Tag: play

Working and Playing

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Lately, it has been difficult to concentrate on creative tasks. For one my health has been bad and secondly, I have had other things to do. I have a deadline to finish writing two books by summer next year. So what I have been doing is doing small baby steps- like reading something on the train on the way to an appointment and then transferring my thoughts on to the manuscript when I get back. Or when I meet someone new, I ask their opinion on what I am writing. What they might say might trigger off something else and I put this into the writing too. This might be a sentence or two, but at least it is something to keep me on track. Work can be play and play can be work. As L P Jacks said

“The master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his education and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence at whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him he is always doing both”

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The best type of work

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The best work does not feel like work. You do not feel tired, heavy, bored- it feels like you are doing nothing extraordinary, it feels like you are playing! As LP Jack says-

The master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his education and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence at whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him he is always doing both.

To find out what you are good at, see how you spend your time and then check to see if you can make your living from it. I love reading and writing- so I found that I was getting free books to read and getting paid to write!

What is your best work?

Don’t finish what you start!

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Recently I was working on an piece of writing which felt like dragging a large stone, pointless and painful. I had worked on this writing for weeks, thought about it endlessly and yet, when I was working on this, it felt like such a chore. At one stage, typing even one letter of the alphabet seemed like a days work. Did I have to do this? No. Did I like doing it? No. Was this going to help me in anyway, financial or even fame? No. So why was I doing it when the answers were a resounding no? I reflected about how pig-headed I was at times. I figured out that the only reason why I was doing this was because I had started it- and so I had felt, it ought to be finished. Don’t all the self-help books say, finish what you started?! But what a stupid reason this can be.

So here was my big lesson. Certainly things or project that we start and don’t finish can offer a big lesson to us about why we don’t like doing something. They can tell us what we like doing- because we will for sure, bear the pain and finish something we love doing. It won’t feel like a chore, like a piece of stone dragging us down. Work will become play and play will become work. So if something is feeling like a stone, stop, and reflect. Only do it if you really enjoy it. Otherwise it is such a waste of your time- your life!

“The master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his education and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence at whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him he is always doing both.”

–L P Jacks

Oliver Smithies explains how to work hard

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Oliver Smithies explains how to work hard

I came across this youtube video (click on the link above) featuring Oliver Smithies who won the Nobel prize for medicine in 2007 about the meaning of work and how we can work hard.  As he explains, working hard means ‘playing hard’ i.e. following your heart- simple!