Fuck Pinterest.

Meeting interesting people is fun. 

As a writer, I feel it’s my job to study everyone I meet and extract what’s interesting about them. Any time I meet someone new, when I’m at my best, I’m doing my absolute best to learn something about them that goes against the initial judgment I had about them.

And because of my current occupation, much of my time is spent meeting new people. I work approximately 50 hours and every second of that time is spent inside my restaurant where I’m constantly exposed to new faces. I rarely stop studying them.

Not everyone is interesting at first glance. In fact, I’ve noticed the more interesting a person hopes to appear, the less interesting they often are. The ones who do their best to mimic popular pinterest trends or to make it appear as if they’re a relative of the kardashians are the least interesting among us. Of course, this is a generalization and I despise generalizations despite the fact that they allow us to sanely do our lives day in and day out.

It usually takes time to learn who is interesting and who isn’t and the only way I’ve found to do that is to engage in genuine conversation with them.

While there’s no secret recipe to becoming an interesting person, I have found that most people have one thing in common: they either have or do something that the masses would call them crazy for. 

To illustrate what I mean, since I’m feeling generous, I’ll give a few examples:

Recently, I met a man who worked for his dad’s insurance business starting in his early twenties until he was in his late twenties when his dad decided to sell the business. He then hopped careers for a few years, making minimum wage, until he stumbled upon an ad in the paper for a law school in Nashville, TN. Going against most of the chatter he heard from those around him, he decided to enroll at the age of 35. He went on to (somewhat) enjoy a career in law along with running a martial arts academy with his wife.

I met another gentleman who decided to move to Costa Rica when he was 50 years old because he wanted to learn how to speak Spanish. Without knowing a word of Spanish, he moved to Costa Rica in his fiftieth year and sunk his teeth into this new language. He’s now in his sixties and has since forgotten nearly every word but I don’t know anyone else that would even attempt such a feat. 

Another example is one of my closest friends who still lives in Los Angeles. When he was in highschool, he’d made the decision to attend college and study biology. When he made that decision, he was dating a girl whose father was an established Physician’s Assistant, making good money and providing a good living for his girlfriend’s family. He looked up to this man therefore decided to attempt to follow in his footsteps. He went to school and studied biology. His grades were good. He had everything it would’ve taken to follow through with his plan. Everyone around him encouraged the plan. It made sense. On paper. To everyone but my friend. He knew that to follow that path would be to slit the wrists of his dreams as a writer longways. And so, after graduating from college with an undergraduate degree in biology, he decided to rip the E-brake on his life and make a hard left turn. Instead of taking the next steps in becoming a physician’s assistant, he dropped everything and moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career in screenwriting and acting. When I met him, it was 2016. To my knowledge, he hasn’t landed any real work in screenwriting or acting but each time I speak to him, he inches closer. If nothing else, he’s always got engaging stories to tell me. Much more interesting than stories about prescribing more furosemide to another geritric with high-blood pressure which is what he would’ve spent his life doing had he decided to continue to follow the path everyone claimed he should’ve.

I think you get my point. 

Interesting is subjective, yes. 

What’s interesting to me won’t necessarily be interesting to you. 

I guess what I’m saying is that if you ever hope to grab anyone’s attention with anything you do, you’ll do well to make sure it challenges the norm. 

I’m not suggesting you live your life by doing the exact opposite of what everyone says you should do. 

But if your gut is telling you to do something, even if everyone else calls you crazy, I think you should listen to it.