🛼 Unlearning productivity to discover purpose through play
Balancing productivity and play to keep us pointing the right way
A brief anecdote
It was July of 2006 and I was 11 years old waiting in line for lunch to be served at my summer camp. The meals here were often spartan: chicken, rice and broccoli.
But today was different.
It was pizza day.
Pizza day was a highly anticipated event. So much so in fact, that it brought out the most cunning tricks of the campers, eager to get an early pick of the pies. And that day, I witnessed one firsthand.
Another camper casually started up a conversation with the person standing in front of me in line, and then proceeded to gracefully wedge himself between us.
It was beautifully executed, really. A masterful hostile takeover.
I’m normally opposed to line cutting, and happy to make my sentiments known. But on this particular day, I was too impressed with this kid’s prowess pirating the position in front of me, and too tired to make a fuss. So, I didn’t. Just this once, I was inclined to let this line-cutter’s crime slide.
The kid standing behind me in line, however, was not:
“Hey Copernicus!” He shouted from over my shoulder.
“Just a reminder in case you forgot your own scientific findings: you’re not at the center of the universe! How about you crunch those celestial calculations again and navigate yourself to the back of the line!”
Gold. Pure gold.
At the time, I believe that’s what one would’ve referred to as a sick dis.
Needless to say, this was not your typical kid standing behind me.
And this was not your typical summer camp.
The birth of hyper-productivity
Every summer growing up, I would attend a highly selective multi-week "gifted and talented” program held on top college campuses. The likes of Harvard, Princeton and Johns Hopkins.
We lived in dorms, ate cafeteria food, went to lectures and labs 8 hours per day, and had exams each week. It was just like college!
Minus the good stuff — parties and booze readily replaced with 7pm curfews and 24/7 chaperon supervision.
The summer courses offered by age bracket were no less than 4 years beyond the actual grade level that you were going into. 9 year olds were memorizing Periodic Elements in Organic Chemistry. 10 year olds were plotting Euclidian vectors in Linear Algebra. And 11 year olds were writing proofs for Lipschitz continuity conditions in Multivariable Calculus.
Needless to say, some of the kids at these programs were quite remarkable.
Natural born Copernicuses, Galileos and Newtons, that casually discussed yet unsolved conundrums in theoretical physics over lunch breaks — the 15 minutes of free time that we had each day. These kids were truly “gifted and talented.”
And then, there were kids like me.
Kids that weren’t gifted, and inherently talented, so much as they were gifted with inheriting talented parents.
My parents, like many parents to these program-goers, were heroic, self-sacrificing and shrewd — investing countless hours of their own time and energy to tee me up with every future opportunity possible.
They tutored me in evenings and weekends outside of their full-time jobs, were constantly navigating public school bureaucracy to get me placed into more advanced classes, and did their research early on the college application process.
They knew what it took to get into a top school — not merely for the sake of a fancy name, but rather, for the sake of unbridled freedom in the future. To study wherever and pursue whatever I wanted. And to instill the confidence to know that I could.
But unlocking that full spectrum of future opportunities, also meant diligently preparing today.
Just to get into these programs as a kid, you needed to take and submit an SAT score that was higher than the national average for graduating seniors 8 years older than you, get written recommendations from your teachers effusively praising your 6th grade capacity for “intellectual vitality,” and write multi-page personal statements highlighting your academic career accomplishments in artfully veiled failure-turned-success storylines.
But of course, you were just deeply grateful for all you “learned.”
I went into my junior year of high school having effectively applied to college 5 times over already, before I actually applied to college, for real. And that’s what it took. You had to prep to get into the programs, just so you could prep to get into college.
Soon, I became an expert at that pattern of productivity: prepping the prep required for my prep.
And at that time — to be clear — I wanted to.
I loved the idea of going to my top choice college, with a beautiful campus, world class professors and a community of nerdy Copernicuses. And, I ultimately did.
That mission demanded a lot of me, but it also felt clear and meaningful until the day I completed it.
Then, 4 years later, I became a working adult.
And my productive patterns from childhood carried forward, but in a new twisted way.
I started to feel that every moment of my time needed to go towards productively preparing for future-me.
And, worse yet?
I started to feel stressed if it didn’t.
When focus on front-loading becomes fear of delay
By the time I became a career woman, I was starting to feel pangs of conflict deep in my gut. And I think for many of us, that indigestion takes the form of a question:
At what point do I stop optimizing for the future, and allow myself to actually enjoy today?
Above all else, I feared feeling disappointed down the line. But disappointed how? — I couldn’t concretely say.
I was wise enough to know that more money wouldn’t solely unlock happiness. And also wise enough to know that more money would undoubtedly unlock some.
So my best guess on a fool-proof way to avoid future disappointment was by continuing to maximize financial freedom, even if it meant taking some hits to happiness today.
Down the line, all drains on fulfillment would surely be forgiven!
Such is the trap we hyper-productive-types fall into:
Recurrent amnesia of our daily sacrifices, coupled with blind faith that all of that happiness-debt will surely, eventually be repaid.
In fact, the closest thing to the feeling of “deep fulfillment” that I knew, was just my own stress when it was briefly fleetingly numbed.
The only way I could feel better in the face of an ongoing conveyer belt of work, was by doubling down for the sake of future-me — and working more today.
I didn’t pause for reflection or even allow a second of procrastination. Instead, I became more productive, and less discerning of when I deployed that superpower. It became a drug: a way to un-feel doubt of whether I was being smart enough about my future.
I was no longer charting a path towards a purpose, so much as I was seeking comfort and reassurance that I’m at least keeping pace.
What was once my gift — a powerful capacity for focused execution — had become my curse:
The fear of detour, inefficiency or delay.
And if you find yourself in that place — knowing in your soul that you’re being hyper-productive to relieve your stress, more than using it to realize a specific outcome that delights you — it might be time to reset.
It might be time to return to something we used to know how to do, by default. It might be time to ramp down that productivity.
And instead: ramp up some play.
Unlearning some productivity to relearn play
When you know concretely what you want, a mindset of productivity is a beautiful thing. It can filter-out distractions and focus-in on a goal.
But when you don’t know what you want, it can backfire. Our fear of delay turns us into prisoners of our own inertia.
A distinctly adult phenomenon to sometimes resist trying new ways.
I, for one, have never met a kid that needed to be “life coached” on how to find fulfillment. And I’ve never met a kid that forced themselves to keep doing something out of fear that they couldn’t part ways.
In my case, I steered clear of playing around with new pursuits for years.
If it wasn't guaranteed to be fruitful — having proof of some future value today — it wasn’t getting any energy from me. The bar for my own productivity, killed my curiosity.
And that’s the key difference from kids.
Kids start things. And they stop them. They pick up things. And they put them down again. They do seemingly pointless things all the time — like building pillow forts that eventually get cleaned up, or making sand castles that wash away.
Kids don’t police themselves out of trying seemingly pointless pursuits. And they don’t need line of sight to some future value to dictate what they choose to try today.
For us adults, play may look a bit different, of course. But the freedom from fear of pointlessness holds true all the same.
It’s taking a dance class knowing you have no imminent plans to become a choreographer, trying out for “Villager #3” in your community’s theater production of Oliver Twist, or signing up for the town bake-off even though you’ve never made a peach cobbler in your life.
None of these activities offer proof of profound future value upfront.
But mistake not: play is productive — it’s just productive in a different way.
A mindset of play lowers the barriers to entry of pursuits. And it may even feel a bit like work upfront — but only if make it.
Play may feel like work only so much as it needs to battle against your own apathy, self-consciousness or cynicism.
Playing with new pursuits only feels like work if you make it litigate against your own stubborn sense of certainty, that has you so convinced that you already know all that there is to know about what you like and dislike.
But if you breakdown those mental blocks that don’t serve you, you realize play at its core is a gift to yourself: the freedom to cultivate insight and input into what you like, before your obsession with the promise of some productive output can get in the way.
In fact, I’ve found that honoring more play in your routine is like injecting fun-sized bits of entropy into life.
A lot of play may end up being pointless. But sometimes, when you look back on it — you realize something profound.
You realize that the path of fulfillment is, in fact, a dance between play and productivity.
Partnering together beautifully, to forge the way.
Takeaways: Balancing productivity and play
They say that the best way to avoid deathbed regret is to avoid bedtime regret.
And giving yourself permission to play — carving out time on a regular basis for pursuits that don’t need to prove that they’ll optimize anything about the future upfront — is a wonderful way to do that.
On a micro scale, regular detours from our execution mindset each week can help extract joy on an ongoing basis, so that we’re not banking on a fulfillment payout that arrives just in-time for our funeral.
And on a macro scale, over longer periods of time, the practice of play can guide us towards meaningful life changes. Paths that we wouldn’t have stumbled on otherwise — and even if we had — we might have been too afraid to take because we prematurely raised the stakes.
And I share all of this, because I’ve seen how much the mindset of play fostered discovery of the most fulfilling things in my own life.
When I look back, the pattern is clear:
Play gives you runway to see patterns before you filter them out, from fear. It’s the pre-requisite to finding the things that excite you.
And once it discovers those starting lines, it can decide whether or not it wants to move on to try something new, or hand the baton to that productive mindset to double-down.
Some people call this the balance between “exploration” and “execution.” But whatever you want to call it, the message is the same.
In my case, the pattern played out like this:
[Playful exploration] 8 years ago, I felt aimless in my job, so I picked up a GoPro and started making little videos with God awful shaky footage spliced together, in front of whatever royalty-free music I could download easily online. My grandma was my sole loyal YouTube subscriber.
[Productive execution] 2 years after that, I realized that I truly got into ~flow~ when making videos. So I decided to get more serious and raise the stakes by trying to turn my hobby into a professional gig. I hunkered down and built a small videography business making promo videos for corporate clients.
[Playful exploration] 2 years after, I sensed that I was burning myself out on too much of the stuff that I liked the least: hours of lugging equipment and onsite filming. The part I liked most was at the bookends — working with the clients upfront to craft the script, and editing until we got the story right. So I closed up shop to do more of precisely that. I started casually blogging — where it was all about writing and editing a narrative arc instead.
[Productive execution] 2 years after that, I realized again that writing got me into a type of ~flow~. I was actually building a story here, and I wanted to shape that story more. So I started packaging pieces of journal entires that had accumulated over the years, and challenged myself with a mission to write a book.
I’ve skipped over some details. But that’s the crux of the route to where I find myself today. Grinding through a process that, at the present moment, is definitely not play.
It takes a lot of hours, immense focus, and every lick of my productive powers. And I have high expectations — in quality and deliverability timelines — for myself.
This phase of focused productivity is sometimes not fun, but I also have deep conviction that I’m going the right way.
And authorship may not be the be-all-end-all of what I want to do with my life. Soon, I may need to experiment again, playing with a new stepping stone of learning along the way. But the mere process of building deeper understanding and deep conviction for what I like, is fulfilling.
We can pull fulfillment towards us, rather than leaving it posted at some abstract future finish line, when we treat life as one long, fun exploration-to- execution relay.
And if you don’t know what you want to do in life, and you sense in your soul that you’re not happy with the present course — I wonder — is there even any other way?
Play as a concerted, conscious practice, may actually be the most, dare I say, productive path — to optimizing our future, today.
It doesn’t plan. Or predict. Or censor upfront.
And I suspect those are the precise forces we need to feel free from. Freedom from fear of the future.
So that we can finally begin the process of finding our own beautiful way.
If you found something here that speaks to you, leave a comment :)
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Another great piece by Sabra. I have forward the piece to a number of friends. Gabe
Another thought provoking article!