The Boring Stuff Is the Good Stuff

When I look back at the things I love—and the few things I’ve actually gotten good at—I notice a stubborn, slightly embarrassing truth: I got there because I stuck with the boring stuff.

Not the lightning-bolt moments of inspiration. Not the cinematic breakthroughs. Just repetition. Tedious, steady, unglamorous repetition.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, in his study of “flow,” argued that deep engagement comes not from novelty, but from absorption in structured, often deeply mundane activity. Flow doesn’t happen when everything is exciting. It happens when things are just challenging enough to stretch you—and just routine enough to hold your attention.

The things I care about most—writing, music, surfing, coffee, the gym—are what philosopher James P. Carse would call infinite games. There’s no final boss. No level 100. No ending. The goal isn’t to win; it’s to keep playing.

But here’s the trick nobody mentions: to play infinite games, you have to become intimate with boredom. Think about music for example, before a song, before a solo, it’s scales. It’s forcing your hands into positions that would make a contortionist blush. It’s callous-building monotony. Or with surfing, you paddle. Then you paddle some more. Then you paddle again. 90% of the time, you’re not surfing you’re paddling—you’re positioning yourself just to be ready. In the gym you do the reps. And then you do them again. Your muscles don’t appear and the scale doesn’t drop after one workout. Or even after one week. Progress isn’t sey. It’s technical, subtle, and slow and repetitive.

What separates mastery from mediocrity isn’t necessarily talent. It’s tolerance for repetition. It’s whether you can stomach the boredom long enough for your nervous system to rewire. The people I once thought were “naturally gifted”? Many of them burned out or got over it and did something else. I stuck with it—not because I was better, but because I was willing to be bored.

Today we live in a paradox; never bored but always boring.

We carry boredom erasers in our pockets. Endlessly scrollable, frictionless distraction. The problem isn’t the tech, it’s the logic underneath it—what Byung-Chul Han calls hyper-availability. Everything is accessible. Nothing is engaging.

We become fragmented. Shallow. Always-on, but never in. It’s like the collapse of time itself—a permanent present tense, where we’re too stimulated to find satisfaction, and too distracted to make anything last.

We feel like we should be productive. Inspired. In flow. But we’re just bouncing between tabs like we’re playing a game of cosmic-internet-browser-pinball.

Slavoj Žižek has this idea that discomfort has become taboo. We treat any friction like a design flaw. If you’re bored, something’s wrong. Optimise it away. In a lecture Slavoj said, “I think boredom is the beginning of every authentic act. (...) Boredom opens up the space, for new engagements. Without boredom, no creativity. If you are not bored, you just stupidly enjoy the situation in which you are.”

So what if boredom isn’t a problem? What if it’s a portal?

Far from a lack of stimulation, boredom is the flipside of overexposure. A signal that we must slow down and inhabit our own experience again.

We only get better—at focus, at craft, at life—when we resist the itch for instant novelty. When we stay still long enough to pay attention.

When a routine feels painfully dull, stay. It might mean you're on the path to something worthwhile. Treat boredom like a barbell: it builds strength. Not flashy, but foundational. Be offline sometimes—not as punishment, but as practice.

The irony is that all my favourite things are steeped in boredom. Music drills. Gym sets. Pour-over rituals. Paddling towards an inevitable pounding from an oncoming set. They’re not the fireworks. They’re the fuse.

If there’s one thing I’ve truly leant, it’s this: the boring stuff is where the magic hides.