Overcome Boredom the Same Way You Overcome Training Pain
Yesterday I made the case for why the ability to overcome boredom is one of the most important mental skills you need to go from good to great. I call this mental skill mastering mental monotony. It takes an extreme amount of repetitive solo practice to become great at anything. Subsequently, if you can’t maintain focus when practice gets boring, then you can’t become great. Therefore, mastering mental monotony is a basic pre-requisite for going from good to great.
This leads to the obvious next step of figuring out how do you learn to master mental monotony. To figure this out, you must take a page out of the same process one follows to master training pain. Training pain is a type of pain that is not injury related. It’s the pain that is most often the result of fatigue and one generally feels this pain in the muscles and lungs.
Purpose and Progression Is the Key to Increasing Tolerance
In order to improve your ability to handle training pain, you must follow a process to gradually push yourself further and further beyond the stage of fatigue. This requires a progression to increase one’s pain tolerance over time. So, this ultimately means the only way to increase your pain tolerance is to gradually experience more pain.
Correspondingly, mastering mental monotony requires this same thought process. This means more boredom is the secret for overcoming boredom. But not just boredom for the sake of it, boredom with a purpose and a progression. Ideally, this would flow from doing the repetitive drills that lead to real improvements in whatever skill you are building.
For example, if now you can only do these drills for 15 minutes without getting bored, then the next step is to work towards 16 minutes. From there the progression may just be to add 1 minute each time you do the drills. The key is to continually increase your tolerance without decreasing the quality of each repetition. If the quality decreases, then decrease the time and don’t increase the time unless the quality remains high.
Over time, if you stick with the progression, your ability to focus through boring and repetitive activities will increase to expert levels. Then you will be a master of mental monotony for that particular activity. While it’s possible that your mastery of boredom could transfer to other related activities, it’s more likely that each additional activity will require a new progression for mastery.