Learn the Skill of Enjoyment to Pull Motivation Like a Lever

As long as you’re willing to do whatever it takes, you won’t have to

Photo by Lena Kudryavtseva on Unsplash

When you think of fun, where does your mind go? You might associate fun with leisure, grouping it with sensory pleasure, time spent with friends, and so on. However, this framework forgets that a major component of fun is curiosity, and curiosity is easy to produce.

We’ve all been having fun for years without realizing it. Everyone knows what it’s like to begin a project with resistance only to later become immersed in it. That immersion was the product of becoming curious. Yet most people think about curiosity as incidental, an effect of a particular arrangement of circumstances, not something to be learned and attentively cultivated.

Fun is the side effect of treating something with full attention. The problem is that so many people see “working hard” as virtuous, but “hard” work simply demonstrates an attachment to an end result at any and every cost.

“Fun is not a feeling so much as an exhaust produced when an operator can treat something with dignity.” — Ian Bogost

Instead of seeing how “hard” you can work at something, challenge yourself to see how much you can enjoy it. The truth is that…