Want To Be Successful? Get Bored!

Ever wonder why success seems to slip between your fingers?  Why, no matter how hard you try, the end result is mediocre?  James Clear in his blog ‘Buffer’ writes about this sort of thing all the time.  Recently, he chanced an interview with an Olympic coach, and asked, “What’s the difference between the best athletes and everyone else?”

The coach rattled off a shopping list of sports caster talking points.  The words ‘genetics’, ‘luck’ and ‘talent’ were thrown around.  Then he got to the meat of the issue.

“At some point, it comes down to who can handle the boredom of training every day and doing the same lifts over and over and over again.”

Seems obvious, right?  You can’t be good at something unless you do the work.  But work is hard.  Sometimes, it will bore you to tears.  But that’s where success comes from.  Olympic montages don’t focus on it, because, well, it’s boring.  That’s the point.  Boring things make for bad television.  That doesn’t make it any less true, though.

And most of us don’t want to believe it.  How many times have you started a long-term project with an intense thrust of energy and passion, telling yourself that you can finish this goal?  You can teach yourself how to paint.  You can lose thirty pounds, and keep it off.  You can be a marathon runner.  All you need to do is stay motivated.  If you keep the passion present and steady, then the job will practically complete itself and you will bask in your accomplishment.

Courtesy of andreasphotography.co.uk

Well, no.  No you won’t.  Not with that attitude at least.  You can’t artificially stimulate the pleasure centers of your brain, instilling yourself with a long-seated passion.  Not without some serious medication with terrifying side-effects.  If you’re playing for the long game, you need to learn how to handle being bored.  You must accept that most of the time you spend becoming an expert will be painful.  Occasionally, it will be fun.  When you finish, it will feel awesome.  But on an average day you’ll do the same damn thing over and over again, and it will be horrible, horrible, horrible, and you can’t stop.  Because if you stopped now, you might stop for good.

It makes sense.  That body builder is stronger than us because she kept lifting curls, years after we got bored with going to the gym and feeling our muscles expand.  That athlete was bored, too.  She just chose to accept being bored for the sake of achieving excellence.  Got it.  But this breaks down with a few subjects.  For example, it gets confusing when we talk about writing.

Sir Reginald Alderbury, inventor of Erotic Fan Fiction, and author of ‘The Fifty Shades of Dorian Grey’.

That’s because writers need to be ‘on’ more than ‘off’.  When you’re writing new content, you can’t be bored.  If you’re bored, your audience is bored.  Game over.  No continues.

Our theoretical body builder doesn’t encounter this problem.  Certainly, she needs to be on her game when competing in a body building competition.  But she only spends a fraction of her time at competitions, and those are special events that get the dopamine running.  Most of the time, she’s busy hitting the gym, doing a lift, doing a lift, doing a lift.

Even (most) serious actors and musicians don’t deal with this problem on a regular basis.  Actors read lines and musicians practice their craft.  Both of them spend far more time rehearsing and observing than performing.  By comparison, as a blogger, approximately half my time is spent composing an article, and maybe half is spent editing it.  I need to be enlivened the entire time I write to get good content.  And, often, I need a boost of passion when I edit to push past the routine into unexpected territory.  I’m not saying a good writer doesn’t have the luxury of being bored.  But the window is smaller.

Screen capture blatantly stolen from Vi Hart’s video ‘Doodle Music’.

Vi Hart, that curious mathemagical vlogger talked about this problem on her new blog.  She recently finished a series on fractals, and the resulting three videos make for an intriguing watch.  Granted, it’s a mind-numbing experience for anyone who didn’t major in mathematics. But Vi Hart is a professional, and can turn a twenty-five minute lecture into a fun doodling adventure full of little jokes and surprises.  It’s entertaining, even for those of us who can only grasp at half the content in the video.

Even with her wit and charm, though, it can still be a challenge to sit through all that math.  Imagine, then, what it must be like for Vi Hart.  According to her, it takes about a week for every minute or two of finished product.  That means Vi Hart spent the equivalent work of 19 weeks producing these three videos.  Ouch.  This is her full time job.  She makes math videos for the masses.  I don’t know what a regular work week looks like, but she just pushed out four months of content in a little over two months.  How does she put up with all that tedium?  This next bit comes from her blog:

“When I find myself not wanting to work on a thing, usually because unexpected delays make it drag on, I ask: ‘What can I do to make this fun for myself?’

Sometimes the answer is simple as adding snakes, puns, and existentialism. The weirder a thing gets the more motivated I am to finish it, because I no longer know just what the finished effect will be. When I’ve had enough experience with a thing that I truly know how it will turn out, and the finished form looks just as it did in my head, I feel no motivation to actually do the thing. When it could all go wrong, life is fun!

Other times the answer is in how I do it, things that don’t noticeably affect the finished video: challenging myself to keep really good posture while I film and to grab sharpies super gracefully, or to edit my script in an unusual setting, or as I did today, to order my favorite takeout and see how much video I can edit before it arrives. Part of the creative challenge of my work is to keep coming up with things like this, because ‘see how fast I can edit this video’ doesn’t work very many times before I need to start adding new layers. Being your own boss is great! My boss is nuts.”

She’s cheating, right?  I mean, here we were talking about accepting the mantle of professionalism, and assuming that would require a lot of boring days before you get that one day of achievement.  But Vi Hart makes it sound like every day of work for her is a carnival ride.  It’s not fair!

But the truth behind Vi Hart’s solution is buried in her comment that “Part of the creative challenge of my work is to keep coming up with things like these…”  The little flairs that she adds to her videos aren’t just games, but goals: bite-sized achievements.  And if she keeps using the same goals, the goals don’t work anymore, since there’s no feeling of accomplishment.  Just another peeled potato on the pile.  Some of those goals make for strange games, too.  “See how well you can sit still while drawing” is the kind of game a mother would make up for her child so Mom can concentrate on sewing.

The funny thing is, depending on the age of the child, these non-games work.  Children are experts at engineering play to fight monotony.  It’s easy to think of children as flighty, but that’s because they’re forever processing more information than we are.  The truth is, children contain masterful levels of concentration and hone new skills on a daily basis.  We could do much worse than to emulate childish problem-solving tactics in order to remain focused on our current goal.

What children lack, however, is the vision to see a long term plan reach fruition.  They’re on tilt to do seven impossible things before breakfast, and can’t appreciate the dedication required to perform one realistic goal by year’s end.  If we approached all our problems the way children do, we’d accomplish nothing, always moving onto something that’s easily mastered.  We’d never specialize in anything, thereby becoming valuable.

It seems to me that the trick is to be both the parent and child, or, in Vi Hart’s example, a worker and their crazy boss.  You need enough vision to aim yourself in a certain direction, and not lose focus on your goals.  Meanwhile, you need to forget there’s a goal at all.  That the work, itself, is what’s important and worth doing, even if the goal is never achieved.   You can play games, set small achievements, sing songs or achieve a zen-like focus.  But you’ll never become an expert unless you do the work.  And you won’t remain an expert unless you keep working.  So learn to enjoy the work.  Drive is nice.  But it’s got nothing on persistence.