George Kao quit phone games by committing to boredom, resisting the constant pull of novelty to notice small details instead. He calls it replacing novelty for nuance, finding gentle joy in wall patterns, food, and work. His dog Buddy makes a cameo.
Hi, this is George Kao, and I want to share with you something I've been learning about myself, practicing in the realm of conscious living. So recently, for several years now, I've been off and on, addicted to this video game on my phone. And I can easily play the game for an hour and, you know, where did the time go, right? Or sometimes, you know, if I wanted to finish game, it could be like two, three, four hours. And there's. I know there's better things I could do with my time, with my life energy, my precious life energy. And so I decided to commit to boredom. I know it sounds funny, but let me kind of talk you through what I mean by this. A commitment to boredom is the willingness to not give in to the need to play the game and instead to be okay with the present moment, to be bored, knowing that as I observe the nuances of the present moment, I can get into a gentle joy, okay? A more subtle living enjoy, instead of having to always seek out, you know, colorful action and sound on a screen. I heard a podcast recently, which I'll link in this, the notes of this video about grit, G R I T grit, and the importance of grit for our success in any worthwhile endeavor. And the speaker, Angela Duckworth, she said, replace novelty for nuance. Substitute novelty for nuance. So instead of always having to go chase the shiny new object, the shiny new thing, let's practice sharpening our concentration and our consciousness and our ability to notice nuance in life and find what I call a gentle joy in that nuance. It could be at home. You notice in the present moment, as you're walking down the hallway of your home, you notice the pattern in the wall that you hadn't noticed before. And you could take joy in the fact that you just noticed that nuance, okay? Or it could be eating a food that you eat every day, or you eat regularly and you could be bored by it, or you could intentionally notice the nuance in the food and once again find joy in that regular activity. It could be at work. You're working on a difficult project, and instead of having to go seek out something new and exciting to stay with that problem just a bit longer and notice the nuance in that challenge and find a gentle joy there as well. So I hope that this is interesting and helpful. I hope that you can apply this idea of nuance, of a commitment to boredom in order to find that nuance and find the gentle joy. And I believe, as we do, that we are making our consciousness more subtle. And as we make our consciousness more subtle. We start to align more with the still, small voice within us that's calling us to a higher place all the time. I hope this is helpful. And last thing I want to do is show you my little dog, Buddy, who's been running around. Okay, Buddy, that's enough. All right? So until the next video, I wish you a gentle joy and substituting novelty for nuance.
