Anything is Interesting
There is a question I love: with no time to prepare, what is a topic you could do a 15 minute presentation about ?
Most people will have at least one. When you think about that question, you quickly realise there might be more than one. In fact it is likely that there is a topic you could give a full-on lecture series on with little to no-heads up. The one one I would jump to is probably Formula 1.
Ask this question to a group of 100 people and chances are you will get as many answers (some people will probably pick the same topics but from a different angle). This reveals a fundamental truth, everything can be interesting.
People get into history because of arguably dramatised accounts of important historical events. Once hooked, they want to know more. They start asking questions. They start to realise there is more nuance than they thought. They ask more questions. From there they pull one thread then another and before you know it you find out about the Yellow Fleet postal system.
Some things feel inherently interesting, but framing is what does the trick. Take F1. I was primed for it by my father, but most of my friends could not care less. Yet something interesting happened with F1. If you follow the sport you probably know what I am referring to, it might be why you are into it today: the Netflix show Drive to Survive. It took a sport that many considered boring - "it's just cars going round and round" - and made it interesting. They did this by changing the focus from the cars to the stories behind them. It might seem silly but the amount of people who were suddenly interested in F1 made me realise the importance of this.
Stories are a reliable way of making things immediately interesting to people. The author Michael Lewis understands this, which is how he can tell you a great story and make you care about baseball number crunchers, bankers, and government workers. He focuses on the human stories within. The context becomes secondary at first, once you care about the characters you want to learn more about their field.
You can make anything interesting by finding these stories. I find that once I'm hooked by a story, I have questions. Finding answers is fun, and leads to more threads to pull on. That's how I have acquired loads of random knowledge and interests.
Anything is interesting once you know that everything can be interesting. In fact, anyone is interesting because everyone is interested in something. Despite always being curious, this was a slow but rewarding revelation for me.
I find people's passion for their niche interests contagious. The challenge is to tease it out. The best way I have found is to ask questions. In some cases the best question is, bluntly: "what is something you could talk about for 15 minutes straight?"