Reason-4-Smile Weblog

Being interesting

Posted by admin on Monday, October 29th, 2007

What makes a person interesting? Not necessarily the topic he/she is talking about. It’s more of ‘how’ than ‘what’, more of how he talk, how he communicate his/her ideas instead of the topic he is speaking about.

Today I want to share from a book I’m reading right now, in fact I’m studying it. It’s not an inspirational book, it is a technical, IT-related book. I’ve been thinking all along, whether anything that I can share about the book I’m reading right now in my blog. Of course I don’t want to share technical stuff in this blog, otherwise this blog will be reason2program or reason2code instead of reason2smile =)

The book is one of the Head First series (can be checked in Amazon here) and I study this book for a certification I plan to take next month. Something very interesting about this book was that how it’s been structured not in a conventional way, a way that the topic becomes very interesting and easier for readers to understand.

Some of the things I learned from the author of the books that I find it might be useful for us to become more interesting:

• Clear about your goal and your audiences’ purpose.
  • The authors make it very clear that the book was made to help readers pass the certification exam

• Research about your audiences, helping them to reach their purpose.
  • The authors have done research on how the brain works, to enable reader to learn and memorize better

• Media to grab attention
  • The authors use a lot of pictures, some even made in a comical way to grab the readers’ attention

• Relating topics, communicate complex concepts to become much simpler
  • The authors relate the difficult topics with something closer to the readers’ world, such as everyday life, poem, movies and acting, story-telling, bar conversation, etc

• Repetition of the concepts
  • The same concepts was repeated over and over again to emphasize the importance

For more resources on being interesting, you can read the book from Edward de Bono, How to Be More Interesting, available @ Amazon.com here. It has a lot of different techniques and exercises to relate topics to make conversation more interesting.

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Posted in: The Leader.

3 Responses to “Being interesting”

1. first other Says:
   October 29th, 2007 at 5:05 pm

   Being interesting? Sometimes I feel like I’m so boring, then I finally talked to someone and shared with them, my story… who I was. And to my disbelief, they thought it was fascinating so they suggested I write about it.

   I just bought that book, thanks!

2.   Confession of an extrovert salesperson — Reason-4-Smile Weblog Says:
   January 31st, 2008 at 12:08 am

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