The Threat of Boredom | Protecting a Winning Construction Mindset

Contractor’s superpower is making simple things harder. I could never understand why a contractor would choose to work harder.  

When I began developing content and training for contractors, I was introduced to three concepts that helped me understand why contractors choose to work harder and the mindset necessary to prevent working harder.  

Only working on essential items efficiently and repetitively are requirements for avoiding burnout while nurturing better mental and physical health. 

• “Atomic Habit” by James Clear helped me understand boredom is what leads contractors to choose to make work harder than necessary.  

• “Do simple Better” was picked up from an interview of a Georgia football player talking about Kirby Smart’s favorite phrase, “Do simple better”. Do simple better provides a mindset that prevents contractors from making work harder and supports essentialism.  

A great line from Atomic Habits is “The greatest threat to success is not failure, but boredom.” James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits, suggests that boredom is a threat to success because habits become less interesting and satisfying as they become routine.  

When people may start to seek novelty a cycle of jumping from one habit to another.  

Jumping from one habit to another may work in the short term for an owner or executive of a contractor, but it does not work for the team leaders and team members that want to work in a consistent framework before going home to their families.  

They do not want to arrive at home frustrated or exhausted.  They want to be able to enjoy their time with their families.  

The first wave of distractions for newly successful business owners will come from friends and family wanting you to help them become successful in some “opportunity” by investing time and money. Money that would likely have a greater return with less risk if invested in your own company, and time that you already do not have enough of.  

You may feel you are being selfish, or that you may hurt your relationship with a friend or family member if you say no. You are not being selfish; you are honoring your responsibilities to the stakeholders of your business.  

A critical responsibility that too many contractors forget until it begins to hurt their business.  

Principal level involvement is critical for an execution centric culture. It provides the mindset of accountability. Owners will find nurturing principal level involvement within one organization hard to achieve when they themselves are not 100% principally involved in the organization.  

If saying no to a friend or family member hurts your relationship with them, you can almost bet going to in business with them will end your relationship permanently.  

Just say no to financial opportunities that are really distracting opportunities.  

Saying yes to these “opportunities” will stunt the growth of your team members and team leaders. It will be hard for them to stay locked and not get frustrated when you are not available while attending to the new “opportunity”.  

If your time was not needed, then the person bringing the opportunity would not have asked for your involvement. Your time will be needed.  

Don’t lie to yourself by telling yourself the opportunity will not take your time. I say this because I have seen many contractors tell themselves this lie and later bemoan “Why did I do this to myself?” 

Stay in your lane. Life will be more rewarding and easier. Everything that glitters is not gold. 

How many times have you heard the following phrases? 

• Less is more. 

• Use the kiss principal. Keep it simple stupid. 

• You have to slow down to go fast.  

Quality can be defined differently for an individual or an organization. It is not a one size fits all concept.  

The power of “doing simple better” is it addresses boredom. If you are disciplined in the pursuit of “doing simple better”, you will not have time to be distracted by boredom.  

Simple is easy to teach and manage.  

Doing simple better is another way to implement and execute continuous improvement. Doing simple better is a more approachable, and memorable terminology for continuous improvement. A winning terminology. 

Doing simple better will reduce employee turnover. People have enough complexity in their lives today, they do not need more because their team leader is bored.