HOW TO STAY FOCUSED WHEN YOU GET BORED WORKING

HOW TO STAY FOCUSED WHEN YOU GET BORED WORKING
ON YOUR GOALS
After my baseball career ended, I was looking for a new sport. I joined a
weightlifting team and one day an elite coach visited our gym. He had
worked with thousands of athletes during his long career, including a few
Olympians. I introduced myself and we began talking about the process of
improvement.
“What’s the difference between the best athletes and everyone else?” I
asked. “What do the really successful people do that most don’t?”
He mentioned the factors you might expect: genetics, luck, talent. But
then he said something I wasn’t expecting: “At some point it comes down
to who can handle the boredom of training every day, doing the same lifts
over and over and over.”
His answer surprised me because it’s a different way of thinking about
work ethic. People talk about getting “amped up” to work on their goals.
Whether it’s business or sports or art, you hear people say things like, “It all
comes down to passion.” Or, “You have to really want it.” As a result, many
of us get depressed when we lose focus or motivation because we think that
successful people have some bottomless reserve of passion. But this coach
was saying that really successful people feel the same lack of motivation as
everyone else. The difference is that they still find a way to show up despite
the feelings of boredom.
Mastery requires practice. But the more you practice something, the
more boring and routine it becomes. Once the beginner gains have been
made and we learn what to expect, our interest starts to fade. Sometimes it
happens even faster than that. All you have to do is hit the gym a few days
in a row or publish a couple of blog posts on time and letting one day slip
doesn’t feel like much. Things are going well. It’s easy to rationalize taking
a day off because you’re in a good place.
The greatest threat to success is not failure but boredom. We get bored
with habits because they stop delighting us. The outcome becomes
expected. And as our habits become ordinary, we start derailing our
progress to seek novelty. Perhaps this is why we get caught up in a never-
ending cycle, jumping from one workout to the next, one diet to the next,
one business idea to the next. As soon as we experience the slightest dip in
motivation, we begin seeking a new strategy—even if the old one was still
working. As Machiavelli noted, “Men desire novelty to such an extent that
those who are doing well wish for a change as much as those who are doing
badly.”
Perhaps this is why many of the most habit-forming products are those
that provide continuous forms of novelty. Video games provide visual
novelty. Porn provides sexual novelty. Junk foods provide culinary novelty.
Each of these experiences offer continual elements of surprise.
In psychology, this is known as a variable reward.
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Slot machines are
the most common real-world example. A gambler hits the jackpot every
now and then but not at any predictable interval. The pace of rewards
varies. This variance leads to the greatest spike of dopamine, enhances
memory recall, and accelerates habit formation.
Variable rewards won’t create a craving—that is, you can’t take a reward
people are uninterested in, give it to them at a variable interval, and hope it
will change their mind—but they are a powerful way to amplify the
cravings we already experience because they reduce boredom.
The sweet spot of desire occurs at a 50/50 split between success and
failure. Half of the time you get what you want. Half of the time you don’t.
You need just enough “winning” to experience satisfaction and just enough
“wanting” to experience desire. This is one of the benefits of following the
Goldilocks Rule. If you’re already interested in a habit, working on
challenges of just manageable difficulty is a good way to keep things
interesting.
Of course, not all habits have a variable reward component, and you
wouldn’t want them to. If Google only delivered a useful search result some
of the time, I would switch to a competitor pretty quickly. If Uber only
picked up half of my trips, I doubt I’d be using that service much longer.
And if I flossed my teeth each night and only sometimes ended up with a
clean mouth, I think I’d skip it.
Variable rewards or not, no habit will stay interesting forever. At some
point, everyone faces the same challenge on the journey of self-
improvement: you have to fall in love with boredom.
We all have goals that we would like to achieve and dreams that we
would like to fulfill, but it doesn’t matter what you are trying to become
better at, if you only do the work when it’s convenient or exciting, then
you’ll never be consistent enough to achieve remarkable results.
I can guarantee that if you manage to start a habit and keep sticking to it,
there will be days when you feel like quitting. When you start a business,
there will be days when you don’t feel like showing up. When you’re at the
gym, there will be sets that you don’t feel like finishing. When it’s time to
write, there will be days that you don’t feel like typing. But stepping up
when it’s annoying or painful or draining to do so, that’s what makes the
difference between a professional and an amateur.
Professionals stick to the schedule; amateurs let life get in the way.
Professionals know what is important to them and work toward it with
purpose; amateurs get pulled off course by the urgencies of life.
David Cain, an author and meditation teacher, encourages his students to
avoid being “fair-weather meditators.” Similarly, you don’t want to be a
fair-weather athlete or a fair-weather writer or a fair-weather anything.
When a habit is truly important to you, you have to be willing to stick to it
in any mood. Professionals take action even when the mood isn’t right.
They might not enjoy it, but they find a way to put the reps in.
There have been a lot of sets that I haven’t felt like finishing, but I’ve
never regretted doing the workout. There have been a lot of articles I
haven’t felt like writing, but I’ve never regretted publishing on schedule.
There have been a lot of days I’ve felt like relaxing, but I’ve never regretted
showing up and working on something that was important to me.
The only way to become excellent is to be endlessly fascinated by doing
the same thing over and over. You have to fall in love with boredom.
Chapter Summary
The Goldilocks Rule states that humans experience peak motivation
when working on tasks that are right on the edge of their current
abilities.
The greatest threat to success is not failure but boredom.
As habits become routine, they become less interesting and less
satisfying. We get bored.
Anyone can work hard when they feel motivated. It’s the ability to
keep going when work isn’t exciting that makes the difference.
Professionals stick to the schedule; amateurs let life get in the way.
H
20
The Downside of Creating Good Habits
ABITS CREATE
THE
FOUNDATION
FOR MASTERY.
In chess, it is only after
the basic movements of the pieces have become automatic that a
player can focus on the next level of the game. Each chunk of information
that is memorized opens up the mental space for more effortful thinking.
This is true for any endeavor. When you know the simple movements so
well that you can perform them without thinking, you are free to pay
attention to more advanced details. In this way, habits are the backbone of
any pursuit of excellence.
However, the benefits of habits come at a cost. At first, each repetition
develops fluency, speed, and skill. But then, as a habit becomes automatic,
you become less sensitive to feedback. You fall into mindless repetition. It
becomes easier to let mistakes slide. When you can do it “good enough” on
autopilot, you stop thinking about how to do it better.
The upside of habits is that we can do things without thinking. The
downside of habits is that you get used to doing things a certain way and
stop paying attention to little errors. You assume you’re getting better
because you’re gaining experience. In reality, you are merely reinforcing
your current habits—not improving them. In fact, some research has shown
that once a skill has been mastered there is usually a slight decline in
performance over time.
Usually, this minor dip in performance is no cause for worry. You don’t
need a system to continuously improve how well you brush your teeth or tie
your shoes or make your morning cup of tea. With habits like these, good
enough is usually good enough. The less energy you spend on trivial
choices, the more you can spend it on what really matters.
However, when you want to maximize your potential and achieve elite
levels of performance, you need a more nuanced approach. You can’t repeat
the same things blindly and expect to become exceptional. Habits are
necessary, but not sufficient for mastery. What you need is a combination of
automatic habits and deliberate practice.
Habits + Deliberate Practice = Mastery
To become great, certain skills do need to become automatic. Basketball
players need to be able to dribble without thinking before they can move on
to mastering layups with their nondominant hand. Surgeons need to repeat
the first incision so many times that they could do it with their eyes closed,
so that they can focus on the hundreds of variables that arise during surgery.
But after one habit has been mastered, you have to return to the effortful
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