“Imagine a graph,” my friend said, “where one axis is how interesting you are, and the other axis is how self-involved you are.” Done.

Everyone falls on this graph. Donald Trump: extremely self involved, but also extremely interesting. Elon Musk: also extremely self involved and extremely interesting. Probably why people call Musk the Trump of the left. Then you have Bill Gates: extremely interesting, but not at all self-involved. AOC: extremely self involved, and not at all interesting.

I guess the point of this exercise is to give people a little more credit for being self involved when they have something to be self involved about. On the other hand, it serves as a good litmus test for the sort of people you want to avoid (the self involved / non-interesting ones) vs the ones you want to get to know (the non-self involved / interesting ones). I, for one, am in the other quadrant: extremely self involved and not at all interesting.

Amongst other heuristics, this is one way to view the world. But it obviously isn’t the be-all-end-all of how people can be defined. Imagine another graph where there are completely useless heuristics on one side and heuristics that actually work on the other. This Interesting / Self Involved graph would be about in the middle.

Still, you can tell me friend it worked out great.