Work should be fun - b*****ks or deadly serious?

I have been playing with the idea of play and fun at work over the last couple of weeks.

I got serious enough about this to consider renaming my company Work is Play or something similar (the name is taken sadly).

An aside: I’ve changed it to Blooming Work instead. I’m enjoying the double meaning. We will explore what the positive meaning of blooming might mean in this article too.

So, what’s in a word.

What is play? Is it the same as fun? Well it’s personal which means we can’t impose a definition of play or fun. It’s a bit dated but we all knew that fussball and table tennis wasn’t fun. For some people, playing fussball for hours IS fun because it is personal and that might really give them a buzz.

And there’s a clue. Fun is whatever it is that gives us a buzz. And that tends to relate to what we are innately good at, what comes easily. It needs to be both in that we need to get that buzz and also find it relatively effortless.

One of the problems here is that we don’t tend to notice what we are good at. If you find yourself irritated at someone else’s inability that’s often a clue. Something that you think is obvious or easy may well be far from it for many other people.

For me fun is mostly exploring, indulging my curiosity, trying to make sense of things. I feel very comfortable using the word play because that is what I like to do with what I find in my travels — I think…