The Boredom Dividend

Most people think good ideas come from ambition, genius, or relentless hustle. But more often than not, they come from boredom.

Not the kind of boredom where you're glued to your phone, swiping between distraction apps. The old kind. The sit-with-your-thoughts, nothing-on-the-calendar, “what now?” boredom. The kind that makes your brain restless in a good way. The kind that nudges you to notice things you usually overlook.

I’ve come to believe boredom is one of the most underrated engines behind making money.

You start to pay attention differently when you’re bored. You notice little gaps in the world — a service that doesn’t exist yet, a moment of friction that someone would happily pay to eliminate, a behavior people keep repeating that could be systematized, packaged, or sold. These moments are everywhere, but you rarely see them in the middle of a busy, scheduled life. You notice them when you’re drifting, scanning, watching without purpose. Boredom makes space for pattern recognition.

There was a story I once heard about a guy who started a newsletter curating secondhand luxury watches. It didn’t sound revolutionary, but it grew fast and turned into a six-figure business. When someone asked how he thought of it, he said it came to him while sitting at his in-laws’ house with nothing to do. He was scrolling through Reddit and Facebook Marketplace, killing time, and realized that watch enthusiasts were constantly hunting for deals but had no centralized way to track them. That moment of idle curiosity became the seed for a product that solved a real pain point. No formal market research. No funding. Just boredom and attention.

I’ve felt this myself. The most interesting ideas I’ve ever had didn’t show up when I was optimizing Notion dashboards or reading productivity blogs. They showed up on long walks without headphones. In cafes where I didn’t open my laptop. In the early part of the morning when the world is quiet and I haven’t yet plugged in.

I don’t think this is just a poetic observation. I think it’s a practical tool. If you want to find ideas that have a shot at making money, try doing less. Not forever — just long enough to notice what’s quietly broken in the systems around you. What’s inefficient. What people complain about. What they patch together with spreadsheets or DMs or overly complicated processes. Those broken bits of daily life are where income hides. But you need mental whitespace to see them clearly.

It’s uncomfortable, at first. Boredom in a hyper-digital world feels wrong, even dangerous. It’s easier to fill the gaps with noise than to sit in silence. But that’s where the leverage lives — in that discomfort. Because the people who make money aren’t always the ones chasing ideas. Sometimes they’re the ones waiting patiently, doing nothing, until an idea shows up with teeth.

MoneyHash exists to follow those ideas to their source. Sometimes they’re found in headlines. Sometimes they’re found in market shifts. But sometimes, they just bubble up when you stop trying so hard.

So if you’re stuck, overthinking, or forcing your way into a business model, maybe the best thing you can do today is nothing at all. Close the tab. Walk somewhere. Leave your headphones behind. And just watch the world for a while.

You might come back with a million-dollar itch to scratch.