J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit
It was dark when I arrived, so the next morning, I hopped out of bed and threw back the curtains of the hotel to see the beautiful ocean just outside my window. I was there only for a day, but man, we just don’t have the beaches in Missouri that they do in Hawaii. I couldn’t wait to stroll down the beach and dip my toes in the ocean.
During my breakfast meeting, I met with some of the conference organizers, who had arrived a few days earlier to get everything prepared. I bounded into the room and asked, “Hey! How’s the water? Is the beach as nice as it looks?”
They stared at me in confusion. Though they were squarely in paradise, not one had removed their shoes, shucked their sports coat, and stepped into the sand. Racing to get ready, they’d been too busy. No one had even looked out the window to notice the Pacific, just within reach.
Conferences are often jam-packed. Schedules get tight. There’s too much to fit into each day.
But do you know what part of the school day is most essential for kids? What pocket of time matters most?
Hint: It’s not math or science. It isn’t reading or writing.
It is recess.
Active playtime allows what happens in the classroom to be much more effective.
A school district in Texas learned this firsthand. Like many other schools across the country, they were struggling to manage students who were being diagnosed with ADHD at increasingly younger ages and had trouble focusing in school. They decided to join a pilot program to see if adding more recess to the school day would improve student outcomes.
Modeling their program after the Finnish school system, which allows elementary school students fifteen minutes of unstructured, outdoor playtime for every forty-five minutes of instruction, the school shifted from providing just twenty minutes of recess for the kindergarten and first-grade students to four fifteen-minute recesses plus a lunch break each school day.
The teachers were initially concerned about the loss of class time, and how they would be able to cover all the required material. But halfway through the pilot year, one first-grade teacher said they were already “way ahead of schedule.”
How could that be? They had less class time, but they were keeping pace and in fact moving more quickly through the material?
Here’s what was happening. The students were less distracted and more engaged. They were less fidgety and making more eye contact with their teachers.
The class time was therefore much more productive.
The designer of the pilot program outlined the many benefits of more frequent recess. They included increased attentional focus, improved academic performance, improved attendance, decreased behavioral diagnoses, and improved creativity and social skill development.1
Not bad for a little extra time on the monkey bars.
Ohio State University pediatrician Bob Murray, who helped write the American Academy of Pediatrics policy on recess, says: “If you want a child to be attentive and stay on task—if you want them to encode the information that you’re giving them in their memory—you’ve got to give them regular breaks.”2
Kids need play to be at their best.
And it is just as essential for adults.
Many of the dramatic leaps we’ve made professionally aren’t the result of working harder, but of stepping away and taking time to play. It allows our brains to get into the kind of state necessary to figure out new approaches to the problems we confront. Let me give you some examples.
George de Mestral, an engineer, stepped away from his desk one day to take a hike in the woods with his beloved dog. Upon returning home, he found his pants and his dog’s fur covered with small green burrs that were incredibly difficult to remove. It was like they were glued to the fabric.
Being someone who loved to discover how things worked, he extracted one of the burrs and examined it under the microscope. It was made up of minuscule little hooks that grabbed on to any creature that passed by, embedding themselves into fabric or fur.
What George de Mestral created from what he discovered that day while out for a hike is what is known today as Velcro.
Alexander Fleming, while researching staphylococcus, a bacterium at the root of many infections, took several weeks off from his work to go on vacation with his family. Upon returning to his laboratory, he noticed that some fungus had grown in his absence, and that it had destroyed a colony of staphylococci.
He later named the mold penicillin. This accidental discovery would go on to give birth to a new class of drugs known as antibiotics, save millions of lives, and ultimately earn Fleming the Nobel Prize.
Oliver Smithies, a Nobel laureate scientist, famously loved to play. “His breakthroughs always came during what he called ‘Saturday morning experiments.’ Nobody was around and he could just play. ‘On Saturday,’ he said, ‘you don’t have to be completely rational.’ ”3
Regardless of our profession or age, we need play. Play permits us to get immersed in an activity we love, and enter a state of creative flow where we stop judging ourselves and start enjoying ourselves.
That’s when revolutionary discoveries are made.
Hanging in my conference room is a magnificent work of art created by my friend Russell Irwin. The work is titled Ablaze.
I reached out to him several years ago, explaining that I wanted to commission a piece of art that would symbolize both my journey and the unlimited potential within each of us. I wanted the piece to reflect that no matter how bruised or battered we become along the way, present adversity would not be wasted and the best remained ahead.
Russell and I got together for several conversations about what the piece could look like. Several months later, when he delivered the finished piece, I sat back just staring at it.
I wasn’t expecting something so grand.
At a quick glance from a distance, the image looks like an oil painting of the sun, radiating light. Although it’s stunning, that first impression completely misses the story of complexity, beauty, pain, and redemption told within the work.
The image isn’t made with oil paints, but with thousands of pieces of colored paper meticulously glued down, then covered with other pieces of paper and more glue.
After the glue dries, Russell puts on a mask, and grabs a belt sander, laboriously removing layer upon layer of paper. It’s a messy, loud, tedious process. When done with expert care, it reveals something that no other art possibly could.
Staring at it up close, you see that it’s all a bit chaotic, torn, ripped, broken. It doesn’t seem like it all fits together.
When you step back, though, the beauty of the image shines through.
As I stood looking at this incredible work of art that now graced my office wall, I asked Russell how he came up with this utterly novel approach to creation.
He laughed and told me a story.
One day he’d left his studio feeling stagnant and uninspired. He walked into his house to find his twelve-year-old daughter, Ashley, at the kitchen table, ripping construction paper to the size she desired, plastering the pieces with glue, and adhering them to a large sheet of paper.
Russell stood back and watched as beautiful artwork came to life from the shredded, mangled, sticky paper.
“Where did you learn to do this?” he asked, marveling at this new technique.
Ashley looked up, surprised by the question. “What do you mean? I’m learning it now.”
And with that, she went back to her creation, back to making something completely fresh, original, and new.
She wasn’t trained in a classroom. She didn’t learn it from a textbook. In the very act of experimental play, she was creating something entirely new. She was revealing to her dad a technique that would transform his entire business. And she was joyfully lost in the moment.
When you get absorbed in a task and forget all sense of time and purpose, you enter a state called flow. It can happen when you are practicing a musical instrument or playing a sport. It can occur when kids are completely wrapped up in an imaginary game of their own creation. Flow is defined by a laser-like focus on one thing, and it’s accompanied by the temporary deactivation of the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for self-monitoring and impulse control. What that means is that, in flow, we turn off the annoying part of our brain that is worrying about what others think. This allows us to be less critical of ourselves and more courageous in action.
Consequently, we are also more creative.4
Flow, however, requires total immersion. You cannot access a flow state when constantly interrupted by email and texts and calls. This is the “deep work” state that Jason Fried wanted his employees to be able to enter. Play and work actually aren’t that different when work is something creative and consuming. A quote often attributed to famed psychologist Jean Piaget says: “Play is the answer to the question: How does anything new come about?”
To live a life In Awe, we’ve got to relearn what it means to play.
We’ve got to recognize the call to look out the window, see the ocean beckoning, and go put our feet in the sand.
Play is not just about going to the movies, playing a board game, or going to parties on the weekends. Play is an attitude, where the only goal is fun or exploration or release. And you get lost in it.
And it is one of the most important elements of leadership.
I’ll let historian Doris Kearns Goodwin explain.
Goodwin is one of the most respected presidential biographers of our time. In her most recent book she wrote about the leadership styles of four different presidents. These four presidents had something in common besides their exemplary leadership.
They all recognized the importance of play.
One of those men was Abraham Lincoln. In her earlier biography of Lincoln, Goodwin had recorded his dedication to the theater: “In the most difficult moments of his presidency, nothing provided Lincoln greater respite and renewal than to immerse himself in a play.” His assistant said of Lincoln, “The drama by drawing his mind into other channels of thought, afforded him the most entire relief.”5
Respite and renewal and relief. Doesn’t that sound appealing?
But you don’t need to reserve a weekend at the spa to achieve this. It is available to every one of us when we take the time to play.
Teddy Roosevelt understood this, too. He famously went swimming every afternoon. His fifth cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, another president, threw parties. These were the most important leaders in the country, shouldering more responsibility than you and I will ever know. And they made sure that they still had time for fun, even during the most difficult moments. Especially during the most difficult moments.
Goodwin stated: “If Lincoln during the Civil War can go to the theater a hundred times, and if FDR during World War II can have a cocktail hour every night where you can only talk about books you’ve read and gossip, and if Teddy Roosevelt can take two hours every afternoon to exercise,” she says, none of us has an excuse to skip incorporating play into our lives. “We just keep thinking our time is more complicated. It is because we’ve made it so.”6
So now it’s time to make life a bit less complicated and a lot more fun. It’s time to unapologetically step away from work and skip to recess. Our recess can mean reading a book, painting a picture, or attending a sporting event. It can include taking a hike, going for a run, or playing a game with your kids. Recess doesn’t mean you don’t work hard or take life seriously. Instead, it means you’ll actually enjoy what you’re building and be equipped to build it even better.
So get out to the blacktop, pick up your tennis racquet, go fly a kite, or jump some rope. Give your brain the break it deserves.
Play will unleash greater creativity, connectivity with others, and ability to leverage the power of flow.
And it will give you a chance to do something else incredibly important.
Nothing at all.