Jennie Jerome, Winston Churchill's mother, once dined with both Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli and his rival, William Gladstone, on consecutive nights.
When asked about her impressions of the two men, she said, "When I left the dining room after sitting next to Gladstone, I thought he was the cleverest man in England. But when I sat next to Disraeli, I left feeling that I was the cleverest woman."
Most people think they want to be charismatic. They want their energy to be compelling and their stories to be electric—to walk into a room and have everyone be impressed. But when I think about the friends I love and want to spend the most time with, they don't have charisma; they have Reverse Charisma.
Why do certain people make us feel boring but others do not? Why do we feel full of stories and inspiration around some people, but around others we have nothing to say? We tend to assess people based on how interesting they are, but thereby miss a much more important issue — how interesting they make us feel.
How engaged is this person? How much of us can they tolerate? How much of our reality can they handle without us editing ourselves? How encouraging and reassuring are they? How much do they make us want to dig deeper and talk more? How comfortably can we sit in silence without needing to fill it?
Basically, how much of us do they get? If it's not a lot, then we will inevitably be cautious.
A person feels interesting, precisely to the extent that they have become familiar and at ease with things that are extreme, sad, dark, agonizing and shameful. If they are at home with their own strangeness, then they can help us feel at home with ours.
Where they have gone, we can follow. What they have felt safe exploring in themselves, we will be able to safely unpack around them.
Architecting your charisma is a nebulous, scrappy task that autistic pickup artists gave themselves existential crises by failing at achieving. Building your Reverse Charisma is something that anyone can do — by becoming curious, patient and encouraging.
Some people feel interesting, some people make us feel interesting. There's a place for both, but on average our favorite people are the latter, not the former. — h/t Alain de Botton