Why inspiration is your enemy, boredom your friend
You hate being bored – everyone does, right? Well you shouldn’t. Just as today’s kids need to learn what it is to be bored and create their own games and explorations of the world, so you need to find enough space in your life to get really bored – and fill it with something different to our contemporary pillar to post, media saturated, time-poor, stress rich existence.
This IS a web site about vision and inspiration in business, but I’m going to highlight when inspiration is your enemy, and why boredom can be a good thing.
Inspiration:
- great ideas are deceptive: sometimes they are really crap ideas with a seductive kernel of goodness in the middle – just watch dragons den a few times to see what I mean. You need people with experience in the right areas – or just an intelligent devils advocate – to sort out inspiration from huge time waster
- entrepreneurial inspiration in the hands of someone with no business acumen is like letting a toddler loose with a taser gun – possibly a youtube video hit, but scary results nonetheless. A staff member or even director who thinks they have found ‘the solutions to all our problems’ and wants to implement it straight away probably has a very dangerous mix of enthusiasm and impatience, neither of which leads to problem solving.
- inspiration can be distracting when the basics of the business are not being attended to. To make a business work, you need the fundamentals of productive people and systems in place, only then should you look to your business vision or branding strategy to move the business to the next level.
- inspiration can divide rather than unite. the problem with new and different ideas, no matter how good, is that people will not be in agreement about their merits. This is a great way to test the validity of the idea(s), but the skill comes in taking the decision to proceed (or not) without everyone agreeing – but still keeping everyone committed to make it work.
Boredom
- Ah those heady days growing up when inactivity seemed like torture (“are we there yet?”) – well it’s worth cultivating some of that ‘dead time’ again to reflect on bigger issues: the position of the company, your position vs the company, do you have a (work) life balance? do your staff? where are your keys…?
- If you are bored with your job/business/goals it is time to reasses and look at what options for new horizons; either re-working an existing situation or striking out with something new to refresh the old. After all, if you are bored with your company, chances are your staff and customers will be less than inspired as well
- if things are stuck, try changing a few things, preferably environmental: move your desk, move offices, partly work from home, partly work from a cafe, adopt a bison (maybe not that one)
The great mistake we often make is to think that less is not more – more is more, and better. But no matter how busy are lives are, it is very rarely a waste of time – or ‘productivity’ – to take some time out to get some perspective, and to avoid getting a little too inspired for our own good!
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