The Multiplier of Boring Work

There’s a kind of work that doesn’t make headlines. No one posts their warm-up sets, and no one celebrates shaving 100ms off load time, but that’s the work that wins.

For every PR pulled in competition, there are hundreds of days of grinding behind it: submaximal sets, long pauses, light reps, mental resets. Product has the same hidden ledger. Every effortless-looking release rests on a foundation of something much deeper, months of planning, iteration, bug-fixing, and late-night Slack threads.

In lifting, it’s the mobility work you do alone at 6 a.m., the back-off sets you don’t skip, the deload week you take seriously. None of it looks impressive, but it makes everything else possible. In product, it’s building out role-based access controls, not because it’s exciting but because your biggest customers expect it. It’s mapping audit logs across services so your platform isn’t a compliance risk anymore. It’s the 10th conversation with a user about the same rough edge in the UX. None of these are “big bets,” but they’re the reason your big bets land.

Boring work compounds. Each rep you don’t skip, each ticket you don’t shortcut, each problem you refine instead of avoid, stacks up quietly and relentlessly, and over time it becomes your edge. You don’t need to go viral. You need to be trusted, and trust is built in the boring work: the warm-up that prevents injury, the small fix that prevents churn, the five-second improvement that gives a user five minutes back. What separates the strong from the strong enough is not what you do once but what you do without applause, for the growth, for the discipline, for the user whose day you quietly made better, and never for the accolades.

The new wrinkle, in 2026, is that AI can do some of the boring work for you. The release notes can be drafted, the audit log can be summarized, the user transcript can be tagged, and that is real and mostly good. But the reps that build you are not the ones a model can take. They are the ones you choose to show up for, and I’ll have a lot more to say about that line in the chapter on AI.

What separates long-term success from short-term effort isn’t glory but the passion to do the work for its own sake. The features and the gains are just symptoms. What matters is the mission that fuels them. It’s a big part of why I’m so passionate about product management, and about lifting. The best PMs and the best lifters don’t just show up for themselves. They show up for the team, for the user, and for their own growth, not in a selfish way but in a way that elevates everything and everyone around them.

And if you’ve made it this far, through the reps, the plateaus, and the quiet work, you already know this isn’t just about shipping or lifting. It’s about becoming the kind of person, or the kind of team, that keeps showing up. That is the real win, and it lives not at the peak but at the foundation.