“Everyone wants to be the best. But very few people are willing to do what it actually takes…You have to fall in love with the boredom. You have to fall in love with the repetition. If you can find joy in the mundane work that no one else sees, the lights will eventually shine on you.”
NBA legend Kobe Bryant was explaining what it actually takes. And decades before he offered up embracing the boring as the key, a sociologist who spent years embedded with Olympic swimmers came to the exact same conclusion. Except he took it one step further.
In the 1980s, sociologist Daniel Chambliss went to the best swimming club in America and sat down and observed. He wanted to see the difference between the age-group, club, and elite swimmers who were training there.
As one of the coaches, Mark Schubert, put it when coaches and athletes would arrive at the club, “They all have to come to Mecca, and see what we do. They think we have some big secret.” Instead, within an hour they were bored. Looking at their watches. Waiting for the revelation that never came.
Chambliss noted that the top athletes’ approach to the sport was entirely different. As he wrote: “What others see as boring… they find peaceful, even meditative, often challenging, or therapeutic.” He concluded that “Excellence is mundane.” What the best of the best did was figure out how to do all the boring, repetitive work that made a difference for a long time. Or as one of the central figures in his study, Mary Meagher, a three-time Olympic gold medalist, said “People don’t know how ordinary success is.”
But he didn’t just stop at they get used to the boring stuff. The swimmers he observed took staring at a line for hours and made it interesting. They looked forward to the repetition, it became a kind of challenge to master. At a certain point the thing stops being boring.
It’s Not About Boredom. It’s Meaning.
How could you not get bored looking at a line or shooting the same shot a hundred times? It seems unthinkable. Of course it’s boring. How could it not be? Well, science explains it.
That’s because we fundamentally misunderstand boredom. In 2012, researchers ran a series of studies to figure out what made boredom boredom. They came away with two main contributors to boredom: feeling unchallenged and judging the situation and your actions to be meaningless.
We all just assume that what makes something boring is the repetitiveness. But that’s not what the research says at all. It’s about doing an activity that feels pointless and doesn’t lead anywhere.
This is the same experience every high school cross country coach faces. When a young runner starts out, of course running a ton of loops around a park or on the track is boring. It sucks. But you don’t say, “okay, let’s make it fun and quit running and instead play games every practice.” Because what every coach knows is if they can get that kid to stick around, eventually they’ll get hooked. The workouts start to have meaning. The summer miles have a purpose. It might start small with helping you improve your performance, but over time it grows into a part of you. You find yourself out on those runs, and start to weirdly look forward to the swirl of fatigue.
And that’s precisely what research shows. While we tend to think of effort as something hard and unpleasant, work by Michael Inzlicht and colleagues found that effort can become rewarding in its own right. They called it the effort paradox, “Not only can the same outcomes be more rewarding if we apply more (not less) effort, sometimes we select options precisely because they require effort.”
The discipline and grind folks on social media try to convince us that it’s all about tolerating discomfort or making sure your discipline can withstand the suffering, but that’s not what actual people in the arena experience at all. Effort becomes the reward itself. It stops being a cost.
It’s why just about every elite performer I’ve worked with doesn’t see the hard work as a “sacrifice.” They fall in love with and enjoy the process, even the boring and really freaking hard parts. It’s what Bryant told us. Fellow basketball superstar Steph Curry has talked about it, “It always became just a joy of finding ways to get better. Every day I was just exploring, trying stuff...I was always curious about how can I get better the next session?”
And it’s precisely what Chambliss found with the Olympic swimmers: “It is incorrect to believe that top athletes suffer great sacrifices to achieve their goals. Often, they don’t see what they do as sacrificial at all. They like it.”
To paraphrase Shrek, what seems boring at first is an illusion. It’s because you haven’t put in the work to peel back the layers of the onion and see that the mundane is actually quite interesting.
From Boring to Fascinating.
There’s a story in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance where the main character is teaching a student how to write an essay and she’s stuck. She is eager to do well but just can’t figure it out. So the teacher tells her to narrow down the topic, to make it about the town they’re in, and then when that doesn’t work, the street they’re on, and then finally: "Narrow it down to the front of one building on the main street of Bozeman. The Opera House. Start with the upper left-hand brick."
She came back the next class with a 5,000-word essay. "I sat in the hamburger stand across the street, and started writing about the first brick, and the second brick, and then by the third brick it all started to come and I couldn't stop."
Pirsig’s point was that the brick was always interesting. She just hadn’t really seen it, spent time observing it. Rarely do we take the time to investigate something and see it fully and clearly.
Even a brick can be fascinating if we give it our full attention. Interest is about being engaged with the world. Whatever we give attention gains in value.
In 2006, two researchers gave us a model for how interests develop. They found that interest has four phases: triggered situational → maintained situational → emerging individual → well-developed individual interest.
We often treat our passions as something we have or we don’t. Either it initially grabs our attention and we fall in love with it or we don’t and move on. But that’s not how passion works. It develops with time and care. Which is precisely what the interest model gets at: we need to spend time seeing if the thing catches fire. As their model shows, the later stages need more stored knowledge, value, and self-generated curiosity. In other words, we’ve got to have the foundation and see that this thing matters to us, before we start to see it as a passion.
That’s the whole point. No one thinks that running endless laps around a track is interesting the first time they do it. Nope, it’s boring. Mind numbingly so. But the more time you do it, the more layers you pull back. You start to see the nuance of performance. You start to feel and slice and dice apart the variations of effort or discomfort that you’re experiencing. While from the outside it might seem like every rep is the same, you learn to experience that every run or repeat brings something interesting and a bit different.
We need to spend enough time staring at the brick to see that it really does have value. Most of us never get to that stage because we dismiss it from the get-go. “How in the world could that be interesting?” And if we go look at that brick long enough, we frame it as a test of suffering.
So what?
Excellence is boring. But in the most interesting way possible. It’s staying with that run, swim, or sentence long enough so that you appreciate its nuance. You stay with it like a craftsman making his 10,000th piece of the same pottery, realizing that while it may be the same cup to others, each one presents its own challenge and tells a different story.
It sounds absurd. How can staring at a black line, doing 40x400m repeats, working on the same paragraph over and over, not be boring? But the answer to that question is the key to excellence in just about anything.
It’s the answer that John L. Parker conveyed to us 50 years ago in his cult classic Once a Runner, that was based on his time training with Olympians like Frank Shorter:
“What was the secret, they wanted to know; in a thousand different ways they wanted to know The Secret. And not one of them was prepared, truly prepared, to believe that it had not so much to do with chemicals and zippy mental tricks as with that most unprofound and sometimes heart-rending process of removing, molecule by molecule, the very tough rubber that comprised the bottoms of his training shoes. The Trial of Miles; Miles of Trials.”
Kobe said fall in love with the boredom. The people who get there stopped calling it boring a long time ago. The trial of miles was fascinating to them. Even if it didn’t look like it from the outside.
-Steve Magness
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Again, an amazing piece, Steve! As a runner, cyclist and adventure racer for over 25 years now, I only learned that lesson during the last 3 years. Now I enjoy having the privilege of being able to train, even if conditions are shitty. It is way cooler to be happy with your craft everyday than to place all your happiness on a win that once may or may not come.