Routines & Boredom

“If you don’t build a routine, you will be assigned one.”

-Dan Koe

Introduction:

There’s a serious problem…

How many times have you heard that “Time is your most valuable asset.”

Although this statement is true, it has become nothing more than a neglected platitude. 

It seems like every chance we get, we’re still going after cheap sources of pleasure.

People will say that time is important, then proceed to spend it on the most useless activities.

Why? Just to feel entertained. 

That’s a serious problem. The single greatest way to determine the quality of a person’s life is to analyze how they spend their time. If they spend it on things that are moving them towards their goals, they clearly value their existence & time. If they spend time consuming meaningless content, they’re clearly just numbing themselves from an existence that they deem unsatisfactory. 

If you want a miserable life, go after pleasure & entertainment.

If you want a fulfilling life, go after boredom & routine.

Entertainment:

Entertainment is a scam. Why do you need to feel entertained? More importantly, what is entertainment if not a coping mechanism?

Since I started on this journey, I think this has been the biggest revelation for me. Whenever we work, we almost always take mandatory breaks every 20-30 mins to check our phones & make sure we’re not missing out on anything. 

Instead of entertainment being a distraction from work, it seems like work has become a distraction from entertainment.

I can assure you that our mighty purpose is not to sit in front of a TV or scroll on our phones!

Think about it: if your work was aligned with your interests & purpose, would you really need an escape from it? Real work is the stuff that you actually care about doing, not the stuff that was assigned to you. 

I don’t know about you, but to me, finding purpose-driven work is the most important responsibility we have as humans. 

You owe yourself a life where you’re not miserable about the thought of waking up in the morning. 

And the thing about finding your purpose is that most people already know what it is. Or at least they know the next step they need to take in order to pursue the path that will lead them to their purpose.

They just don’t want to take the risk & pursue it. 

Note: There’s nothing wrong with taking breaks & recovering from work when you need it. My issue is with the people who pursue a lifestyle where they take breaks for no reason. It’s the people who check 8 emails & scroll on TikTok for 20 minutes. Absolute brain-dead behavior. Rest time should be spent away from screens. 

If you want to achieve any goal in your life, you need a purpose, long-term vision, & daily inputs to achieve the long-term vision. 

Routine:

If you have a vision & purpose, but distractions & responsibilities are holding you back, this next section is for you. 

Let’s say you’ve identified your purpose: you want to become a writer. The first thing you’re going to want to do is adopt the identity of being a writer. If you make changes at the habitual level, but neglect your identity, you’ll need to constantly find motivation to stay disciplined. Instead, if you cultivate the right identity first, the changes at a habitual level will follow as a natural consequence.

Once you’ve successfully adopted a new identity, the next step is to clearly define your daily inputs. Let’s go back to the writing example. Let’s say you’re currently working a 9-5, but you want to break free & build your own creator business online. In order to do that, you’ve identified that you need to spend at least 1-2 hrs writing & researching every day. 

When you get back home from your 9-5, you have to complete your deliverables, spend time with family, exercise, & rest because you’re exhausted from a hard day at work. You’re obviously not going to be very creative or focused when you’re that exhausted. 

You wake up around 7 to complete your morning routine before heading to work. What if you just woke up 2 hours earlier? Start the day off at 5am instead of 7 & get an additional 2 hrs of distraction-free, productive work. Of course you’d have to sleep a bit earlier, but a single lifestyle change can have a profound impact on the trajectory of your future. 

Those 2 hours will compound into 30 days over the course of a year. Imagine if you spent a month doing nothing but work…

That is the power of building a consistent routine.

Once you identify other pockets of free time, even if it’s a mere 15 mins per day, you can allocate that time to build a new skill. As you continue to develop & stack these skills, you’ll finally be able to capitalize on the opportunities that present themselves to you. 

There’s a common notion that it takes 20 hours of focus to learn the applicable 80% of any skill. 

15 mins per day equated to 90+ hours per year. Combine the newfound time with the learning tactics I’ve discussed in a previous post & you’ll become a machine!

Action Step: Identify your priorities & build your routine. 

Boredom:

I think I’ve made my point about the useless nature of entertainment.

Just to summarize: If you need entertainment outside of your job, you need to find a new job. Life is too short to spend half of the day building something you hate, just to come back home & cope with Netflix. 

With that being said, what would happen if we were to completely eliminate external entertainment from our lives?

No Netflix, no Hulu, no video games, no social media (unless you’re creating content) or any other platform that has been stealing your attention for years. Most importantly, no music! Believe it or not, music has genuinely become an addiction for most people. They listen to it when they work, when they’re at the gym, when they’re commuting, & god knows when else. Totally ruptures any conscious development we can undergo during periods of solitude. 

I’ve had this question for a long time. A life without any external entertainment; would it lead to insanity or uber productivity? Well, I’m about to find out. I’ve decided to cut everything out for the next 2 months or so, just to see where it leads me. This might sound extreme, but I have rationale to support this decision.

If my only 2 options are to sit in silence or work, 9/10 times I’m gonna choose the latter. 

Eliminating distractions is an ingenious way of reducing mental friction towards difficult tasks. 

Boredom is not when you don’t have anything to do. It’s when the options available don’t appeal to you. 

Remember that. 

Closing:

Hopefully you guys found some value in that!

If you’re on X/ Twitter at the moment, let’s connect.

Here’s my page: https://twitter.com/trident_mastery

I’ll catch you on the next one,

J.R.