Blur the line between work and play

make your vocation you holidays. I think it’s one of the smartest business concepts I’ve come across. I learned it from a book called Work is my game by Wallace E. Johnson, one of the founders of Holiday Inn.

One of the things Johnson says in his book that I love so much is this: The secret to success is working part-time. It doesn’t matter which half you work on; just make sure you work half a day. Now, you have to take that in its proper context, because he is not talking about a standard eight-hour workday. Is talking about a day, the full 24-hour period from sunrise to sunrise, which means your “noon” is 12 hours. If that leaves you squarely, consider this: When you study all the great commercial hits, you’ll see that they were not made by people who marked the time like most people. Average workers put in their 40 or 50 hours, but their real life exists beyond what they do for a living.

Well folks, the secret here is to put all your heart and soul into your business. Put it all out there. My best analogy for that is the farmer. Farming is not really a job that people do for money. Agriculture is a way of life. It is part of who you are, and it is every cell in your body. It is what they live for; it is your whole identity.

When I think of blurring the line between work and play, I can’t help but think of the standard work mindset. For most of us, it’s all about the money, isn’t it? Most people naturally assume that’s what it’s all about as well, because for the past two decades I’ve been “successful.” But they are wrong. For me, it’s about play. Its about emotion. Its about Liberty. It’s about the fun, the adventure of racing.

I have successfully blurred the line between work and play, and you should too. Find out what you are really good at and run with it, putting all your passion in the things that you really enjoy and do well. I often get up at five in the morning and start work right away. Noon comes and I think, “Wow, it just happened seven hours, and it happened really fast!” Sometimes that surprises me and I wonder What did I do Simple enough: I became engrossed in my work. It became as nice to me as any play. The flow makes me feel alive. It’s fun. It is exciting. It is interesting.

I have a little sign on the treadmill where I exercise and it says, “Do what makes you feel totally alive.” That is what a company should be about. It is not just about making money; that’s just a necessity, like breathing, and for me there is nothing more boring. As long as you focus only on money, or anything else, as far as I’m concerned, you’re going to make wrong decisions. That’s why you focus on the game, in its entirety, and revel in the excitement, the adventure, of trying to build something substantial.

Try to do something that you are passionate about and fall in love with your job. Do what makes you feel the most satisfied and spend most of your life in those areas, playing with what gives you the greatest sense of joy and satisfaction. For me it is marketing, writing, communication. It is everything that has to do with selling and developing business plans and strategies. Just don’t take it too seriously or you’ll lose track of what really matters.

Now does that mean you should laugh at all your troubles and just skate through them? Of course not! But this whole idea that being in a business is like a prison sentence, where you have to keep your nose on the whetstone and it’s wrong to loosen up, relax, and have fun … that’s an old, useless idea that you have to establish. aside right now.

Think of professional athletes, who provide the ideal example of blurring the line between work and play. They get paid to play … although it is also a lot of work. It’s not an easy job to be, say, a baseball player who plays 160 games a year from April to September. That doesn’t take into account all the training and the playoffs, either. They work incredibly hard on it; these athletes are very fit, because they are active and train all the time. But they are playing.

Even more surprising, they are basically playing child’s game. Thousands of baseball games are played every day in the US and around the world. These guys are doing it for a living … and some are making millions from it. That’s a classic example of getting paid to have fun. Your game is your job and vice versa. They work hard at it, just like us entrepreneurs.

Now, don’t take this attitude too far, because to be successful in business, you have to take it seriously on some level. That doesn’t mean you have to let him have a heart attack or a nervous breakdown. Also, don’t take it so seriously that you are exhausted all the time. It’s okay to be exhausted every now and then, in the same way that a good play session or a good workout will exhaust you. In fact, that’s a great way to think about it – it’s hard work while you do it, but you like the results you get from doing it.

Even if you lose sight of your enjoyment in the heat of the moment, you like to see what you’ve won and you like to keep score. He likes to go to the scale to see how much weight he has lost or how much muscle tone he is gaining. It’s challenging, but it’s fun.

Business should be like this. Take it seriously and play to win, but remember it’s just a game and have fun playing.