The #1 Skill Every High Performer Has (And Every Quitter Lacks)

0:00There's a skill that every high performer has and every quitter does not have. It's called boredom tolerance. There's this hidden superpower behind consistency, grit, and discipline, and it's actually incredibly rare. It's so easy in our world today to be really distracted, so I'm going to give you four science-backed tools to defeat your dopamine addiction and actually increase your boredom tolerance, plus this simple two-question test to determine if your boredom is lying to you or worth listening to. Today, we're going to outlast everyone. I'm Cody Sanchez. This is The Big Deal Podcast. Let's dive in.

0:33And also, if this show has ever saved you from a bad decision, made you a dollar, please hit subscribe. It is the single biggest thing you can do that helps me get this in front of one more person who needs it and keeps the show independent. Costs you nothing. Okay, let's go. There's this story that I'm obsessed with about how you're not really competing against the most talented person in your field. You're competing against the version of them that gets bored and quits. And there's lots of words for this. Some people call it the attrition moat. It's basically in any field, the crowd doesn't thin out by talent.

1:06Isn't that crazy? It's not that like some people are really, really good and some people suck and there's some sort of like bell curve between the two. That's how we think about it, right? Like, you know, most people are in the middle. There's the A plus students. Then we have Fs over here, right? And that's the difference between the two. That's not it at all. It actually thins out by commitment. So most people are like kind of hoppers. They'll stay in the middle. Some people quit everything or never start. and very, very few people stay committed and keep showing up, then this field is clear for you.

1:36And you didn't even have to get smarter, faster, or better. You just had to stay there. I think about this often. I have a line I repeat to myself, which is you can beat someone smarter, better, and faster than you if you just work longer in more focused ways. And so like, give me a difficult competitor that's less focused than I am. And it actually, I mean, if I think about it, if you think about the businesses that survive, the Bureau of Labor statistics shows that half a new businesses don't survive to your five, right? And so they don't just get killed by competition. Actually, that's not the most common.

2:07They get killed by commitment and boredom tolerance. It's not only a personal habit, it's a business moat that widens over time. The cool part is it does it for free while you sleep if you'll just stay in the fucking game. So like ask yourself, if you're like a two or three year jumper for work, for business, I'm going to tell you something right now, you're never going to be really rich, which is maybe okay. You don't, that's okay. You don't care about that. But like, just know that you will never be stupid rich if you jump and change every two to three years. Even every five, you're kind of fucked.

2:37And so here's a story for you. In 2001, Ben Chestnut and Dan Kersias were running this like tiny little web design agency. On one side, almost as an afterthought, they built a little tool to help their clients send email newsletters. They named it after a cartoon chimp, MailChimp. You guys know this company? For the next eight years, nothing exciting happened. Just two guys running this email tool as a side project. But they kept showing up. Then in 2009, they made the tool free to start. And the boring little side project, it began to compound. By 2021, Intuit bought MailChimp for about$12 billion.

3:13So when you know you just need to keep pushing, I want you to realize that like that part, you're all pretty capable of. Like you're capable of it. I'm capable of it. We don't actually have to be smarter. Just grit, discipline, and consistency. like that's the input and the output. And the skill underneath all of them is boredom tolerance. Isn't that wild? Like you don't have to be that smart to win. You have to stick with it. I've seen this all the time because we invest in, I don't know, we've invested in hundreds of companies by now. And usually what kills them is that they get bored. I can always tell it with the founder who wants to launch 57 different things or all of a sudden starts podcasting all the time and the podcast isn't related to the business and it doesn't come back to the thing.

3:53That's true for your work. And it's even more true for what you choose to build because the same instinct that makes people quit boring work is what makes the best boring businesses, all the ones that I own about, the most profitable things a business owner can do. Your brain runs on prediction, right? Like the first time you do something new, it's surprise, surprise, surprise, and a surprise is a dopamine spike. That's the high of a new project, a new gym program. By like the hundredth rep, your brain knows exactly what's coming. So the surprise and then the spike, all those chemical rewards, they're gone.

4:28This is what we call the novelty cliff. And most people fall off it right around the time the work starts actually paying off. And I see this all the time in business. One of my best executives of all time, I told him that the reason that he hasn't made the money that he wants to make in the long term is because he only wants to be entertained. He doesn't want to do the work that is needed. I always ask people, have you done what is needed or do you just do what you want? And neuroscientist Kent Barrage actually spent decades proving that the brain runs on two different systems, basically, wanting and liking.

5:03So dopamine drives wanting, right? That's like the pull towards the new and stimulating. Liking, the actual value you get, runs on a totally different circuit in your brain. And this matters because when boredom hits, you stop wanting the work, but the work never stopped being valuable. You just confused a drop in dopamine for a drop in value. I really want you to land on this for a second. Like, are you bored or do you just need a small break in order to continue to compound and make more money over time? As a thought exercise, picture this. A restaurant opens. The whole town shows up. The owner is so excited.

5:3918 months later, the food is better. The systems are tighter. The owner is bored out of their mind and thinking about the exit. This is the standard, guys. It's why venture capital actually requires two founders, typically. Technically, what happened in this? Everything got better, but the dopamine just left, you know, and the owner is about to abandon this well-oiled machine right as it's learned to run. That's the novelty cliff actually eating all of your success live. And Anders Ericsson, who's this researcher behind the 10 ,000 hours idea, studied elite violinists and basically found that the practice that made them world-class was in his words, so like Norwegian, not inherently enjoyable, right?

6:21The best players didn't find practice more fun than everybody else, right? That's what we think. But they just kept doing the unfun thing. That's where all the money is. Like the enjoyment wasn't the point, the reps were. And so burn this into your brain. Boredom is actually a signal, not a verdict. So what if it's your brain nudging you towards something more stimulating? What if it's a sign that your brain has normalized the work that you once wanted to do. And it's counterintuitive, but that's a good thing. Like it's okay to normalize the thing that you wanted historically. And be careful because your phone, your friends, and the monotony of the daily grind, well, that is like a series of distractions that are surrounding you.

7:04If you're not focused, you'll see something shinier and your little brain will wag its tail and suddenly you're going to jump down whatever rabbit holes is sitting around you. So to keep you focused and me focused, I've come up with a system. And the system is all about how do we have this one word grit, which is the consistency to grind on something over time, maybe even longer than it's reasonable. I think about it like, hey, how do we stick with things? Well, the G is like, I stick with things if I can gamify it, right? Can I make this fun? R is for rename and reframe. Almost all the time you guys are hearing systems and name frameworks for me because why?

7:39We can remember it. I is for if then, like if this happens, then I'm gonna do that. And T is for the temptation bundle. Like, what do I do when I'm really, really, really want to do what I'm not supposed to do? And so gamify it means like, if boring work is super low feedback work, like nothing's going to happen right away, you don't get an immediate response. The reward is real, but delayed and invisible. So your brain, it's starved for simulation. It's getting nothing to hold on to. There's no like, you know, when you're texting somebody and it's brand new and you send out the text and butterflies in your stomach waiting to get back as you've been with that person for a while.

8:12You're like texting them like, what's for dinner? I don't know. What the fuck do you want for dinner? You've just lost it. So you need to build that reward feedback in yourself. Gamify sort of the boring bits. I think about it like the scoreboard rule, which is count the reps, not the results. I think about this every day. I'll show you actually what I do real live, you guys, because I have to do boring shit all the time. So the results are lagging and out of your control, which makes terrible daily fuel. So the reps are immediate and not fully yours. I like to count the calls. So like yesterday, for instance, that was the 21st, maybe it was the day before.

8:46Oh yeah, the day before. I do this every day. So this is a fresh notey, but you can see them two days. Basically, I just have a little checklist. It looks like this. It's like check, check, check. And I just count up the number of boring things that I needed to do. Yesterday, I had to write a

9:0615, 16, 17. I approved 10. I needed to reach out to a bunch of companies. So I hit 5, 10, 11 to the 13. I needed to record a pod. So I did that. I needed to do two hires. So I wrote down two. I like the checklist because it's counting the reps. Like Jerry Seinfeld's rule to a young comic was to mark a big X on the calendar every day he wrote new jokes and don't break the chain. Jerry found that when he did that, he stopped writing for the laugh and he started writing for the X he could mark off that day. Great. Reps, not rewards. That's probably why Jerry's one of the highest paid comics of all time.

9:42So set your goal metric and put it on a whiteboard or a notebook or the wall or whatever, and then give yourself a tiny little tally mark for each and every one of them. It's just as soon as you complete the goal metric. And now, even if all the things I did were shit yesterday and it was all bad and it never paid off in the immediate, well, your brain experiences the high of winning. So the metrics, you can actually control them and you don't focus on the ones that you can't, which is what's going to happen afterwards. So create a game out of it, gamify it. Okay. R is for rename and refrain. So if we believe now that boredom is a signal, not a verdict, the highest leverage move is changing what you believe the signal means.

10:22Psychologists call this a cognitive reappraisal. They have such funny, serious words, But basically it means you don't try to run away from the feeling of boredom. You reinterpret it. And if you reinterpret it, then you change your mindset on it. It makes you keep going. So I like the toll reframe, which basically means boredom is the toll you pay on the road to mastery. Like you don't get mad. Well, you shouldn't get mad if you have to take a toll every day to get your favorite beach crossing over a big bridge. The toll booth is exactly where the crowd of would-be's turn around and you keep going.

10:56And so when your brain says switch to something else, you just run the two line test. So one idea is like, OK, that's the board I'm talking, not the data. Line two might say, what is the what is the scoreboard actually say? So I know I'm bored, but can we just go back to the scoreboard? And when you separate them out loud, you basically strip boredom of its power to decide for yourself. And I think there's another thought exercise here, which is like picture two people who deal with boredom differently. So both hit that month six of a grind and they kind of get that gray, flatless, monotonous world.

11:34Nothing will satisfy me. Person one reads it as, this format isn't for me and starts over somewhere new, resetting the clock to zero. This happens all the time. So many people do this. In fact, one of my proudest moments was getting two employees that I thought were really good employees back in the day to stay with the company because they were bored and burnt out. often, by the way, burnt out feels like boredom. And it usually means that you're like, oh, I'm just going to go switch and go to someplace new. Okay. That's okay. You could do that. I'm not saying that's always the wrong way of, but more often than not, you should just go talk to somebody else at the company and be like, I think I've been pretty good at this one thing.

12:10What else you got here? Is there something else I could do at this company to really like help it grow? But I want to learn something new. Maybe I want to make some more money. What else is an option here? Why? because then you don't have to build up all that historical like appreciation. They do a good job. You understand the corporate politics. You understand not to work with Nancy. Nancy sucks. So like all of that you just leave behind when you allow boredom to make you hip hop on things all the time. I wish I understood this when I was younger. Now person two reads that same feeling as good.

12:43I'm past where everybody else starts to quit. I'm bored. Great. That means that like if I keep going, this is going to be easier and easier for me than anybody else. And a year later, person two looks like a winner. They like won. They're an overnight success. What's happening with person one? They're on their fourth fresh start. There's like all these excuses, you know. I think rename and reframe is a proven winner long-term. I stands for if then. So let's say you're on a boring day and you're kind of like, I don't know if I want to do this work today. The work might be up for debate. Well, if the work is up for debate, you'll lose that debate.

13:22Willpower is really terribly inconsistent. And so delete the decision in advance and institute an if-then framework. So I need to do this all the time with working out because I don't like to do it, especially right now because I'm pregnant. So if-then lock is stupidly simple. It goes like this. If it's 7 a.m., then I write for 30 minutes before checking my phone. If it's 7 a.m., I get up at 7.30 and I go to the gym. If I finish lunch, then I make five calls. If it's Sunday night, I schedule the week's post. Like, it's just like, if this happens, then I do that. You're basically pre-wiring the behavior to a trigger so it fires automatically.

13:58And the reason this beats discipline is basically timing. Discipline asks you to win an argument, like at that moment, when you have no willpower and you'd rather just go and watch Harry Potter or whatever, you know? And the if-then lock moves that decision days upstream. So you're not having to like re-litigate it and not decide whether that was the right decision or wrong every day. You know, I found over time, the people who look superhuman aren't white knuckling anything. They're like, I already made the decision. Shit, I don't feel like doing it today. Well, I'm gonna do it anyway, because it's on the calendar.

14:29Like that's half of my plan. I'm late to stuff all the time. I have way too much on my plate. But how do I get all this accomplished? I'm like, well, it's on the calendar. So I got to do it. And two researchers actually ran this meta-analysis across 94 studies. So basically a big, huge study of studies. I think it was like 8 ,000 people. And they basically found that if you do this, an if-then plan, produce this huge increase in follow-through. So when in doubt, decide ahead of time. And the T, the last one, is the temptation bundle. So it's a little sneaky. Let's say your work feels flat. Connect it to something that isn't.

15:05So a researcher at Wharton calls it temptation bundling. So I'm stealing their words. She let people hear addictive page turner audio books, but only at the gym. I don't know if that'd do it for me. Tell me, do you guys listen to page turner audio? I've never done that. I've only read them. But I kind of like this idea because I need to get my happy ass to the gym more. So want to know what happens next? You get on the treadmill because you're going to listen to XYZ. And when she ran that study, she found that the group hit the gym 51 % more often. That is unhinged because of like one tiny little micro reward.

15:38So pick one thing you crave and say you're not allowed to get it unless it's during the boring task. So fancy coffee in the morning. Cool. I'm on board with it. I'm not a Dave Ramsey in that way, although I love Dave. Have the fancy coffee, but do cold calls. Like have your favorite show only on the exercise bike. I actually do do this and I am aging myself, but with Harry Potter, I like watching Harry Potter in the evenings when I'm stressed, but I'm only allowed to do it when I'm on the treadmill or when I'm doing work on other things. I can't just sit and only watch it. You might have your favorite podcast, like the big deal podcast with Cody Sanchez, on like only while cooking your meal prep for the week, right?

16:13So you can give your brain this dopamine it's begging for, but only when the dopamine is helping you with something you might abandon otherwise. So now you got it. That's the grit system. Gamify it, rename and frame it. If then it, bundle those temptations. Also, I think I'm going to give you a bonus rule, which is shrink the rep. So on like a really miserable day, don't lower the goal, lower the entry cost. So maybe like, how did I finish my book? I didn't write a book. That wasn't the commitment. I literally would say every single day, I have to write one sentence. Like you're never just gonna write one sentence.

16:47You just like keep going. So I'd sit down, fiddle fuck around, write one sentence. That would become a page every day. You know, you don't have to finish all 50 expense reports, just finish one. Because basically what happens is you have a battle not with finishing a thing, with starting a thing, almost always. So when you shrink a rep to a size that feels absolutely ridiculous, there will be no excuse for you not to do that one single thing. You'll always start. But for a lot of you, the problem isn't just motivation. It's actually knowing the next steps to move forward with the things that you are inspired to do.

17:17And so I actually wrote a book specifically for you on how to win in business way beyond just being motivated to do it, but how to actually make more profit with less pain. So Owner Beyond has 12 plays across pricing, profit, people, and process. and every chapter ends with basically a handoff you can hand directly to your team, to your assistant and say, hey, here's the deadline. Here's the thing I want you to execute on and I want you to do it exactly like Cody says it in this chapter. So this is how you have a business that starts running without you the same week you read this book. You do not even have to finish the whole book.

17:54You have to buy it. You have to read one chapter then hand it to one of your number twos. They're gonna make more money. you're going to make more money. And so what's going to happen? You're going to have a flywheel effect of wanting to read more chapters. They're going to want to do more of the same chapters and your business is going to get better because you're going to have a playbook. You won't be running around like a chicken with your head cut off, not knowing what to do next and neither will your team. So if you're an owner who's looking to win big, then this book is for you. So I guess I want to end this episode on two statements.

18:25One, boring is not your enemy. Boring is where your money hides. And two, joyful boredom is the ultimate metric of business success. It's the morning you wake up with nowhere to be and no reason to reach for your phone. Like a great owner gets that quiet Saturday afternoon spent with your family where nothing happens. And it's because you've moved through the muck to discover something lucrative and systematized and consistent. And that is true ownership more than any number or diagnostic. So if you like today's episode, you're going to love my new book because it turns out you can make a very not boring bank account by sticking with some boring things in business.