Every Sunday I share an inspirational video and this week’s is a 2 minute inspiration blast from my very good friend Robin Dickinson.

The best bit about this inspiration video? It isn’t telling you what you need to do that you aren’t already doing. It’s telling you what not to do that you are already doing: do the boring stuff.

I love this. Robin basically says that the business is in the boring. Once you’ve got the idea and made the sale, now you must deliver, and delivering isn’t as fun. I certainly have struggled with executing the boring on a regular basis, and have suffered greatly because of it. I continually find myself restless, looking for new things to tweak because I don’t want to knuckle down and deliver.

Obtaining vs Maintaining

In our attention age we have two problems that have strengthened the hold of boredom as an influencer on our lives:

  1. We are so used to multitasking and being distracted that the focus on mantainence is increasingly unnatural to us (and thus needs to be learnt.) Remember that it’s easier to obtain than maintain.
  2. The saying that “you can do anything you put your mind to” has created a youth culture in particular that thinks, “I can do anything I put my mind to and don’t really need to fine tune my skills because I can do anything.” What they forget is that you have to put your mind, and everything else you’ve got, to do anything of worth. Thus we have a complacency and an atitude that considers itself to be above the boring. Again, they’d rather be obtaining (having fun) than maintaining (sharpening the saw).

We need a major shift in our thinking to overcome this detrimental habit:

Getting Clear On Results And Rewards

We need to get smart about what our results are, so that we can stand being bored because it gets my results. I would say that when I haven’t done what was boring but necessary, it was because I wasn’t clear that it was necessary for my end results. We must focus! This also requires a challenge to know what does hit our bottom lines, and filter everything by that.

Secondly, we need to know what our reward is: that being bored by getting my results empowers me to have time for what I really enjoy. If I can get into the mindset that the boring empowers me to have the fun, then perhaps I’d stop working 18 hours a day.

Respect The Boredom

Robin’s best quote is that he “respects the boredom.” I think I should take that same atitude, and get some healthy respect for the boring but profitable things that work, albeit without glamour. I know what many of those things are, and I feel the results when I do them. It’s just bad that often times emotion takes over and pushes the important underneath the interesting.

Your Leading Thoughts

  • Robin’s already got a conversation going on about this subject on his post “the secret money power of boredom“, so please join in there.
  • If you’d like some tips on overcoming this issue in your own life, Robin has some great tips that I highlight on this post on maintenance.
  • Our culture has created a hatred of boredom that is detrimental in my opinion. What’s yours?