We all get bored occasionally but the bored I’m talking about here is LONG boredom. It hangs with you, sticks to you, you feel mentally sluggish, just blah, just going through the motions. It’s not a good place to be.
How do you get out of it?
Well, one of the stock answers is just to do something new. While that’s a good thing to do, it can temporarily alleviate boredom but you’ll be back to square one after a while. It’s just a temporary stop gap measure.
The other stock answer is to set a goal but just setting a goal isn’t going to get you motivated enough to go through with it. You can set a goal to run a mile a day but then you go – eh, why bother. Setting a goal just for the sake of setting a goal doesn’t cure boredom.
Here is a fool proof way to cure your boredom because within this one action are all the ingredients necessary to obliterate boredom.
It’s so simple.
Make a list of all the problems you’re currently facing and choose one of them to work on.
Now the one you work on – it can’t be too hard for you to solve and it can’t be too easy. If it’s too hard, it’s easy to not even try. If it’s too easy, same deal. It has to fit that sweet spot of just out of your reach because it’s the possibility of solving it and all the benefits you’ll acquire from it that excites you.
Because when you’re working on a problem that matters to you, that’s within your abilities to solve, the motivation is already built right in so the energy is there.
Boredom is low energy.
When you focus on solving a problem that matters to you and the problem is within reach of your capabilities, it’s as if all your resources – physical and mental activate. It’s as if all your mental and physical energy is concentrated and now it’s harnessed toward something. You literally feel more alive because you get that bursting feeling of energy trying to escape from within your chest.
You start researching, brainstorming, trying this and that, creating a protocol, implementing it, seeing what happens, making changes here and there, and maybe even breaking one of your paradigms so your mind is blown and you see the world in a whole new light.
That’s one of the best parts about this because you’ll find so many of your rock solid assumptions were wrong.
You thought it would be too expensive to do XYZ, but turns out, it’s not that bad. Plus you find ways to get discounts.
You thought it would be hard to do ABC, but there’s free step by step tutorials online to follow.
You thought you would have to do it all alone, but find many people you know are willing to help you.
All this gets the gears going in motion and then you wonder how you could have ever been this bored all along.
It’s a beautiful thing to realize.
That one task helps you exercise your creativity, makes you think, gets you to take action, helps you learn to adjust, reach out to others, gets you to learn more things that will help you later on, inspires you to dream of more possibilities after you’ve seen what you done, etc.
Now at first, it may seem as if you have a subtle feeling you can’t solve your chosen problem, but put your toe in the water, and you’ll see it’s fine and that you can do more than you ever thought you could.
There’s a great quote by Vince Lombardi that helps us understand the source of boredom and how to get out of it.
“The joy is in creating, not maintaining”.
It’s so easy to maintain. We are creatures of habit.
But when we tackle an issue that bugs us and CREATE a solution to deal with it – that’s when we get that spring back into our step.
That’s when we activate our full abilities.
That’s when we wonder how we could ever have been so bored for so long, all this time in the first place.
