Boredom is surprisingly stressful. And when we're busy, but still bored, it's even more so. How many of us feel this way? I do, and I suspect you might too.
By the looks of it, my own working life should actually be quite exciting. I travel twice a month to such exotic places as Kuala Lumpur, Doha, New York, and Helsinki to teach bright executives. I write books and articles, give interviews for newspapers and radio. I get to meet interesting people from society's upper echelons. I have been lucky enough to win some fairly prestigious awards. I get to spend months living full-time with teams of high performers in such unique environments as elite sports and war hospitals. I have more projects in the pipeline than I can shake a stick at. I am busy. And I am bored.
Unable to shake off my melancholy, I went out on a limb and told my boss. As a huge credit to him, he said: "Fine ... take your sabbatical year and do something completely different". What I suspect he realized is that my boredom stems not from having nothing to do but from having nothing that seems worthwhile doing. We human beings are addicted to meaning, and this kind of existential boredom signals its unhappy retreat. Surely, it shouldn't ever be as if you never existed at all?
The funny thing is, if boredom were due simply to lack of stuff to do it could be eradicated by giving people more to do. Even relatively mundane tasks will help alleviate the feeling of utter uselessness. However, this is only ever likely to work in the short-term if what people are asked to do does not contribute directly to something more meaningful — something bigger than themselves.
Likewise, if boredom were the result of having had too much of a good thing — the novelty has worn off, the sense of excitement has gone — it could be solved by giving people something new to do. This is one way that many people are busy but bored at work, and this type of boredom is particularly acute with high performers and with people who take to tasks quickly but are easily bored by them. There are some obvious fixes — such as job rotation, or a training program to broaden skills, or a larger portfolio of responsibilities — and usually this kind of boredom can be eradicated after awhile.
But how do we fix our working lives when we suffer from the boredom of having more than enough to keep us busy all hours of the day, but nothing that gives us meaning? I was lucky — I had a boss who understood my problem and I had the luxury of a sabbatical, which most people in organizations do not have, to do something completely different.
And so it ultimately seems that the only obvious solution to existential boredom is to give people something more meaningful to do. As any regular reader of this site will have noticed, discussions about the lack of meaning at work are conspicuously frequent. This is the kind of boredom that the philosopher Kierkegaard labeled the root of all evil. In fact, I occasionally ask executives: if your organization disappeared overnight, aside from you and those that depend on you financially, who would actually care about this? Who would be affected by it, and why? There are many variations on these existential questions, and you will no doubt have yours, but their object is always the same: to wake people up to the realization that what they do on an everyday basis actually matters.
Left to your own devices, how might you address this? If meaningful work is too much to ask, why not develop a passion instead? Is it any surprise that many high achievers have "other lives", or a competence in a skill unrelated to their everyday work? For example, in my own line of work, some of the most highly respected business professors are also quite accomplished in other areas. These include a poet (Stanford professor James March), a nun (Boston College professor Jean Bartunek), a blacksmith (New Mexico State University professor David Boje), and a painter (University of Virginia professor Mary Jo Hatch).
To meaninglessness there may be a different solution too — albeit tougher to implement. A clue to it lies in the second paragraph of this article. Take a look at the first word of almost every sentence in that paragraph — you'll find the pattern consists of a conspicuous single letter word. And as Jonathon Sacks explains, it may well be this singular focus that lies at the root of our discontent. If so, the key to a meaningful life — at work and elsewhere — lies in turning our focus from ourselves to "the other". We can do this by focusing on creating opportunities for those we work with to make a little bit of progress everyday, giving them something to feel good about. Perhaps there lies our real challenge?
HBR article: Mark de Rond
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