Category: “Personal Productivity”

According to Daniel Pink, author of the book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, what drives most people to do things is basically the satisfaction they get by simply carrying them out. Under certain circumstances, working can be just as exciting as not working at all.

A very important issue in any company is deciding when to invest in improving existing products and services and when to invest in researching new possibilities ¹. How many companies have been ruined by blindly following the products that led them to success, not caring to investigate new concepts, technologies and trends?

Basically, you’ll hear or read two kinds of comments about boredom and productivity. The most common is that “boredom is a productivity killer.” Other, the less common, opposite and somewhat counter-intuitive, is that “boredom improves your productivity.”

We are all born curious. You just need to look at how children play, constantly ask questions and try everything that is unknown. However, at some point in our unfortunate education, this curiosity is somewhat appeased. A myriad of rules, norms and conventions appear that are slowly killing our curiosity. As Einstein said, “it is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education”.

In his book Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?, Seth Godin talks a lot about the term “lizard brain” ¹ (also known as “reptilian brain”) to refer to the most primitive part of our brain, where the instincts that warn us of danger when it lurks reside. Actually, this lizard brain is a metaphor for the amygdala, the part of the limbic system which is responsible for processing our emotions.