The Greatest Threat to Success is Not Failure, But Boredom

Photo by Joshua Rawson-Harris on Unsplash

“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.” — Machiavelli

If you want to be successful, you’re going to have to cover the basics. You’ll need to live within the intersection of talent, passion, hard work, and luck. You’ll also need something else — the ability to embrace boredom.

It’s not enough to be excited about the work your doing. It’s not even enough to have a really great system in place to track your business or your goals.

If you want to make it to the top, you have to figure out a way to address the repetition of practice in a way that fuels you rather than drains you.

Staying Motivated in a Shifting World

With seemingly endless options to satisfy our every desire, it’s difficult to learn how to stay motivated and locked into one task as you work towards growth and improvement.

While starting a new habit can be difficult and frustrating, it’s also exciting. We typically tend to approach our habits through the lens of our motivation. If we step on the scale and realize we weigh more than we’d like, we are motivated to start working out. Our motivation is always highest near the start of any new habit.

However, the longer our habits continue, the more they stop intriguing or motivating us. James Clear writes it this way:

“We get bored with habits because they stop delighting us. The outcome becomes expected.”

This is where we run into problems. Anyone can start a new habit and most people can sustain a habit over short periods of time. But when it comes to long-term, intentional repetition, many people will fall off and never reach their goal.

Success is achieved through consistent effort over time. For most people, the question isn’t: “what kind of effort do I need to put in?” We know those answers. Go to the gym. Read books. Show up to the office early.

The question holding people back from is: “how do I continue in my good habits after all the motivation has worn off?”

We shortchange our opportunities to be successful by jumping ship too quickly. As soon as we encounter the smallest drop in motivation, we begin looking for a new strategy or solution — even if the old one was still working.

The Novelty Addiction

And as our habits become ordinary, we start derailing our progress to seek novelty. 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 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.”

While our motivation decreases over time, our desire for novelty increases. When examples of resistance and tension are added to the pursuit of trying staying motivated, too many goals and habits get abandoned way before any real lasting change is seen.

The temptation to fulfill our novel desires immediately interferes with the greatest weapons we have in our pursuit of success: longevity and consistency.

Failure vs Boredom

Many people associate failure and boredom as if they are the same thing. They, however, are not.

Failure is the result of an attempted effort. Boredom is the result of a lack of motivation over time.

The scary reality is that boredom will come for us all. It is nearly impossible to maintain a high level of motivation over extremely long periods of time. On every arc of achievement, there are valleys of boredom.

The tension then is not how to avoid boredom completely. The tension is how to properly filter your boredom to allow you to embrace the grind rather than turn away from it.

Unfiltered boredom dismantles goals. Filtered boredom inspires them.

Failure can be learned from and re-leveraged for the good of your goals and habits. Unfiltered boredom is the apathetic approach to the goal, and therefore, has little positive implications moving forward.

People tend to be terrified of making mistakes. Many avoid failure at all costs, while at the same time neglecting to establish healthy practices of filtering boredom. This discrepancy will keep you from being successful in the long run.

Filtered Boredom

If unfiltered boredom can be destructive to your long-term goals and success, how can filtered boredom reverse that outcome?

Filtered boredom allows you to see your boredom through the lens of your great goal. The popular phrase “no pain, no gain,” is an example of this. The goal of gain provides a filter, a context for the gain.

Similarly, filtered boredom can become a necessary step on the journey to success. If you are going to play basketball in the NBA, you’ll have to shoot hundreds of thousands of shots. You’ll have to run the same drills a million times. Instead of seeing that monotony as something that fuels unfiltered boredom, leading to a lack of motivation, the filter allows for those tedious activities to be contextualized in the broader scope of vision.

When filtered boredom becomes integral in our planning and pursuit of success, we can more easily combat the gravitational pull of novelty. We begin to see the tug towards novelty as a distraction from the filtered boredom, rather than the answer to our unfiltered boredom.

Keep Going

If you are on the path to success, keep going. Some people are able to capture lightning in a bottle and find success overnight. But for the vast majority of us, success is the reward at the end of the long road of hard work.

Somewhere along your road lies a decreasing desire of motivation, an increasing desire for novelty, both of which are compounded by the feeling of boredom.

How you filter your boredom will ultimately transform your ability to be successful.