A self education in entrepreneurism and marketing

I’ve been known to credit myself with never being bored, declar­ing that I always have some­thing to do or that there is always some­thing that can be found to be done. And yet recently, des­pite this, I have found myself feel­ing com­pletely and utterly bored. Given my pre­dilec­tion to the afore­men­tioned declar­at­ive state­ments and that I actu­ally do have plenty of things that occupy my time, being bored came as a bit of shock. I figured there must be some­thing else going on here.

First world problem

Well, it turns out that there is. In my case, I’m in the for­tu­nate situ­ation of doing exactly what I want to be doing. No — I’m not fly­ing around in private jets and with all expenses paid by some muse com­pany… quite the oppos­ite. But I am in a situ­ation where I have the choice to do whatever I want. And that (appar­ent) free­dom of choice gives us our first clue to the emer­gence of bore­dom since us humans aren’t great at mak­ing choices when the world is our oyster, des­pite what freedoms we think it gives us. In fact, we’re more likely to do noth­ing, so over­whelmed are we by the thought that we could do some­thing. Okay, so that’s a neat explan­a­tion for where the bore­dom came from, what can you do about it?

Influ­en­cing ourselves

When we’re denied some­thing, we want it more.

Glad you asked. I just fin­ished read­ing Robert Cialdini’s clas­sic book, Influ­ence, in which he describes the many ways in which we per­suade and are per­suaded by oth­ers. It’s a fas­cin­at­ing read — scary, too, just how sus­cept­ible we are to skilled com­pli­ance prac­ti­tion­ers (any­one who’s in the busi­ness of extract­ing a ‘yes’ out us). On the upside of hav­ing a brain that’s eas­ily influ­enced, we can use com­pli­ance tech­niques on ourselves. One par­tic­u­lar trait that’s com­mon to every­one, but espe­cially two year olds and teen­agers is some­thing called react­ance. That is, when we’re denied some­thing, we want it more. React­ance also helps explain why being able to do any­thing can res­ult in noth­ing being done — but it also provides a key to counter bore­dom. And it’s really quite simple: cre­ate a struc­ture that lim­its (gulp!) the amount of free­dom that I have. [click to continue…]

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