Blissful productivity: Where work meets play
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Some are lucky enough to let others decide whether they are working or playing because to themselves they always doing both.
There is place where work meets play. It’s a marvelous, wonderful, hard to find place. Perhaps you know someone who’s been there? Perhaps you’re lucky enough to have been there yourself?
I got into computer programming when I was about 12. I spent entire weekends and holidays reading BASIC manuals and coding from morning till night.
No one was grading me, paying me or asking me to do it. Like a kid in a candy store or a moth to the flame, I simply couldn’t help myself.
Even 25 years later I still do a bit of coding “on the side”. Over December I built a couple of things and caught myself several times just fully immersed in that blissful productivity.
Immersed and transfixed, with an almost hypnotic focus. Not wanting to break to eat. Letting Mother Nature’s calls go to voicemail. Completely lost inside the work.
It made me think of this Keith Cunningham quote I saw on Twitter recently:
“The Master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his information and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence at whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him he’s always doing both.”