If You Want to Be Interesting, You Have to Do Interesting Shit
My mom leaves for Portugal this week.
This is not a surprise. This is just who she is.
Even when I was a kid, I was impressed by her. Not out of obligation, but genuinely impressed. She had a workout routine, her own interests, her own opinions about things that had nothing to do with me. She was a whole person who also just happened to be my mother.
She had a life. Not a life organized entirely around me. A life that included her family and extended far beyond us.
She makes me believe something I now say out loud: if you want to be interesting, you have to do interesting shit.
That sounds obvious but it’s not.
A lot of people want to be interesting without doing anything uncomfortable. They want the personality without the process. People don’t become dull by accident. They slowly choose predictability. Same places, same opinions, same version of themselves from a decade ago that nobody has questioned, including them.
They’re not boring. It’s more like they’re underexposed.
We live in a time when everything has to be efficient, monetizable, and worth the investment. People won’t try a hobby unless it could become a side hustle. They won’t go somewhere new unless they’ve watched 10 TikToks and scrubbed Google for every review. That mindset shrinks a personality.
Curiosity used to be its own justification. Now it has to submit a business case first.
My mom never did that. She just lived….she traveled, worked out, and had friends who were hers, not ours. And I absorbed it without realizing it.
Which is probably why I’m always planning something. A class, a trip, something new, even if I’m not sure I’ll be good at it. This summer, I’m building a curriculum for my kids, not to fill their time, but to show them what it looks like when someone stays engaged with life on purpose.
I want them to grow up impressed by me the way I was impressed by her.
That’s the real inheritance. Not the trips or gifts. The proof that a full life is something you build on purpose, not something that happens after everything else is taken care of.
The people who stay interesting into midlife are still experimenting. They let themselves be bad at things. They change their minds and admit it. They don’t treat their own personality like a finished product.
The real risk is becoming so predictable that even you feel bored inside your life.
My mom didn’t teach me that in a conversation. She just never stopped living it.
What are you doing this week?