A Dividing Line Between Success And Failure
On December 11, 2021, I picked the great writer Robert Greene up from the airport, and we drove forty-five minutes to Bastrop, TX. At one point, Robert told me he’s had more than 20 research assistants since Ryan Holiday and none have been any good. Why weren’t they any good? I asked. “Some didn’t grasp the spirit of the material I look for,” he said. “Some couldn’t discern what’s interesting from what isn’t. Some melted like an ice cube in the sun at the first piece of constructive criticism. Some…” He paused here to think. As he was thinking, I understood the implication was that those first three reasons didn’t really cut to the core of his troubles with research assistants. “Without exception,” Robert realized, “they weren’t interested in boredom. It’s a dividing line between people who are successful and people who are not.” Mastery, Robert said, requires boredom and tedium. It requires doing the same mundane things over and over and over. It requires sitting with the frustration of putting in work that doesn’t immediately pay off. It requires sitting with the torture of, am I going to spend sixteen hours reading this biography only to discover there’s nothing in it I can use? You have to be able to sit with boredom, Robert said.
Sitting with boredom—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
Your Brain Will Get So Bored It Will Come Up With Something
For a leg of shows on one of his comedy tours, Jerry Seinfeld brought along Mark Normand as his opener. Hanging out with the comedian he grew idolizing before and after shows, Normand not only observed how one of the great comedians of all time went about his work, but asked him about his writing process, daily routine, and approach to crafting jokes. “He told me this great thing about writing,” Normand said. “He said, ‘If you turn the music off, turn the TV off, put the phone away, and just stare at an idea you think is funny, your brain will get so miserable that it will crack the code on the joke. It’s like if you’re stuck in a room, you’ll find something to do because your brain doesn’t want to be bored. So if you stare at the premise of a joke long enough, and when you have that feeling of, ‘Alright, this sucks, I want to do something else’—if you hang in there, your brain will get so bored it will come up with something.” And if you analyze Seinfeld’s material, Normand continues, “you can see that he does this. He’s got this joke about golf, for example. He’s like, ‘Golf, I don’t understand golf. You know why people go golfing? Because they need to be alone—that’s what golf stands for: Go Out, Leave Family.’” Like Normand, I can put aside that I like golf to appreciate that “you can tell he came up with that joke from just staring at that word—g-o-l-f—forever.”
During REST, The Brain Defaults To Creativity
After noticing a similar habit among highly creative people (including Einstein, Mozart, and da Vinci), the neuroscientist Dr. Nancy Andreasen designed a brain-imaging study to explore the neural basis of this habit. Essentially, these creative people all carved out time each day for “free-floating periods of thought,” Andreasen writes in her book The Creating Brain: The Neuroscience of Genius. The specifics of the habit differ from person to person. Leonardo da Vinci, for example, would often sit in front of a painting “and simply think, sometimes for as long as a half day.” Mozart liked to go to billiard halls—he’d bring bundles of music paper and compose while waiting his turn. And Einstein loved to aimlessly drift at sea on a little wooden boat he called the “Tinef” (Yiddish for “piece of junk”). He had to be rescued by the Coast Guard so frequently that a friend eventually bought him an outboard motor for emergency use, but Einstein refused to use it. “To the average person, being becalmed for hours might be a terrible trial,” the friend said. “To Einstein, this could simply provide more time to think.” In any case, Dr. Andreasen conducted the first brain-imaging study, looking at brain activity during “free-floating periods of thought,” when the body is in a “resting state” and the mind is free to wander. “We found activations in multiple regions of the association cortex,” Dr. Andreasen writes. “We were not [seeing] a passive silent brain during the ‘resting state,’ but rather a brain that was actively connecting thoughts and experiences.” Essentially, Dr. Andreasen found that the brain defaults to creativity. When we sit with boredom, when the mind is allowed to float freely, the brain engages in what she termed REST (“random episodic silent thinking”). And during REST, Dr. Andreasen writes, the brain “uses its most human and complex parts…areas known to gather information and link it all together—in potentially novel ways.”
A Productivity Trick I Didn’t Know I Had
For a little over five decades, the legendary designer Paula Scher has been highly productive. If you’ve used Microsoft Windows, eaten at Shake Shack, seen the Citibank logo or the Boston album cover, or been to New York City (it’s said that “New York City ate the style identity” that Scher developed for The Public Theater in the early 1990s)—you know some of her work. Asked if she has any productivity tricks, Scher said, “I have a productivity trick that I didn’t know I had until I heard about it on a radio program. NPR did this interview with experts about boredom” and how—with iPhones and AI and emails and video games and Wifi on airplanes and so on—it’s increasingly difficult to sit with boredom. “I didn’t realize until I listened to that broadcast how important boredom is to me,” Scher continues. “I think I figured out every identity program I’ve ever done in a taxicab…Or trapped in some other boring situation, that’s when I get the best ideas.”
Out Of Pure Boredom
It was a night spent sitting with boredom that began the writing career of the screenwriter and playwright Aaron Sorkin (The West Wing, The Social Network, Moneyball, Molly’s Game, and others). After graduating from college, Sorkin moved to New York City to pursue an acting career. He slept on friend’s floors and couches, and he said, “there was this one night where I was staying in this very, very tiny studio apartment. It was a Friday night, one of those nights in New York City where it just feels like everybody has been invited to a party you haven’t been invited to.” The apartment had a broken TV, a broken stereo, no books, no magazines, and a working semi-automatic electric typewriter. “The only thing to do was to put a piece of paper in that typewriter and start typing,” Sorkin said. “Out of pure boredom, I stayed up all night writing, and I feel like that night has never ended, like I’m still in that night.”
Periods of Non-Doing
Robert Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, observed that people need periods of doing nothing like plants need periods of darkness. “If a plant gets nothing but sunlight,” Pirsig said, “it’s very harmful. It has to have darkness too. In the sunlight, it converts carbon dioxide to oxygen, but in the darkness, it takes the oxygen and converts it back into carbon dioxide. People are like that too. We have to have some periods of doing and some periods of non-doing.” We get plenty of periods of doing and consuming and watching and scrolling. We need to carve out periods of nondoing, of sitting with boredom, too.