Why the Secret to Getting Better is Being Bored
Boredom strikes all of us. Whether it’s for a few days, a few weeks or even years, it’s inevitable that we hit a streak where we’re stuck going through the motions. In this phase the things that we’re working toward seem to have plateaued and the tedium of routine and monotony are getting to us. It’s in these moments that we want to quit, change everything, or find whatever pleasures we can — whether they’re beneficial or not.
To stay on track we usually focus on our strategies. We often attempt to forecast events far ahead and aim to shape them in our favor. But we’re misled into thinking that if we create the perfect game plan, we’ll account for all of the variables of life. We think we’ll be able to control reality and bend it to our will. Humans often have an incorrect relationship with strategy, and it leads to misconceptions.
Strategy’s problem is usually that it doesn’t account for life’s randomness. It doesn’t factor in when things won’t go according to plan. It doesn’t make room for the unpredictable. These events are called black swans. They’re situations that come as a surprise and change everything. A black swan could be getting fired due to a stock market crash. It could be an injury that occurred in your house and had nothing to do with training. There’s a number of unforeseen and random events capable of happening.
Black swans are impediments because we fail to plan for them and they can’t be known. But our lack of planning extends to the inevitable — we forget to plan for a lack of interest. Why do we overlook this? Where the black swan is unexpected, boredom is a complete known. We’ve all been bored before. I remember my basketball coach in high school telling me to “quit going through the motions,” and I’ve had my share of phases where it’s taxing to keep up with things.
If we struggle to account for what’s unpredictable in our world, which is most of existence, why are we also overlooking what’s so obvious?
The Problem We’re Facing
We should remember two things:
- We rarely act in our own best interest. (Anyone who’s ever procrastinated can admit that.)
- Boredom is just around the corner.
While we plot and plan our lives, we get material. We read books. We binge articles. We listen to podcasts. We watch the right TV shows and get the right mentors. Our calendars and to-do lists are coordinated in ways that aim so that we’ll only succeed. We have the best intentions and are smart enough to know that results are inevitable if we stick with the path, but then we avoid the long and arduous tunnel of effort.
Despite meticulous and plotted strategies that would make a war general blush — we fail. The weight isn’t lost. Marathon training goes awry. The kids don’t pass their tests. A promotion isn’t obtained. Blog posts and podcasts that were committed to be done never happen.
What gives? And what do we do? We usually head back for the same process. We gather more material. We buy more books. We read more articles. We seek more advice. The cycle repeats itself and results never happen.
A season of loss interest can have a dismal effect. A plateau could result in something as simple as lost time or something as dramatic as a missed promotion. We can’t exactly calculate how failure or lack of progress in the present will impact the future. We live with the results, but never realize what could have been or why what’s occurred has taken place. This is exasperated by our narrative fallacies, a concept by Nassim Taleb that addresses our habit of creating stories to make sense of the world. These stories are necessary for our survival, but they lead us to believe false cause and effects about our lives that aren’t necessarily true.
What Should We Do?
Occam’s Razor is a philosophic principle that states that the simplest answer is likely true. This approach, while not as rhetorically or mentally stimulating as other philosophical ideas, is a useful tool to apply to our beliefs and actions.
What’s the truth about boredom, plateaus, and lack of interest? You just keep doing things. You keep being bored. There isn’t a secret formula or answer or magic trick or way of thinking that will launch you into results.
Entrepreneur James Clear learned this lesson from a coach during a session in the gym. To address the difference between those who succeed and those who don’t, the coach said, “At some point it comes down to who can handle the boredom of training every day and doing the same lifts over and over again.” It’s quite simply a matter of who wants it more. Who’s willing to grind away, day after day, exhausting their mind and body, unsure of what results are actually taking place?
This is the most honest approach to hard work, getting things done, and seeing results over time. There is no magic idea. There is no Kool-Aid. Your only chance at improvement — if it happens — is to stick with the grind, no matter how bored you get. This is the opposite of what a noisy internet tells us. Attending conferences and reading motivational books and positive quotes — which have their time and place — won’t get anything done for us. Just doing is the best method.
Embrace the tedium. Lean into it. Like the Roman Emperor and Philosopher Marcus Aurelius said, and a quote that I remind myself ad ad nauseam, “The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.” There will be phases when you’re learning and exercise and work and diet and goals are boring. Lean into them. Be bored. The boredom will pass, but the results and what’s sustained during boredom will remain.
Runner Steve Prefontaine said, “Don’t let fatigue make a coward of you,” and runner Ken Chlouber said, “Make friends with pain and you’ll never be alone.” Boredom causes both fatigue and pain. Both are our friends. Let fatigue and pain be your greatest allies. Because learning how to deal with these friends isn’t just about improving at goals, sometimes these friends can affect our relationships and whether or not we care about ourselves. Fatigue and pain are the most difficult friends to have because they ask the most of us, but they also give the most in return if we build strong bonds with them. Sometimes they’re surprised by our efforts and give back more than we expected.
There’s a beautiful quote from social reformer Jacob Riis that former San Antonio Spurs player George Hill says hangs in the locker room of the team (I can’t confirm if it still hangs). It says, “When nothing seems to help, I go look at the stone-cutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before.”
