing.
  → illustrates active noticing vs. passive consumption
• Simone Weil's claim that attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.
  → supplies the capstone framing that unguarded presence, not technique, is what people ultimately remember

Questions addressed

• ✅ Why are most people forgettable?
  Because they have been socialized into safe, agreeable, non-committal performance rather than genuine self-expression, opinion, depth, attention, and presence.
• ✅ What, concretely, do memorably 'interesting' people do differently?
  Seven behaviors: authentic self-expression, held (and updatable) opinions, idiosyncratic depth, real follow-up questions, cross-domain range, active noticing, and full presence.
• ⭕ Is the causal direction actually behavior-to-outcome, or could the underlying talent/status of the cited exemplars be the real driver of both the behavior and the fame?
• ⭕ What are the social/professional risks or costs of adopting these behaviors (e.g. voicing unpopular opinions, publicly updating beliefs) for someone without an exemplar's pre-existing credibility buffer?
• ⭕ Does 'interesting' mean the same thing across audiences and cultures, or is the essay's frame implicitly that of a Western, intellectual, individualist milieu?

Gaps

• illogicalThe central argumentative move — one admired, already-famous exemplar per behavior, therefore the behavior causes 'interestingness' — is a textbook survivorship-bias fallacy. It never considers people who exhibit the same behaviors (bluntness, obsessive niche depth, cross-domain range) and remain forgettable, nor interesting people who lack these specific traits, nor whether fame/talent is the actual common cause of both the behavior being tolerated and the person being remembered.
  Read next: Compare against literature on survivorship bias / halo effect in trait-based success narratives (e.g. Mlodinow's or Taleb's critiques of retrospective success attribution) for a rigorous treatment of the same fallacy.
• incompleteThe essay offers zero data, studies, or even informal polling — every claim is supported by a single celebrated person's anecdote plus an aphoristic quote. This is standard for the listicle/self-help genre but leaves every mechanism (why does 'texture' make someone memorable? how much depth is 'enough'?) entirely unspecified and untestable.
• incompleteNo engagement with the real social and professional risk of the prescriptions — voicing an actual disagreement, saying 'the thing you actually think,' or publicly updating a belief can carry real reputational cost, especially for people without Feynman- or da Vinci-level status insulation. The essay treats these as free, universally low-cost swaps.
• incompleteThe seven behaviors are presented as an unweighted checklist with no account of how they interact, which are necessary vs. sufficient, or whether they trade off against each other (e.g. deep niche obsession vs. broad range could compete for the same limited attention).