Fun and Mastery

In college I started having a hard time thinking about fun in the abstract. Unsure of how to fill my free time, I started wondering if I had lost some capacity for fun. This bothered me for about eight years.

Last year a friend recommended the short-yet-transformative Mastery by George Leonard. This required reading for anyone who wants to be excellent at anything has some unexpected insights into the nature of fun.

Mastery points out that young children get very good at a variety of tasks very quickly--stuff we take for granted, like balancing and speaking. What do children do? They play. Playing is fun. Children will walk on curbs when out walking and play word games when they're bored and away from media sources. They're practicing skills by going slightly outside of what they normally do. They're engaging in low-stakes challenges of their current skills and loving it. This is fun.

Of course, kids don't realize this is what they're doing. They're just thinking, "Hey, this is fun." Then we grow up, spend tons of time doing homework and meeting obligations on our calendar, checking off achievements, and we can forget about going taking those tiny, low-stakes experiments against our skills.

So there you have it: a formula for rediscovering fun. Take something you're doing (anything: your job, your workout, your hobbies, social situations) and test yourself with little low-stakes challenges. Do it backwards. Do it faster. Do it on one foot. Do it with a new tool. Do it in fewer actions. It's fun!