Austin Kleon

Have you tried making yourself a more interesting person?

Years ago, at SXSW 2009, I drew a panel called “Try Making Yourself More Interesting.” It introduced me to this (possibly apocryphal) story about the writer Barry Hannah, told by Rick Bass in his introduction to Boomerang and Never Die:

Another passed-down tale: a student getting her story back from Barry, with the honest criticism on it: This just isn’t interesting.

As I understand it, the student, a whiner, complained, What can I do to make it be interesting?

The cruelest advice I ever heard, but also the best—advice that I do not think I could have withstood had it been given to me directly, but which I have remembered. Barry, I am told, looked long and hard at the student, decided she was earnest about becoming a better writer, and told her the truth[:] “Try making yourself a more interesting person.

Brutal, so brutal, but so dead on. J. Maureen Henderson said the same thing in a friendlier way in this article about advice she gives to students:

Work on being an interesting person other people want to be around and are willing to open doors for…. There are many roads to becoming an interesting person, but they all involve developing your curiosity and your desire to know and understand — yourself, others, the world around you. You can read. You can pursue a new activity like knitting or rock climbing. You can volunteer. You can commit to asking three people a day an open-ended question about themselves and really listening to their responses. You can share your information and connections freely.

My friend Jessica Hagy wrote a whole book about it called… How To Be Interesting. 

I wrote about it in Show Your Work!:

If you want followers, be someone worth following. [“Have you tried making yourself more interesting?”] seems like a really mean thing to say, unless you think of the word interesting the way writer Lawrence Weschler does: For him, to be “interest-ing” is to be curious and attentive, and to practice “the continual projection of interest.” To put it more simply: If you want to be interesting, you have to be interested.

As I’ve said before, if you want to be the noun you have to do the verb.

Perpetual Thanksgiving

Weird times we’re living in, but there’s plenty to be thankful for. My son Owen and I made something for y’all that we hope you’ll share with your loved ones. Download and print it here [PDF]

Here’s what Henry David Thoreau said 160 years ago, 12/6/1856, in a letter to his friend, Harrison Blake:

I am grateful for what I am and have. My thanksgiving is perpetual. It is surprising how contented one can be with nothing definite…. My breath is sweet to me. O how I laugh when I think of my vague, indefinite riches. No run on my bank can drain it, for my wealth is not possession but enjoyment.

Happy Thanksgiving. Hope it is perpetual.

No expert, no guru

Call me an “expert,” and I will correct you. Call me a “guru,” and I might throw up on you.

Re: “expert”: My books are the by-products of the process of trying to figure out how to be a writer and an artist. When I write, when I publish, when I speak, it is in the spirit of being a fellow student. I am simply sharing the things that I am learning. I not only do not consider myself an expert, being an expert seems unbelievably boring to me. Becoming an expert, to me, seems like a kind of spiritual death. A kind of creative petrification. (As my friend Mike Monteiro recently put it, “the secret to being good at anything is to approach it like a curious idiot, rather than a know-it-all genius.”)

Re: “guru”: What reasonable human being would actually want to be a guru? (Again: answers are boring. Questions are interesting.) The people in American culture who position themselves as gurus seem to all have either what the comedian Bill Hicks called “a fevered ego,” or they seem to have some extreme character deficiency. More than that, from what I’ve seen, the more you’re considered a “guru,” the harder it is to tell what it is that you actually do. (My nightmare is becoming someone who talks about making art more than actually making art.)

On top of all that, I am starting to feel that the best teacher is the one who refuses you as a student. I’ll end with this parable from John Cage’s Silence:

How to survive Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving approaches. The supermarkets are jam packed with people who behave as if they have never shopped for groceries before, and Twitter is full of people who behave as if they’ve never had a meal with someone who doesn’t share their political views.

Regarding the meal, @poniewozik tweeted: “A thing I love about this country is it invented a holiday where millions of amateur cooks have to prepare a freakishly large bird. Like, the same country where people buy pre-made PBJ sandwiches, ONE TIME a year they have to figure out how to roast basically a dinosaur.”

Regarding the company, my friend @erika, the author of Just Enough Research, has it nailed: “Heading out to see your family this week? Don’t fight with them. Study them!” She suggests, if the conversation starts to head south, this magical phrase: “Tell me more about that.”

Say nothing else. Do not argue. Keep quietly sipping your beverage… All the research shows that facts are powerless in the face of contradictory beliefs. You will not win the argument. You have a better chance that Second Cousin Rick will talk himself out of his own theory if he talks long enough.

In the words of Oliver Sacks, pretend you’re an anthropologist on Mars.

Perhaps this perspective comes easiest for writers. (Czeslaw Milosz: “When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.”) In Teaching as a Subversive Activity, Neil Postman & Charles Weingartner write that the “anthropological perspective” is exactly what a good education is supposed to provide you. “[It] allows one to be part of his own culture and, at the same time, to be out of it. One views the activities of his own group as would an anthropologist, observing its tribal rituals, its fears, its conceits…”

But the anthropological perspective is not just for surviving Thanksgiving! It’s a way of surviving all sorts of situations involving people who are being assholes. Here’s a trick for cultivating the proper detachment the perspective requires, from Bob Sutton, author of The Asshole Survival Guide:

I’ve got this colleague who does this astounding thing: He pretends when he’s in a meeting and there’s a really nasty person, what he does to detach is he pretends he’s a Doctor of Assholeism. And he says to himself, instead of getting upset, “I’m so lucky to have this fabulous specimen! To be so close up! I just can’t believe it!”

Good luck, my fellow anthropologists! I’ll be at home in my pajamas.

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