By Ethan Maurice | December 7, 2022
Would you like to live a captivating life? To feel alive and engaged in the ways you spend your days? Interest is the unsung key.
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about interest the past year and believe it to be the missing vital value and navigational compass for the modern day. Interest is the fountain of youth we don’t know we’re after, not in the sense of everlasting life, but of life ever-engaging. When rooted in your interests, you don’t need all the tips and tricks to be present, happy, and engaged — living in alignment with the delights and drives of your deeper self, you simply need a lot less soothing.
While the effort to discover your deepest interests is far from straightforward, the process is remarkably simple. So simple, in fact, it can be written out in the most standardized and trite form in the world: a three-step formula.
Ready? Here it is:
Follow curiosity
Cultivate interests
Live a captivating life
It’s a simple process, but difficult to follow. Let’s dive in, break it down, and examine each step.
1. Follow Curiosity
To follow curiosity, you must first learn to notice it.
Curiosity is subtle. It’s often but a nudge, a little hint that bubbles up from the depths of the unconscious into the conscious. All the forces that shaped deep down you (whether nature or nurture or whatever else) also influenced the things you’re curious about.
So when you notice you’re curious, it’s time to drop what you’re doing and investigate. Damn the social conventions, fear, or momentum in another direction pulling you away. This is a signal from the shrouded depths of your unconscious mind saying “wait… what is that?” to the conscious mind.
Curiosity is like a metal detector. Over time, I have come to revere my curiosity for alerting me to my own personal gold. That curious inkling has lead to many treasured finds:
Pedaling a bicycle across the United States to raise $96K for the children’s hospital that saved my life started with a sudden urge to google “has anyone pedaled a bicycle across the united states” and an undying enamorment that took hold of me for months after browsing the results.
WONDER WANDER resulted from that metal detector going off around repeated use of the word “chautauqua” in the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and upon encountering ideas of philosophical gatherings of any sort for years afterwards.
I saw the animated movie Tarzan as a kid and decided Tarzan was basically the coolest dude ever. Twenty years later, I find myself having followed curiosity into lifting weights, barefoot running, rock climbing, and natural forms of movement. Lately, I’ve been seriously wondering if I’m interested in all these forms of movement because Tarzan is my unconscious definition of cool?
What’s important to note is that these examples are unique to me. Following curiosity is about finding the things that sing to you — that resonate with you personally on levels deeper than you can grasp or explain — these are your interests.
Here’s a three-minute clip of Elizabeth Gilbert, one of my author-heroes, brilliantly outlining the curiosity following process:
2. Cultivate Interests
Curiosity is the first scent of your interest. Thus, investigation is only step one. If the internal sense remains that you have stumbled upon something special, the move is to try and cultivate a relationship with this interesting thing.
Cultivating interest is part adventure and part discipline. The interest you feel will naturally compel you to continually engage with your interest. However, discipline and conscious effort are also essential. By consistently putting time and energy into your interest, you deepen, expand, and further your relationship with this thing that has resonance with parts of you deeper than you can even consciously grasp.
Examples of cultivated interests are numerous. Artists, musicians, creatives, cooks, athletes, alpinists, innovative business people, and well, anyone who is deeply engaged and regularly drops into “flow-state” while doing what they do is obviously interested in what they are doing.
If you want to take a deep dive into the higher realms of interest, dig this John Frusciante interview:
John has a near mystic perspective on creativity, interest, and living in alignment with “the creative force of the universe” (or God, if you will), that I really jive with and explored in this article.
3. Live a Captivating Life
With time, following curiosity and cultivating interest compounds into a captivating life. It’s so simple once you see it:
If you spend your life doing things you are interested in, then your life will be interesting to you. If you spend your life doing things you are not interested in, then your life will not be interesting to you.
If money, security, material things, family expectations, or other values trump and tramp out the curiosity and interest you have in life, you may very well get those things, but at the risk of losing interest in your life.
This is such a common pitfall in our culture. The paradoxical caricature of the “successful” person in our society is someone who has seemingly everything except an interest in everything they have. Many people grow further and further into a disinterested grayness and pass their time with a variety of low-grade forms of entertainment to distract from the lack of interest they have in their own life.
There’s a quote floating around the web commonly misattributed to Ben Franklin that, “many men die at twenty-five and aren’t buried until they’re seventy-five.” These words resonate because we all know people who have outlived their interest, who checked the boxes their culture told them to check, but their non-logical, unconscious, deep-down self was not interested in those boxes and so they lost their interest in life along the way.
Interest is the secret sauce. The inexhaustible within you. Your personal fountain of youth and unique-to-you holy grail.
So follow your curiosity and discover your interests. Over time, the cumulative effect will amass into a captivating life — an engagement with reality uniquely compelling to you.
