While it may be an old saw and a dated saying, the notion that, “If you love your job you’ll never work a day in your life,” has more currency today as home and work often blend seamlessly – or not. Paul O’Keefe offers some answers in his timely column:
We have all had to work on tasks we detest: Calculus homework, for example, is boring and hard. As soon as we start, we feel mentally exhausted, and the quality of our work suffers.
Now imagine you are an aspiring architect. Learning how calculus can help you design more creative and ambitious structures could be fascinating. Instead of feeling exhausted by your homework, you might feel energized and could work on it all night. The same work, but with a very different psychological effect.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a psychologist at the Claremont Graduate University, has been studying this latter phenomenon for decades. He calls it flow: the experience we have when we’re “in the zone.” During a flow state, people are fully absorbed and highly focused; they lose themselves in the activity.
Those who read the first statement, and who also thought the task would be enjoyable, solved the most problems. Moreover, their work didn’t flag, meaning they did not perform best simply because their interest made them want to work on it longer, thereby causing them to solve more problems. Instead, their engagement was more efficient. In other words, they were “in the zone.”
Make work play – get into the zone!
Post a Reply