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Multifamily Investing Made Simple Podcast

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Episode Transcript:

Anthony Vicino:

Hey, what’s up guys? Real quick. I’ve been working really hard to amplify my social media presence recently, and recently just started diving into Instagram, which has actually been a ton of fun. It’s a cool platform for connecting with Y’all in just a more personal way. So if we aren’t already connected on Instagram, let’s change that. You can find me at the Anthony Vasino. So go connect. Let’s do it.

Anthony Vicino:

Alright, let’s get to the show. Hustle culture can go fuck itself. Um, I bought into the lie I heard from all the influencers and all those successful entrepreneurs who preach that you’ve got to rise and grind starting at 04:00 A.m. And then got to burn the oil all the way until midnight. And if you have any hope of being successful someday, then you have to jam pack your calendar with as much work as possible. And for years I felt shitty because I thought there was something wrong with me. Like no matter how hard I would try, I would literally waste hours of my day on completely stupid shit. Now, if you’ve ever felt this way, then stick around.

Anthony Vicino:

Because I discovered that the real way to outwork everybody, get way more meaningful stuff done, is not through discipline. It’s not through work ethic or willpower. It’s through boredom. Specifically, we need to understand two neural networks called the Default Mode Network and the Executive Function Network. The Executive Functions Network describes a set of cognitive processes and mental skills that help an individual plan, monitor, and successfully execute their goals. This includes like attentional control, working memory inhibition, and problem solving. Now, as an interesting side note, people like me with ADHD often have what’s referred to as executive dysfunction, which is why we struggle to control our attention. We have short term memories and high impulsivity, but that’s okay, because we more than make up for it by having a hyperactive Default Mode Network, which is the part of our brain active when our attention is not directed by external stimuli.

Anthony Vicino:

And this is important because when we’re not processing external information, it means our memory becomes the primary source of our thoughts and images. Just think about all the random thoughts that pop into your head right before bed or when you’re in the shower with nothing to look at. True creativity is born when our thoughts are allowed to wander inward without external stimulation distracting us. And it’s here that we start making new connections and associations, which is all creativity is anyhow. It’s the ability to connect unrelated pieces of information in new and novel ways. And since an IBM study of a thousand CEOs found that creativity is the most valuable skill in the modern workforce, it’s well worth our time and energy discovering new ways to expand our creativity. Which leads us to the first psychological study I stumbled upon a few years ago that absolutely changed my life. This study from 2014 was aptly named does being bored make us more creative.

Anthony Vicino:

And as it turns out, it does. To determine this, researchers split participants into two groups. One was asked to copy phone numbers out of a phone book by hand, while the other was asked to read them out loud. Now, both of these are pretty boring tasks, but reading numbers out loud is considered more boring because you’re not as actively engaged as when you’re writing something down by hand. In the second stage of the study, researchers conducted a fluency task where participants had a couple of minutes to come up with as many creative uses for a brick as possible. Like you could use it to build a wall or a paperweight or a baseball or a bludgeoning weapon or a flower pot, whatever. Your imagination is literally the limit. Now, the study found that both the phone number writing group and the speaking group outperformed the control group, who didn’t go through any boredom preconditioning.

Anthony Vicino:

But even more interesting is that the speaking group, the group that was supposedly more bored, they came up with the longest list of creative uses for the brick. Okay, so what’s this tell us? Well, it’s simple. Boredom enhances creativity, which in turn enhances the value of the work that you produce. So you’re starting to see the way that you outwork people is by producing more value than them in the same period of time, which is important because we all have the same amount of time in the day. So the idea that you can outwork anybody by putting in more hours is completely idiotic. I know plenty of people working two and even three jobs where they just grind around the clock. There’s literally no more time in the day for them to work. The problem is, they’re working on the wrong things.

Anthony Vicino:

Because here’s the truth. Success isn’t about how much you get done. It’s about what you get done. And this is why creativity is such a high value skill. But here’s the problem, and I’m not going to lie. It’s a really big problem. As Blaise Pascal pointed out, all of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone. And to prove this, we turn to the second psychological study that I mentioned earlier.

Anthony Vicino:

Timothy Wilson and his team put participants alone in a room for 15 minutes with nothing but a button, a button that, if they pressed, would shock them. Now, before the study even began, the majority of the participants said that they would be willing to pay money to avoid being shocked. And yet, once the study commenced, 67% of men and 25% of women chose to shock themselves. And this disparity in the gender’s willingness to inflict pain on themselves, it might be the reason why women tend to live longer than men, but I don’t know. Now, the question is, why on earth would people rather inflict pain on themselves than to just sit with their boredom and to understand this, we have to go back to why the human brain ever evolved the capacity to feel boredom in the first place. And you’ve really got to wonder because boredom is often described as a very unpleasant state where you feel simultaneously stressed and agitated and at the same time lethargic. So what exactly is the evolutionary advantage to feeling bored? Now, there’s a bunch of thoughts on this topic, but the leading theory, and the one that makes the most sense to me, is that boredom serves as a motivational factor to go and actually do stuff. In particular, there’s two things that would have served our ancestors very well.

Anthony Vicino:

The first is to experiment with new and novel things, such as new foods or experiences or venturing into the unknown. And this is important because trial and error is the overpowered strategy that nature has used to develop every living organism on this planet over the last couple billion years. If it’s good enough for the universe, it’s good enough for us. And this leads to the second benefit of boredom, which is that it induces more introspection and time spent thinking about the future. Another word for this is daydreaming. Daydreaming is a fascinating concept that might not seem like that big of a deal until you consider the fact that humans are the only creature on this planet that we know of with the ability to daydream. But what exactly is daydreaming? Well, here’s a very simple definition. Daydreaming is a state of decoupled processing in which attention to ongoing perceptual information, aka.

Anthony Vicino:

Things you’re perceiving outside of yourself, are reduced in favor of the active consideration of internally generated thoughts and feelings. Now, does this sound an awful lot like the default mode network, which is the part of the brain responsible for creativity? Why, yes, it does, because of all these concepts boredom, creativity, and daydreaming. They’re all interconnected through the same neural network. Now, studies show that daydreaming boosts creativity problem solving skills and increases your ability to focus on a specific task. Now, unfortunately, most of us probably grew up thinking daydreaming was bad because our well meaning parents and our teachers, they’re probably always yelling at us to stop drifting off and to just pay attention. So this subtle message that daydreaming and therefore boredom, is bad, it actually did a lot of damage to me because for years, I felt deep guilt and shame whenever I’d drift off. And I started equating boredom with a lack of discipline, work ethic, and focus. And so I had tried living my life in accordance with hustle culture, and I filled my days with nonstop work.

Anthony Vicino:

And the result was I did more work, but not necessarily better work. So the first thing I had to change on my journey of using boredom as a means for outworking everybody else was to simply give myself permission to be bored, to stop looking at boredom as somehow unproductive, and to just give myself the space and permission to stare out the window or spend the afternoon in a hammock staring at the clouds. And I know it might sound silly, but my guess is that a lot of you feel a similar shame when it comes to intentionally not doing work. So step one is to just give yourself permission to be bored. Now, here’s the second reason many of us run from boredom, and you need to understand this, or you’re never going to unlock the true power of boredom. See, we all have countless things in our life right now, at this moment, that we’re putting off things that we know we should do, but for whatever reason, we’re just not. This means that we all exist in this state of perpetual mental purgatory with countless open cognitive loops running in the back of our minds, things that we know we should do and that we, in fact, maybe even want to do. But because we’re distractable little monkeys simply chasing the easiest dopamine, we push these off because they are, by definition, things that require an act of creation.

Anthony Vicino:

And the reality is this consumption is always easier than creation. But you can’t consume your way to fulfillment. It can only ever be created. And this creates a dissonance for many of us between what we’re doing and what we know we should be doing. It’s a difference between who we are and who we know we could be. Now, most of the time, we can simply drown out these thoughts by turning on social media or Netflix. But when boredom inevitably occurs, our minds suddenly have space to wander, to think, and to reflect. And the first thing that most of our minds will reflect on are around the big existential questions of life, like, why am I here? What’s it all mean? What’s my purpose? Now, most of us run desperately away from boredom because we’re afraid to confront these questions, because we don’t like what we’re going to find there or who we’re going to find there.

Anthony Vicino:

But as Aristotle said, the unexamined life is not worth living, which means this is one of the most important battles any of us will ever fight. Now, knowing boredom is important is one thing, but acting on it is something else entirely, because, remember, being bored really sucks, which is why most of us turn into dopamine seeking missiles. The second we feel that twinge of boredom when we’re standing in line at the coffee shop or we’re waiting in the elevator or sitting at a red light, and the drug we all typically reach for to mainline a world of instant entertainment and distraction straight into our eyeballs is none other than our phones. Now, in my experience, it is practically impossible to be well and truly bored in this day and age, when our phone, as it’s currently designed, is always within arm’s reach. Which is why our battle for boredom begins by dumbing down our smartphone. Here’s five ways to do just that. First, turn on grayscale mode. See, our phones produce remarkably high resolution images that the human brain simply did not evolve to experience in nature.

Anthony Vicino:

This means our brains, they light up like Christmas trees right alongside all of those thousands of pixels flashing on our screens. Now, on the one hand, this creates awesome viewing experiences if you want to watch a movie or play video games. But the problem is we often get sucked into those movies or video games when we actually just unlocked our phone with the intention of doing some actual work. And the reason for this is because our brains almost immediately go chasing the dopamine white rabbit from app to app without even realizing it. Now, the solution is actually quite simple, but I can almost guarantee the initial reaction from most people will have one of resistance because it involves turning your phone permanently to grayscale mode. And all this really does is it puts your phone into black and white mode. And it’s crazy how impactful simply taking away the color from the screen actually is. The reason this is so effective, though, and why you’ll probably resist it, is because it instantly makes your phone less beautiful to look at.

Anthony Vicino:

And I get it. We spend a lot of money on our phones because they are beautiful and fun to use. But the truth is, your phone is probably using you more than you’re using it. And truly, of all the hacks I’ve experimented with over the years to change my relationship with my phone, none have been more powerful than this one, simply because it instantly makes my phone less interesting. Now, the second tweak to make to your phone, it’s pretty obvious turn off all notifications. Now, the other day I was sitting down with my marketing manager and he casually just leaned over to show me something on his phone. I’ll remember what it was because all I remember seeing was little red notification bubbles over all of his apps. In particular, his Gmail has like 4315 unread emails.

Anthony Vicino:

And I kid you not, I could feel my cortisol level spike and my heart rate actually increase. And so I told my guy about this severe physiological response I was having and he just kind of shrugged it off and laughed and said, oh yeah, I don’t even notice those anymore. My response? Bullshit. Now, you might be numb to what’s happening in your body, but I guarantee you those notification bubbles are eliciting a physiological reaction that will drive you towards a particular behavior. And the reason I know this is because these companies have spent billions of dollars on research to determine that they do work, which is why they use them. So here’s a takeaway notifications are impossible to ignore. It takes mental bandwidth and willpower to see a notification and not address it. Now, most of the time, these notifications aren’t even important, which means we’re leaking attention for something that doesn’t even matter.

Anthony Vicino:

The no brainer solution, therefore, is to just turn off all notifications on your phone. And I literally mean all of them. Social media emails, text messages, missed calls, all of it. Turn them off. Notifications are nothing more than the external world’s attempt to make their agenda your distraction. Don’t let the attention terrorists win. All right, so let me get off my soapbox and hop onto another one. Now, this might be a controversial opinion, but I believe your phone should only ever be used as a tool in pursuit of your goals.

Anthony Vicino:

It should never be used as a distraction, an escape, or as entertainment. The reason I believe this is because you cannot consume your way to a life of fulfillment. It can only ever be created. And your phone, for better or worse, is primarily designed as a tool of consumption. Whether that’s scrolling endlessly on social media, playing Flappy Bird until your fingers bleed, or watching a never ending parade of YouTube videos, your phone is a perpetual consumption machine. Breaking the cycle and taking control of your phone begins by selecting the apps you use with intention. For myself, this means no games and no social media on my primary phone. Now, I use social media a lot for work, so it’s actually quite important that I have ways of using these apps.

Anthony Vicino:

Now, the solution that’s worked incredibly well for me is actually our fourth way of dumbing down your phone. It’s by having a designated social media phone in addition to your primary phone. My primary phone is the one that I carry with me everywhere. I use it for texting, emails, navigation, notetaking, and Google searches. My social media phone, on the other hand, is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a $400 phone that has all my social apps on it. Now, there are two things that make my social media phone especially useful. First, I rarely carry it anywhere with me.

Anthony Vicino:

And second, this phone doesn’t have data, which means the only way I can use it is when it’s connected to WiFi or if I set up a mobile hotspot. With my primary phone, this means that really the only way I can use this phone is with intention. And I cannot overstate how powerful this social media phone has been in my life, so I truly recommend giving it a try. All right, so the fifth tactic for dumbing down your smartphone is just to simplify the home screen. Over the years, I found a lot of truth in the idea that a messy desk equals a messy mind. And I’m saying that as a guy with severe ADHD who frequently uses the floor as a hamper. One of the things that’s really helped me on the journey of turning my ADHD into a superpower is just simply realizing I needed to build organization systems with a bit more intention. And when I did, my productivity skyrocketed.

Anthony Vicino:

Now, it took me a really long time to apply this same principle to my phone, but once I did, it was an absolute game changer. And the way that I did this was by simplifying the home screen so that when I unlock it, I’m not greeted by a dozen enticing apps. Instead, I see a simple folder that has my nine most used apps inside of it, things like email, text or calculator. Now, the reason this is so surprisingly effective in curbing my mindless phone usage is because often I just open my phone as a reflex to boredom. And I found that by landing on a blank homepage, it’s almost like a pattern interrupt that causes me to stop, just reflect on what I’m actually trying to accomplish in that moment. And at the end of the day, I actually don’t believe there’s a wrong way to use your phone, assuming you do so with intention. But again, this is hard because our phones are designed to put us into autopilot mode, which is why I strongly recommend that you implement these five tactics to make your phone less interesting so you’re less likely to turn to it the moment you start feeling bored. Which is the goal, right? We’re trying to make space for boredom in our lives so we can reap all the benefits associated with increased creativity and productivity.

Anthony Vicino:

And it’s with that in mind that I want to share with you three very simple ways to make space for boredom and daydreaming in your life. First, no more listening to music, audiobooks or podcasts while out driving or walking. For a lot of you, this is going to be painful. But trust me, making room for silence in your life is going to pay massive dividends. Second, take boring breaks. I’m a big fan of the Pomodoro technique of working in 25 minutes sprints with five minute breaks, but it’s important that you avoid doing interesting things during those breaks. Don’t reach for the phone or social media or scroll the Internet, because these things will kind of short circuit your subconscious mind from continuing to work on the primary thing you were working on. Instead, just do something boring with that time so that you’re chomping at the bit to get back to work.

Anthony Vicino:

Do some air squats or, I don’t know, stare out the window, go for a five minute walk. Whatever you do, don’t overstimulate. All right, our third tactic is to increase our capacity to be bored. And we do this in the same way that we increase our muscle’s capacity for moving heavier objects by just going to the gym. In particular, our goal is to go to the boredom gym. And one of my favorite exercises for this is what I call meditation. Emphasis is literally on the air quotes here. Now, in typical meditation, the goal is to clear the mind and simply focus on the breath.

Anthony Vicino:

But when I meditate, I don’t care about any of that. My only goal is to sit still for 15 minutes with my eyes shut without falling asleep, and that’s it. I don’t care if my mind wanders. I don’t care if it leaps from thought to thought. The only thing that matters is that I sit with the boredom, and I don’t try to do anything about it. Now, this is a surprisingly hard but super effective practice for increasing your capacity to sit with your boredom, and I’m confident that if you apply this practice alongside all the others we’ve discussed in this video, you’re going to be well on your way to turning boredom into a superpower.

Anthony Vicino:

What’s going on, everybody? I just wanted to let you know real quick that the Hyper Focus Masterclass is officially live. We put a ton of time and energy into this project, and based on all the positive feedback so far that we’ve received from students, it’s pretty awesome. Seriously, we’re really on how it all turned out. If you’re interested in learning all the habits, rituals, routines, systems, processes, frameworks and more that helped me turn my ADHD into a superpower to get out of massive debt and build a $70 million real estate portfolio over the past ten years, then you’re definitely going to want to head over to beyond theapex.com Hyperfocus and check it out. All right, let’s get to the show.

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Email anthony@anthonyvicino.com to let me know you want on the waitlist.

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→ Multifamily Investing Made Simple: Top Apple Podcast.
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