I've found that the value often lies in the tedious and the boring. One example from my experience is helping with customer complaints. One can go about this by actually going deep and understanding the root cause and solving that root cause once and for all. This takes time, but the consequence is that the specific bucket of complaints might be completely eliminated, or at least minimized. This approach can be especially tedious if there are many different buckets of customer complaints, and it might initially be hard to understand them and that's when the grind comes in. Another example is introducing some type of a linter in all codebases. This could quite a tedious tasks, especially if the company has tens of different git repos. But the advantage is that a whole set of questions simply disappear from daily conversations and code-reviews. Apart from the technical grind, there's also the social implications. If one endeavours to introduce such a standard, consensus with the team is needed and that again is work that might be sometimes hard. > I often have people newer to the tech industry ask me for secrets to success. There aren’t many, really, but this secret — being willing to do something so **terrifically tedious** that it appears to be magic — works in tech too. > —Jacob Kaplan-Moss, from [Embrace the Grind](https://jacobian.org/2021/apr/7/embrace-the-grind/) > In a startup, you should seek out activities that seem **hard**, **boring**, **annoying**, and **unscalable**. The highest-value tasks are often hiding amongst them, and no one else has noticed because they seem unappealing on the surface. > > —Greg Brockman, chairman and CTO of OpenAI, [from twitter](https://twitter.com/gdb/status/1511019107222638596), (emphasis mine) > The process of facing and selecting our possessions can be **quite painful**. It forces us to confront our imperfections and inadequacies and the foolish choices we made in the past. > ... > It's going to be **labor-intensive** and **time-consuming**, but you need to take all the books down and put them on the floor. Take them down and spread them in one area. Physically pick each book up, one by one. If the book inspires you, keep it. If not, it goes out. That's the standard by which you decide. > > —Marie Kondo, from [The life changing magic of tidying up](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22318578-the-life-changing-magic-of-tidying-up)