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

Codie Sanchez (0:00)

There'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 Codie Sanchez, this is the BigDeal Podcast. Let's dive in.

And 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. Isn'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 and 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. And 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 of new businesses don't survive to year five, right?

And so they don't just get killed by competition, actually, that's not the most common. They get killed by commitment and boredom tolerance. It's not only a personal habit, it's a business mode 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.

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. And so here's a story for you. In 2001, Ben Chestnut and Dan Curzius 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, male chimp. You guys know this company?

For the next eight years, nothing exciting happened. There was 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.

So 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, there's 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. That'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, you know, 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. This 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.