Summary
Embrace the Boring fundamentals.
Thoughts
Notes
We go to incredible lengths to avoid actions that we know are good for us.
For any endeavor, there are a set of basic skills needed to build a strong foundation. These are the boring fundamentals:
- Sleeping 8 hours a night, exercising consistently, eating your vegetables.
- Meditating, reading books, writing for yourself and for your peers.
- Domain specific fundamentals, like drilling guitar chords, or calculus.
Even when we know they are good for us, even when we know they will advance our goals, we avoid taking the steps needed.
We don’t do the boring fundamentals because, well, they’re boring. Repetitive actions done day after day are not a recipe for excitement. There’s a disconnect between the future positive result and the present slog. Progress often plateaus, and only arrives in unpredictable bursts.
Ski enthusiast Tim Peck shows us that there are actually two types of fun:
Type 1 Fun: Pure fun, untarnished by setbacks Type 2 Fun: Suffering now; fun after the fact, in retrospect Not Fun: Not fun now, not fun later, “I’m never doing that again”