Insatiably curious, children have a hard time concentrating on any one thing for too long; if you sit with a child and try to teach them long division, for example, you’ll most likely be met with the disgruntled complaint “I’m bored!!!”  After a single problem, your restless pupil will want to play his saxophone, pretend to be an astronaut, or draw stick figures on the board.

In many ways, the goal of education is to teach children to withstand such boredom.  From 8:30 in the morning to 3:00 in the afternoon for twelve years of their lives, children have to resist the urge to write stories and build blanket forts so they can learn how to add two digit numbers, compose neat, orderly paragraphs, and locate the atomic mass of elements on the periodic table.  To excel academically, they must endure long periods of boredom.

On one hand, there is obviously value in this educational model.  School teaches the discipline and steadfastness to stick with a subject even when it doesn’t immediately interest us.  If we couldn’t occasionally tolerate doing things we disliked, we’d never be prepared to enter the adult world.  After all, much of adulthood is doing things we don’t want to: going to long meetings, listening to maddening elevator music while waiting on the phone with Comcast, having dinner with our in-laws to name a few.

The problem is as we grow up, we become too good at ignoring our boredom.  Because school requires us to suppress our natural curiosity and essentially disregard our interests and enthusiasms, we stopped listening to our boredom.  But boredom— like all emotions— has something valuable to teach us.  Boredom is a sign that something is amiss.  If we feel wearisome, whatever we’re doing is lacking interest and engagement.  

Rather than be a strict school master to ourselves and demand we do things we find dreadfully dull, we should find what truly exhilarates us.  In his edifying A More Exciting Life, Alain de Botton makes the compelling claim that the average human life is only 26,000 days, far too short to squander on occupations we find boring.  Ultimately, Botton gives us permission to stop being such dutiful “good” students.  Instead of obey our inner school teacher and do things out of a dreary sense of duty and obligation, we should be like children and value our own penchants and predilections. 

Pick up the latest bestseller only to find it so yawns-worthy you couldn’t get past the first five pages?  Don’t demand that “you finish what you started.”  Find a book that absorbs your attention and keeps you turning pages.

Go to an art museum only to struggle to stay awake?  Ditch the MOMA and go see a movie.  There’s no reason to make yourself appreciate Van Gogh if you find reading placards and staring at paintings all day woefully uninteresting.

Force yourself to read the morning paper every day even though you dread the exercise?  Stop trying to “be informed” and read something you find fascinating, whether that’s children’s literature or 19th century poetry.  

When we listen to our boredom, we learn what we like and dislike, what we love and what we loathe; we discover what sort of books we prefer, what kind of music stirs our souls; we define our aesthetic, our sense of humor, our taste in clothes.  In other words, we become like all great artists and develop a “late style.”

What, exactly, is a late style?  According to Botton, as artists get older, they tend to create far better works.  Take Picasso.  A child prodigy, Picasso exhibited extraordinary artistic talent from a young age.  In the masterful “Study of a Torso” (depicted below), he had already grasped the fundamental principles of painting.  Remarkably, he made this work when he was only 14.

Though Picasso’s early work demonstrated considerable technical skill, his later work was far more original.  Take the below oil painting “The Dream” as an example.  Painted in a single afternoon in 1932 when Picasso was 50, “The Dream” is a revolution of color and form.  No longer bound to traditional ideas of how to depict reality, Picasso experimented with distorted shapes and bold, contrasting colors. 

The titan of 20th century art once said that it took him four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.  What he meant was that it took him decades to unlearn all his instruction and instead paint like himself.  In school, he learned to paint “properly”: how to proportion a face, how to depict a beautiful woman sitting on a sofa.  He mastered the principles of line and shape, unity and harmony, color and form.  The result?  He produced many expertly-crafted paintings, but they were paintings we’d seen countless times before.

However, as he got older, Picasso became less afraid of breaking from convention and more devoted to pursuing his own pleasure.  Rather than “ignore [his] inborn ideas and impulses,” he listened to his boredom.  He didn’t want to paint faithful-to-life representations— he wanted to paint in a way that reflected his own perspective.  So he abandoned the traditional rules of composition and started painting like he wanted: with a playful disregard of reality, with a passion for the phantasmagorical, with expressive brushstrokes, with strong, striking colors.

Like Picasso, we should develop a “late style” and pay attention to what truly excites us.  What kind of work do we find most fulfilling?  What qualities do we most desire in a romantic partner?  How do we want to spend our time?  Where would we travel if we could go anywhere?  Botton reminds us we don’t all have to paint classical Greek torsos— we can paint surreal women on bright red sofas.