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When I was in the water polo team competing for nationals, I used to remember the coach would holler at me whenever I smiled in a match. “Be serious,” he warned. Being serious didn’t sit well with me. As much as I wanted to win, I also wanted to have fun. For me, being serious took the fun out of everything, leaving only fear and anxiety. That wasn’t how I wanted to compete.
We are serious all the time
We live in a society that is constantly becoming more and more competitive. Although I do believe competition does push us to better ourselves and drives companies to innovate better products/services, I think we have long past a healthy level of competition. Nowadays, the bar is set way higher than before, meaning more sacrifices have to be made. No wonder people are arguably less happy than before, with increase incidences of depression, anxiety and burnout. While the system is partly to blame, I feel we need to change our mindset to adapt with the times. From one of seriousness to one of sincerity.
In my view, being serious places undue importance on something at the expense of everything else. Your health, relationships and your other pursuits may suffer. Being serious makes you extremely result oriented. Nervousness and anxiety take over. Your brain, being an avid storyteller, starts catastrophizing. Seriousness dulls the mind, hampers our creativity which compromises our performance.
If you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life.
American singer-songwriter Marc Anthony
Worst of all, in being serious, there is no room for fun. In being result oriented, we lose that enthusiasm towards learning and forget to celebrate the small successes along the way. Work becomes dull. Look around, we all struggle with procrastination. Why? It is not because we are lazy. If we all did stuff we enjoyed, we would be super productive throughout the day. Rather, I think it is because we take our work too seriously that it takes the fun out of it. In taking things seriously, work that we once enjoyed doing becomes something we dread.
With competition being more intense than ever before, we are in serious mode majority of the time, which really takes a toll on us. We yearn to have fun and laughter but simply cannot find an opportune time to do so. Eventually, our emotion burden can be too great for us to bear. In being serious, we are doing a disservice to ourselves.
Be sincere about your work
Truth is, excellence and enjoyment does not have to be mutually exclusive. Rather than being serious, I say we all should be sincere in handling our work. Being sincere means to tackle tasks with enthusiasm and curiosity. Remember when you first picked up something you eventually came to love? For me, it is learning the guitar. Learning chords was painful and tiring but I looked forward to it. I actively looked for new avenues to improve. That is being sincere.
Truth is, in life we can only control our mindset and our actions. In being sincere, we focus on the process instead of the results, doing our utmost best to ensure the highest chances of success. While we might be disappointed that we do not succeed, knowing we did our best make it that much easier to move on.
The best part about being sincere? There is room for fun. There is excitement in tackling each new challenge and bettering ourselves. We are not afraid about being silly or making mistakes because it provides an excellent opportunity for us to learn from.
“I have fun running ALL the Virgin businesses — so a setback is never a bad experience, just a learning curve.”
Virgin group founder Richard Branson
Take a look at the people who have achieved sustained success in their careers. They are all sincere when it comes to their work. Richard Branson, founder of Virgin group wanted to live life to the full by tackling new challenges. He ventured into many areas such as telecoms, hotels, healthcare, music and even space. Each project posed new challenges, but Branson learnt to pour his heart into anything he does, have fun and live with the results, whatever it may be. There is hardly room for regret and frustration for Branson when he is already having fun doing his next project.
Playfulness means not just silliness but an experimental attitude. Looking at the world sideways and being curious.
Slack’s founder Stewart Butterfield
The founder of Flickr and Slack, Stewart Butterfield did not know what he wanted to do at the age of 25. Several of his projects early on had failed to release. Instead of being discouraged, he continued approaching his work with enthusiasm and an open mind and it opened him to many new opportunities.
How to develop sincerity in your work?
Make your work fun: You can only be enthusiastic about the things you enjoy. While you can’t always pick things that you are interested in, but you can make things fun. Youtuber Ali Abdal makes his studying process more enjoyable by color coding his notes and does up aesthetic study schedules. Think about what can you do to make your work seem more like a game instead of a chore.
Explore new things you are interested in: In learning new things from scratch, you develop the amateur mindset. An amateur is always enthusiastic when it comes to learning and celebrating small successes along the way. You learn to enjoy the process and have fun in everything you do.
Continually reflect: being sincere in your work means you must be in touch with your feelings and your values. Be mindful about what are your likes and dislikes, what are your priorities and why you are doing this. It keeps you focused on the things you value while removing other distractions in your life. Read: Discovering your life’s purpose
Color your world by being sincere. Approach things with a childlike enthusiasm and sincerity. And don’t forget to have fun.