If you aim to be great, you must welcome boredom

You cannot be great at anything if you cannot use boredom constructively. There are two ways you can do this. One requires you dedicate yourself to a skill, aspects of which may be boring beyond belief. The other requires you to sit with boredom and play with it. You will need both at different times. Let me give you two practical examples.

Lance Armstrong. Yes, he was a drug cheat. But he was also arguably the cyclist of his generation who got the most out of himself. How did he become great? One of the things he did every off season, over the new year period, was to practice pedalling. I know, pedals can only go around in circles. How hard can it be? And, what’s more, the shoe cleat latches into the pedal. So, the pedal can only go around, and the foot can’t go anywhere else anyway! The point in this is to master the ‘how’ the foot goes around – perfect circles, keeping near perfect pressure, using different muscles on each of the different planes around the circle so that each of the muscles get just a little bit of rest every time the foot goes around. Perfect circles. And, you have to be able to do that for, say, 6+ hours, day after day. By the end of three weeks, you’re exhausted, but imagine how much you’ve been able to balance the demand across all those muscles by better pedalling! That’s what it takes to achieve greatness. To be able to dedicate yourself to something boring, to truly focus on just that skill and perfect it beyond what others can achieve.

Boredom also offers us another door to greatness as it opens us up to insights. Boredom isn’t necessarily a creative process; we all know that from experience. But if we sit with that boredom, that’s when an idea can spark. The crucial point to accessing this tool is to resist temptation, sit with boredom and play in your mind. Resist social media, talking or whatever distracting opportunity you may seek to grab.

An example of this spurned one of the greatest tales of recent times. A young woman had spent a weekend flat hunting in Manchester and was on her way back to London. Still counting her pennies, she took a train. Even apart from the delay, it was a four hour trip. She couldn’t afford to purchase anything. She had nothing with which to distract herself. She was too shy to even ask anyone if they had a pen. She has since called these hours ‘the best thing’ as it gave her time to sit with boredom and to play in her mind. Over the course of this journey she came to see a bespectacled boy and, from that, JK Rowling and her young boy, Harry Potter, changed publishing history and many a persons imagination. If you have the discipline to sit with boredom it triggers your mind to wander to places you may not have otherwise ventured and that can open you to creativity.

The key to both is to sit with boredom. Don’t avoid it. Don’t seek a distraction. Allow yourself to focus and use it to hone a skill (in the first example) or to play with your thoughts to explore opportunities you may not have otherwise entertained (in the second example).

Two ways you can use to become great. Both involve boredom and, with that, discipline. Set aside the time. Start to practice. Start an ideas journal. Reflect on your progress. Welcome the boredom and the discipline it requires and then you will reap the benefits.

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