A Game-Changing Idea to Transform Your Outlook on Business Life: Infuse Happiness into Work by Turning it into a Game

One of the biggest obstacles we face in enjoying life is undoubtedly our obligations. Most of the time, we cannot even put the words necessity and happiness together.

Most of our lives are spent working, and this working life is a necessity for many people. In this case, happiness becomes a dream for people with this kind of perspective.

Philosopher Alan Watts was one of the most important people who spread Taoism to western civilizations. With his books, he changed many people's perspective on life, including me, and had a direct impact with his ideas that can be applied in daily life.

Alan Watts, who has thoughts that change perceptions about “happiness in business life”, shared the key to happiness on this subject: Turn your work into a game to be happy.

Let's take a closer look at his thoughts through the story he told:

There is a very sharp distinction between work and play in our culture.

You have to work because you have to earn enough money. This way, you'll have time for yourself. But this is completely different from something we might call play or entertainment.

Imagine you are a bus driver. Bus drivers often come to mind as exhausted people. He must follow all traffic rules: all traffic, police, people getting on the bus… He must collect money from passengers and give them their change. If this bus driver got it into his head that this was all a “job”, it would be terrible for him.

Now let's think of a driver who handles this in a different way: He sees moving through all this complicated traffic as a game that needs to be very orderly. Thus, what the driver will feel will be just like someone playing the guitar or dancing. It will flow like water, bypassing all obstacles while passing through traffic. And with all this, he will create music. When he does this, he no longer feels tired at the end of the day, he feels completely energized because he did his job.

If you treat everything you do as a game and do not feel like you have to take what you do seriously, even for a single minute, you will open the door to happiness.

The art of washing dishes is this:

You only need to wash the dishes once at a time. If you're washing every day, what you'll see in your mind will be dishes piled up and other dishes you've washed in the past. Along with this, you will also remember the accumulated dishes that you need to wash in the future.

But if you bring your mind back to the world of reality, that is, just to the “now”: Here we are! There is only now. You only have “one” dish to wash. You just need to wash what's in front of you. You can ignore all the rest.

Because in reality there is neither a past nor a future. There is only now.

“Did I make it clean like my mother told me in her “angry voice”?”, “Did every spot go away?” Instead of thinking “Otherwise he will be angry with me”; You can turn all this cleaning into a dance.

When I was in primary school in England, I had to learn to play the piano. They said, “Playing the piano,” but actually they expressed it to me out of necessity: “You have to play the piano.”

In England they give children “compulsory games”. They would say, “Everyone will go jogging this weekend.” If you don't run and it is discovered, you will be punished. That's why everyone hated running.

Because everyone was under pressure to play: “Everyone has to play!”

Life, like the life we ​​are all a part of, is just a game. Everyone has to be a part of it. That's how we would go running.

I remember once I was behind on a run because I had swelling in my foot and I was trying to enjoy it. A dance alone. The one right behind me was running on his heels with great passion, and every time his heels hit the ground, a sound was heard.

“What's the problem?” I said to him, “You are shaking your whole body by doing this” he continued doing this. Years later, he even became the inter-school long distance champion.

But he didn't enjoy it, it was a job for him.

His only pleasure was the suffering that made him feel that he was making a contribution to humanity. He reconciled his existence and meaning with the pain he suffered.

Real great runners dance when they run.

They don't have to follow a single line. Likewise, if you had witnessed the world football championship in 1970, you would have seen the champion team, Brazil, playing the most extraordinary football. They played football like they were playing basketball. Their game was a dance. The football I was taught at school as a child was very ordinary and rule-based. We didn't even have fun. But these guys were moving the ball around, using all the muscles in their bodies and showing great team play. At the same time, they were dancing with their games. A sports commentator from the London Times said:

“They danced their way to victory.”

My point is this: You can do anything you have to do using this mindset. Don't separate play and work!

Treat everything you do as a game, and don't think for a single minute that you have to take what you do seriously.

Editor's Note and Final Thoughts

Alan Watts created his thought system largely by adhering to simplicity. For him, everything in life is a game and we should have fun while playing this game. Not only our work, but our life is a game, and there is only one winner in this game: The one who has the most fun while playing.

If you want to investigate how old and important the word game is in human history, as a book recommendation, Johan Huizinga's book Homo Ludens explains in a fluent language that the concept of game is a much greater necessity than we expected.