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.”