Becoming the Person Who Thinks Interesting Thoughts 💭

The work that comes before good writing happens.

A group of people work in an office at a paper company. They file reports, attend meetings, and answer phones. Everyone eats lunch in the breakroom. They have a boss who’s annoying and tries too hard to be liked.

A show with this setup would make for the most boring television ever.

Yet ‘The Office’, as everyone knows, became one of the funniest, most rewatchable TV shows ever.

One of the standout things about The Office was its sharp, layered writing.

Michael Schur, one of the writers on the show, tells a story about writing an episode called “Christmas Party” where the office does Secret Santa. Schur had to come up with gift ideas for everyone.

For Angela—an uptight, religious character—he wrote that she’d get a Christian self-help book.

But Greg Daniels, the showrunner, pushed back. He wanted something else.

“I was annoyed at first. It wasn’t even a main part of the story, just a small detail. But he thought the book didn’t reveal anything new about her. Even if it’s only three seconds of screen time, it’s a chance to show something deeper”.

They spent an hour discussing it. Eventually, someone in the writers’ room suggested that Angela might be into those photos where babies are dressed up like adults. Maybe a poster of two babies dressed as jazz musicians.

“That was it. Everyone knew immediately. Yes, Angela would love that.”

It was perfect—the innocence of babies, the charm of the costumes, and the old-fashioned propriety of jazz musicians. Of course Angela would love that.

Having Interesting Thoughts

How do you go from the obvious “Christian book” to the interesting “babies dressed as jazz musicians”?

Even though it might seem like a stroke of genius coming out of nowhere, it wasn’t that.

It came from pushing past the obvious to observe a character’s deeper psychology rather than just their surface traits.

Going deeper, beyond the surface level—that’s where interesting thoughts about a person, situation, or moment come from.

And having interesting thoughts is where good writing is birthed. You can master the grammar, dialogue, and three-act structure, but if you have nothing interesting to say, none of it matters.

Becoming the Person Who Thinks Interesting Thoughts

The good news is that having interesting thoughts isn’t some fixed trait you either have or don’t. It’s a muscle you can develop.

When researching this topic, I kept coming back to the essayist Henrik Karlsson, whose insights on this felt the most practical and honest.

In a podcast, Henrik talks about what he calls the “animating question”—a question that urgently needs answering, one that matters deeply to you as a person.

For him, it’s about trying to get better at the things that matter in his life: being a better father, husband, friend, writer.

“You just have to grab hold of what awakens a sense of loving curiosity in you,” he writes. “If you pursue those things, they never cease to open up to new questions and observations and ideas. The richer your understanding of ‘the landscape’ gets, so to speak, the more paths onward you spot.”

That animating question becomes the lens through which everything else becomes interesting.

But Henrik doesn’t just think about these questions, he creates the conditions for interesting thoughts to emerge.

​​He reads widely and oddly, pulling ideas from unexpected places like machine learning and math. He talks to interesting people—his wife, his friends, online readers who reach out after discovering his essays.

He also spends a lot of time alone. “I go on four-hour walks, letting things slowly collide and merge in my subconscious,” he said.

He’s deliberately constructing his life around experiences that enable “left-field thinking”.

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Good writing doesn’t start with a pen and paper. It starts with cultivating a mind that experiences life richly, that chases the questions that matter, and that goes to the depths in answering them. It starts with becoming the person who thinks interesting thoughts.