Or can it?
Think about this. Imagine a little kid who loves to draw. During play time at preschool, she draws because that’s what she loves to do. Then imagine she’s told that as a reward for drawing during play time, she’ll get a pretty blue ribbon. And for a while at school, she gets the ribbon every time she draws. And then one day there’s no ribbon.
What do you suppose happens?
Well, Daniel Pink* describes a study done some years ago (at 37-38) with a group of kids who liked to draw. Some were promised a reward for drawing and others were not. The kids who didn’t get ribbons continued to draw during play time because they liked to. But the kids who were promised ribbons for drawing quit drawing when the ribbons stopped coming.
Why?
The reward had turned play into work.
Or think about this. Remember Tom Sawyer and whitewashing the fence? Tom tricked other kids into whitewashing his fence for him, because he made the chore seem exciting.
He turned work into play.
Or think about this. Wikipedia. An online encyclopedia completely written by volunteers. Or open source software, such as FireFox. A free web browser developed primarily by unpaid programmers. Is what they do work? Is it play? What’s the difference?
What qualifies a task as "work"? Is it as simple as getting paid? Or does it have more to do with how we feel about it? What makes a task fun, and what makes it drudgery? Do we define work as unpleasant, and unpleasant tasks as work?
Once we realize that the boundaries between work and play are artificial, we can take matters in hand and begin the difficult task of making life more livable.
~Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, Beyond Boredom and Anxiety
It’s interesting, isn’t it? It strikes me as having huge implications for me as a self-employed (self-motivated) freelance paralegal. And the implications may be even greater given that I primarily work remotely such that my attorney clients can’t see me working.
About which, more in the next post in the series!
*This post is the 3rd in my series of musings on Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, from which the examples discussed in this post derive. Daniel H. Pink. New York: Riverhead Books, 2009.
2 comments:
Great post! It helped me realize something about a writing project I did years ago. We might have talked about it before. I read a book on writing where you figure everything out on 3x5 cards: the plot (each scene gets a card), the characters' tags and back stories, research, etc. Everything is done on 3x5 cards. So I diligently worked my way through this book, figured out a story, even went to the setting, and ended up with a big stack of 3x5 cards. At that point, I realized I was done with the project and never took the next step of writing down the story. I've told this story to people and they asked me why and I could only answer "The story was done, there was no reason to write it down." Now I know that this exercise was really like a class assignment. It had become work and once I was done with the method, I was done with the story. Weird, eh?
Sorry this comment is so long. You don't have to post it.
MT
Are you kidding? I LOVE this story! What a great example of turning something meant to be productive into a dead-end make-work project! Thanks for sharing, MT :)
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