Maybe This Is What’s Missing – Or – It’s Only Work If You’d Rather Be Doing Something Else
Source: MIT
Substitute (instructional design | course development | teaching | writing | learning) where you see “research” and “physics” in the excerpts below.
“But when it came time to do some research. I couldn’t get to work. I was a little tired; I was not interested; I couldn’t do research!… And then I thought to myself, “You know, what they think of you is so fantastic, it’s impossible to live up to it. You have no responsibility to live up to it!”… Then I had another thought; Physics disgusts me a little bit now, but I used to enjoy doing physics. Why did I enjoy it? I used to play with it. I used to do whatever I felt like doing – it didn’t have to do with whether it was important for the development of nuclear physics…. So I get this new attitude… I’m going to play with physics, whenever I want to, without worrying about any importance whatsoever. Withing a week I was in the cafeteria and some guy, fooling around, throws a plate in the air…. I had nothing to do, so I start to figure out the motion of the rotating plate… And before I knew it (it was a very short time) I was ‘playing’ – working, really – with the same old problem that I loved so much, that I had stopped working on when I went to Los Alamos; my thesis-type problems; all those old-fashioned wonderful things. It was effortless. It was easy to play with these things. It was like uncorking a bottle: Everything flowed out effortlessly…. 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.” – Richard Feynman, excerpts from Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman
There. How does that make you feel? More importantly, how does that make you feel about your work? Worth a try, isn’t it? After all, if Feynman had not realized the connection between play and learning he might have stayed in funk much longer and, perhaps, missed the opportunity to experience the pleasure in discovering something really interesting. (I am tempted to end the last sentence with something like “…that ultimately led to a Nobel Prize in Physics,” but I know enough about Richard Feynman to avoid that one. He would be quick to say that nothing he did was ever about winning a prize.)
Attribution
Miki at PythonWise
References
Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman (PDF)
Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Adventures of a Curious Character)
The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman
The Feynman Lectures on Physics
Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher
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