My jazz tutor Matt Warnock recently flipped a familiar saying on its head. It’s not necessity, he suggested, but boredom that is the mother of invention. His challenge was simple: play over the same thing for long enough that you run out of ideas. And then keep going. That’s where the interesting stuff lives.

I took that idea and sat with a minor blues backing track for just over ten minutes. I started where most of us start — inside the familiar pentatonic boxes, playing what I know, reaching for the phrases that have always been there. Safe ground. Comfortable ground.

But I kept going.

Somewhere around the halfway mark the vocabulary started to dry up. The boxes felt smaller. And rather than stopping — which is what I usually do — I pushed through. By the final few minutes I was playing purely by ear, reaching for outside notes, deliberate dissonance, chromaticism. Stuff I’d call “tangy.” Some of it surprised me. Not all of it was pretty. But it was mine in a way that the earlier, safer playing wasn’t.

The minor blues was just the launchpad.

What strikes me about Matt’s idea is that boredom is usually the signal to stop. We run out of steam, we put the guitar down, we make a cup of tea. But boredom might actually be the threshold — the point where the rehearsed vocabulary is exhausted and something more personal can emerge. The magic isn’t despite the boredom. It’s because of it.

You don’t need to be a jazz guitarist for this to apply. Pick anything — a chord progression, a groove, a single scale — and stay with it longer than feels comfortable. Past the point where you think you have nothing left to say. See what’s on the other side.

I’d love to know how far out you’re willing to go before you pull back.