An old girlfriend once asked me: “Tell me something new”.

Since then, I’ve always been able to answer that question.

Everyone is interesting – for a while, and to new people. After someone gets to know you, staying interesting becomes more difficult. If you talk every day, there’s generally little new in your life. However, you can become intriguing and stay interesting, and here are some ways of doing that.

Becoming intriguing

Generally, be unusual, in ways that work for you. Don’t be, look, watch, read or listen to mainstream. Get involved in different activities. Be an apparent contradiction (for example, I’m an atheist who volunteers on occasion. Some folks can’t reconcile the two). Recall interesting stories from your life and make a list of them. Read philosophy – it will help you develop perspective and you’ll be asked for your opinions. Take risks. When in doubt between doing something and not doing it, generally choose the action. It will more likely than not, create memories and stories you can tell. Get intriguing stuff. Random ideas: cast puzzles, a love sac, a powerball and anything else from ThinkGeek. For more ideas, go to a mall and see what products people are gathering around or staring at.

Staying interesting

• Always be in the process of reading a book. Want to be really intriguing? Read controversial books
• Subscribe to a movie rental service so that you end up watching at least one movie a week.
• Watch TED talks. Many of them are very interesting and intriguing.
• Read the news. Use a feed reader to keep up in news that interest you: odd news, technology, cool popular stuff online, whatever draws your interest.
• Use an online bookmarking service such as del.icio.us to bookmark interesting or cool stuff that you find.
• Seek cool stuff. I bookmark mine at del.icio.us, and you can use del.icio.us to search for the tag ‘cool’ and bookmark your own findings as well. In addition, check sites like Neatorama, popurls, Digg and reddit etc.
• Find events around you and attend those that interest you.
• Meet interesting people. This is perhaps the most concentrated way of becoming more interesting. Meet someone fascinating, buy them dinner, and get them to talk.