How to make work into play

November 2022

As children, we’re told that we should explore life as much as possible. It’s perfectly acceptable to play, in fact, it’s encouraged. However, during this period, grown ups normally say something along the lines of ‘enjoy it while you can because you’ll have to work soon’.

The underlying implication in that statement is that work and pleasure face mutual exclusivity. Is this actually the case?

Probably not. The reason for this is that if all work we did as adults were rarely enjoyable, net positive productivity as a whole would cease to exist. The mind is capable of doing work that isn’t interesting, but over a long-enough time horizon, minds, especially creative minds struggle to do so. The same is true for the other side of the spectrum. If everything was just fun, it’s possible that work wouldn’t be taken as seriously and net production would be lower.

There is an element of truth in the idea that work isn’t play in the sense that there isn’t a non-stop enjoyment of it. But that being said, neither is play.

Consider a child playing football and that they’re actually good at it. Do they enjoy it? Probably. Is this play? Most likely. But did this just occur naturally? Absolutely not. In order to have gotten to the place where they now have a developed skillset, there was a period of time where they didn’t have even the knowledge, let alone the skills required to play the game.

This is the case for anyone chasing any new endeavour, either personally or professionally. You’re probably going to suck at it, at least initially anyway. At this point in time, this phase of learning something new is not play by default. The concept of play is to be doing something of enjoyment and (at least for most people), doing something and sucking at it is not particularly enjoyable. The reason that this isn’t enjoyable is due to a lack of competency or curiosity in that area. This isn’t to say that the state of ‘play’ is unequivocally always positive, but the general consensus is that it is at enjoyable in spite of the adversity. This phases whereby competency is low is the ‘work’ aspect.

The graph below fully illustrates what the journey of competency development looks like.

Let’s role play this so it’s more contextualised to you as the reader. Pick any skillset, whether it’s playing the piano to understanding quantum mechanics. Pick whatever is relevant to you. We’ll call this skill, X.

You start your journey to developing X. You consciously know that you’re not going to be any good at it but also have no idea as to the difficulty required to be at least reasonably competent at X, so you start learning and you make progress.

You are now at point A. You’ve made some progress, not enough to be classed as competent, but enough to feel satisfied with (comparing where you are now vs where you were before you started).

You continue along and the difficulty increases. You’re now spending more time, but you feel you are not getting any better at X. You really wish you were back at point A right about now and hope that if you keep going, you’ll get the same euphoria you once had.

You’re now at point C. You kept going but still made no progress, or so it feels. While in reality, you have more knowledge than you did at A, you feel less satisfied and feel less competent. You are at a crossroads, do you give up or do you continue, potentially iterating on your method to improve your feelings of dissatisfaction.

If you have chosen to give up, you are still competent than where you were when you first began this journey, but are not competent enough to the point where you feel confident about X.

Let’s assume you stayed on the path. You continue to iterate and make progress and after going through the abyss, you can see a light at the end of the tunnel. You are now at point D. You have now developed 2.5x the skillset from point A and have built character along the way, having gone through adversity and now projecting yourself into greater knowledge. You feel like the only way is up from here on out.

Then point E comes along. You face another technical issue. The realistic gravity of the problem is greater than at point B-C, but the interpreted gravity is much lower. This is because your ego has started to kick in. You are at another point where you can give up or continue onwards, but the weight is lower. If you give up now, you’re at least somewhat competent and you’ll feel less shameful because you’ve gone through a set of trenches already. You’re nowhere near competent enough to be a subject master about X, but if you were to converse about or demonstrate X, you could hold your own somewhat reasonably.

You decide to continue onwards, you now reach point F, where your competency begins to take off. The problems you experienced at points B, C and E seem amateurish looking back. You begin to experience exponential growth in your competency and develop your competency much more strongly in a shorter time period.

I would argue that point E is of a larger danger than points B & C. At B & C, you don’t have the ego. If you give up at those points, you’re just not interested in X enough to want to persevere, but at E, you’re under the false illusion that you’re confident and the barrier to quitting and preserving your ego is low. You can walk out feeling more confident (while somewhat wrongfully so) and don’t need to go through further pain in the pursuit of competency.

So, how does this relate to the title surrounding work and play? Well, put simply, at a place of competence, anything can be play. The way to become competent is through obsession and curiosity. Curiosity will get you started, obsession will keep you going, especially during the down trends.

What happens at a point of maximal competency? Is such a point even possible? The answer is no. There is no such thing as a max upper bound unless you define a specific point at which constitutes perfection in your eyes about X.

Now let’s assume you hit that defined upper bound, what happens now? If you stay at the same level of competency at the same area and either do not seek to improve in that domain or find a new domain to master, you will become bored. It will seem mundane to you. The reason for this is because as human beings, one of our psychological needs is this need for growth. This is the reason why you feel much happier in making progress towards a goal than actually hitting that goal.

Work and play do not have to be antonyms, they can overlap if you allow yourself to find curiosity in the domain and choose to become obsessed with becoming better, especially if it’s reasonably challenging. In fact, just the pursuit of becoming better can be enough to make work into play. The best way then to turn work into play is to start with a goal, achieve it and progressively raise the bar for what is required, forcing you to become better in the pursuit of the goal.