Law Six: Always make your enjoyment greater than your effort.

Enjoyment is essential for lifetime growth. Some people believe that success has to be hard-earned to be real. They are highly suspicious of any gains that come as a result of enjoyment. If they earn rewards this way inadvertently, they feel guilty. If others appear to be profiting from enjoyment, they question their morality, certain that such gains can only be ill-gotten.

Meanwhile, they continue to toil away at things that give them no pleasure, suppressing any hints of enjoyment that may creep through, lest these be interpreted as signs that they’re not “serious” or “professional” and deserving of success. In the process, they cut themselves off from a major source of energy, creativity, and motivation.

Finding ways to get more and more enjoyment from your activities is one way to ensure continued growth. Creativity in all fields of activity is intimately linked to playfulness — the constant desire to do new things just for the fun of it. Approach everything you do with this sense of play, and you will ensure that, though you still get as good or even better results, your enjoyment is always greater than your effort.

Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go into the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius. –Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Work is the main form of effort.

While there are those who theorize about some other basis for society, the real world we live in is based on certain fundamentals. One of those fundamentals is that we need money to survive, and the main source of money is work.

Three attitudes about work prevail:

• “I resent having to work. Work is tedious.”
• “I work hard because it gives me status or rewards.”
• “I love what I do.”

Our attitude may shift among the three depending on the kind of work we’re doing, but only the third approach contains room for lifetime enjoyment and growth.

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Law Six: Always make your enjoyment greater than your effort.

Enjoyment is essential for lifetime growth. Some people believe that success has to be hard-earned to be real. They are highly suspicious of any gains that come as a result of enjoyment. If they earn rewards this way inadvertently, they feel guilty. If others appear to be profiting from enjoyment, they question their morality, certain that such gains can only be ill-gotten.

Meanwhile, they continue to toil away at things that give them no pleasure, suppressing any hints of enjoyment that may creep through, lest these be interpreted as signs that they’re not “serious” or “professional” and deserving of success. In the process, they cut themselves off from a major source of energy, creativity, and motivation.

Finding ways to get more and more enjoyment from your activities is one way to ensure continued growth. Creativity in all fields of activity is intimately linked to playfulness — the constant desire to do new things just for the fun of it. Approach everything you do with this sense of play, and you will ensure that, though you still get as good or even better results, your enjoyment is always greater than your effort.

Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go into the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius. –Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Work is the main form of effort.

While there are those who theorize about some other basis for society, the real world we live in is based on certain fundamentals. One of those fundamentals is that we need money to survive, and the main source of money is work.

Three attitudes about work prevail:

• “I resent having to work. Work is tedious.”
• “I work hard because it gives me status or rewards.”
• “I love what I do.”

Our attitude may shift among the three depending on the kind of work we’re doing, but only the third approach contains room for lifetime enjoyment and growth.

Next