Be Boring My Friend
“Be Water” was an admonishment by Bruce Lee. Today I think a similar piece of advice is “Be Boring.”
What is boredom, anyway? It is defined as a lack of interest in an activity. We’ve all been there, I’m sure. In fact, much of life is boring, which is why we turn from it so often and don’t allow it in our television fantasies. Super boring topics involve waiting, traveling, long-distance driving, commuting, cardio, listening to a poor speaker, working repetitive jobs, practicing, doing chores, and more.
But to face boredom is a superpower. We have to deal with anyway, there’s no avoiding it, and to avoid it actually makes you weak-minded, therefore it is important to know how to cultivate it. How do we cultivate boredom anyway? James Clear mentions in Atomic Habits that people who best deal with boredom often gain the most skills, perform the best, and reach the top of their fields. It’s a massively neglected skill. Let’s dig into it a bit more and figure out how to turn dealing with boredom into a superpower.
First, you have to practice. For this illustration I have chosen a few subjects: Minecraft, Drumming, and Meditation. Each of these activities involves mundane repetition. For Minecraft, mining for diamonds is the most boring task in the game. You dig down to a very deep level and strip-mine series of straight lines, coming up with only a couple of diamonds after mining thousands of blocks. For drumming, practicing one rudiment (a basic pattern) slowly and only going faster once you’ve mastered the slower pace of the rudiment takes a lot of time and is incredibly boring. Meditation is, well, you sit there and do nothing.
Each activity serves a purpose, with Minecraft you are getting one of the best materials in the game, with drumming you are mastering the fundamentals and gaining control over your sticking, with meditation you are learning to quiet your mind and deal with a lack of stimulation. The object and goal for our purposes regarding these items is to lessen the impact of feeling bored. As you make yourself deal with each boring task you teach your body that it can handle the repetitive and mundane.
Boredom must be dealt with if we are to learn greater skills to get ahead in life. In the past, boredom was a necessary component of survival. A hunter would have to track prey for long distances or stay in one place and wait a long time for something to come along. Or a fisherman would have to wait a long time for a bite on their hook. If you watch the show Alone, a show about survival in the wilderness, the contestants frequently have to deal with boring tasks that take a lot of time. One guy took hours to light a fire. If he had succumbed to boredom he would have had to be evacuated as he wouldn’t have survived the night.
A lot of things we do in life take days, weeks, even years to do. I can’t learn to code in a day, instead I have to face many boring hours of trying to figure things out since my brain is limited in how much it can learn. If I want to be a good drummer it will take time to practice and gain a level of competence I can feel comfortable with, and it would take time to memorize songs if I were to play in public or record. If I wanted to be good at a sport or game I would have to play many repetitions or practice specific skills in order to gain winning-level skills.
The kids who I notice excel at sports seem content to practice. They’d practice their dribbling constantly. They’d practice taking shots and work on their technique. I simply played around. Never were my actions deliberate and repetitive, because it bored me. Only as an adult did I take a soccer ball outside, watch a video on how to dribble, and practiced. Immediately I felt the difference and then lamented my lack of practice as a kid. But a lot of kids don’t realize the benefits, or they aren’t interested, or they don’t have someone to guide them and help them.
I watched videos on how to drum. I had learned as a kid at school, but I never thought to see how others were taught. As a result I learned I had been holding the sticks wrong the entire time. The way I held sticks I could only go so fast and had a hard time using my wrists to bounce the sticks. Within a day my sticking was faster and cleaner then when I was at my best as a teenager. I couldn’t believe it! Then I began to practice rudiments again, forcing myself to take it slow and only gradually build up speed once I had the rudiment down pat.
That’s when I noticed something. Practicing became fun. Boredom turned into pleasure. It felt rewarding to accomplish something that took longer than five minutes to learn. It gets easier to be consistent with something if you see results.
That’s why I encourage anyone to begin their journey of boredom with a physical skill, be it an instrument, a sport, something that involves the dexterity of your fingers rather than begin with a foreign language, coding, writing, or studying.
Lastly, allow yourself to be bored. We live in an age of overstimulation. Because of the smartphone I can be anywhere and get stimulated by the internet. It used to be that smartphones didn’t exist and the internet was only accessible from your desktop computer at your home. Not to mention the internet wasn’t high-speed so there wasn’t as much to access to be overstimulated. High-speed internet and smartphones revolutionized boredom. It is now possible to never be bored. But you should be bored because there are a lot of boring things we have to face in life.
Whenever I find myself overstimulated I will do my best to disengage from electronics and all other manner of media, be it books or paperwork, and do nothing. I won’t be specifically meditating, but a form of that, sitting and doing nothing. I will allow my mind to wander uncontrolled. After about ten minutes I find my brain will feel like it rebooted. I’m interested in accomplishing things again. If I don’t do this I descend into scrolling social media, not even to be stimulated, but to pass time and be numbed by all the junk I’m consuming.
I have to say, before doomscrolling, it never happened to me where I’d zone out or go numb staring at a screen. Scrolling sucks you in and it can be difficult to disengage. Sometimes you will discover you’re having a hard time thinking when scrolling. You start to speedscroll where you only take input in through the eyes. If I didn’t know any better I’d say it’s brainwashing. Brainwashing for what? I guess to make you dumb. Literally. Meaning, literally unable to think words and absorbing into your subconscious whatever garbage you are looking at.
Even now as I type this I feel a fear of missing out creeping up on me. It’s early in the morning and I wanted to write while sipping my coffee (a frequent fantasy of mine, now a reality). But as I reach the end of my writing I want to open websites and start checking things. Boredom is creeping up and I need that hit. Well, I didn’t say it was going to be easy to deal with boredom, but it helps to have a plan of action and to have a few things to be deliberately bored with until you show improvement. Otherwise, learning to sit and wait and not accomplish anything is a skill unto itself, because it’s going to happen to you. You’re going to be in traffic, you’re going to have to sit on an airplane for hours, you’re going to read stuff for improvement, you’re going to be engaged in activities you don’t care for.
Go ahead then, be boring, my friend.
