Alright, we got a question here from Jules. Jules says, "My favorite nugget of wisdom from your book was something to the effect of if you begin craving distraction, the next 30 minutes of resistance can become a training session of concentration calisthenics. I love this idea of strengthening your power to resist.

What more can you tell us about this training? Do you have a few stories from people who view the moment of resistance as training and how it slowly developed?" So Jules, the relevant piece of advice here comes from deep work, and it's where I recommend that you embrace boredom.

And here is the whole argument. By embracing boredom, I mean expose yourself to boredom on a regular basis. So at least once or twice a day, have a period in which your mind is craving novel stimuli and you do not give it to it. It wants to look at your phone and you don't.

I do not mean embrace boredom in the sense of think of boredom as an unalloyed good, something that's going to generate lots of good things. We should be bored. Bored is a good state. Boredom feels bad and we should take that seriously. Our body makes things feel really bad if there's a real reason it wants it to feel bad.

So I don't think we should be bored all the time. The reason why I think you should be periodically, temporarily bored, however, is that it breaks the Pavlovian connection that so many of us have developed between boredom and distraction. If at the slightest hint of boredom, you always take out your phone and relieve it, your brain learns boredom means shiny treat.

Boredom means shiny treat. So then what happens when you want to do something that's cognitively demanding, you want to focus deeply to write a chapter of a book or come up with a new strategy for your business, your brain will say this is boring because there's no novel stimuli.

We're just thinking about the same thing again and again. Where's our shiny treat? And it won't tolerate it. It won't tolerate it. Your brain will go on strike and say, give me a phone. Come on, we don't do this. And then you can't actually produce things of value with your brain.

So if on the other hand, on a semi-regular basis, you expose yourself to boredom, your brain gets comfortable with that option. And when it comes time to think deeply about something and you're lacking novel stimuli, your brain is not going to go on strike. It's like, okay, this is one of those times where we don't get the stimuli.

I get it. Okay, great. Let's go back to writing this chapter and thinking through this strategy. So, yeah, it is like training. Your brain hates it. You want to get it to the point where your brain hates it less. That is going to give you a lot more flexibility to do things of real value with that brain.