Synopses & Reviews
You want to leave a mark, not a blemish. Be a hero, not a spectator. You want to be interesting. (Who doesn't?) But sometimes it takes a nudge, a wake-up call, an intervention! — and a little help. This is where Jessica Hagy comes in. A writer and illustrator of great economy, charm, and insight, she's created
How to Be Interesting, a uniquely inspirational how-to that combines fresh and pithy lessons with deceptively simple diagrams and charts.
Ms. Hagy started on Forbes.com, where she's a weekly blogger, by creating a "How to Be Interesting" post that went viral, attracting 1.4 million viewers so far, with tens of thousands of them liking, linking, and tweeting the article. Now she's deeply explored the ideas that resonated with so many readers to create this small and quirky book with a large and universal message. It's a book about exploring: Talk to strangers. About taking chances: Expose yourself to ridicule, to risk, to wild ideas. About being childlike, not childish: Remember how amazing the world was before you learned to be cynical. About being open: Never take in the welcome mat. About breaking routine: Take daily vacations... if only for a few minutes. About taking ownership: Whatever you're doing, enjoy it, embrace it, master it as well as you can. And about growing a pair: If you're not courageous, you're going to be hanging around the water cooler, talking about the guy that actually is.
Synopsis
An inspiring visual guide to a richer life. "If there's a thinker to steal from, it's Jessica Hagy."--Austin Kleon, author of Steal Like an Artist and Newspaper Blackout
How to Be Interesting is passionate, positive, down-to-earth, and irrepressibly upbeat, combining fresh and pithy life lessons, often just a sentence or two, with deceptively simple diagrams and graphs. Each of the book's more than 100 spreads will nudge readers a little bit further out of their comfort zones and into a place where suddenly everything is possible.
It's about taking chance--but also about taking daily vacations. About being childlike, not childish. It's about ideas, creativity, risk. It's about trusting your talents and doing only what you want--but having the courage to get lost and see where the path leads. Because it's what you don't know that's interesting.
About the Author
Jessica Hagy is known for her Webby Award-winning blog Indexed. Her cartoons regularly appear in the New York Times, and she writes a weekly blog for Smithsonian and an online column for Forbes. Ms. Hagy lives in Seattle, Washington.