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For Obama, Jobs, and Zuckerberg, Boring Is Productive
Hugh Pickens writes "Robert C. Pozen writes in the Harvard Business Review that while researching a behind-the-scenes article of President Obama's daily life, Michael Lewis asked President Obama about his practice of routinizing the routine. 'I eat essentially the same thing for breakfast each morning: a bowl of cold cereal and a banana. For lunch, I eat a chicken salad sandwich with a diet soda. Each morning, I dress in one of a small number of suits, each of which goes with particular shirts and ties.' Why does President Obama subject himself to such boring routines? Because making too many decisions about mundane details is a waste of your mental energy, a limited resource. If you want to be able to have more mental resources throughout the day, you should identify the aspects of your life that you consider mundane — and then "routinize" those aspects as much as possible. Obama's practice is echoed by Steve Jobs who decided to wear the same outfit every day, so that he didn't have to think about it and the recent disclosure that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is proud that he wears the same outfit every day adding that he owns 'maybe about 20' of the gray, scoop neck shirts he's become famous for. 'The point is that you should decide what you don't care about and that you should learn how to run those parts of your life on autopilot,' writes Pozen. 'Instead of wasting your mental energy on things that you consider unimportant, save it for those decisions, activities, and people that matter most to you.'"
Don't most people eat the same thing (or about the same thing) for breakfast and lunch every day? I have for years and years, but I guess I didn't realize it was noteworthy to do so.
If you haven't read Jurassic Park, check it out. I picked up recently and was surprised how much I enjoyed it. The article made me think of this passage
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"But don't you find it boring to wear only two colors?"
"Not at all. I find it liberating. I believe my life has value, and I don't want to waste it thinking about clothing," Malcolm said. "I don't want to think about what I will wear in the morning. Truly, can you imagine anything more boring than fashion? Professional sports, perhaps. Grown men swatting little balls, while the rest of the world pays money to applaud. But, on the whole, I find fashion even more tedious than sports
Congratulations! You're calling it by the name professionals have used for years. There's even a mention of it on Wikipedia, where it forms part of a larger article on the problems with decision making.
I'm an educated and intelligent person, and this happens even to me. OTOH, that's one of the things that Costco attributes to it's sustained popularity and growth - almost always they have just one of a given thing. (And keep in mind that in many ways, Costco is the anti-Walmart. It's customer demographics skew strongly upscale and intelligent.)
Nope, they haven't discovered anything - at best, it's a rediscovery of an old military principle. "A leader can be wrong, he cannot be indecisive".
Quite often they tend not to consider that introverts don't, and instead find the constant novelty draining.
Novelty isn't inherently draining to an introvert - social interaction is. I'm an introvert myself, albeit not severely so and I am quite energized by novelty. I just don't much care what other find novel. Engineering and science research fascinate me whereas fashion and reality tv could not be more boring. Both have novelty as a component but the difference is one is internally directed and the other is externally directed.
lined a whole wall with Ikea wardrobes... a wall is a waste of precious space
A wall, being two-dimensional (from the point of view of the resident of the room. what's inside the wall is treated as inaccessible from his universe), takes up no space at all. X * Y * 0 = zero cubic centimeters.
Unless, of course, it's one of those fractal space-filling walls.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
The silliest part of this to me is that the White House has a chef, so while I'm sure that the president can request anything he wants, he could just as easily have given the chef a list of foods he likes in 2008 and allowed him or her to pick the meals, if deciding what to eat is too big a mental exercise. The same for the suits. I don't know about Obama, but most presidents have had a man-servant or valet to take care of such things as making sure clothes make it to the laundry or dry cleaners, laying out suits, with appropriate ties, shoes and shirts. Why is Obama having to even notice such things?
You'd be surprised how much of a toll it can take, being in a position where your primary duty is to make hard decisions, i.e., those without definite answers. I remember very clearly, being a network admin at a company that was on the verge of failing for the last 10 year, whose infrastructure was an ad-hoc mess that was built up purely as a response to immediate needs. I had to make so many decisions, none of which had clear right answers due to the constant constraints of time, money, and the need to "sell" absolutely everything, that I would literally get irritated at the thought of deciding what to eat for lunch.
Most people probably spend the majority of their life without even being aware of it, but you can actually feel it, your decision-making reserves emptying. And if you spend a lot of time tapped out, you come to resent the utterly irrelevant decisions that have to be made, like what to eat for lunch. I'd think, "Oh my GOD I don't care, I just need to stop being hungry so I can function."
I never got to the point of resenting the decision about what to wear for the day, but then again I've never really cared about that, and usually didn't start to feel the drain until about 10 AM anyway. But I can easily see how a more demanding situation would lead to it, and I'll never forget that feeling. If you haven't felt it, I can see how it'd be hard to understand, but it's real, and there's no "anxious" feeling about it. You've just got none left. If you'd never run in your life, you might find it hard to understand what it's like to feel like you don't have enough breath. It's just a finite resource that most people never really put pressure on.
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