How to become more interesting and interested

Video Transcript

The world forces people to feel like they need to fit in while aggressively rewarding the people who stand out. While everyone is leaning into AI and making themselves feel, look, and sound like the global average, I want to propose another direction. I believe that smashing together unexpected things makes people interesting and successful right now. Looking like everyone else, [music] sounding like everyone else, copying everyone else's workflows and tutorials, walking down a beaten path is boring and expected and pedestrian.

So, here's what I want to propose. Stop hiding all the random things you love and start [music] to smash together unexpected things. Bring your hobbies and interests together. Find ways to link your [music] passions, however random they might be.

This is how you create a unique voice. This is how you stand out in an ever-growing crowd. This matters now because the world keeps asking us to fit in by forcing us into the same algorithms and the same music and the same TV shows using the same AI trained on the same data to produce the same outputs. It's exhausting.

We have to fight to break out of it and this needs to be a conscious choice that we make. So, I want to talk to you about three ideas that I think empower me to smash together unexpected things in my life. The first is curiosity. The second is high agency.

And the last is self-efficacy. Curiosity notices. Self-efficacy grants permission and agency spins that permission. Curiosity is the noticing mechanism.

It flags the gap, the I must know this. Then self-efficacy is the belief that you specifically can close that gap. Without it, curiosity just produces browsing. You notice the interesting thing, you consume some content about it, and it dies as a bookmark.

Agency is then what happens when your interests get spent in the world. You don't wait for someone to greenlight it. You go act on what you learned. Now, let's dive into each of these concepts and unpack them a little bit more.

Before we do that, I want to actually tell you about Brian May. Yes, the Queen guitarist Brian May. May paused his physics PhD at Imperial College in the early 1970s to go on tour with a new band called Queen. 33 years later, after Queen had become one of the biggest acts in music history, he went back and finished his thesis that he'd abandoned.

And that hobby earned him a spot as a science collaborator on NASA's New Horizon mission, where he used a decade-old obsession with stereoscopic 3D photography to assemble the first high-quality stereo image of Pluto. Both are proof that the strange, seemingly unrelated thing you're into isn't a distraction from your real work. Given enough time, it can become the exact thing that makes your work unmistakable. Music, maths, and physics seem far apart, but they aren't to Brian May.

Now, let's get into curiosity. Everybody talks about but very rarely do I hear people define curiosity. So, let's do that now. Curiosity is the intrinsic pull to close an information gap.

It's that thing deep in you that says, "I must know this. I must find out. I must pursue this." You know that saying that if you love what you do, you'll never work a day in your life? I call But if you love what you do, you'll be more curious, have greater self-efficacy, and the agency to become better at what you do all the time.

While grinding at my last job, I forgot that I love to acquire knowledge just for the sake of it. And then, link this newly acquired knowledge to different aspects of my life. Without the wondering, the meandering, and the intentional acquisition of random knowledge, I don't think that I could stand out. We've been trained to ignore this by the world around us.

Social media, distractions, life getting in of intentionally closing this information gap in our lives. That's it. That's what you need to know about it. Now, you need to start recognizing it in yourself.

>> [snorts] >> Observe yourself and take note of it. Take note of when you're interested in something or anything. When you are in conversations, when you're browsing YouTube or Spotify, when you're reading articles at work, wherever. When do you feel the pull towards a piece of content?

Write that down. And come back to it later when you have time. Start establishing patterns of curiosity. And get to know what you want out of your curious life.

Then, self-efficacy is the belief in your own ability to execute a specific task and get a specific result. It's not general confidence, it's confidence in this skill, this challenge right now. High self-efficacy doesn't mean you already know how to do something, it means you trust that you'll work out how. You'll recognize it in yourself.

Next time you face something unfamiliar, notice where your default is, "I can figure this out." or "I'm not that kind of person." Notice when you commit to something before you know exactly how you'll put it off, and notice when you followed through and proved yourself right. That track record of evidence, not borrowed confidence, is where self-efficacy actually comes from. And it's really close to our next point of high agency. High agency is the belief backed up by your actions that you can change your circumstances instead of waiting for someone else to change them for you.

It's the gap between someone should fix this and let me fix this. High agency people treat rules, queues, and closed doors suggestions and starting points for negotiations, not as dead ends. You start recognizing it by watching how you already respond to friction. When something breaks or is slow or unfair, do you wait for permission or do you go find a workaround?

Do you wait for the thing to be built for you or do you build a version of it for yourself? Notice these moments. Notice the moments you sidestepped the proper channel. Write them down.

That's high agency showing up in your life. Someone I think you should know about who acts with high agency herself is Naomi Osaka, the four-time Grand Slam tennis star. But her curiosity extends much further than the tennis court. Osaka noticed sunscreen formulated for melanin-rich skin barely existed despite the obvious health stakes being very real.

So she combined her platform as a tennis champion with a year and a half of product development alongside a dermatologist to launch Kinlò. She then went further building HanaKuma, a media company telling stories at the intersection of sports and culture. And she's not alone. Think about Ryan Reynolds and Rob Rob McElhenney, who are business moguls now in the sports world as well as being famous actors.

There is research that found that curiosity, especially in the exploration related dimensions of curiosity, predicted entrepreneurial self-efficacy, and this self-efficacy in turn predicted outcomes such as starting a business. So, figure out what you're curious about. Figure out what moves you and how to dive into this more and more over time. If your job doesn't make you want to learn more, then you are going to lose your job to someone who actually does love what they do and does want to learn more because they have curiosity, self-efficacy, and high agency to go the extra mile because they want to, not because they have to.