Be Less Boring
(dive deeply)
If anyone tells me they are bored I assign them chores. My children learned this lesson very young and also learned to busy themselves with independent activities lest I offer a dusting rag or a bag of unpeeled carrots and say “get to work.”
As my Auntie Dora used to say,
“only boring people get bored.” Which means this is your fault. But it also means, you can fix this. Here’s today’s suggestion:
Don’t be afraid
to be too niche. One of my favourite TikTokkers has a thing for dandelion coloured Crayola crayons, which were discontinued in 2017. She collects them, she does art projects with them, she creates content about them. Sure, she has a few other topics of conversation (like thrifted miniature cheeseburgers,) but she has close to 1M (ONE MILLION) followers built on the back of a yellow stick of wax.
I’m not saying we all need to pick a colour,
but I am saying that we can all take our passing interests one step further. If you’ve always liked chocolate chip cookies, you might be less bored if you attempted to bake 52 different chocolate chip cookies this year. Or baked only recipes taken from the back of chocolate chip packets. Or chocolate chip cookies using everything except actual chocolate chips. Or versions of choc chip cookies from all over the world, or —
If you don’t know where to start
look through the content you’ve been consuming. Watching Bridgerton? Read the series. Listen to the fan podcasts. Look at the fashion. You might become an expert on 19th century buttons.
If you have too many interests and you can’t choose
then think of it as sequential. You aren’t picking your favourite, you’re just picking your favourite for right now. You can deep dive into the other ones later. If it helps, you can make a list and calendarize (I love that word) your future deep dives.
Persistence
here means giving yourself a reason to keep going. Sometimes the reason is innate - you are just so curious about a party theme, or a typeface font or an ex-frenemy from middle school that you keep clicking until all of the sudden you are hours deep in the wild horses of Assateague. But sometimes, you need to make yourself interested - or interesting - and please consider this your push.
Your dive might be
directly related to the project (book, article, photography collection) you are working on or it might not be. Doesn’t matter right now. We are just trying to make ourselves more interesting. We are trying to find that fire that lights us up from the inside.
We are trying to avoid chores.
And we are trying to eat cookies.
