How to be interesting.
What I've learned watching dancers, bartenders, and obsessed friends.
Twice a year, I sit through a dance recital.
If you’ve ever had a kid or a sibling in dance, you know the format.
Several hours. Many numbers. Your child or sibling is in maybe three of them. The rest of the time, you’re an audience member with nothing in particular to do.
And I’ve noticed something about what I do with that time.
When my daughter isn’t on stage, I find the most absorbed dancer in the group. And I watch them. Not the most technically precise one. Not the one in front. Not the one who has the solos.
The one who has clearly forgotten that any of us are here.
You can see it in the face. The movement. The emotion.
There’s no part of her tracking the audience, managing how she’s coming across, wondering if she’s doing it right. She’s just in it.
That’s the one who pulls me in. That’s the dancer who makes me, someone who does not care about dance, suddenly care about the dance.
Then there’s the bartender. The sommelier. The tour guide. The artist.
The ones who lean in when you ask the right question. The ones who light up and can’t help but tell you the thing behind the thing.
I usually don’t care about the craft itself. I like the cocktail, preferably made quickly. I like wine, but not enough to learn about it. I love travel, but home is around the clock’s corner. I appreciate a good painting or a perfect lyric, but I’m not interested in becoming a painter or musician.
But put me in front of someone who has gone all the way into their craft…someone who has organized a real part of their life around it? I want to get as close as I can to their why.
I could listen for hours.
It shows up with friends, too.
When someone I care about gets deep into their work or some random hobby, I want to hear all of it. Not because I want in. I’m not looking for a new interest.
I want to understand what lights them up about it. I want to see the thing through the eyes of the person who can’t stop thinking about it.
The subject is irrelevant.
Dance, wine, the friend’s obscure hobby. I’m not drawn to any of it.
I’m drawn to the absorption.
To the person who has given themselves over to something so completely that the performing stops.
That’s the whole thing. That’s what I can’t look away from.
We treat “interesting” like a performance. A set of moves. Have good stories, ask good questions, seem curious, seem deep. Be interesting to people.
But the dancer who pulled me in wasn’t performing. The opposite. She was interesting because she’d forgotten the audience entirely.
The second any of those people started performing their passion, started managing how it landed, the spell would break.
You don’t become interesting by trying to be interesting.
You become interesting by caring about something so completely that you stop performing it.
The interestingness is a byproduct. It’s what seeps out from genuine absorption. You can’t manufacture it, because the manufacturing is the thing that kills it.
What I’m actually drawn to is devotion.
People who have surrendered to something. Who let it matter more than looking good while they do it.
In a world where most of us are half-present (curating, performing, attention splitting four ways), someone who has gone all the way into a single thing reads as rare. It reads as alive. I think we’re all subconsciously starving for it, which is why we can’t look away when we see it.
I’ve spent years collecting these people, getting close to their fire, warming my hands on it.
And the question I always avoid is the obvious one.
Am I absorbed in anything like that?
Because I know what it’s like to perform. To track the audience. To manage how I’m coming across, even to myself. I’m good at it. Most of us are. It’s the water we swim in.
But the folks that are absorbed by something? The folks that are nearly swallowed whole by it, but still come up for air to tell us about it?
That’s the company I want to keep. Not because those people are remarkable. But because they remind me of a way of being I keep circling and rarely land in.
The absorbed dancer isn’t interesting because she’s the best.
She’s interesting because, for three minutes, she forgot we were watching.
And I’m still learning how to forget.
✌️ and ❤️,
Adam Griffin
This article was so interesting 💯