How Do You Meet Interesting People?

Note: This article is based on a blog post by Scott H Young, in which he tells us about his experience searching for special people in life.

Someone might say that most people they know are boring and may find it challenging to connect with people who lack ambition, passion for life, or motivation to do anything significant.

This is common: if you are an ambitious person seeking to improve yourself, the crowd around you often seems lazy and mediocre, cares about the simple things in life, gets caught up in the minute details, and rarely cares about critical issues.

There Are a Lot of Interesting People

Most people are not exceptional, if everyone is exceptional, that will be normal, and you will not mention this quality as a special and unique feature. So don't expect everyone you meet to have the same values, ambitions, or motivation that you do.

Fortunately, everyone doesn't have to be interesting, as your friends are just a small part of the people. For me, I have a few hundred of them, a few dozen close friends, and less than a handful of special ones, so out of more than 6 billion people, my best friends make up less than 0.00000001% of the world's population.

With this kind of prospect, you can easily be surrounded by interesting people who also have exciting goals if you so choose.

Caring for Others Rather Than Making Them Care About Us

The real problem is not being around boring people. Most people have many interesting people around them, but they don't even notice.

I have found that ambitious people are more likely than others to suffer from this problem. A side effect of obsessive pursuit of your goals is to become preoccupied with yourself and your thoughts, not only out of vanity but because your mind is forced to rule out many other thoughts to focus only on your pursuits. By pushing those thoughts, you spend most of your time thinking only about yourself.

Your ambition can be carried over if you are not careful in your conversations with other people. So when you meet a new person, either you talk about yourself or you try to listen to their conversation to see if any of them apply to you, so you speak or wait for your turn to speak.

This was a flaw in my character in the past. I'm a more aggressive talker, so I can interrupt some of the quieter people when they're talking about their activities. I've had some success in overcoming this problem, but as with all things, it still needs to be resolved.

The solution is to stop trying to interest others in conversations but instead take care of others around you. Many people have exciting goals, life experiences, or ambitions, but these unique features only emerge after spending some energy getting to know them and learning from them.

Attempting to Impress Others Shows Insecurity

Confident people don't need others to prove it to them, and by trying to convince others of your life, ambitions, or goals, you just show that you're not sure about them at your heart.

If you spend most of your dialogue talking about yourself, you miss the opportunity to find other interesting people. 90% of my friends I know have exciting ambitions, and they didn't seem particularly noteworthy at first, so I had to get to know them better by listening to their experiences.

Another flaw in trying to impress others is that it usually produces counterproductive results. When you try to tell people about the exciting aspects of your life, they usually end up belittling and underestimating you, so instead of becoming more interesting, you might just become an arrogant person.

Communicate with People with Different Perspectives

Another situation that hinders some people socially is trying to meet people who share the same values as you. If you are pro-environmental or vegan, don't limit yourself to just people in these categories, look for people who are passionate and supportive of life, and find out how many things you have in common.

Most people don't consider themselves prejudiced, but they mean not to get to know anyone who doesn't fit into their group, and I think that's a big mistake because if you're only dealing with people who look like you, how are you going to meet anyone interesting?

It is characteristic of the group that the brains of all its members are programmed to think similarly, so don't form isolated groups. Be prepared to meet people with whom you disagree with 90% of your values to learn from the other 10%.

In Conclusion: Where Do You Find Interesting People?

They're everywhere, and they're often not the people you first suspect, but if you spend too much time focusing on yourself, you'll never find them.