Why would we simply endure essential activities when we can enjoy them instead?

By pairing essential activities with enjoyable ones, we can make tackling even the most tedious and overwhelming tasks more effortless.

If their work is satisfying people don't need leisure in the old-fashioned sense. No one ever asks what Newton or Darwin did to relax, or how Bach spent his weekends. At Eden-Olympia work is the ultimate play, and play the ultimate work.

Work and play do not have to be completely separate activities. It is good to find the fun in your work. Finding enjoyment in daily tasks helps us get through the day and through our lives.

Take work as a game and enjoy it. Everything is a challenge. Just don’t go on doing it, dragging yourself because it has to be done.
So there are only two possibilities: either find work you like or become capable of liking the work, whatsoever it is. The second is the best alternative because it is very difficult to find work that you like.like. Sooner or later you will dislike it. In the beginning, maybe you like it.

ways that seem increasingly elusive, if not downright impossible, if you’re working too hard. This doesn’t have to be an either-or proposition. It is possible to be effectively doing while you are delightfully being, in your ordinary workaday world. The art of resting the mind and the

To keep up this “standard” most of us are willing to put up with lives that consist largely in doing jobs that are a bore, earning the means to seek relief from the tedium by intervals of hectic and expensive pleasure. These intervals are supposed to be the real living, the real purpose served by the necessary evil of work. Or we imagine that the justification of such work is the rearing of a family to go on doing the same kind of thing, in order to rear another family … and so ad infinitum.

Eventually, tuning out the undermining voices and losing yourself in the work will not be an effort of will, but an earned ability.

Now to exert oneself and work for the sake of amusement seems silly and utterly childish. But to amuse oneself in order that one may exert oneself, as Anacharsis puts it, seems right; for amusement is a sort of relaxation, and we need relaxation because we cannot work continuously. Relaxation, then, is not an end; for it is taken for the sake of activity.

Doing things we know how to do well is enjoyable, and that’s exactly the opposite of what deliberate practice demands….

What if the biggest thing keeping us from doing what matters is the false assumption that it has to take tremendous effort? What if, instead, we considered the possibility that the reason something feels hard is that we haven’t yet found the easier way to do it?

Laziness may appear attractive, but work gives satisfaction.

Ironically, really good work often appears to be effortless. People will say, “Why didn’t I think of that?” They won’t see the years of toil and sweat that went into it.

It is easier to do trivial things that are urgent, than it is to do important things that are not urgent, like thinking.