OUTWORK Everyone By Being BORED

Before we dive in, I just wanted to thank you for the past week - the launch of FOCUSED was brilliant and the feedback has been amazing.

If you missed the launch, you can check FOCUSED out by clicking here

When was the last time you just sat there and did nothing?

No phone. No netflix. No YouTube. No books. Just you and your thoughts?

We live in a wildly connected world - getting information from across the globe on demand, being bombarded with 1000’s of bits of information with every scroll for hours and hours every day.

Yet your mind wasn’t designed for this.

It was designed to gather food, hunt animals, nurture relationships with your small community and watch sunsets.

And when our ancestors weren’t doing any of these, they spent a lot of time doing nothing, being bored.

1 day of stimulation in the modern world would send your ancestors crazy - yet we still have the same brain as we did 1000’s of years ago.

So can you really be surprised that when you sit down to work, your mind wanders and looks for every distraction or bit of stimulation it can find?

This is the exact reason you can’t get anything done.

The idea of sitting down to focus on 1 thing for even just 1 hour seems crazy to a modern mind that’s used to seeing 5 new things every second with every scroll.

But there’s a solution.

A solution that when embraced regularly and purposefully will eliminate your procrastination and allow you to outwork everyone.

And that’s to be more like your ancestors and to embrace being bored.

Of course, you might have a family to feed and a job to work so you can’t just spend your day watching sunsets, gathering fruit and doing nothing, but you can utilise boredom to get ahead of the pack, achieve your goals and improve your quality of life.

In a distracted world, boredom is a superpower.

You see, it was likely that your ancestors willingness to do nothing and be bored gave them the time, the space and the energy to be both creative and useful, to invent new things and do the work they had to do.

They had a problem in their life that needed solved and they had time to do nothing that gave them no other choice but to be bored and think of a solution and try it.

So in our modern world, full of distractions pulling us away from the things we need to do and the problems we need to solve, the answer to facing them is to be bored.

If you sit down in room with a desk, a chair, a laptop and your phone - which are you more likely to focus on, the work or the device that pumps your brain full of unearned dopamine?

No matter how disciplined you are, if there’s something that can stimulate your mind more than the thing you’re meant to be doing, eventually, you’ll give in.

So the only option is the extreme option.

If you want to outwork everyone else, give yourself no other choice but to do the damn work.

Turn off your phone and remove the option to scroll.

Install an app and website blocker on your computer and remove the option to check your emails.

Because even the simple distraction of changing tasks is a form of procrastination that ruins your focus and takes you out of flow.

But when you sit down in a room with just a desk, a chair and a laptop that gives you no other choice but to do the work you know you need to do, you only have 2 options;

You either do the work, or, you do nothing and be bored.

If you choose to do the work, great.

But if you choose to embrace boredom, a beneficial state that is uncomfortable, eventually the discomfort of doing nothing will force you into action and you’ll work.

So if you want to outwork everyone, embrace boredom.

Turn off your damn phone, sit down at your desk and give yourself the choice of either working or doing nothing.

Because when everyone else has the option to scroll, the option to get distracted and to procrastinate - they will.

But when you only have the option of doing the work or being bored and doing nothing, the end outcome is always you facing the work in front of you, because if you allow yourself to be bored, eventually, you doing nothing will turn into you doing something.

And if you want to really take this to the next level, dedicate time every day to doing nothing.

You see, the constant stimulation we get from the modern world can make your mind feel overwhelmed - remember, your brain was never designed to deal with this much information at one time, all the time.

With this sense of overwhelm you can feel what’s best described as brain fog and a lack of clear thinking.

You’ll struggle to see things clearly, you’ll struggle to think sharply and life will much more stressful than what it is.

Which of course is going to make you less likely to do the work, less likely to be consistent and less likely to maximise the one life that you have.

Your brain is struggling to deal with all the information it’s taking in from your every day life and from what matters because it’s being fried by the constant stream of massive amounts of information that you get from the likes of your phone.

So every single day, dedicate time to doing nothing.

And I mean nothing.

You can’t sit there and scroll your phone, you can’t sit there and watch a YouTube video, you can’t even read a book because all of these things are external stimuli that trigger your brain and don’t give it time to recover - the goal is boredom.

So when you’re scheduling time to do nothing, the only 4 things you’re allowed to do are;

• Walk (with no headphones and preferably in nature)

• Meditate

• Journal

• Sit there

The whole idea is that you give your mind time and space to think and to breathe, let it catch up and recover from the bombardment of stimulation that it’s constantly getting.

Now the more time you can spend doing nothing, the better - 30 minutes will be better than 10, but if you can only make time for 10 minutes, that’s fine, do what you can.

What you’re going to notice is that your mind is able to take time to breathe and to recover and so it’s cluttered and your thinking becomes sharper.

You’ll be able to think clearer, with more intention and actually think better - which of course is life-changing since your thinking dictates everything you do.

If you can think sharper, you can make better decisions and take better actions.

And if you think more clearly, you’ll have less brain fog, less overwhelm and therefore less anxiety because your mind can properly process the problems in your life and with time to do nothing, you’re much more likely to do the work you need to do and solve the problems you need to solve, which will remove at least 90% of your anxiety.

You’ll also notice your creativity go through the roof.

Which if you’re a creator, an artist or anyone that does anything creative, this is crucial.

When you do nothing, and especially when you reach and embrace boredom you give your mind the space to make connections between old ideas in the back of your mind and new ideas in the front of your mind to make something unique - which is essentially all creativity is.

You’re clearing the path to allow new connections to be formed but when you never give your mind time to do nothing and you’re always stimulated, your mind is so much busier that it’s almost impossible for these connections to find each other.

So every day, schedule at least 10 minutes but honestly, schedule as much time as you can, to do nothing each day.

Once you see the benefits of increased productivity, increased clarity and decreased anxiety, this time to do nothing and the idea of embracing boredom will be one of your favourite parts of the day.

- Ross

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