Don’t work — play
This post was inspired by Naval Ravikant’s conversation with Kapil Gupta on hard work.
When I was a child I loved building Legos. Never have I ever built the thing on the Lego box. I didn’t even knew what it was. Throwing all the Legos on the floor and building something new which I didn’t know how it would turn out was the way to go. Time flew by and I could sit on the floor for hours building before my parents would rush me off to bed.
Later in life, Legos evolved into little electronic assembly things. I loved tinkering with light bulbs, motors, and batteries. Today I write code for a living and whenever I’m truly enjoying my craft — it feels just like playing with those legos in childhood.
Complex and complicated software engineering challenges and very engaging and feel just like building those legos. You build one brick at a time and you also have to hold the big picture in your head. You constantly zoom in and out of the solution, circling it and converging into the best solution you can currently provide. This processes is engaging, thought provoking and meaningful given a hard enough problem. The best way to gain specific knowledge is by engaging in domains which feels like play.
In a previous post I wrote that doing meaningful work has to do with the environment you are in and the KPIs that you measure. Interestingly, doing things that feel like play is a good compass for finding meaningful things to do and it might just be the piece I’ve previously missed.
Nothing dreadful has ever felt positively meaningful. That is not to say that you do not have to do some things that you do not enjoy in order to keep doing things that feel like play. With time, however, you should be able to eliminate most of them either by outsourcing or bypassing them in some fashion.
If those concepts sound familiar it is probably because you have already heard of Flow State. I think that things that feel like play are exactly the things that put you into Flow State. Derek Beres has written about the connection between flow state and meaning, although he did not explain a clear connection and it is worth exploring further.
Take Home Message
Find something that feels like play to you and double down on it. Whatever it may be, it will bring you a joy as well as business opportunities if leveraged correctly. It is indefinitely hard to become an expert at something that doesn’t feel like play.
