Not equating fun with leisure.
I spent the summer of 2007 pulling staples out of shoes. I could not have had more fun.
It was my first holiday job. The old collection went out, the new one came in. I had the important task of removing all the price tags, which were stapled to the soles, and putting on new ones. It was incredibly tedious work. I didn’t even have a tool to use, so my hands were sore every day. But for as long as I worked there, I enjoyed coming in every single morning.
There were a ton of bad things I could’ve focused on, but I chose not to. I chose to make it fun. Here are some of the good things I saw:
- They had a reaaaaaaaally nice office. Everything was brand new. But I was working in the warehouse, which was okay, because…
- …the bosses used it as a garage and parked their insane cars there. Audi RS6’s, Porsche Cayenne’s, I could just stare at cool cars all day.
- I was mostly by myself, which meant I could turn the work into a game. I tried to do as many shoes in an hour as I could or stack the boxes as efficiently on the shelves as possible.
- Whenever I wanted a break I could visit one of the accountants, who was a soccer hooligan, so he always had the craziest stories to tell.
- For lunch we always went to cool places and got delicious food.
- Most of the time I could listen to music while working.
These were all incredibly small parts of my day, because 90% of my time was spent, after all, pulling staples out of shoes.
But by blowing these out of proportion in my brain, I turned what most people would’ve considered a few miserable weeks into the time of my life. I’ve done this again and again. With internships, jobs, school work.
You can give me the shittiest job you want, I’ll find a way to make it fun. I’d be happy to serve people coffee all day long. I could pick up trash for all I care.
I’ve never understood why people think fun always has to equate to doing nothing. When most of my fellow students show up to the study room, they don’t come here to have fun. They come here to force a couple slides and equations into their brain, so they can then go home and have fun later.
How the hell are you supposed to find work that’s fun when all your life you’ve told yourself that work and fun are two separate things?
With that attitude, you won’t have fun no matter what job you do. Because you think the two don’t go together.
Don’t hope what you do will be fun. Make it so. Have fun with whatever you do and whatever you do will be fun.
