Bored and Brilliant
A lot of really important things, not just great and brilliant things, but important things happen between active tasks in your day in life and when that cell.
Season 5, Episode 49 · Bored and Brilliant
Play the original Excel Still More episode here without leaving the article.
The story behind the idea
If you've been missing being bored, either just missing out on it or genuinely missing those moments, we need to find more space in your life for sitting, thinking, and planning. When I think of the word bored, I don't think of lazy or idle, I think of unbusy. I think we've covered this in episodes before, but I don't know if you're proud of being busy or how you feel when someone says, you are so busy, but to me that is an unintended insult or an indictment of my poor time management.
What stands out
A lot of really important things, not just great and brilliant things, but important things happen between active tasks in your day in life and when that cell phone is in your pocket. This has sparked some great conversation between myself and my wife Summer and my son Luke on how we keep our minds at ease and work through our problems and make sure we're properly energized for the tasks of every day.
Why it matters
Instead, you're rapidly shifting from one thing to the next, depleting natural resources as you go. The TED Talk presenter Manoosh went on to add, a decade ago, we shifted our attention every three minutes. We do it every 45 seconds and we do it all day long.
A faithful way forward
I'm not telling you to find that time, I'm telling you you need it. There are probably more brilliant ways to do a lot of the things that you're working very hard on in your life. There are ways of being more productive, more efficient, and more disciplined. For some of us, we have a totally inverted idea of how to get there.
Put it into practice
Day two was not take any pictures with your phone, just experience life. Day three was delete an app at least for the day and hopefully for the week or for the rest of your life. Day four had to do with setting up an auto reply on your phone so that you would send it out instead of getting notifications. Day five was making one small observation about a person or an object or something that you probably would have overlooked if you'd been staring at your phone.
Take the idea with you.
- 01What idea from this study most needs my attention right now?
- 02Where does this challenge the way I am currently thinking or living?
- 03What is one faithful step I can take this week?
Prefer listening?
The original episode player is available near the top of this article, so you can listen without leaving the page.