The Case for Boredom - Armaan Agrawal

Boredom is when our brain wanders, and when it’s used to having direction it can be painful. Here’s why boredom is important, how you can make it less painful, and examples of successful people using these techniques.

Point 1: Repetitions

Your ability to tolerate boredom will repeating the same action determines your odds of success. Life is not a chess game where knowing a better opening or next move is going to get you to win.

More likely, it’s battering the opponent with pieces and trying different things over and over again until you win. Just to stay in the game, and squeeze out more iterations than the next person can increase your odds of success significantly.

Why? Conviction to believe in the slow feedback loop: a seed you plant today won’t get you a plant over night. As long as you make it to summer, you’ll do great. Most people quit when, by day 7, they see no immediate benefits to what they’re doing. Think in the long run, tolerate the boredom and like the work for the work.

Therefore, do you enjoy the work enough to be able to put the reps in? The work doesn’t have to be inherently enjoyable. In fact, it’s better if it’s not—where there’s muck there’s brass. Work that people like doesn’t pay well.

Of course, don’t do work that you hate. This follows the same rules as the ones Cal Newport introduced in “So Good They Can’t Ignore You”: there must be the opportunity to grow or get highly skilled, it shouldn’t be useless or actively hurt the world, and you shouldn’t work with people you really dislike. If your work doesn’t match any of these three conditions, then repetitions is the only thing stopping you.

Point 2: Silence

If you’re engrossed in your work all the time, you’re not giving your brain the time it needs to rest, process and take an idea further. You end up doing work instead of thinking about why that work needed to be done. But it’s not just about being engrossed in work, it’s about being engrossed in your phone.

The most compelling reason to get off your phone is that life-changing epiphanies only occur in times of silence (during downtime) such as in the shower, on a walk, while staring at a wall. You won’t find what you’re looking for on TikTok. Think of your brain’s information diet. If you won’t feed yourself junk, why feed yourself crap information?

This doesn’t mean you have to cut yourself off. Even getting 20 quality minutes of undistracted silence a day could make a night and day difference after just a few days. I beg, you just try it. It gets easier as you do it more often. Here are some ways to do it and examples of successful people doing it.

Solution:

Engineered rest = great sleep = better silence = better ideas.
Rituals = ability to tolerate repetition = ability to tolerate boredom.
Noise-canceling headphones = more likely to have silence = more likely to have better ideas.
Meditation, walks, free-writing = ability to tolerate boredom.
Staring at a white wall with all devices in another room = type of meditation. Let the mind wander.
Nature = peace, silence, repetitive, unmoving = ability to tolerate boredom.
Physical exercise and movement = repetitive & reduces resources (blood) for the brain to overthink = ability to tolerate repetition, boredom.

Examples of solutions from successful people:

Eight showers a day

When Aaron Sorkin writes, he takes eight showers a day for resets. Eight! He uses it to overcome writer’s block and achieve a fresh start during long, challenging, or frustrating writing sessions. I believe it helps him as a ritual and to get silence. He uses the idea of “shower thoughts” on steroids. Take the idea figuratively here, not literally. Find your own “eight showers a day.” Silence, ritual.

Einstein’s boat

Albert Einstein was an avid, yet unskilled, sailor who loved the water as a way to escape intense theoretical work. Silence, meditation, nature.

The Gates Method

Starting in the 1980s, Gates takes two weeks per year to isolate himself in a secret, remote cedar cabin to read papers, study, and think. Out of this came projects like Internet Explorer, and “Virtual Earth”. Silence, meditation, nature.

Pavel Durov’s 4-hour swim

Durov uses repetitive exercise, swimming in actual lakes, to enhance mental clarity, resilience, and physical strength. Beyond swimming, he practices extreme, daily, high-repetition workouts, including 300 push-ups and 300 squats. Repetition, exercise.

Darwin’s stone

Darwin used his daily walks, specifically on a path at his home known as the Sandwalk (or “thinking path”), to solve complex scientific problems. To keep track of his laps without interrupting his train of thought, Darwin would place a small pile of flints (stones) at the start of the path. After each completed circuit, he would kick one stone away. He would sometimes classify the complexity of a problem by the number of laps needed to ponder it, referring to “three-flint problems”. Repetition, walking, ritual.

Shonda Rhimes’ 5-mile run

Shonda Rhimes uses a metaphorical “5-mile run” to describe the intense, disciplined, and often exhausting daily effort required to achieve a state of “flow” in writing. She runs through a bunch of garbage before you get to the good stuff. Repetition, ability to tolerate boredom.. Original quote.

Paul Graham on productive procrastination

Use good procrastination. You have to ignore things that the world thinks is important. Think about big ideas if the idea you’re working on isn’t interesting to you in the moment. Don’t put yourself on your phone or think about easier ideas like what clothes to wear for the day (bad procrastination). Try procrastinating by giving yourself a moment of silence and let your mind wander.

“I wasn’t the fastest guy in the world. I wouldn’t have done well in an Olympiad or a math contest. But I like to ponder. And pondering things, just sort of thinking about it and thinking about it, turns out to be a pretty good approach: — Jim Simons

Give it a shot today, I believe in you.