The money’s in the boring stuff
For the rest of this year, I’m trying to make things as boring as possible.
It’s not some perverse way of punishing myself. The longer I play this game of business and life, the more I realise that actually, the money, glory and achievement are in the boring stuff.
Last week, my wife was away so I was alone with my three kids. The family routine was mine to manage, and by the end of each day, my brain was fried from trying to balance everyone’s schedules. Keeping on top of clients, team members and children was more challenging than I expected. But a few things happened that surprised me.
The first was a reminder of the effectiveness of sticking to a routine. With minimal time to spare, I had to cut down how long I spent thinking about what to do, so once my week was planned, I decided not to question the choices I’d made and just concentrate on executing. By focusing only on the most important things and refusing to second-guess myself, I had an incredibly productive week.
I discovered, too, unexpected moments of joy in the midst of what I expected to be boring tasks. Walking my youngest son home from school gave us an opportunity to earnestly debate the relative merits of Pokemon, Beyblade and Bakugan. Drop off at a birthday party was much more exciting when we took a shortcut through the woods. A Friday evening filled with chores turned into a mini Harry Potter marathon.
I opened up Claude one night while sitting up waiting for the dryer to run and, in a burst of impatience, started a chat about how to accelerate my financial plan. After 45 minutes of back and forth, we came to the conclusion that I was on the right path - I just needed to manage my own restlessness and allow the plan we’d already set in motion to work. Sometimes, you’ve just got to leave things alone.
All of this led me to the conclusion that boring gets a bad rep. In business, new ideas are exciting - but most of them fail. Optimising your processes is much less glamourous, but improving something that’s already working usually gets far better results. If you’re investing, sticking to your strategy and refusing to chase the big win is the right call, even if it’s painfully slow at times. And when it comes to family and friends, it’s criminal to miss the magic buried in the daily routine.
So for me, 2026 is the year of being boring. I’m excited to see how it turns out…
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