Truly, everything is interesting. It’s just that sometimes the showing of its interesting-ness is more or less so.

But back to the question: are you interesting? Or to reframe it a bit, since we’ve established that everyone and everything is interesting: what’s at the core of your interesting?

This core notion is expressed a lot of ways. It’s the passion, impetus, mission statement, what blows your hair back or what gets you out of bed in the morning. Simon Sinek, in his great book, Start from Why, calls it, very simply and elegantly, the “Why.” Why do we do the things we do when we could do other things? Here be interesting.

Brands have to self-consciously pinpoint their interesting. Brands can’t wing it like people do – boring others to death for decades before a kind friend mentions that maybe people would like it if you asked questions about them for a change. Brands need to know what their interesting is and how to go about showing it to people in a way that doesn’t take all the interesting out of it.

So how do you do all that? Well, it starts with the pinpointing. There is no single way, but there is one commonality: listening (see: The Name). Also, it’s not rocket science. We’ve never come across a brand that didn’t know what its interesting was. More often than not, it’s mired in other thoughts or complicated by ‘shoulds’ or ‘need tos’ or ‘other people are doings.’ Identifying interesting is simply a matter of listening and providing clarity.

However, agreeing to your interesting often means letting go of the primacy of other personally or organizationally held beliefs, which can be tough. You only get one core interesting. Everything else is secondary. And then there’s the standing behind it part. Often that’s where courage comes in. And that’s when things get interesting.