The difference between being right and being interesting
Correctness is maintenance. Interesting is creation.
We’re living through a plague of people who are technically correct yet spiritually dead. You know exactly who I’m talking about. It’s the person at the dinner table who interrupts a great story to correct a minor date or statistic, or the reply-guy on Twitter who has a peer-reviewed citation for everything but hasn’t had an original thought since 2016.
But correctness doesn’t make you compelling. And if you look closely, most people today aren’t suffering from a lack of accuracy, they’re suffering from a lack of imagination.
Facts are cheap, actually
Part of the problem is that “being right” has never been cheaper. Fifty years ago, knowing obscure facts was a sign of a well-read mind, but today, it just means you have access to the internet. You can Google or ChatGPT your way into being right about literally anything in seconds. Information is now a commodity, which means it has no inherent value in a deep conversation.
Socrates didn’t walk around Athens shouting answers; he walked around asking annoying questions. He understood that knowledge wasn’t about holding a database of facts, but about the humility of inquiry. Michel de Montaigne, the father of the personal essay, spent his life bragging about what he didn’t know. These men were magnetic not because they were omniscient, but because they were honest about the limits of their own understanding.
When everyone has access to the truth, the differentiator becomes taste. It becomes interpretation, discernment, a point of view. It becomes the ability to take a dry fact and weave it into a story that actually means something.
And yet, we cling to correctness
If being interesting is so much more valuable, why are we so obsessed with being right? Because being right feels safe. It makes the ego buzz. It gives the illusion of some kind of mental superiority.
Neuroscience tells us that the human brain hates ambiguity. Uncertainty triggers a threat response, while certainty gives us a hit of dopamine. Clinging to the “correct” opinion is a safety signal. It tells our tribe, “I am one of you; I know the codes; I am not a threat.” This is why we see so many people who confuse rigidity with intelligence. They think that by memorizing the approved talking points, they are displaying brilliance, when really they’re just displaying anxious ideological purity.
Bertrand Russell famously observed that “the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.” He was highlighting the tragedy of the human condition: ignorance often feels like clarity, while knowledge feels like mess. The more you know, the more you know you don’t know. But if we look at this through a modern lens, we can see the mechanism at play. Certainty is a nervous system hack. It’s a way to close the loop so you don’t have to deal with the messy complexity of being alive. You can resolve every contradiction so you and your ideas fit neatly into one box.
The anatomy of interesting
So, if it’s not about having the right answers, what makes a person interesting?
Interesting people think in diagonals, not straight lines. They connect things that don’t look like they belong together, they ask better questions than they give answers, and most importantly, they hold their beliefs loosely. They are willing to play with an idea, turn it over, and inspect it without instantly accepting or rejecting it. And to take it a step further, they have no problem updating their priors.
Right people follow the rules; interesting people bend them to see if they break. Galileo wasn’t just right about heliocentrism; he was fascinating because he was willing to burn down the entire worldview of his era to prove it. He created friction, and interesting requires friction. If you agree with everyone and everyone agrees with you, you might be right, but you are also boring. There’s nothing to ponder, nothing to chew on.
The algorithm of sameness
We are currently dying of intellectual sameness because we’ve built a digital world that rewards predictability. The algorithm pushes the “correct” take to the top of the feed because it gets the most engagement, which usually means the most outrage or the most validation. The result is a flattening of culture. Film criticism has collapsed into identical moralizing, and political commentary has become a recitation of team slogans.
Everyone is so terrified of being wrong—of being “dunked on” or canceled or corrected—that they have stopped taking intellectual risks altogether. We have prioritized safety over aliveness. It echoes the Victorian obsession with propriety, where following the social script was more important than having a soul.
Interesting isn’t a personality type, it’s a cognitive posture. It’s how you metabolize reality—through curiosity, contradiction, and play. Being interesting is simply what happens when your inner life is awake. So if you want to cultivate it, you must build the conditions where aliveness can occur.
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If you want to escape this trap and actually be interesting, you have to shift your framework. Here’s how:
Audit your inputs: If you only consume what the algorithm feeds you, your personality will be a mirror of everyone else’s. Interesting people are usually reading weird shit. They read books from 1970 that everyone else forgot. They read philosophy that contradicts their politics. If your inputs are unique, your outputs will be unique. If your inputs are garbage, your outputs will often be garbage.
Practice public uncertainty: Prioritize curiosity over certainty. Stop trying to win the argument and start trying to understand the dynamic. Be more like Feynman, who loved the state of “not knowing” because it meant there was still work to be done. The most boring people are the ones who have a pre-packaged opinion for everything. Try saying “I don’t know” or “I’m still thinking about that.” Watching someone think in real-time is infinitely more compelling than watching someone recite a script. It creates tension, and tension is magnetic.
Embrace your contradictions: Walt Whitman famously wrote, “I contain multitudes.” Complex people are interesting because they aren’t flat characters. You can be a futurist tech founder who refuses to allow screens in your own home. You can be a deeply spiritual person who is skeptical of organized religion. You can be a die-hard environmentalist who loves the engineering of Formula 1 racing. Don’t smooth out your edges to make sense to other people; the friction between your opposing traits is where the real energy comes from.
Have a take, not just a fact: A fact is “The movie made $100 million.” A take is “The movie made money because we are collectively starving for earnestness.” Facts are commodities; perspectives are art. Stop trying to report on the world and start interpreting it instead.
Develop taste: Taste is simply the intelligence of selection. It’s not about knowing everything, it’s about knowing what matters. We live in an infinite feed of information, so the most valuable skill isn’t accumulation; it’s curation. It’s the difference between a hoarder and a museum curator. “Right” people try to collect every fact, but interesting people are ruthless editors. They know what to ignore, they have the confidence to look at the consensus and say, “Actually, I think this is garbage,” or to find value in something everyone else has dismissed. Being “right” is about objective accuracy; taste is about subjective conviction.
Think in diagonals: Linear thinkers move from premise → conclusion.
Interesting thinkers move sideways. They pull ideas from unexpected domains, they cross-pollinate, they follow threads that don’t look related until suddenly they are. Da Vinci studied anatomy to paint better. Ada Lovelace combined poetry with mathematics. Steve Jobs obsessed over calligraphy. Diagonal thinking is where originality hides, because it can’t be automated. It’s what turns information into insight.
Lower the shield: Vulnerability is the ultimate hook. If you are willing to admit you were wrong, or that you’re struggling with an idea, you immediately become the most interesting person in the room because you are the only one being real. Perfection is boring because it offers no entry point for connection.
There is a place for being right. If you are building a bridge or performing heart surgery, please be right. I want my accountant to be right. But in the messy, beautiful business of being a human being, accuracy is not the highest virtue.
Being right wins arguments, but being interesting wins hearts. Right is a fact. Interesting is a force. If you want to be unforgettable, you have to stop trying to be correct and start trying to be alive. Truth is cold, but curiosity is the fire.
As always, thanks for reading with me. If you enjoyed this post, please consider hitting the like button and/or sharing it to help boost its visibility. I appreciate you so much. xo
I could do you one more
morewhy is being interesting that important?
I get it, we all want to be right, but would rathee love to be interesting.
But why do we keep being interesting.
Is this some kind of FOMO, if yes.
Then seeking to be interesting is also a fatigue in itself.