Law Six

Always Make Your Enjoyment Greater Than Your Effort

Enjoyment is essential for lifetime growth. Some people believe that success has to be hard earned to be real. They are highly suspicious of any gains that come as a result of enjoyment. If they earn rewards this way inadvertently, they feel guilty. If others appear to be profiting from enjoyment, they question those people’s morality, certain that such gains can only be ill-gotten. Meanwhile, they continue to toil away at things that give them no pleasure, suppressing any hints of enjoyment that may creep through, lest these be interpreted as signs that they’re not “serious” or “professional” and deserving of success. In the process, they cut themselves off from a major source of energy, creativity, and motivation. Finding ways to get more and more enjoyment from your activities is one way to ensure continued growth. Creativity in all fields of activity is intimately linked to playfulness—the constant desire to do new things just for the fun of it. Approach everything you do with this sense of play, and you will ensure that, even though you still get as good or better results, your enjoyment is always greater than your effort.

In the bureaucratic world, people get paid for putting in time and effort. But entrepreneurs, who get paid only for how much value they create, regardless of what it took to get there, know that it’s not how much time and effort you put in that counts—what matters is the result. If you can get the same or better result and have fun doing it, there’s nothing wrong with that. With a little ingenuity and the right attitude, you can find ways to get enjoyment—and growth—out of even the most daunting tasks.

Seeking Enjoyment, Finding Growth

Clifford Shearing was a mere 17 years old, working on a lovely farm in South Africa during apartheid. The farm had all its workers organized into teams, and Clifford was the manager of one of them, though he admits that he knew the least about what they were doing—he was their manager not because of his knowledge but because he was white. To get the most out of his workers, the farmer would assign task work every Friday and say, “As soon as you’re done, you can have the rest of the weekend off.” The tasks would always be bigger than what could be finished on a Friday, so they would encroach on the team’s weekend.

One Friday, he gave Clifford’s team the task of emptying a large wetland, a job that would take the entire weekend. Fed up and feeling mischievous, Clifford decided to have some fun and teach the farmer a little lesson. First, he arranged that his team would get up at 2 a.m. Then he managed to corral others from nearby farms who weren’t working at that time to come help. They all set out in the dead of night, quietly rolling tractors and Land Rovers down to the site, and by 6 a.m. it was clear that they would have the whole job done by 8 a.m. Thinking this worthy of a celebration, a member of the team drove to the local butcher and bought a lamb, and everyone who had helped gathered outside Clifford’s little cottage for a breakfast barbecue (or a braai, as they say in South Africa).

At about 9 a.m., the farmer came by and saw his entire workforce laughing, joking, and not working, although (he thought) they still had his task to complete. He immediately identified Clifford as the culprit and began berating him:

“This is typical of you, Clifford! You’re undermining discipline on the farm!” And on and on. Somehow, in the midst of this barrage and in spite of his youth and the fact that he suffered from a speech impediment, Clifford managed to speak out perfectly calmly and clearly, “I don’t know why you’re getting so excited. We finished your silly little job a long time ago.”

At this, the whole staff burst out with a roar of laughter. The farmer, his authority and status now completely undermined, said, “That’s it! I’ve had absolutely enough of you! You have to leave this farm within two hours, and don’t think you’ll ever get another job on a farm in this district or anywhere else!”

Growth Sets the Stage for a Bigger Future

So Clifford packed his bags and found himself standing at the side of the dirt road outside the farm, waiting for a bus, and in that moment he had a revelation that shaped his whole life from that point on: He realized that the power of apartheid didn’t rest in the government or the police or the army; it lay with all these people—the farmers and everyone else—who were really the instruments of apartheid. It dawned on him that if power was everywhere, then everyone had an opportunity to shape their world.

Clifford went on to become a globally respected scholar with a specialized interest in security issues. Decades after the incident at the farm, the understanding he had gained by pursuing questions that had arisen that day would play a key role in creating the conditions that allowed for South Africa’s first democratic election, in 1994, to take place peacefully. The task force he was a part of came up with a way, based on his experience and investigations, to have those demonstrating during the elections take responsibility for keeping their own demonstrations peaceful. As a result, there was very little need for the riot police, which meant that brutal clashes that could have been fatal to the country’s fledgling efforts to create democracy were avoided.

Had Clifford just grudgingly gone about his task, it is likely that his life would have taken a very different course and he wouldn’t have arrived at that point to make that contribution. So, though Clifford lost his job on the farm, he gained a vision and a set of questions that have led him to a lifetime of discovery and contribution.

The Game That Engages You

Finding a way to bring enjoyment to work engages our creativity and gives us the sense that we are in control rather than being oppressed by a task. This opens us up to making new discoveries about ourselves, and perhaps, as in this case, to finding courage and strength of character we didn’t know we had. If you approach life as a game with growth as the objective, you’ll put yourself in the right frame of mind to engage in and enjoy the adventure, whatever it brings.

You never know what will happen when you make your enjoyment greater than your effort. A spirit of fun can bring out remarkable qualities and also inspire others in ways that are difficult to foresee. Approaching anything you want to accomplish with this attitude definitely makes it easier to bring others on board to help. Making something fun encourages others to engage with it and to want to be a part of it.

Chad Johnson, an entrepreneur from Oregon, is a master at this. As a kid, he was always making up games and challenges for his many siblings and cousins to keep them entertained and learning. He even started his own circus when he was nine, with the kids as performers and the local adults as the audience. With his wife and their own 11 children, cleanup after meals could be a huge job, so Chad turned it into a game. They call it SCAMP for “Speedy Clean After Meal Party” and the goal is to completely restore order and cleanliness in 15 minutes. Since Chad used to be a firefighter, there are always a few paramilitary elements in his games these days. For SCAMP, a different kid gets to be the leader each time. They all fall in and do a team cheer, then the timer goes, they turn on music, and everyone starts doing their thing. Everyone has pre-assigned responsibilities and nobody’s done until everyone’s done. If you don’t pull your weight, the “team” can give you extra jobs, and the bigger kids help the smaller ones to make sure they get done in time. As a result, not only is cleanup relatively stress-free and fun, the kids also learn leadership, responsibility, and teamwork.

Your Unique Ability Will Help You to Grow

There is another important reason to seek enjoyment over effort: the things we are best at and most passionate about, that offer us the best opportunities for never-ending improvement and growth, are activities that bring us enjoyment. At Strategic Coach, we call these your Unique Ability activities. Every person has a Unique Ability, and the best opportunity to make a contribution comes from discovering it and finding ways to create greater and greater value with it in the world.

Often people get trapped doing what they are very good at but not passionate about. Though these efforts may bring rewards, they do not bring enjoyment or significant growth over the long term. People may get marginally better at activities for which they have no passion, but they will never be motivated to grow in these areas the way they are when they do the things they truly love to do. So if you’re focused on activities that bring you no enjoyment, chances are it’s at the expense of doing what would offer you the greatest opportunities for productive growth—what would allow you to truly make a unique contribution if you focused on it.

We see this often with entrepreneurs who trap themselves in managing their teams and handling details that would be much better left to others instead of strengthening client relationships, selling, or coming up with innovative solutions—whatever they do that really charges them up and creates their best results. It’s easy to convince yourself that these other tasks are necessary, and sometimes they are, but do you really have to do them yourself? Sometimes the answer is yes, but often, with a little honesty and a little creativity, they can be delegated, done differently, or eliminated altogether. So if you’re finding that your effort is greater than your enjoyment, it may be a sign that you’re doing something you’d be better off not doing.

Do what you love and find ways to inject fun into what you do, and you will open up opportunities for ongoing growth that you didn’t know existed.

Where Do I Start?

  Use measurement and challenges to turn tasks into games. We like to use a technique we call “sprints” to break down large tasks into manageable chunks and turn them into a game. The idea with a sprint is to set a measurable goal and then challenge yourself to finish it within a certain time. For Dan, this might mean writing a page in 20 minutes. If he finishes in 10, he’s ahead of the game. Keep track of your results and, if you like, give yourself a prize for achieving your goal. As you challenge yourself like this, you not only make it more fun to do tasks that might otherwise seem repetitive or daunting, but you also create an impetus to find better ways of doing things. Try to set up a game you can win that still stretches you a bit. This helps you to get the task done and grow while doing it.

  Innovate more enjoyable ways to get the desired result. This has a lot to do with attitude. If you start with the idea that something could be enjoyable rather than drudgery, you can build enjoyment right into it. Chad Johnson’s SCAMP game is an example of this. Ask yourself, what can I do to make this more fun? If you’re short on ideas, enlisting the help of others through an online community like Quora or Facebook, or just asking around the old fashioned way may turn up suggestions you can work with.

  Give yourself permission to use “enjoyment level” as a filter. We often see people reluctant to give up doing things they don’t like because they either hold the mindset that “doing things you don’t like is just a part of life” or that “it’s not fair to give this crappy job to someone else.” Here’s a different perspective: One thing we’ve learned in our work with Unique Ability is that, because everyone has a Unique Ability, and everyone’s is different (hence “unique”), what you dislike is inevitably someone else’s passion—so by hanging onto it you’re actually depriving someone else of doing what they love! The trick is to find that person. Busy entrepreneurs who can’t stand organizing are often surprised to find that there are people out there who would relish the opportunity to create order out of their chaos. If you’re interested in discovering your own Unique Ability and learning about tools that can help you identify others who enjoy doing what you don’t, visit lifetimegrowth.com, strategiccoach.com, or amazon.com and look for Unique Ability 2.0: Discovery, our comprehensive book and workbook that will guide you through the process we’ve been using to help our clients discover theirs for more than 15 years.

  Recognize that you can have fun and still be taken seriously. At Strategic Coach, we have a lot of clients and team members who are both really good at what they do and really fun to be around. If people criticize you for having too much fun when you’re doing your job, or think that you must not be working hard enough because you seem to be enjoying yourself too much, it might be time to seriously consider whether that’s an environment you want to stay in. In workplaces that truly foster and appreciate growth, seeing people enjoying their jobs is the norm, not the exception.