Make this your year of being boring

I recently asked you to become more foolish. Today I’m asking you to be boring—all year long.

The nudge came from this excellent tweet by Mark Manson:

“The older I get, the more I realize that success at most things isn’t about finding the one trick or secret nobody knows about.

It’s consistently doing the boring, mundane things everyone knows about but is too unfocused/undisciplined to do.

Get good at boring.”

He’s right. Everyone wants the life-changing hack; very few want the life-sustaining habit.

Peak moments don’t hold a life together. It’s the dull, repetitive things you do when no one is noticing or clapping. Sleeping at sensible hours. Basic cleaning and grooming, every day. Walking and exercising to a steady rhythm. 

Most people know all this, but can’t stick with it. That’s exactly Manson’s point: the ideas aren’t secret; the execution is.

The real magic trick is staying with a routine long after the excitement has worn off. A boring person might simply be someone who has made peace with repetition. The vapidly glamorous are often those who are no good at enduring the unglamorous.

You can chase new experiences every weekend, or you can stick to a dull process of saving, exercising, reading, and resting—and wake up ten years later with far more freedom and health than the “interesting” people.

Let’s take boring into the workplace. In careers, boring often just means: you turn up, you prepare, you respond, you document, you follow through, you close the loop.

The people who become the long-term heroes are usually the ones who can answer the boring emails, keep promises, be on time, take notes, maintain a task list, do one more quiet rep of prep before the meeting.

The flashy stuff—charisma, big presentations, personal brand—sits on top of the unremarkable grind. When the basics are missing, the glamour collapses quickly. 

And here’s a subtler point: boring is where trust is built. Your colleagues don’t trust your big ideas; they trust your consistent behaviour. They trust the person who sends the minutes, who updates the doc, who remembers the loose ends. Reliability looks very dull from a distance—until you don’t have it.

I have spent a lifetime working on strategy with CEOs. The same lesson holds: most firms don’t lose because they missed some exotic, secret trick. They lose because they were too distracted or undisciplined to do the obvious things consistently well.

Listen to your customers properly. Ship on time. Maintain quality. Keep costs under control. Train your people. Fix problems at root, not with patches. Is this stuff not strategic? Are these not the disciplines that will help you celebrate your 100th corporate birthday?

Not every strategy has to be about the game-changing innovation. Sometimes it’s about doing the simple stuff relentlessly, without drama.

So do strategy, not strategy tourism. Don’t be the leader who loves the offsites in exotic places, is happiest when generating visions, is in thrall to management gurus and fad merchants. Be the one who insists on the quiet work being done: standardized processes, simple scorecards, motivated teams, clear communication. Week after week.

What about countries? At national level, boring is almost the whole game.

A well-run nation looks uneventful on most days. Roads are maintained before they crumble. Power works. The tax system is dull and predictable. Courts plod along but are generally fair. Censuses, elections, public accounts—same rituals, every cycle, with minimal drama.

The opposite is very familiar: Big flashy projects, ribbon-cuttings, grand announcements; but underneath, the everyday systems are chaotic or decaying. Records are messy, payments delayed, maintenance skipped, rules bent. It makes for stimulating news—and frustrating lives.

Healthy nations are built on boring competence, not fireworks.

Our true national ambition should be to make the ordinary person’s ordinary day smoother: getting water; connecting to healthcare; renewing a licence; boarding a bus. That’s where discipline (or its lack) shows.

Populists sell spectacle; good stewards improve procedures. Only one of those accumulates into a better country.

We should rethink what boring means. A pianist repeating scales. A runner doing slow miles. A coder refactoring old code. A nurse checking the same vitals every few hours. A writer proofreading every draft several times. Healthy food eaten to a strict rhythm. 

Boring, you say? Try not doing that stuff. Then you’ll realize how much beauty comes from being boring.

THE SIGNAL IN THE NOISE

Glamour is a moment; discipline is a pattern. Choose the pattern.

 

Like it? Hate it? Engage here