Almost by definition, creativity is the opposite of boring. If something is creative, it’s because it triggers some degree of surprise or excitement within us—it reconfigures existence in ways we could not have previously imagined.

Creative people are not boring. Creative work is not boring. Therefore, we assume that the secret to creative success must not be boring.

I had a friend in college who wanted to be a famous novelist. After graduation, he bought a one-way ticket to Paris and intentionally became homeless for all of about three weeks, believing he had to suffer romantically to find inspiration for his art. A few years later, I met a guy in a punk band in Boston who insisted that his heroin usage wasn’t an addiction but part of his creative process, because, as he put it, “nothing good was ever written sober.”

And, sure enough, if we look at history’s greatest creative geniuses, there’s anecdote after anecdote of them being absolutely fucking looney tunes. Igor Stravinsky believed he could only become inspired to write music if he did headstands. In the early days of Apple, Steve Jobs reportedly soaked his feet in the bathroom toilets to clear his mind before meetings. Vincent Van Gogh got in an argument with his flatmate, lopped his own ear off, and—not wanting it to go to waste—gift-wrapped the ear and gave it to his favorite prostitute as a memento.

Yes, “boring” is the last word you would ever use to describe the world’s creative geniuses. And indeed, their work is anything but.

But I’m going to argue something different. I’m going to argue that the process of creativity is actually quite boring. And, because it is boring, creativity itself is repeatable. It’s something you and I and anyone else can practice and become good at.¹

Because while the person and the work may be anything but boring, history and science teach us that the process that generates great work… is totally b𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠.