Bree Groff is a company culture, engagement, and leadership consultant, and serves as a senior advisor to the global consultancy SYPartners. She has guided executives at companies including Calvin Klein, Google, Hilton, Microsoft, and NBCUniversal.
What’s the big idea?
Bree remembers sitting in the waiting room at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center with her mom, hoping desperately that her mom’s oncologist could give her every last day possible—and then talking to a friend from work, telling her she “couldn’t wait for the week to be over.” The different attitudes toward the value of our days was striking. It became very clear: when we wish away the workweek, we wish away our lives. What would it take for us to look forward to Monday?
Below, Bree shares five key insights from her new book, Today Was Fun: A Book About Work (Seriously). Listen to the audio version—read by Bree herself—below, or in the Next Big Idea App.
1. Most work, most days, should be fun.
So much about the working world is patently ridiculous. It’s not normal to be too busy to eat. It’s not normal to look at email before you look at the partner lying beside you every morning. It’s not normal to choose being high performing over happy. And it’s definitely not normal to enjoy 2/7ths of our lives each week.
So no, I don’t believe work needs to be drudgery. I also don’t believe it needs to be our religion or identity or the sum of our fulfillment. That end of the spectrum, while sometimes invigorating, is an easy recipe for burnout. Work can, instead, simply be fun! A nice way to spend our time on the planet.
Because work, at its simplest, is fundamentally enjoyable! We don’t get paid because work is painful. We get paid because we create value. The pain is entirely optional. It’s fun to create something others appreciate. To show off our skills, learn, experiment, and build next to people we like.
Sure, not every day will be fun, but when we falsely equate struggle with greatness, we’ve guaranteed we’re either happy or successful but never both. Consider Kati Kariko, the famed mRNA researcher whose work led to the development of the COVID-19 vaccines. As she would dash off to the lab, her husband would tell her, “You are not going to work—you are going to have fun.” Or take Milton Glaser, the renowned designer of I <3 NY fame, who, when asked why he kept working at age 87, replied, “I do it because it’s so pleasurable for me. I derive this deep, deep satisfaction that nothing else, including sex, has ever given me.” That’s a strong endorsement for fun at work.
2. Your brain works whether you’re wearing a suit or stretchy pants.
We need to lose the notion that we must be “super profesh.” Somewhere along the way, we decided to equate being professional with being well-dressed and well-groomed, rather than doing high-quality work, on time, with respect. We’ve confused being professional with looking professional.
Work is, in many ways, performative. No one really knows what they’re doing, and yet our ability to get things done rests on other people believing that we do. So, we’ve created symbols of professionalism that we use to telegraph our competency. We wear tailored suits to look like what society tells us businesspeople look like. Or we use buzzwords and jargon to obscure our lack of clear thinking. It’s silly. Can we all decide that the new professionalism means being respectful and doing good work, whether or not we’re wearing a zipper?
“We’ve confused being professional with looking professional.”
Also, it’s really no fun. Who wants to be (literally) buttoned up and proper all day long? Why should work be a costume party? When we get dressed for work in the morning, the last thing most people want to put on is a business mask: that way of being that allows us to be seen as palatable, presentable, and acceptable within the dominant business culture. An employee I interviewed at one client said, “The feedback was focused on delivery, not content. We’ve gotten better but have work to do around embracing people, their styles.” And another said, “There shouldn’t be one template of what a successful leader is.”
You might think, Sure, some tech startup or creative agency can be casual and spunky and fun, but serious business demands proper professionalism. But consider perhaps the most serious of all workplaces: the operating room. Dr. Peter Attia, author of Outlive and former Johns Hopkins surgeon, recounts, “Surgeons are often listening to music in the OR, but we only listened to that CD [of Napoleon Dynamite clips]. For an entire month… we never stopped laughing at this thing. People always ask when I tell this story, ‘Did it compromise the outcomes?’ And I will say that there was a period of three days when we did 13 kidney transplants: every one of those patients had a remarkable achievement outcome.” If surgeons are having fun while people’s lives are on the line, you can have fun in your next budget meeting.
3. Shoveling shit is fun if you like your co-shovelers.
Loads of research shows that friendship at work drives business outcomes. I’m far more interested in the argument that friendship at work drives “I’m enjoying my life” outcomes. Because what good is a strong bottom line if everyone’s miserable? If we know relationships are the secret to long-term human happiness, why do we pretend it’s different at work? You should like the people you spend your days with. Plain and simple.
“What good is a strong bottom line if everyone’s miserable?”
In the show The Office, the imaginary organization Dunder Mifflin is a paper sales company—a brilliant choice for its extreme dullness. The point of the show was not to showcase purpose at work, or passion, or that work sucks. It was to show that, even without purpose and passion, work doesn’t suck because of the people.
The office workers at Dunder Mifflin all kind of hated each other (except for a few notable romances), but they made their own fun, nonetheless. From the dullest of scenes—HR presentations and fire safety protocols—came all kinds of hilarity. I’m very aware that some of the jokes didn’t age well. But I think the sentiment remains: Work is fun if we, together, make it that way.
4. Make brilliant work—don’t let busyness and conformity sabotage you.
We should do brilliant work because it drives business. Because it creates value. But even cooler than either of those reasons is that doing brilliant work makes us feel alive! It’s a cool part of being a human that we get to play around on the planet and try to make stuff that makes others happy. We’re all just big kids shouting, “Hey, watch this! Look what I can do!” It’s simply fun. And yet, two things get in the way: busyness and conformity.
Busyness can be a strategy problem. You aren’t prioritizing what drives your business and are making yourself busy with too many side quests. It can be a power problem—that managers need to constantly coordinate and are therefore making workers attend 17 status meetings a week. Or it can be a psychology problem: It feels good to be busy because busy means “I’m in demand,” “I’m needed.” It can also be an escape from the rest of life.
Brilliance requires spaciousness. Busyness is fight or flight, while brilliance is sitting in the meadow, dreaming about your innovative new shelter. What does it take for us to simply sit and think once in a while?
“Busyness is fight or flight, while brilliance is sitting in the meadow, dreaming about your innovative new shelter.”
Conformity is equally dominating and alluring. Making our work look like everyone else’s work is a form of safety. It’s “I’m just doing it how we’ve always done it. Don’t blame me!” But what happens when we honor our own instincts first and lead with creative confidence? Take the acclaimed and non-conforming screenwriter Stanley Kubrick. Someone once asked him if it was usual for a director to spend so much time lighting each shot. He said, “I don’t know. I’ve never seen anyone else light a film.” He trusted in himself.
You may not want a whole organization filled with Stanley Kubricks who are definitely not getting their expense reports done on time. But truly anyone—anyone!—can learn to be brilliant in at least some aspect of their work: whether they’re a barista making latte art, an HR manager creating trainings, or a CEO setting a strategy, there is always some opportunity for human expression. And that’s the fun stuff.
5. Get good at life, not just work.
The trouble with work is that it can be greedy. Sometimes you may work too much because that’s what the job requires. Other times it might be because you find it fun and even addicting. But either way, there’s a cost, and it can’t be avoided. When you overwork, you underlive. And that’s no fun.
Our time is finite, and if more is spent working, less is spent on date nights, crossword puzzles, your health, or many other parts of your life that are important to you. Under no circumstances should you take your laptop on your date night in a quest to “have it all.” You are more important than you think to those who love you. You are less important than you think to those who employ you. Even leaders of nations are replaceable! But it can be hard to keep overworking tamped down if we don’t see how much there is to gain.
We were at the beach one day when my husband, Brad, said to a friend of ours, “It was so nice to have a day to do nothing.” Our friend responded, “Nothing?! When was the last time you had lobster for lunch and swam so vigorously in the sea? You did everything!” Of course, Brad was referring to having done no work—the measure of how productive we are for business or society. When I think of a day I did “everything,” I used to think of a day when I ran around hyper-efficiently getting things done. But that’s not the kind of everything-life I want now.
I want the kind of everything-life where I have time to sing the ridiculous wake-up song to my daughter in the morning. Where I belly laugh with colleagues instead of getting right down to business. Maybe some everything-days are grand and filled with lobster and the sea, while some are small and sweet and filled with time to read and walk and cook with my family and totally mess up the recipe, but it doesn’t really matter. I want that kind of everything-life. Perhaps you do too? The kind of life where I curl up at night and think: Today was fun.
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