For the Love of Monotony

For the Love of Monotony. Your daily grind, your habits, your struggles, and your pain are unseen by nearly everyone else on this planet. Your work is mostly invisible, and additionally, most of your work is also monotonous.

Monotonous work is not for everyone. It is not fun. It is hard and it is stressful.

And just like a person tasting beer or coffee for the first time, monotonous work is bitter. If you truly care to arrive at the places you strive for, you need to acquire the taste for monotonous work. Not tolerate it. Not pretend to like it or be unbothered by it. I mean prefer it and its taste. 

Monotonous work is routine, familiar, and feels like a process. No work starts out that way; work starts out much more chaotic. Work is like a firefight, and it stays that way until someone finds a way to break down that chaos and turns it into a process; and there is power to process. Processes allow you to complete tasks with efficiency, and improved processes compound the efficiency. Efficient processes free you up to have more time to attack other forms of work chaos and, similarly, turn them into processes. Developing processes is a way of creating work that is routine and is a significant part of the source of monotonous work.  

When you acquire the taste for monotonous work, you will see its value: its consistency and backpressure on progress and improvement, its complement to the new and exciting, and its criticality for any sustainable growth. By understanding its role and impact, your desire to avoid monotony transforms into a desire for it and its value. Monotonous work raises the barrier of entry for competition by filtering out those without the taste buds for it. The bitterness you’ve chosen to order and taste every day in your work is hard for others to understand. The sweetness you prefer to taste is on the other side of your work. That sweet taste will come from the successes you achieve because of the monotonous work you’ve put in relentlessly. 

It is too easy to forget the amazing ability that you have to adapt to the environment that you place yourself in. It is very underutilised superpower. You have the ability to become proficient, and even an expert, in the work you imagine doing in your fantasies. The stress and chaos of the new challenges you battle will undoubtedly become additions to your list of monotonous work as you make the battleground of chaos the environment you evolve in, adapt to, and conquer. The grit you develop from showing up each day to take on these challenges becomes your nature as you turn yesterday’s chaos into today’s monotony. 

Instead of dreading work and looking forward to the release of weekends and time off, you will find the peace that exists in the productivity of monotonous work. You’ll notice yourself change as it becomes strange when this newfound peace is disrupted. Midweek holidays are one of the most illustrative examples of this phenomenon. You start to feel anxious about getting back to your monotony, that feeling of productive peace. Unsolicited advice from others about you needing to take a vacation is now confusing to your nature. Such advice does not usually come from a maverick [1]; it comes from someone who hasn’t acquired the taste for such remarkably productive monotonous work.  They don’t know. They don’t understand. They haven’t worked or lived in the darkness and chaos that you are placing yourself in. They haven’t buried the obstacles and challenges that you have. Their human nature has not evolved like yours. Your nature is now one that appreciates monotony, and it has made you different.   

Change your mind about monotony.  Realize the benefits that monotonous work provides to you and in achieving your goals.  Realize how impactful and great it is going to be when the challenges and stress that you face today become run-of-the-mill monotonous tasks that gets done every single day.  Crave the taste of turning today’s stressful challenges into the monotonous tasks of your future that move you closer every day to your goal’s destinations.  

Craving monotony is a path few will ever take. Become comfortable being different. Isn’t that what mavericks do?    

Footnote

[1] Maverick – Judith Germain has been defining a Maverick as wilfully independent person, since 2005