Remember to have fun

Remember to have fun.

It’s one of the things we tell our children when we see them getting carried away, when an innocent game unravels into a jealous tousle with a sibling — the toy breaks, the smiles fade, the aggression, frustration, tears ensue.

It’s not just an admonishment for children though. It should be an encouragement for all of us — especially those of us who become so hellbent on effectiveness and efficiency — to recover a lighter, more playful sensibility toward our work. To step away, climb a hill and look down on our sandcastles with a grain of humor.

The desire for mastery is admirable, but the blind and dogged pursuit can be deadly. One of the sad pitfalls that can plague any honest pursuit is to lose the initial joy you once had doing the thing.

We see this happen to athletes regularly. They become so eager to excel, so impatient to improve, so devoted to development, that eagerness, impatience, devotion, — all those worthwhile ingredients meant to nurture a deeper love of the game, become ironically, impediments to improvement. Instead of enjoying the process of getting better, they fixate on perfection. They flagellate themselves on the field. They grind and grind. And soon they burnout.

We’re all susceptible to this. When I write I find I need to go back often to an earlier time when I had no ambitions of being an author, or ‘telling great stories’ or ‘learning the craft’. All these ideas came later — and though important in their own right, they can never replace the primal delight I felt when I was a boy, with aimless hours at my disposal to stage great battle scenes with my action figures. That’s where it started. It was pure play; unconscious, alive. I had no thought if I was doing it right, if I was good at it, or how I could do it better. I was just doing it and having a ball.

I want to keep doing that.

The best kind of work and the purest forms of performance always contain a spirit of play, even when the stakes are high. Fun is not frivolous, it’s fundamental. Whatever you’re playing, swing for the fences and remember to have fun.