10 Ways to Make Your Life Quite Interesting

The QI Manifesto

This summer, I spent a month traveling through England, Scotland and France (and what a month it was!). One of my favorite days was at the Cornbury Music Festival, where I had the privilege of seeing the fabulous Elvis Costello perform as the headliner. Wow. What a powerhouse!

Before Costello started, my mates and I did a photo essay on people wearing Wellies (we were in the middle of a rainy stretch), and then we went to a beer tent, where I saw a large poster sporting the QI Manifesto. I’d never heard of QI but was drawn in by the content. I want to share it here and am eager for your thoughts on it, too!

Here’s what I found out: QI (short for “Quite Interesting”) is arguably the hardest panel game in the world. It is built on the philosophy that everything in the world is quite interesting, provided you look at in the right way. It is a 26-year-long project, created by the BBC in England.

The QI Manifesto

Ten steps to making your life more interesting:

1. Everything is interesting. You just have to look at it the right way. At the beginning of QI, we set ourselves the Quite Boring challenge to see if we could turn up anything that was intrinsically dull. We failed. Allow yourselves the luxury of looking closely and patiently at anything—a turnip, the history of Chelmsford, a letter from an insurance company—and new layers of detail come into focus.

2. Ask more questions. QI is one long string of questions. Six-year-olds are full of questions, before school and busy parents teach them that you get on quicker by pretending to know things. Socrates asked lots of difficult questions. He might have ended up dead (who doesn’t) but he was never bored and he never bored anyone else.

3. We all know less than we think we know. That’s what “general ignorance” means. Cultivate humility and a sense of mystery. “The wise man knows that he knows nothing” (Socrates, again). Despite what some scientific fundamentalists tell us, we still don’t know how or why the universe began, what consciousness or light are, or even the best way to bring up our children.

4. Look for new connections. We always tell our researchers to only write down things they don’t already know. They find this hard, because formal education is all about recycling and repeating other people’s knowledge (some wag once defined education as the process by which the notes of the professor appear in the notebooks of the student, without passing through the mind of either). Interestingness is a lot like humour—it can’t be defined or taught, it’s a spark which arcs between two previously unconnected things.

5. If it’s worth writing down, it’s worth writing down clearly. Technical terms, jargon and mumbo jumbo might give you the fleeting warmth of belonging to an exclusive club, but they are the enemies of truth. As the anthropologist Margaret Mead once wrote, if you can’t explain yourself to a 12-year-old child, stay inside the university or lab until you have a better grasp of your subject matter.

6. What you leave out is as important as what you leave in. Too many of our knowledge institutions base their authority on spurious claims of “comprehensiveness.” We prefer storytellers to panels of faceless academics. QI isn’t about lists of trivial facts, as we’ve said, it’s about making connections.

7. Digressions are the point. We’re burrowers not grazers. What might start out as a question from the back seat of the car: why do pigeons not fly away sooner might lead to an investigation into how the brain processes visual information; the truth about carrots and night vision; the history of pigeons as a communication device; the Dickin Medal for Animal Bravery; how migratory animals navigate; the chemical constitution of bird dung; the design and ornamentation of medieval dovecotes …

8. Take your time. The interesting stuff doesn’t just roll over and ask to have its tummy tickled. We reckon it takes three hours of reading, thinking and researching to get into the QI zone, when you might notice the unseen link, the mind-altering fact, the life-changing insight, lurking in the fireplace.

9. Walk towards the sound of gunfire. Fear is what stops us, everywhere in our lives, particularly the pointless fear of what other people will think. We know when something isn’t right. We should trust our instincts and risk saying so. It’s surprising how often things turn out for the best when you do.

10. You already have everything you need. The most interesting thing you have is you: your instincts, your curiosity, and your own ignorance. But the great paradox is that, in order to be most yourself, you have to shut up about how much you know. The great American philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson, wrote that the greatest poets carry “us to such a lofty strain of intelligent activity, as to suggest a wealth which beggars his own.” We all have this lofty strain; we just have to find our frequency.

How does the QI Manifesto resonate with you? Please comment. I am super interested! Let’s get a dialogue going around this fabulous material. Happy thoughts to you all!

Comments

  1. Thanks for the great article!

    Making EVERYTHING compelling is the task I set for myself as a teacher. After creating a culture and climate where learning is the expectation, making it all interesting is the most important task I have. Your article was terrific food for thought. I sent a link to my principal, and I’m sharing it with my students on Monday.

    Best Regards,

    Jim

  2. Hello Chris,
    Thank you for this article in your blog! I have a 6-year-old and he is always asking questions and sometimes thinks he knows all the answers. My usual reply is to ask some questions to find out where his mind is going at the time. All of these points are definitely worth reading and applying to our lives and jobs. I am so glad you had a meaningful and eventful journey. Let’s get together for some java or tea and discuss your travels and goals. Take care.

  3. Chris, I love the QI Manifesto! Since my work is encouraging people to talk about and prepare for dying, I looked at it as lessons pertinent to my focus and the work I do with others. It has so much to suggest that is useful. Because my clients are at all stages of their lives (actively dying to those who have never thought much about it), I especially appreciate “Walk towards the sound of gunfire.” Facing our fears about death makes life lighter and more vibrant. Thank you!

  4. 26-year-project!??? Wow. I would be very interested in reading more about what they have discovered and how it’s going.

    “Everything is interesting.” I really like this, in particular, because so many people are going through such hard times right now. This QI Manifesto gives permission to not only feel the pain, but to delve into it, which can then lead to a healing, or a deeper understanding of the situation and how to bring about relief. It doesn’t have to be “good” but it can be “interesting”. So true.

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