Being interesting isn't a gift — it's a skill you can practice

Edward De Bono opens How To Be More Interesting by demolishing a comforting myth: that interesting people are simply born with charisma, wit, or a fascinating life. His claim is the opposite — being interesting is a skill, like tennis or cooking, that improves with deliberate practice. Most people are dull not because they lack material, but because they never learned the habits of attention and thinking that generate interest.

De Bono argues that our schooling trains us to be correct rather than interesting. We learn to give the expected answer, avoid mistakes, and stay on safe ground. But correctness is predictable, and predictability is the enemy of interest. To be interesting you must be willing to move away from the obvious.

The book's promise is practical: through techniques of perception, curiosity, and idea-generation, anyone can become someone others want to listen to. Interest is created, not inherited.