STOP Doing “The Boring Work”
So many people out there advise you to “do the boring work.”
“That’s how you get ahead!”
I’ve been using AI to analyze the life and work of really successful people, and based on what I found, it doesn’t look like they were bored to death doing work that drained them all the way to success.
Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, Walt Disney, and Warren Buffett didn’t grind sales calls.
They didn’t grind boring admin work.
They didn’t grind support tickets…
They weren’t bored to death with their work.
From the outside, people might look at their work and think “that looks boring!”, but internally they were engaged and enjoying the work.
Examples
Elon Musk
Obsessed with:
Physics
First principles
Scaling systems
He sleeps on factory floors not out of discipline, but obsession.
He says he works because he can’t stop thinking about the problems.
Factory logistics might look boring to outsiders, but for Musk it’s a physics puzzle, not boredom.
Steve Jobs
Obsessed with:
Product taste
Simplicity
User experience
Storytelling
Delegated execution details aggressively.
Known for pacing, arguing, refining, not administrating.
Jobs didn’t “push through boredom.”
He protected his attention for the work that lit him up.
Warren Buffett
Spends most days:
Reading
Thinking
Talking through businesses
He has explicitly said he does this because he loves it.
He avoids operational grind entirely.
What looks “boring” (reading annual reports) is play to him.
He structured his life to eliminate work he doesn’t enjoy.
Mark Zuckerberg
Obsessed with:
Systems
Code
Network effects
Long-term architectures
Zuckerberg enjoys abstract system design.
What drains others stabilizes him.
Walt Disney
Obsessed with:
Story
Experience
World-building
He hated administration and finances.
He nearly destroyed himself when forced into roles that didn’t fit.
Disney thrived when creating worlds — and suffered when stuck in misaligned work.
Surely, all those entrepreneurs I just listed pushed through a lot of work in their careers that they didn’t love.
But that wasn’t 80% of the time.
It was the minority.
I think that’s how they lasted so long.
If they did some boring work, it was because they had to, not because of this mentality of:
“You have to grind!”
Based on every book I’ve read, success is a long-term game.
How are you going to last a long time if you are bored to death?
If you are bored, you will quit — unless you have a high pain threshold.
But that’s not the type of success I want.
My takeaways from this research
The people who win long-term aren’t better at tolerating boredom.
They’re better at structuring their lives so their hardest work is also the work that engages them, aka “aligned work”.
Pushing through work that you find boring should be the minority, not the strategy.
I think you can use the feeling of being bored as an important signal that you are doing work that is misaligned with you, and that you should ultimately find a way to reduce, redesign, or remove.
Here are some things I wrote for myself that you can do to stop feeling bored:
Re-engineer the task or job so it does not feel boring.
If you can’t, try seeing if you can get away with not doing the task at all.
If you can’t, delegate it.
Find someone who loves what you find boring.If that’s not possible, sometimes you have to push through, but it should be 20% of the time, not 80%.
If pushing through most of the time is what is required to be successful in the game you are playing, you are going to have a rough time.
The way I think about it is that if you are playing a game that bores you, and someone else finds it exciting or calming, and they love it while you hate it, it’s going to be tough to beat them long term.
When it comes to boring work in relation to success, I think a better way to say this is:
Do high-value work that seems boring on the outside, but you find deeply rewarding inside.
