Could You Be Having More Fun? (Productive Flourishing Pulse #474)
Fun and joy are both necessary and wildly underrated as fuel for engagement, productivity, and creativity
“Work doesn’t need to be a four-letter word. It can be joyful, meaningful, and enriching.” — Charlie Gilkey, in Team Habits
Work is a lot like parenthood (ah, that blessed and endless task!) It’s exhausting, joyful and rewarding all at once.
Still some of us seem to have gotten the impression at some point that productivity, adult life, and our work are not supposed to be fun.1
Tragic mistake to spend life believing work, joy, and creativity should be separate when the average person spends one-third of their life at work.
Sure, admittedly many parts of adult life are plagued by monotony. *Tiniest violin in the world plays in the background.*
The question is: Can we find a way to make our work, rhythms, and daily life suit our need for creativity and joy?
To further the parenting and work analogy… The only way I’ve personally figured out to incorporate creativity and joy into both is by easing the pressure off, big time, by pushing back against:
(Internal or external, and real or projected) time pressure and urgency.
Perfectionism and expectations (often my own) of how ‘perfect’ everything (me included) needs to be.
When I do manage to relax, and realize things don’t need to be perfect to be good, I see new levels of creativity (also, joy) in my work, and more spaciousness for silliness and real play with my daughter.
Of course, it’s easier said than done to stop constantly obsessing over accomplishing things and making them look perfect (as a parent or as a worker/ working person).
But if you take some of that pressure off, new levels of creativity and connection inevitably show up.
Last month we zoned in on the importance of play. Now that we are post-Equinox the longer and brighter days of spring are here, if we took a breath, lessened the pressure just a bit, we could see what kind of creativity is possible.
Because if we have “thriving” in economic and career achievement terms — but no fun or creative juice, what is the point?
Creativity, fun and joy are major components of what makes us feel alive. And research shows creativity and play improve our cognitive function overall. (If you absolutely required a practical reason to have fun.)
Pro tip, and also, spoiler alert: You can have fun and use your creativity without there being any particular aim. (The spoiler alert is… not worrying about the aim is a major part of what fun is.)
Doing things just because they’re joyful and fun for you, and not because you get something out of them, is necessary if you want to have a fulfilling, thriving, and… yes, productive, life.
What kind of creativity and fun would be possible in your work or everyday life if you eased off on time pressure and the orientation towards result or outcome?
~ Mary Clare2
Other News and Features
What habits are getting in the way of your thriving? Earlier this week Charlie shared our newest resource, the Habit Switcher, designed to help you replace bad habits with good or better ones. And yes, that might just include adding in habits that incorporate more fun into your days.
We all know it makes sense to do Quarterly Planning…. And yet making time to do it (and knowing what the plan should involve) can be a challenge. Our next Quarterly Planning session for our Pro subscribers is this coming Wednesday, March 27, 2024 at 11am PDT — a chance to lock in where you need strategic focus, and learn how to prioritize what matters most.
Reads and Seeds
So I’m also running with our reads & seeds this week 😏
Shannon Watts on trusting our inner voice: “Oprah Winfrey refers to it as ‘the whispers,’ Glennon Doyle calls it ‘the Knowing,’ Martha Beck calls it ‘the force.’ But at its core, it’s […] it’s moving past rational thought and reasoning to tap into a deeper truth that lies below all of our layers of social conditioning.”
In keeping with the theme of placing fun and joy as an end goal for whatever you’re working on, Hattie Crisell’s most recent post resonated: “Whatever the outcome, doing something that you find interesting and rewarding is still better than not doing it. When obsession with outcomes falls away, it leaves us with the pleasure of the work (or play) itself, which is worth spending our life hours on.”
From AI in the Age of Mythic Powers (Part II): “In ritual initiatory process, there is a moment of wonder and initiation and death and rebirth that the ancient Greeks called telos. There is a place where wonder, initiation, death, ecstasy, transformation and regeneration all meet. And if you take [this perspective] you understand that the vast majority of things that we do in one way or another are aiming towards that moment.”
This week marked the anniversary of Julie Yip-Williams’ death, whose posthumous memoir The Unwinding of the Miracle: A Memoir of Life, Death, and Everything That Comes After featured this advice to her young daughters (re-shared by the wonderful Letters of Note): “We are here to feel the complex range of emotions that come with being human. And from those experiences, our souls expand and grow and learn and change, and we understand a little more about what it really means to be human.”
If you’re not having fun with what you’re doing, it’s generally a tall ask to manage to be creative at it.
👋 Wanted to highlight PF team members showing up more here in the Pulse: I’m
, a writer and social media maker at PF, living in Italy with my husband and three-year-old, when we’re not in Philadelphia (my hometown). My past lives include stints in labor organizing, as a writing consultant, cook, house cleaner, and PhD researcher (on populism in Rust Belt areas in the U.S and Europe). Find me cooking or eating pasta, and attempting to live out the principles of slow living in actual life.