Have Fun

Here's a little secret about me: I love the Olympics. I love the competition and watching the athletes push themselves and the beauty of someone doing the best they can. I love the athletes' stories...knowing where they come from and why they do what they do. I love watching world records fall and I love seeing people having fun.

When I say I love seeing people having fun, I am talking about the athletes. Yes, they are competing. Yes, many of them won't even come close to winning. But, many of them really seem to be having fun. This is their job and they have put in way more hours of work than we could imagine. They train hard. They compete hard. Through it all, they really seem to be enjoying themselves.

Now, I realize these athletes are competing in sports and not filing paperwork or writing reports or managing a bunch of staff, but they are still working hard. The fact that they are are having fun, makes it easier to work hard. When we enjoy what we do, we are going to put in more effort and spend more time "practicing" to become great. We are going to want to show up every morning and do whatever we can to succeed.

If the athletes on the world stage, competing in the biggest event in their life, are having fun doing it, shouldn't we all strive to find something we enjoy? I know the vast majority of us are never going to do anything close to Olympics, but we have the ability to do what matters the most to us. We can choose to be miserable doing it or we can choose to have fun. Like the athletes in London, the best work is going to be done by those of us who choose to have fun doing it.

We all want to have fun. We want to wake up every morning and feel excitement about the day ahead. Like many of these athletes, we realize most of our days are going to be repetitive, doing the same things over and over. We can complain about this and be unhappy or we can find ways to make it interesting. We can look for ways to have fun. We can figure out what we need to do to enjoy our days. We can work hard, trying to become the best we can at what we do, but unless we are having fun doing it, is it really worth it?

While you are watching the Olympics during the next two weeks, figure out how you can have more fun doing what you do. The more fun we have while putting in the work, the better our work will become. Give it a shot...have some fun and see what happens.