You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.
David Foster WallaceRead
The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unborable... It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The ability to overcome boredom is crucial for achieving great things in life.
David Foster Wallace emphasizes the importance of being able to transcend boredom in order to truly engage with life and overcome its mundane aspects. He suggests that if one can cultivate immunity to boredom, they unlock a vast potential for achievements and experiences, highlighting boredom as a significant barrier to creativity and accomplishment.
Themes
BoredomCreativityPotentialAccomplishmentEngagement
In practice
Example use cases
In a motivational speech about overcoming challenges.
More from David Foster Wallace
All quotes →Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence.
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It seems important to find ways of reminding ourselves that most 'familiarity' is meditated and delusive.
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Under fun's new administration, writing fiction becomes a way to go deep inside yourself and illuminate precisely the stuff you don't want to see or let anyone else see, and this stuff usually turns out (paradoxically) to be precisely the stuff all writers and readers share and respond to, feel.
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Acceptance is usually more a matter of fatigue than anything else.
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Bliss - a-second-by-second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious - lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (Tax Returns, Televised Golf) and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Instant bliss in every atom.
David Foster WallaceRead
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