"Fundamental Orientation" & Living Playfully
"What you have to do, you do with play." — Joseph Campbell
I admit that I can be a bit of a neurotic, productivity obsessive.
But the last few weeks I've been experimenting with the above quote and it's changed my relationship to, well, life.
Pausing, for even a moment, to reflect on the reality of the human situation grounds everything back in play. In fact, I'm starting to think there is nothing so delusional as taking oneself too seriously.
Carl Sagan said…
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
So what the hell are we taking so seriously?
Is it my sales pipeline for the next quarter? Is it my weekly newsletter? Is it the mountain of emails I need to get through?
I often overlook this life-changing question:
Does the level of urgency I feel about this match its importance?
If I really face that question, I find the most urgent things are often not so important. And the most important things: spending time with friends, showing my family I love them, and getting enough sleep are the things I overlook.
Or how about this for importance?…
There’s a quote about “there’s more to life than just increasing its speed” — how about fully enjoying my wild and precious life while I can? Sure I’m 26, I’m not exactly on my death bed. But in case you aren’t paying attention, death doesn’t discriminate. Nor does it give advanced notice. Most of the time you just take a breath and don’t realize you didn’t take another.
So how about feeling a sense of urgency to live fully?
Living fully means living with a sense of lightness, playfulness, and presence. It’s wholehearted engagement. It’s a love affair with life.
It’s life as play!
And this sets us up to talk about how you actually start to live that way — it’s what I call your “Fundamental Orientation” (FO).
Fundamental Orientation is the term I use for your operating system or your standard mode in which you engage with the world. If you study how you go through your days. You will find there’s usually some underlying pattern driving what you do and how you do it.
Another way to think of this is “what am I optimizing for?”.
For the year and a half in which I grew my business and held down a competitive corporate job, I had essentially made a compromise with myself that I would run a little too hot and be a little too busy in the name of financial stability. Financial stability is a nicer way of saying fear. Fear of scarcity, poverty, and what other people will think of me. Anyway, my FO during this time was productivity. When I was making decisions about what to do and how to do it, the top priority was productivity.
I still struggle with what I call productivity anxiety – this subtle inner tension that is always scanning and gnawing at me to get things done. Much of the last year or so, productivity anxiety was in the driver’s seat.
If I asked myself, what am I optimizing for? The answer was “productivity”.
The shift I’m working on — the one I’d suggest is key to a happier life — is my FO.
It’s shifting my FO from optimizing for productivity to optimizing for enjoyment / life satisfaction. Again this is a subtle shift. It doesn’t mean we stop working hard or start living like a 19 year old college freshman. Let me give a personal example.
My last semester of college I went full on “Y.O.L.O.” mode. I dropped my 3rd major (sidebar: if you are considering a 3rd major, please ask the question “why the hell am I doing this?”). I planned to work like 20 hours per week on my school / work to prioritize being a college kid for one last semester. My FO was getting every last drop of enjoyment out of life.
What happened?
I fell into drinking too much, sleeping all day, and I flunked out of college.
I’m kidding!
What happened is I didn’t work as hard nor as much and yet I still…
landed a great corporate job.
taught the first Happiness course in the history of my university.
won a Lightbulb research grant.
won a seed grant.
kept a 4.0.
And I did all this while feeling like I wasn’t working very hard. In truth I probably ended up working like 35-40 hour weeks. It was a marginal change in workload BUT my FO changed everything. I hardly remember working that semester, but given the stuff I got done I must have been doing something.
So I don’t share this to boast or say I’m like a productivity guru. It’s really saying when I changed my FO to stop obsessing over getting things done, I still got things done. But I did so in a much more relaxed and balanced way.
My FO by default is engaging with life to prioritize productivity. Optimize for productivity.
My FO at my happiest is engaging with life to prioritize living it. Optimize for happiness.
And I think that’s the most difficult shift, especially if you’re a busy achiever type like me. We get so used to getting things done that productivity becomes our FO. But as I reflect on that season of my life and others like it, I find that when my FO is maximizing happiness (as opposed to maximizing productivity) I’m much lighter, more content, and even more effective.
And remembering this perspective — what you have to do you do with play — helps me keep my FO on track.
There’s nothing more urgent or important living fully. So why not optimize for that?
Your happiness nerd,
JK