Embrace: Boredom and Patience

The hidden change that isn’t talked about: boredom.

If you’ve been pushing towards your dreams and have made it past the point where you’ve had a few checkpoints of gratification, then you’ve got all the satisfaction you need. The process is fun in itself.

It’s an amazing thing to experience at times and that whole adage of, “do what you love”, starts to make a lot more sense.

Through all the effort, all the stress, and the pains that were necessary to understand your business, you’ve learned to find that precious consistency and stability within it. You’ve finally moved past the point where your business is too intertwined with your own life. Any bumps on the business road down spill over into your own life and the way you may value yourself. Those days are no longer.

If you’ve made it that far, fantastic job. Seriously, great work.

It’s comfortable when you know what to expect. You’ve narrowed it down to stressful Mondays and anxious Wednesdays.

It’s just plain easier to get more work done.

But, there’s a bit of an uncomfortable transformation that happens here.

Boredom. So much damn boredom.

The life that you had led before you’ve considered changing your own life with your own hands, was probably mundane in comparison.

The things that once brought you joy are now hollow. The difficulty of the challenge, the anticipation of the reward of liberating yourself from a job reaches a stall.

There is this transition point where you’ve got to reassess the values of your own work. At worst, the problems of your business blind you from what’s really there and you spend far too long to realize it.

You can’t stop thinking about work, well, because you’ve learned to enjoy it quite a bit, but it’s on you to keep the work fresh. The enjoyment of work is the challenges you’ve shaped for yourself. The work has to be difficult enough, relative to your own ability to solve the problems.

Work needs suspense.

And that’s where we find ourselves in an in-between of discomfort.

Why in the hell would you want your work to be harder?

At this moment, we encounter a simple test. Patience.

Whether we hope for it or not, the machine we may call our business is a system of problems and solutions. At times, those problems blind us from the value we’ve originally put into our business, why we’ve started.

The start of a bakery to keep a grandmother's recipes alive is now a constant source of anxiety as employees just don’t show up on time.

It can be counterintuitive, but it’s in these moments where we’ve just got to take a break. That’s not just calling a day off work. Taking that hard break is reassessing the values of your own business and that requires that we don’t think about our business at all.

And at that moment, we confront the patience, the grittiness of purposelessness, the general lack of excitement as the business approaches maturity.

This is the true test of veterans: whether we can confront the nothingness that stands in between these moments where we must wait for answers.

That shit sucks. Bad.