Play More
Divorcing work from play is hurting us in more ways than we realise
This is a monthly newsletter about learning and education, especially in emerging markets. This issue is inspired by the various regional football competitions around the world. It’s coming home! Subscribe here:
It is a lazy Saturday morning. The weather is great. It’s the perfect setting for a casual game of football (never soccer) between twelve amateurs in their 30s. It is halfway into the game when I fail to receive the pass from my teammate properly. My first touch fails me, and as I recover the ball, I shoot wide over the crossbar again. This is the third time this has happened today and it is starting to seriously dent my confidence. Most importantly, I’m no longer enjoying the game.
I stop to think: this entire chain of thought is quite odd. The stakes on this game to be completely frank are zilch. It’s the quintessential “friendly” with nothing at stake but bragging rights until the following weekend. I do this for fun, but since I started practicing more, taking “my game more seriously”, I’ve realized I’m no longer having fun. It no longer feels like play, it feels like work. Counterproductively, that shift in mindset to a more “serious” one (from play to work) has negatively affected my performance.
That mundane chain of thought drove me to ask bigger, deeper questions. Where does play end and work begin? Can we get better at the things that matter to us most without making them feel like work? What is the value of play in a society centered on productivity and improvement? These are all questions that have direct implications for how we design our education systems and the jobs these systems are meant to prepare us for.
The irony of the play and work dichotomy is that most of us usually confuse their intrinsic value. We assume that work is valuable, while play is not. As Emily Ryall points out in The seriousness of play, play itself has intrinsic value. You play for the sake of playing. It is intrinsically valuable to you as a process. Play in itself is the point. Work, on the other hand, only has instrumental value. It is what is known as a telic activity - one that is valued and focused on the endpoint, not the process itself. The answer to connecting work and play may lie in how we think about the “process” aspect of our work and learning.
In his book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, Mark Manson emphasizes the importance of being process-focused. He notes that after failing to do the needed hard work to become a rock star, that a big portion of his failure could be attributed to the fact that he “wanted the result and not the process”. He was “in love not with the fight but only the victory”. In other words, he could not conceptualize or experience the “process” as play.
I think of Manson’s story every time I sit down to learn something new and realize I’m already worried about “getting there”. I’m focused on a fictional end-state, instead of enjoying the play of process. Divorcing play from the process of learning a new skill makes it incredibly more daunting and, frankly, boring. Part of the blame may lie with our systems of education, learning, and productivity, but some onus must be on us to try and preserve and revive that sense of curiosity and wonder we had as children. This mental shift might sound simple but is profoundly important.
When sitting down to learn anything from python to cooking, a spirit of play is one of the best ways to ensure we fall in love with the fight before the victory. Bringing play to work is a prerequisite to developing a beginner’s mindset and learning new skills. Children, before we teach them otherwise, only learn through play and it is precisely because of play that they can overcome so many seemingly insurmountable challenges from learning to talk or walk for the first time. It is because they will try things for the sake of it - for the sake of “play”. It is only as adults that we start asking for “manuals” for the activities and things we want to try. To take a page from good game design, you play the game for the sake of the game itself and rarely ever need to look at the manual. Our systems of work and learning should aim to emulate these experiences through the spirit of play.
A few years ago, a friend and I conducted research for an app on helping users read more and read better. After over 20 user interviews, one of the key unexpected insights we gleaned is that readers that tended to introduce more fiction into their “reading diet” ended up completing more non-fiction books overall. They were also the readers that tended to not complete books they did not enjoy. It seemed that ensuring they let themselves read more “playfully” was the key to reading more - and arguably reading better.
Play has a bad connotation in our productivity-focused society. We contrast play to work, and exile them into separate compartments in our lives. Even when we play, we often play so that we are rejuvenated to get back to “work”. This false dichotomy is hurting us. It prevents us from enjoying the present - working towards a future that never arrives. Ironically, it also hinders our ability to get better by focusing on and enjoying the process on the way to mastery. We must do better. We must play more.
Such an interesting thought and read. And it’s so true.