Fall in love with boredom instead

We all want to be great at what we do. Whether it’s being the stay-at-home mom who maintains a stable, loving household or the wily entrepreneur who slays market giants by driving a razor sharp USP into their flabby, unguarded belly, not one single person on the world doesn’t want to be great in some way.

Some things require far more effort to be great at. It’s damn easy to laze around all day, laughing at memes and pictures of cats. It’s far harder to cold call, taste rejection and close sales all day.

As humans, we’re the only animal able to reflect on and make judgments about our own and others’ actions. That means that when we get demotivated, we are able to make a choice: we can choose to keep going, or we can choose to give in. If our dream is big enough, we find ways to keep going.

In order to keep moving forward, we look for inspiration to motivate us. People try to get inspired in different ways: music, inspirational quotes, positive self-talk, etc. The only problem with looking for inspiration is that it
introduces the need to emotionally invest in what you’re trying to be great at. It’s like an old car that needs more and more fuel every time you fill it up.

Wait, you say. What’s the point doing anything if you’re not inspired by it? While there’s nothing wrong with inspiration per se, if it interferes with the work that’s going to make you great, you’re going to have a problem. Setbacks always occur along the way to greatness.

A study was conducted in Ghent University, Belgium that suggested that motivation could actually obstruct progress. Group A and Group B read an article about a stabbing that occurred. The story was deliberately skewed in favor of the accused attacker. Both groups had to record their judgement after the first article, read a subsequent article where the story was biased against the attacker and re-record their judgement.

Here’s the catch: Group A had to defend their judgments, while Group B were told they could judge as they pleased with no need to defend themselves. As a result, Group A candidates felt a high degree of motivation to defend themselves, while Group B didn’t.

The final kicker was that some participants had to memorize either a long or short string of letters and numbers to reduce their cognitive capacity to varying degrees.

What the research found was that when cognitive capacity was high, more motivation led to better results. When cognitive capacity was low, more motivation actually produced poorer results, i.e. the people who had to memorize
longer alphanumeric strings and were told to defend themselves weren’t able to take in the new information from the second article as well as the people who only had to memorize shorter strings.

tl;dr: motivation and inspiration gives you better results when you aren’t
focused on so many things.

But this was just a study. In reality, we always have too many things on our minds. We feel like we’re pulled in 100 different directions at the same time and end up feeling exhausted, even after we haven’t done anything.

What The Greatest Of All Time Do

Have you realized that the highest performing people don’t rely on inspiration? From as far back as Mozart (and even further) to present day sports people like Kobe Bryant, they all rely on one thing to become the legends that we all look up to and admire: processes. Let’s look at some examples:

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Doing his research out of Carnegie Mellon University, John Hayes researched the effect of deliberate practice had on famous musical composers’ careers. He analyzed thousands of works considered masterpieces in the modern era, specifically produced between 1685 and 1900. His goal was to answer the question, “How long after one becomes interested in music does it take to become world class?”

Get this: of the 500 masterpieces, 497 were produced in the 10th year of the composer’s career (the other three were produced in years eight and nine). In other words, these famous composers and artists who we revere today worked hard and had little recognition for 10 years before they “made it”. They couldn’t have gotten there without falling in love with the composition process and just playing music every day.

Let’s take a moment to appreciate this: here’s Mozart’s Symphony #40 in G Minor, K 550 – 1. Molto Allegro.

Kobe Bryant

Kobe is the Greatest Of All Time (GOAT) in the NBA and maybe in basketball worldwide. His CV is astounding: 5× NBA champion (2000–2002, 2009–2010), 2× NBA Finals MVP (2009–2010) and 18× NBA All-Star (1998, 2000–2016), not to mention being part of the all- conquering, gold-winning Team America in the Beijing and London Olympic games.

There is one famous story that first surfaced on Reddit and is now embedded in folklore on Bryant’s freakish dedication to training, calling his athletic trainer at 4:15 am to prepare for the Olympics in 2012. Instead of regurgitating it word-for-word, read it here.

Sukiyabashi Jiro

Jiro-san is widely acknowledged as the creator of the best sushi and sashimi in Japan. At something like $325 per person, the price is just one hurdle. Trying to get a booking is nigh on impossible.

In the video he says he can’t have mastered the art of making the best sushi and sashimi in the world if he hadn’t spent 50 years doing it. That’s right 50. Could you imagine, 50 years of doing the same thing, over and over? That’s the price you have to pay for mastery.

So if processes are so important, why don’t more of us do it?

Here are a few reasons:

• it doesn’t sell: The self-help industry was estimated to be worth more than $11 billion a year in 2013. People love getting fired up and motivated and some savvy gurus realized that it was an ongoing, perpetual thirst that needed a well.

Selling processes doesn’t work because it doesn’t make you feel like taking over the world (not for normal people, anyway).

• it’s boring: processes by their very nature are boring – that’s why they’re so effective. They take the emotion out of it so you can focus on doing important stuff and compounding your growth every single day.

the people who grow the fastest focus on building processes that almost automates the hardest parts of their lives so that growing becomes a default result.

• people want a quick fix: human beings are lazy. We will not go out of our own way to change unless we are trying to fix or avoid a major problem. We have to really want something badly to do something about it. Even then, when a lot of us say we really want something, when push comes to shove, we don’t take the necessary action.

We would rather someone give us a pre-packaged, done-for-you solution. That’s what good marketing is all about. Sell the hole, not the drill. Selling procedures is unsexy.

OK, I want to fall in love with boredom today. How do I start?

Make your process laughably small. We quit because we go for too much at the beginning. Start with micro-habits and reward yourself with a bigger habit but only after you have been consistent.

For example, if you want to write a book. Commit to writing one sentence every day. Yes, just one sentence. You’ll think, “come on, anyone can do that!” Yeah, but who does?

The idea is to make you feel like you are doing too little. You should want to do more, but hold yourself back from doing that. It’s better to do less and be consistent, than try to do more and not do enough.

Do the same thing for everything in your life and aim to do it for a year:

• want to learn a new language? Learn a new word everyday.
• want to be happier?
• want to be more grateful? write one thing you’re thankful about everyday.
• want to be reconnect with your spouse? write one thing you like about them everyday.
• want to be a better parent? talk with your child for 10 minutes everyday.

Remember if it’s boring, you are moving in the right direction.