DUCKWORTH:  But the boredom itself — there’s two things that are wrong when you’re bored. One is that the difficulty level could be off. So, either you’re doing something that’s just too easy or too hard. Imagine you’re playing one of those video games before we had all these algorithms to put you exactly in the sweet spot of difficulty. Like, you’re just on one of those early screens on “Space Invaders,” and you’re just like, “Oh my God, I can get through the first 20 screens and not make any mistakes.” So, that’s boring. But it’s also really boring when you’re playing a game or — I always think about this when I remember what it was like to be in physics class. I got bored because it was too hard. It’s like, “Let me explain the wave quantum theory of light, da-da-da-da-da-da.” And I was like, “What?!” The second criterion for what happens when we are triggered to feel boredom is that you’re not learning. The difficulty level may be okay, but the task itself is not relevant to any of your goals. 

DUCKWORTH: You can keep somebody pretty interested for a long time, but I think what the intrinsic-motivation psychologists would say is that the best kind of motivation is not when it has an external reward, but actually when the activity itself is enjoyable. And there is some suggestion of — I say suggestion because I don’t think this is rock-solid evidence — that when we do something as a means to an end, it is less fun than when we frame it as an end in itself. So, I don’t want to use the million-dollars-a-minute example as the platonic ideal of being interested. I just want to say, though, that goal relevance — you know, “Is this what I want to achieve to reach the goals that I personally care about right now?” — if the answer is yes, and the difficulty level is right, you are super engaged. 

DUCKWORTH: No. I really did not see my entire potential revealed. I stuck to caffeine. So you can use drugs. There’s also mindfulness, as a practice, to essentially have more understanding of your attention. To me, what victory is that you notice when you’re bored. Like, I teach this class to teenagers on Thursday nights, and one of them asked me about getting bored in class. And I said, “I think the golden opportunity you have when you’re bored is to notice that you’re bored and to get a little bit curious about the fact you’re bored. Like, ‘Oh, I wonder why I’m bored. I wonder if this is too easy or maybe it’s too hard, or maybe it’s completely irrelevant to anything I care about.’ and then you might ask, ‘Hey, I wonder whether maybe there is a way that it could be connected to something I do care about.'” And there’s this research by Chris Hulleman — he’s a psychologist at University of Virginia — and he calls it the “making connections exercise,” where you write down all the things that you’re doing in school — so, he’s done this mostly with students in middle school or high school. And you’re like, “Oh, I’m learning about pronouns,” or whatever, “I’m learning about Boyle’s law.” And then, you have to make a list of all things you actually care about. Like, “I care about skateboarding. I care about music,” and then, you have to draw lines. And it is shown to reveal to you connections that weren’t at first obvious and to increase interest, and engagement, and performance. I don’t know if this is going to work for taxes, and proofreading, and legal contracts, or things that you have reflected on and have decided, “Nope, totally don’t want to do it.” But I do think the first step of noticing and then deciding what to do is the generic advice I would give. 

DUBNER: There’s one more, I guess, state of being that, I wonder if it’s worth exploring, which is the notion of flow. The flow state sounds like a good place to be, especially for things that aren’t naturally enticing and engaging. So, if that’s the case, how can I trick myself into getting into some kind of flow state for things that bore me?