Richard Feynman was a physicist who, at one point in his career, was in a bit of a slump. He lamented how he used to enjoy physics because he “used to play with it.” Specifically, he recalls how “it didn’t have to do with whether it was important for the development of nuclear physics, but whether it was interesting and amusing for me to play with.”
He used to treasure tinkering with physics, having that lightness in his work. But since his joy had faded, he resolved to stop approaching physics too seriously.
Feynman rediscovered that lost spark while sitting in the cafeteria. He noticed a student fooling around and throwing a plate in the air. He thought about this rotating plate and came up with some ideas about the physics of what was happening.
He approached his colleague Hans and said, “Hey Hans, I noticed something interesting here… The plate goes around…” and showed him the accelerations.
Hans replied, “Feynman, that’s pretty interesting. But what’s the importance of it? Why are you doing it?”
Feynman responded, “Huh! There’s no importance whatsoever! I’m just doing it for the fun of it!”
That’s a key line: “I’m just doing it for the fun of it.” Feynman continued to work on it and reflected on how there was “no importance to what I was doing, but ultimately there was. The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate.” This state of playful creativity is what the pioneering psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls a flow state.
By focusing on playful exploration, Feynman became more creative, which led him to win a Nobel Prize. Similarly, Apple, Google, YouTube, Facebook, Airbnb, WhatsApp, and countless other significant businesses all began as side projects pursued by their founders just for fun.
What do you do purely for fun? Which activities cause you to lose track of time because you are so immersed in them? Imagine doing this work instead of clocking in and clocking out. Imagine having fun all day and receiving the equivalent of a Nobel Prize for your work, just like Feynman did.
This article is an excerpt from Chapter 6 of Choose Your Work
Footnotes
Richard Feynman was a physicist who, at one point in his career, was in a bit of a slump: Richard Feynman wrote about this experience in his autobiographical book. See Richard P. Feynman, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1985), 167–169.
This state of playful creativity is what the pioneering psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls a flow state: See Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper & Row, 1990), 63–66, 118–119
By focusing on playful exploration, Feynman became more creative, which led him to win a Nobel Prize: Feynman was not an isolated example either. See Jean Kathryn Carney, “Intrinsic Motivation and Artistic Success,” PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1986; J. W. Getzels and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, The Creative Vision: A Longitudinal Study of Problem-Finding in Art (New York: Wiley, 1976), cited in Daniel H. Pink, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us (New York: Riverhead Books, 2009), 38–39.
Dan Dobos writes about decision making, personal growth, human potential, fulfillment and helping people choose the work that they are meant to do. He is the author of Choose Your Work.