Do Boring Stuff
The most successful people I know are also the most boring. On purpose.
5 rules for winning by doing dull things on repeat · 6 min read
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Don't Break the Chain
In 1993, a young comedian named Brad Isaac was backstage at a comedy club when he spotted Jerry Seinfeld — already a star — waiting to go on. Isaac did the thing every ambitious nobody dreams of doing. He walked up and asked for a tip. Seinfeld didn’t talk about timing, or stage presence, or how to read a room. He said the way to be a better comic was to write better jokes, and the way to write better jokes was to write every single day. Then he shared his system. Get a big wall calendar.
Every day you write, put a fat red X on that day. After a few days you’ll have a chain. “Your only job,” Seinfeld said, “is to not break the chain.”
That’s it. No genius. No lightning bolt. Just a man and a red marker, showing up on the days he felt brilliant and the days he felt like garbage, treating both exactly the same. One of the most successful comedians in history handed over the keys to the kingdom, and the keys turned out to be almost insultingly boring.
I’ve come to believe that’s the whole game. The people who win aren’t the ones with the best single idea. They’re the ones who kept making X’s while everyone else waited to feel inspired.
Here’s the case for doing boring stuff, on purpose, forever.
1. Success knocks when you’re not home.
We tell success stories backwards. We start at the hit and work our way back, which makes the whole thing look inevitable — as if the person had a plan, executed it, and cashed the check. Real life runs the other direction. You do the work in the dark, for a long time, with no idea which piece of it will matter.
Stephen King writes 2,000 words a day, 365 days a year, including his birthday and Christmas. Not because day 2,190 is the magic one.
Because he has no idea which day is. When you can’t know when the door will open, the only sane strategy is to keep knocking on as many doors as you can, as often as you can — so you’re standing there, draft written and product shipped, when opportunity finally shows up. Most people miss it not because they weren’t good enough, but because they’d stopped showing up months before it arrived.
The boring work is how you stay ready. It’s insurance against a moment you can’t schedule.
2. March 20 miles a day — especially when you could march 40.
In 1911, two teams raced to the South Pole. Roald Amundsen’s team marched a steady 15 to 20 miles a day — no more on the sunny days, no less in the storms. Robert Falcon Scott’s team sprinted 40 or 60 miles when the weather was good and hunkered down in their tents when it wasn’t. Amundsen reached the Pole first and brought every man home alive. Scott’s team reached it second and died on the way back.
Jim Collins built a whole book, Great by Choice, around that contrast, and named the lesson the “20 Mile March.” The discipline isn’t just pushing hard on the bad days. It’s holding back on the good ones. The consistent pace beats the heroic sprint because the sprint burns the exact energy you’ll need tomorrow, and tomorrow always comes. Boring isn’t the absence of ambition. Boring is ambition that learned to pace itself.
3. Thirty years of research found the same boring answer.
Angela Duckworth left a high-paying job to become a schoolteacher, and noticed something that didn’t fit the story we tell ourselves: her best students weren’t her smartest ones. So she spent decades studying who actually succeeds — West Point cadets grinding through brutal summer training, kids at the national spelling bee, rookie teachers in the toughest schools. In every setting she asked the same question: who makes it, and why?
The answer wasn’t IQ. It wasn’t talent, or looks, or physical fitness, or social intelligence. As she laid out in her now-classic TED talk on grit, the single best predictor was grit — passion and perseverance for long-term goals.
At West Point, a cadet’s grit score beat every conventional measure at predicting who would survive Beast Barracks. At the spelling bee, the grittiest kids advanced furthest — not because they were smarter, but because they studied longer. Thirty years of data, and the finding was almost anticlimactic: the thing that predicts success is the willingness to keep going after it stops being fun.
4. Buy the tickets. The upside is uncapped.
Here’s what makes the boring stuff worth it: certain kinds of work have wildly lopsided payoffs. Your downside is capped — an hour, a post nobody reads, a little embarrassment. Your upside is not.
Write a post. Worst case, it vanishes into the feed. Best case, the one person who needed to see it — a future co-founder, an investor, a customer, the editor who changes your life — sees it and reaches out. You risked an hour. You gained a trajectory. This is the logic of content, of cold emails, of shipping small products, of putting your work into the world. Each attempt is cheap and probably fails. But you’re not playing for the average outcome. You’re playing for the tail — the rare, enormous win that pays for every boring attempt a hundred times over.
Ask MrBeast. Before he was the most-watched creator on the planet and a billionaire, Jimmy Donaldson spent years uploading videos almost nobody saw, obsessively dissecting why some clips went viral and others died. Or, closer to home, ask Bhuvan Bam. In 2015 he was a nobody recording comedy sketches on his phone in his bedroom, playing every character himself. He kept uploading anyway — and became the first Indian YouTuber to cross ten million subscribers, then built an entire studio and acting career on top of it. Most of those early videos were the boring attempts. Both men just kept buying tickets until one hit — and then understood the machine well enough to keep hitting. You cannot predict which attempt is the one. You can only guarantee you took enough of them.
5. Boring is the filter. That’s why it works.
Here’s the part nobody tells you: the boredom is doing the filtering for you.
Consistency is rare not because it’s hard to understand — Seinfeld explained it in thirty seconds — but because it’s dull, and most people can’t tolerate dull without a reward to justify it. They quit the moment the novelty fades, which is usually right before it starts working. The long, flat stretch between “this is exciting” and “this is paying off” is where almost everyone drops out. Which means the boredom itself is your edge. If the work were thrilling every day, everyone would do it and it would be worth nothing. The tedium is a toll booth, and most people won’t pay.
The math rewards the ones who do. Get 1% better each day for a year and you don’t end up 365% better — you end up roughly 37 times better, because improvement compounds.
The daily difference is invisible. The yearly difference is everything. This is why the merely consistent person laps the obvious genius who works in bursts: the genius is playing a game of addition while the steady one is quietly playing a game of multiplication.
Talent, meanwhile, is overrated because it’s visible and dramatic. Michael Jordan didn’t make his high school varsity team on the first try — and the man widely called the greatest basketball player ever later said he missed more than 9,000 shots, lost almost 300 games, and blew 26 game-winners he was trusted to make. “I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life,” he said. “And that is why I succeed.” He wasn’t celebrating the talent. He was celebrating the reps.
We know the same story here. Long before the world came to watch him, a young Sachin Tendulkar was batting morning and evening at Shivaji Park under coach Ramakant Achrekar — sometimes across multiple nets, on consecutive days, at different grounds. Achrekar would place a one-rupee coin on the stumps: if any bowler got Sachin out, they kept the coin; if Sachin survived the session, it was his. He kept the coins he won for the rest of his life. Genius, sure — but genius that showed up at 7:30 every morning and treated its own wicket as sacred.
That’s how MrBeast and Bhuvan Bam became two of the most-watched people on the internet. That’s how Michael Jordan became the greatest to ever touch a basketball, and how Sachin Tendulkar scored more international runs than anyone in history. That’s how Stephen King wrote 60-plus books and Seinfeld built an empire on index cards. Not one perfect swing. Ten thousand boring ones.
The Only Instruction
Pick something where one attempt costs you almost nothing but sticking with it can change everything — writing, building, shipping, reaching out, exercising, playing a sport. Some of these pay off like a lottery ticket, where one win rewrites your life. Others pay off like compound interest, where the body you’ll have in ten years or the skill you’ll own is built one dull rep at a time. Both reward the same thing: showing up.
Then do it on a schedule you can keep on your worst day, not your best one. Make it small enough to be boring. Make it boring enough to be sustainable. March your 20 miles. Put your X on the calendar.
You will not know which day is the one that matters. That’s the whole point. Keep the chain alive, keep buying tickets, and be in the room when the door finally opens.
Do boring stuff.
Do it long enough that it stops being a strategy and starts being who you are.
Sources: Seinfeld’s “Don’t Break the Chain” · Jim Collins, the 20 Mile March · Angela Duckworth, “Grit” · Stephen King’s daily word count · Bhuvan Bam / BB Ki Vines · Sachin Tendulkar & Ramakant Achrekar
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Srinivas Mullapudi has spent 20 years building enterprise products, data platforms, AI pipelines, and product organizations at the intersection of enterprise software and emerging tech. Ground Truth covers what’s really happening in AI and tech, not what the pitch decks say, with occasional detours into career, life and the messier questions that resist easy frameworks. Check out his portfolio.