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When my friend Richard asked me to join him in training for a triathlon, I carefully considered his request. For about a second.
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“No way.”
“Oh, come on. Why not?”
“Because I’ve raced triathlons before. They’re painful. It takes me a week to recover. And for what? It’s—”
“Wait a second,” Richard interrupted. “Do you actually try to win?” He laughed. “Peter, last year there were fifty-seven people in my age-group. I came in fifty-sixth. Right before the guy with one leg.” Then he looked me up and down. “You know, we’re not the kind of guys who win these races.”
“So why do you do it?” I asked.
“It’s fun.”
Research published recently in the Annals of Behavioral Medicine showed that the harder people exercise, the less pleasure they feel during the exercise and the less likely they’ll be to exercise routinely. As Panteleimon Ekkekakis, one of the authors of the study, said in The Wall Street Journal, “Evidence shows that feeling worse during exercise translates to doing less exercise in the future.”
Obvious, right? We tend to do things we find pleasurable and avoid things we find painful. But we often forget the obvious as we try to push to get things done. Efficiency, it turns out, is the enemy of fun. And yet in the end, fun is so much more efficient than efficiency.
“Look,” someone complained to me about one of her colleagues, “he’s an adult. I tell him to do something, he should do it. I don’t care whether he wants to or not. It’s his job. It’s why he’s paid.”
But that’s not how things really work.
Everything I’ve seen confirms a simple rule: People do what they choose to do. And if something’s fun, they’ll choose to do it.
Marc Manza is the chief technology officer of Passlogix, a client of Bregman Partners. A few years ago, Marc had a problem. Passlogix’s software was conflicting with an older, unsupported version of Sun Microsystems software that some of their clients were still using. Marc tried to work with Sun to fix the problem, but Sun wasn’t interested; they told Marc to tell his clients to upgrade to the newer version of Sun software.
So Marc had his team work on a fix. But it was complicated, and two years later, at a cost Marc estimates in the tens of thousands of dollars, the problem remained unsolved.
Then one day Marc had an idea. He went to a local electronics store, bought a Nintendo Wii, and placed it in a central, visible place in the office. Then he made an announcement: The first person to solve this problem wins the Nintendo. And he added a rule: You have to work on the problem on your own time, not on company time.
It took two weeks.
Marc took a boring project working on a legacy system and made it fun. Cost to the company? Two hundred and fifty dollars.
Since then he’s given away iPods, Xbox 360s, PlayStation3s, and a netbook. Fun competitions that solve real problems are a great way to boost morale and keep people engaged, especially in somewhat depressing times. This is true whether we’re motivating other people or ourselves. Two rules:
1. Focus on real problems and opportunities. A company picnic might be fun, but it doesn’t achieve the same impact. Instead, make the work itself fun. One way to do this is to get others involved. Solving problems with other people is often more fun than solving them alone.
2. Money isn’t fun. When Marc put a $1,000 bounty on a problem, it failed. The cash could have bought four Nintendos, but it was less inspiring. You can parade around the office with a box in your arms as a badge of honor, but who would walk around waving a check? Getting paid for something transforms fun into work. Fun is not about the money.
Special projects that require creativity to crack are the most fun to attack. Like figuring out how to get the attention of a new prospect who won’t return calls. Or solving a product issue that consistently annoys customers. Or finding a new way to communicate with your manager or employee without relying on the dreaded performance review.
But mundane tasks can be made fun, too. Take the anxiety-producing cold call. What if you started a running list (with a prize for the monthly winner) of the most obnoxious responses you hear? That alone could turn angst into excitement.
Fun doesn’t require a competition. When I was waiting tables as a college student, I spiced up the job by serving each table in a different accent. It took all my focus to remember which accent went with which table. Silly? For sure. Fun? Much more so than simply taking an order.
Here’s the thing, though: You can’t fake fun. Which means you have to go into your workday with a sense of amusement. It’s a lens through which you view the world. We all know people who slip easily into laughter and make jokes even as they work hard at something, seemingly unburdened by the threat of failure. And when they do fail, they laugh and keep going. It’s contagious. Which is why it’s such a critical leadership quality.
Fun keeps us motivated in a way that eventually translates into performance. After one of his races, Richard called to tell me he came in 120th out of 200, a huge improvement over previous races. “And they all had two legs,” he told me, laughing. “Wanna join me for the next one?”
Sounds like fun.
Fun reduces our need to motivate ourselves because fun is motivating.
