Feel-Good Productivity: How to Do More of What Matters To You PDF

 Begin Reading Table of Contents About the Author Copyright Page The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book y...

 Begin Reading Table of Contents About the Author Copyright Page The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy. To Mimi and Nani – for all your love, support and sacrifices.  INTRODUCTION ‘Merry Christmas, Ali. Try not to kill anyone.’ With these words, my consultant breezily hung up the phone, leaving me to handle an entire ward of patients alone. I was a newly qualified junior doctor, and three weeks previously I’d made a rookie error: forgetting to fill out a form to request the holidays off. Now, here I was, managing a hospital ward, on my own, on Christmas Day. Things had started badly and rapidly got worse. When I arrived at the hospital, I was met by an avalanche of patient histories, diagnostic reports and cryptic scan requests that would’ve made more sense to a seasoned archaeologist than our on-call radiologist. Within minutes, I was confronted by the day’s first emergency: a man in his fifties who had collapsed from a severe cardiac arrest. And then one of the nurses informed me that a patient urgently needed a manual evacuation (if you know, you know). At 10:30am, I looked around the ward. Nurse Janice was sprinting up and down corridor A in a panic, her arms overflowing with IV drips and medication charts. On corridor B, a stubborn elderly patient was loudly demanding his misplaced dentures. Corridor C had been taken over by a drunken exile from the emergency department, wandering the corridor and shouting ‘Olive! Olive!’ (I never learned who Olive was.) And every minute, somebody was making a new demand: ‘Dr Ali, can you check on Mrs Johnson’s fever?’ ‘Dr Ali, can you help with Mr Singh’s elevated potassium?’ I soon found myself starting to panic. Medical school hadn’t prepared me for anything like this. Until then, I’d always been quite an effective student. Whenever the going got tough, my strategy was simple: work harder. It was a method that had got me into medical school seven years previously. It had allowed me to secure a handful of publications in academic journals. It had even allowed me to launch a business while I studied. Discipline was the only productivity system I knew. And it worked.  Except now it wasn’t working. Since starting as a doctor a few months previously I’d felt like I was drowning. Even when I worked late into the night, I couldn’t see the number of patients or finish the paperwork that I needed to. My mood was suffering, too; I’d enjoyed my medical training to be a doctor, but I was finding the actual job utterly depressing, constantly worrying that I might make a mistake that would kill someone. I stopped sleeping, friendships faded, my family stopped hearing from me. And I just kept working harder. And now this. Christmas Day, alone on a hospital ward, failing to get through my shift. Everything came to a head when I dropped a tray of medical supplies, sending syringes flying across the linoleum floor. As I forlornly looked down at my damp scrubs, I realised I had to figure things out – or my dream of becoming a surgeon would slip through my fingers. That night, I hung up my stethoscope, grabbed a mince pie, and opened my laptop. I’d once been so productive, I thought. What had I forgotten? During my first year at medical school, I’d become obsessed with the secrets of productivity. I’d stayed up night after night making notes on hundreds of articles, blog posts and videos promising the key to optimal performance. All the gurus emphasised the importance of hard slog. A Muhammad Ali quote came up a lot: ‘I hated every minute of training, but I said, “Don’t quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion.”’ As Christmas turned to Boxing Day, I stayed up poring over my old notes and wondered whether that was where I was going wrong. Did I just need to regain my old work ethic? But when I returned to work the next day resolving to just do more, it made no difference. Even though I stayed on the ward until midnight – and even though I was reciting Muhammad Ali’s line to myself during my toilet breaks – I wasn’t getting through my paperwork any quicker. My patients were still getting a tired, ineffective version of Ali. And I was still displaying a conspicuous lack of Christmas cheer. At the end of my hardest day yet, I felt completely underwater. And then from nowhere, I remembered some words of wisdom from my old tutor, Dr Barclay. ‘If the treatment isn’t working, question the diagnosis.’ Slowly, and then all at once, I started to doubt all the productivity advice I had absorbed. Did success really require suffering? What was ‘success’ anyway? Was suffering even sustainable? Did it make sense that feeling overwhelmed would be good for getting things done? Did I have to trade my health and happiness for, well, anything? It would take me a few months. But I was stumbling my way to a revelation: that everything I’d been told about success was wrong. I couldn’t hustle my way to becoming a good doctor. Working harder wasn’t going to bring me happiness. And there was another path to fulfilment: one that wasn’t lined with constant anxiety, sleepless nights, and a concerning dependence on caffeine. I didn’t have all the answers, not by a long shot. But for the first time, I could make out the beginnings of an alternative approach. An approach that didn’t hinge on exhaustingly hard work, but on understanding what made hard work feel better. An approach that focused on my wellbeing first, and used that wellbeing to drive my focus and motivation second. An approach I would come to refer to as feel-good productivity. THE SURPRISING SECRETS OF FEEL-GOOD PRODUCTIVITY Back in medical school, my obsession with productivity had led me to tack on an extra year to earn a psychology degree. As I started putting together the pieces of feel-good productivity, I remembered a study I’d been tested on – one that involved a candle, a book of matches and a box of thumbtacks.  Picture yourself with these three objects before you. Your task is to stick the candle to the corkboard on the wall so that, when it’s lit, the candle wax won’t drip onto the table below. You find yourself puzzling over the items, turning them over in your hands. Can you think of the solution? When presented with this problem, most people only consider the candle, the matches and the thumbtacks. But more innovative minds recognise the potential of the thumbtack box. The optimal solution to the puzzle involves viewing the thumbtack box not just as a container, but as a candle holder. This is the ‘candle problem’, a classic test of creative thinking. First developed by Karl Duncker, and published posthumously in 1945, it has since been used in countless studies testing everything from cognitive flexibility to the psychological fallout of stress. In the late 1970s, psychologist Alice Isen used it as the basis for an influential experiment to study how mood affects people’s creativity.  Isen began by dividing her volunteers into two groups. One group was given a small gift – a bag of candy – before facing the candle problem. The other group started the task with no such incentive. The theory went that those who were given the sweets would have a more positive mood when they tried to solve the puzzle. Isen found something interesting: those whose moods were subtly improved by the gift were significantly more successful in solving the candle problem. When I first read about Isen’s experiment during my psychology degree, I found it interesting but not exactly transformative. Personally, I’d never felt the overwhelming urge to stick a candle to a wall. But coming back to it as a junior doctor, I realised that Isen’s insight was quite profound. It suggested that feeling good doesn’t just end with feeling good. It actually changes our patterns of thought and behaviour.  I now learned that the study had become the cornerstone of a wave of research exploring the way positive emotions affect many of our cognitive processes. It showed that when we’re in a positive mood, we tend to consider a broader range of actions, be more open to new experiences, and better integrate the information we receive. In other words, feeling good boosts our creativity – and our productivity. One of the first people to explore how exactly this works was Barbara Fredrickson. A professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Fredrickson is one of the leading figures in positive psychology, a relatively new branch of psychology that focuses on understanding and promoting happiness. In the late 1990s, Fredrickson proposed what she called the ‘broaden-and-build’ theory of positive emotions. According to the broaden-and-build theory, positive emotions ‘broaden’ our awareness and ‘build’ our cognitive and social resources. Broaden refers to the immediate effect of positive emotions: when we’re feeling good, our minds open up, we take in more information, and we see more possibilities around us. Consider the candle problem: in a positive mood, participants were able to see a broader range of potential solutions. Build refers to the long-term effects of positive emotions. When we experience positive emotions, we build up a reservoir of mental and emotional resources that can help us in the future – resources like resilience, creativity, problem-solving skills, social connections and physical health. Over time, these two processes reinforce each other, creating an upward spiral of positivity, growth and success. Positive emotions are the fuel that drives the engine of human flourishing. The theory suggests a whole new way of understanding the role of positive emotions in our lives. They’re not just fleeting feelings that come and go without consequence. They’re integral to our cognitive functioning, our social relationships and our overall wellbeing. Positive emotions are the fuel that drives the engine of human flourishing. WHY FEEL-GOOD PRODUCTIVITY WORKS When I first started learning about broaden-and-build, I caught a glimpse of a different way of thinking about my life. For years, I’d thought that by simply hustling harder I could achieve the things I wanted. If I wanted to be a good doctor, the life ahead of me would be defined by grinding, unrelenting work. Now, I could see another way. Fredrickson’s theory suggests that positive emotions change the way our brains operate. Step one is feeling better. Step two is doing more of what matters to us. But why? I wondered. The more I read, the more I realised that the explanations are varied – and in some cases remain unclear. But scientists have started to home in on a few answers. First, feeling good boosts our energy. Most of us have felt an energy that’s not strictly physical or biological, one that doesn’t just come from sugar or carbohydrates, but from a mix of motivation, focus and inspiration. It’s the energy you feel when you’re working on a particularly engrossing task, or when you’re surrounded by inspiring people. This energy has many different names. It’s been labelled as ‘emotional’, ‘spiritual’, ‘mental’ or ‘motivational’ energy by psychologists; ‘zest’, ‘vitality’ or ‘energetic arousal’ by neuroscientists. But if researchers can’t agree on what to name it, they’re agreed that it makes us focused, inspired and motivated to pursue our goals. So what’s the source of this mysterious energy? The short answer: feeling good. Positive emotions are bound up with a set of four hormones – endorphins, serotonin, dopamine and oxytocin – which are often labelled as the ‘feel-good hormones’. All of them allow us to accomplish more. Endorphins are often released during physical activity, stress or pain and bring about feelings of happiness and diminished discomfort – and elevated levels usually correlate with increased energy and motivation. Serotonin is connected to mood regulation, sleep, appetite and overall feelings of wellbeing; it underpins our sense of contentment and gives us the energy to tackle tasks efficiently. Dopamine, or the ‘reward’ hormone, is linked with motivation and pleasure and its release provides a satisfaction that allows us to focus for longer. And oxytocin, known as the ‘love’ hormone, is associated with social bonding, trust and relationship- building, which enhances our capacity to connect with others, boosts our mood and, in turn, impacts our productivity. All this means that these feel-good hormones are the starting point of a virtuous cycle. When we feel good, we generate energy, which boosts our productivity. And this productivity leads to feelings of achievement, which make us feel good all over again. Second, feeling good reduces our stress. In addition to the broaden-and-build theory, Barbara Fredrickson also developed what psychologists call the ‘undoing hypothesis’. Fredrickson and her colleagues were interested in decades of research showing that negative emotions cause the release of stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol. This isn’t a problem in the short-term; it’s the mechanism that motivates us to run from danger. But if we experience these negative sensations too often, we become riddled with anxiety, and our physical health suffers. The continuous activation of these hormones can even increase the risk of developing heart disease and high blood pressure. Not ideal. Fredrickson wondered about the flipside: if negative emotions have these harmful physiological effects, then perhaps positive emotions could reverse them. Might feeling good ‘reset’ the nervous system and put the body into a more relaxed state? To test this out, Fredrickson came up with a rather mean study. Researchers told a group of people that they had one minute to prepare a public speech that would be filmed and judged by their peers. Knowing that the fear of public speaking is practically universal, Fredrickson hypothesised that this would elevate the subjects’ levels of anxiety and stress. And it did; people reported feeling more anxious, and experienced increases in heart rate and blood pressure. Next, the researchers randomly assigned participants to watch one of four films: two evoking mildly positive emotions, the third neutral ones, and the fourth sad ones. And they then measured how long it took the participants to ‘recover’ from the stress. Their findings were intriguing. The participants who watched the positive-emotion films took significantly less time to return to their baseline state in terms of heart rate and blood pressure. And those who watched the sadness-evoking film took the longest time to return to baseline. This is the ‘undoing hypothesis’: that positive emotions can ‘undo’ the effects of stress and other negative emotions. If stress is the problem, then feeling good might just be the solution. But the final, and perhaps most transformative, implication of feel- good productivity goes well beyond any one task or project. Because third, feeling good enriches your life. In 2005, a team of psychologists read all the studies they could find on the complex relationship between happiness and success. They delved into 225 published papers which involved data from over 275,000 individuals. Their question: Does success, as we’re often told, make us happier – or could it be the other way round?  The study offered hard evidence that we tend to get happiness wrong. Individuals who frequently experience positive emotions aren’t just more sociable, optimistic and creative. They also accomplish more. These people bring an infectious energy to their environment, proving more likely to enjoy fulfilling relationships, get higher salaries and truly shine in their professional lives. Those who cultivate positive emotions at work morph into better problem- solvers, planners, creative thinkers and resilient go-getters. They’re less stressed, attract higher evaluations from their superiors and show a higher degree of loyalty to their organisations. Success doesn’t lead to feeling good. Feeling good leads to success. Put simply: success doesn’t lead to feeling good. Feeling good leads to success. HOW TO USE THIS BOOK Back in that first harrowing year as a doctor, most of these discoveries were still years ahead of me. I was working endless shifts and trying to shoehorn my productivity research into the fleeting breaks between visiting patients.  But even the basic insights I uncovered were enough to cause a dramatic change in my relationship with work. When I started to let go of my obsessions with discipline and focus instead on making work feel good, my horrific shifts started to get easier. Soon my mood started to improve too. I remember one appointment with an elderly patient a few months after I discovered feel-good productivity. ‘You know, doctor,’ she said, ‘you’re the first one in here who’s smiled all week.’ These new perspectives wouldn’t just alter my approach to being a doctor. They would alter the direction of my life altogether. For the first time in years, I began to see the opportunities beyond the confines of work: my friendships, my family and the other passions that I’d sidelined. And I soon found myself wanting to share my discovery. For a few years, I’d been running a YouTube channel on which I posted study tips and technology reviews. Now, I started sharing practical insights I’d learned from psychology and neuroscience, using myself as the guinea pig, experimenting with everything I learned and the strategies I thought might work. As my radical notion that success doesn’t have to be tied to suffering started to gain traction, I started to get more and more emails from my viewers. High-school students aced their exams, business owners doubled their income, parents managed to balance work and family life better, all by applying the strategies I was sharing. Even seasoned professionals, worn out from the grind of corporate life, were discovering fresh energy, motivation and new direction. And so was I. The more I read, the more my philosophy developed. Eventually, by following the same principles and strategies I was learning about, I realised that I wanted to take a break from medicine to pursue something new. That’s when I knew I had to write this book. What’s contained in these pages isn’t just another productivity system to help you get more done at any cost. It’s about doing more of what matters to you. It’ll help you learn more about yourself, what you love and what really motivates you.  My method has three parts, each of which tackles a different aspect of feel-good productivity. Part 1 explains how to use the science of feel-good productivity to energise yourself. It introduces the three ‘energisers’ that underpin positive emotions – play, power and people – and explains how to integrate them into your daily life. Next, Part 2 examines how feel-good productivity can help us overcome procrastination. You’ll learn about the three ‘blockers’ that make us feel worse – uncertainty, fear and inertia – and how to overcome them. When you remove these blockers, you won’t just overcome procrastination – you’ll feel better too. Finally, in Part 3, we’ll explore how feel-good productivity can sustain us in the long term. We’ll delve into the three different types of burnout – overexertion burnout, depletion burnout and misalignment burnout. And I’ll explain how we can harness three simple ‘sustainers’ – conserve, recharge and align – to make us feel better not just for days and weeks, but for months and years. Every chapter contains its fair share of practical tips. But my goal in this book isn’t to offer you some sprawling to-do list. It’s to offer you a philosophy: a new way of thinking about productivity that you can apply to your own life in your own way. My hope is that you leave this book an amateur ‘productivity scientist’: finding some methods that work, discarding others, and working savvily to see what helps you feel good and achieve more. That’s why every chapter contains not only three simple, science-backed ideas you can use to rethink productivity – but also six ‘experiments’ that you can implement in your own life. If an experiment works for you, great – if it doesn’t, then that too is a helpful insight. By the end of the book, though, you should have a toolkit for applying feel-good productivity to your own work, relationships and life. I only hope it works as well for you as it has for me. Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned by immersing myself in the science of feel-good productivity, it’s that it applies in every sphere. It turns daunting tasks into engaging challenges. It leads to deeper connections with peers. It drives meaningful interactions in what you do, every day.  By understanding and applying what makes you feel good, you won’t just transform your work. You’ll transform your life. Feel-good productivity is a simple method. But it changes everything. It shows that if you’ve ever felt underwater, you don’t have to settle for staying afloat. You can learn how to swim. Let’s dive in. PART 1  CHAPTER 1 PLAY On paper, everything about Professor Richard Feynman’s career looked perfect. Aged just twenty-seven, he was already being hailed as one of the greatest physicists of his generation – the man most likely to work out how to harness the potential of nuclear energy. Now, he’d been appointed one of the youngest professors at Cornell University in upstate New York. There was just one problem. He was bored of physics. The issue had started in the mid-1940s. Every time he sat down to think, he just felt tired. It had begun when Feynman’s wife, Arline, died of tuberculosis in June 1945, months before the end of World War Two in America. After her death, all the music in the young professor’s life faded away. The ideas that had so animated him as a doctoral student felt dull and flat. Even though he was good at teaching, it felt like a bore and a chore. ‘I had simply burned myself out,’ he later recalled. ‘I’d go over to the library a lot and read through the Arabian Nights,’ he wrote. ‘But when it came time to do some research, I couldn’t get to work. I was not interested.’ It was pretty easy doing nothing, he found. He still liked teaching undergraduates, sitting in the library reading and wandering around campus. He just didn’t like working. Easy enough. By the late 1940s, Feynman had reconciled himself to a new identity: a physics professor who didn’t do any physics. Until, one day, everything changed. A few years after his problems started, Feynman was sitting in the university cafeteria, alone, opposite a group of students. One of them was repeatedly throwing a plate up in the air. Feynman noticed something odd. While the plate was airborne, it wobbled. But the Cornell logo inscribed on the plate seemed to wobble faster than the plate itself. Curious, Feynman thought. But not exactly Nobel Prize-worthy. He was the man who had helped crack the code of nuclear fission; he wasn’t supposed to be theorising the characteristics of airborne crockery. But this moment of curiosity sparked a minor epiphany. He began to reflect on what had drawn him to his subject in the first place. ‘I used to enjoy doing physics,’ he later recollected. ‘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, but whether it was interesting and amusing for me to play with.’ After leaving the cafeteria, Feynman found himself reminiscing about how he’d seen the world as a teenager. When he was in high school, the things that had most fascinated him about the world had seemed mundane to others. He would see water growing narrower the further it got from the tap and wonder if he could figure out what determined that curve. ‘I didn’t have to do it; it wasn’t important for the future of science; somebody else had already done it,’ he said. ‘That didn’t make any difference: I’d invent things and play with things for my own entertainment.’ What if returning to that worldview held the key to finding joy in physics again? he wondered. Approaching physics not as a job, but as a game to be played for fun? ‘I got this new attitude,’ he decided. ‘Just like I read the Arabian Nights for pleasure, I’m going to play with physics, whenever I want to, without worrying about any importance whatsoever.’ It started with that wobbling plate. In the weeks that followed, Feynman spent weeks trying to model the equations that explained how the plate moved through the air. His colleagues, bemused, asked him why. ‘There’s no importance whatsoever,’ Feynman told them blithely. ‘I’m just doing it for the fun of it.’ But the more Feynman got into the wobbling plates, the more fascinating they became. Soon, he was pondering whether the wobbling of a rotating plate was anything like the wobbling of electrons in an atom. Or maybe the workings of quantum electrodynamics. ‘Before I knew it (it was a very short time), I was “playing” – working, really – with the same old problem I loved so much.’ Except this time, the ‘work’ of physics didn’t burn him out. Professor Feynman’s interest in plate-spinning would eventually win him the Nobel Prize in Physics. His model for all that wobbling helped make sense of quantum electrodynamics, a theory that describes how light and tiny particles interact at the quantum level. To visualise them, he said, it’s helpful to imagine rapidly spinning plates. Feynman was not alone. To my knowledge, at least six Nobel Prize winners attribute their success to play. James Watson and Francis Crick, who discovered the structure of DNA in the 1950s, described the generative process they used to come up with the structure as ‘constructing a set of molecular models and beginning to play’. Alexander Fleming, the scientist who discovered the antibiotic penicillin, once described his job as ‘playing with microbes’. Donna Strickland, the 2018 Nobel laureate in Physics, described her career as ‘getting to play with high-intensity lasers’. Konstantin Novoselov, who shared the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics for helping discover graphene, put it most simply: ‘If you try to win the Nobel, you won’t,’ he reflected. ‘The way we were working really was quite playful.’ This approach is supported by a growing body of research. Psychologists increasingly believe that play holds the key to true productivity, partly because it provides a sense of psychological relief. As one recent study put it: ‘the psychological function of play is to restore the physically and mentally fatigued individual through participation in activity which is pleasurable and relaxing.’ Life is stressful. Play makes it fun. Play is our first energiser. Life is stressful. Play makes it fun. If we can integrate the spirit of play into our lives, we’ll feel better – and do more too. CREATE AN ADVENTURE Bringing play into our lives is easier said than done, you might say. In adulthood, many of us are all too aware that play doesn’t come easy. When we’re kids, our days are filled with a sense of adventure. We explore every inch of the garden, we race through shopping malls, we climb trees, and we swing from branches. We’re not striving for goals or trying to boost our resume. We’re following our curiosity and enjoying activities without worrying about results. But as we get older, this spirit of adventure gets slowly squeezed out of us. Unless you had particularly forward-thinking parents, you were probably taught that the first major step towards becoming a grown-up is to stop playing and start taking life seriously. Life goes from being filled with adventure to a mundane, predictable existence. This is a mistake. Because adventure, it turns out, is the first major ingredient of play – and perhaps of happiness. In one 2020 experiment from New York University and the University of Miami, scientists attempted to quantify the effects of approaching the world with a sense of adventure. They enlisted over 130 participants and got their consent to track their location using the GPS in their phones. Over the next several months, the researchers sent the participants text messages asking them about their emotions: how happy, excited or relaxed did they feel? The results were eye-opening. As the GPS data and responses to the text messages rolled in, it became clear that those who had more adventurous experiences – those who took themselves off to a wider and more random assortment of places, whether taking a new route to work or trying a different coffee shop rather than sticking to their regular one – felt happier, more excited and more relaxed. Their conclusion: an adventurous life holds the key to unlocking positive emotions. So, the first way to harness the potential of play is to integrate adventure into our lives. But how? Well, with the right tools we can still find the excitement we once got from racing though those malls and swinging from those branches. The first step: choosing your character.  EXPERIMENT 1: Choose Your Character Confession: I used to be addicted to World of Warcraft. WoW is an online role-playing game that is famously aimed at total nerds. You start by choosing your character – it could be a Warlock, a Warrior, a Paladin or plenty more – and explore the fantasy world of Azeroth. You team up with other players to fly around the world, slaying demons, upgrading your weapons and having the time of your life. It’s also famous for being highly addictive. In the three years after I discovered the game when I was fourteen, I clocked up 184 days of played time on it. That’s 4,416 hours. Three hours a day, or 25 per cent of my waking hours. It was a lot. Why did I find World of Warcraft so addictive? As a fourteen-year- old, there’s nothing more exciting than killing monsters and going on quests (actually, as an adult that still sounds pretty appealing). But if this simple fact explains why the first few hours of gameplay are fun, it probably doesn’t explain the next several thousand. To be honest, after a while, the mechanics of the game stop being that entertaining. There are only so many times you can enjoy being sent on a mission to rescue the local villager’s cat. I increasingly suspect it wasn’t the basic mechanics of WoW that made it so pleasurable; it was the escapism. WoW offers a vivid, alternative world, one where you can slay an army of zombies with a magic spell or tame a dragon and fly around on its back. And more importantly, it’s a world that you enter in character. In WoW I’ve never been Ali Abdaal, the slightly nerdy schoolkid with zero sporting ability and confidence issues. I’ve always been Sepharoth, the tall, handsome Blood Elf Warlock with billowing purple robes and an army of demons at my command. Play allows us to take on different roles or personas, whether we’re becoming a character in WoW or acting out an imaginary scene with friends in the playground. These characters allow us to express different aspects of ourselves and transform our experiences into something more enjoyable. When you take on a different persona, you start to find adventure. This is not as out-there as it sounds. Choosing your ‘character’ doesn’t mean reinventing your personality overnight (nor pretending to be a goblin in front of your colleagues). Rather, it means identifying the type of play that most resonates with who you are, so you can choose a type of player to embody. Dr Stuart Brown has spent most of his career studying the psychology of play. A clinical psychologist, he began researching the benefits of play after witnessing its transformative effects on patients. Eventually, he would establish the National Institute for Play and became a clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego. During this time, he spoke to over 5,000 people from all walks of life – ranging from artists to truck drivers to Nobel laureates – about what play meant to them. In the course of these interviews, he discovered that most of us are prone to just one or two particular types of character-play. By finding the ones that resonate with us the most, we can start to take on a ‘play personality’ that frees up our sense of adventure. These are the eight ‘play personalities’ that Dr Brown distilled through his research. The 8 Play Personalities  1. The Collector loves to gather and organise, enjoying activities like searching for rare plants, or rummaging around in archives or garage sales. 2. The Competitor enjoys games and sports, and takes pleasure in trying their best and winning. 3. The Explorer likes to wander, discovering new places and things they’ve never seen, through hiking, road tripping and other adventures. 4. The Creator finds joy in making things, and can spend hours every day drawing, painting, making music, gardening and more. 5. The Storyteller has an active imagination and uses their imagination to entertain others. They’re drawn to activities like writing, dance, theatre and role-playing games. 6. The Joker endeavours to make people laugh, and may play by performing stand-up, doing improv, or just pulling a lot of pranks to make you smile. 7. The Director likes to plan, organise and lead others, and can fit into many different roles and activities, from directing stage performances to running a company, to working in political or social advocacy. 8. The Kinesthete finds play in physical activities like acrobatics, gymnastics and free running. Here lies the first step to approaching your work – and your life – with a sense of playful adventure. Reflect on which of these characters you identify with most, and try to approach your work as if you are that character. If you’re ‘the Storyteller’, that might entail seeking out ways to turn a boring task (writing a dry, logistical email) into one that draws on your sense of playfulness (finding a way to turn it into a story, with a beginning, middle and end, and maybe an unexpected twist). Or if you’re ‘the Creator’, it might mean transforming mundane tasks (filling in that dull spreadsheet) into opportunities for self-expression (turning it into a visually appealing and easy-to-understand infographic).  Identifying and exploring our play personalities helps us reclaim some of the adventure that defined our childhoods – a time when feeling good was the norm, not the exception. It’s a spirit that still lies within us. As Stuart Brown says: ‘Remembering what play is all about and making it part of our daily lives are probably the most important factors in being a fulfilled human being.’ EXPERIMENT 2: Embrace Your Curiosity What does the term ‘dinosaur’ actually mean? What Beatles song stayed in the US singles chart for the longest? Who was the president of the United States when Uncle Sam first got his beard? These are not just questions from a particularly fiendish pub quiz. They’re three of the nineteen prompts used by researchers at the University of California Davis Center for Neuroscience in a pioneering experiment. After asking a group of twenty-four volunteers these questions, they asked each of them to rate how much they cared about the answers to each question, from ‘low- curiosity’ to ‘high-curiosity’. And then they let the questions simmer in the minds of the participants for a while. (The answers, by the way, are ‘terrible lizard’, ‘Hey Jude’ and Abraham Lincoln.) The researchers were trying to investigate what effect curiosity had on people’s minds. For one thing, the researchers had a hunch that when people were curious about something, they remembered the details better. They were right. The study showed that people were a whopping 30 per cent more likely to recall a fact they found interesting, rather than a fact they found boring. But what was perhaps more surprising was what was going on in people’s brains at the point that they recalled these facts. When they were given a brain scan, their neurological activity was quite different when they were asked a question they were curious about: they seemed to receive a hit of dopamine. Dopamine is one of our feel- good hormones, and it also activates the part of the brain responsible for learning and forming memories. So for the study participants, engaging with their curiosity made them feel good – and they in turn became better at retaining information. Harnessing your curiosity is a second method for building adventure into your life. Curiosity doesn’t simply make our lives more enjoyable. It also allows us to focus longer. After painstakingly researching the biographies of some of history’s most pioneering minds, from Leonardo da Vinci to Steve Jobs, the writer Walter Isaacson summarised his findings thus: ‘Being curious about everything not only makes you more creative. It enriches your life.’ Curiosity doesn’t simply make our lives more enjoyable. It also allows us to focus longer. How then do we integrate a sense of curiosity into our lives? One method is to seek out what I call ‘side quests’. In video games like Zelda, The Witcher, and Elden Ring, there are dozens of side quests waiting to be pursued. These side quests don’t affect the main story of the game, but are driven by the curiosity of the player: what happens if I enter this cave, or try to get to the highest point in this area, or swim to the bottom of this lake? Many of the game’s best secrets may be hidden in caves, forests and villages that a player following the basic storyline wouldn’t otherwise come across. I often think of my life as containing a series of side quests. Every day as I sit down to work, I look at my calendar and to-do list, and I ask myself: ‘What’s today’s side quest going to be?’ This question helps me shift my mindset from the obvious tasks that lie ahead to the potential alternative avenues they might take me down. It might prompt me to leave my office and spend a few hours working in a local coffee shop. Or it might encourage me to explore new software I could use to solve the problem I’m working on. By adding a side quest to your day, you create space for curiosity, exploration and playfulness – and could discover something amazing and totally unexpected along the way. FIND THE FUN It was a star-lit evening in the late 1990s at a small university in Ohio. A young graduate research assistant stood in the lab, holding a rat in his palm. He delicately stroked the rat’s white belly with a dry paintbrush, hoping that something interesting would happen. At first, nothing. But then, suddenly, the rat cried out. Except not in distress; if anything, the rat seemed to be laughing. These scientists weren’t tickling rats for the fun of it. In fact, they were investigating the biological effects of play on the human brain – what lead scientist Jaak Panksepp called ‘the biology of joy’. At the time, the prevailing belief in the scientific community was that only humans experienced emotions. It was thought that emotions stem from the highly complex part of the brain that is unique to us, the cerebral cortex. But Panksepp’s discovery that rodents could laugh suggested an alternative: that emotions must come from much more primitive areas of the brain, like the amygdala and hypothalamus. Joy, Panksepp showed, is a deeply primal experience. One of Panksepp’s key findings was that rats love to play. He spent much of his experiment recording the sounds made by rats when they were playing. The noises were joyful, he later said: ‘It sounded like a playground.’ The reason? Play releases dopamine. It made the rats feel good. We can learn a thing or two from those rodents. Panksepp’s rats showed that if we want to find joy in what we’re doing, it won’t be solely down to the higher and most complicated parts of the brain, those associated with the cerebral cortex. It’s also down to the more ancient, basic parts of our neurology – the same feel-good hormones activated in those rats. We too can release little dopamine hits that keep us happy and engaged. But how? The answer can be found by studying what specifically elicits dopamine. As one article published by Harvard Medical School puts it, the hormone is activated by ‘sex, shopping, [and] smelling cookies baking in the oven’ – in other words, by the activities we find fun. So if we want to harness the revolutionary effects of play, our second step is to seek out fun everywhere we go. And that starts by paying a visit to a Disneyfied version of Edwardian London.  EXPERIMENT 3: The Magic Post-It Note During a particularly exhausting phase working as a junior doctor, my housemate Molly and I decided to revisit a childhood favourite: Mary Poppins. We hoped that immersing ourselves in a world of animated birds, extremely bad cockney accents and musical hits about Suffragism would provide some relief, even if only for a couple of hours. At the time, I was struggling to find motivation to study for my postgraduate medical exams. When combined with my hospital work, the looming deadlines and complex material felt overwhelming. The idea of sitting down to read textbooks at the end of my shift felt nightmarish. But as I rewatched Mary Poppins, something unexpected happened. The movie wasn’t just a frivolous tale of a quirky nanny with magical powers – it held a profound truth. One of the film’s most famous songs is ‘A Spoonful of Sugar’, which Mary sings to the children when they’re complaining about chores. I didn’t remember many of the lyrics from my childhood, other than the chorus: ‘A spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down … in the most delightful way.’ Watching this familiar yet forgotten scene twenty-something years later, I heard how the song begins. In every job that must be done, There is an element of fun. You find the fun and snap! The job’s a game. The rest of the song describes various ways in which larks, robins and honeybees make their tedious tasks more enjoyable by singing while they work. (Robins apparently sing their ‘merry tune’ in order to ‘move the job along’; an analysis I was subsequently sad to learn is not ornithologically accurate.)  I decided to apply this idea to my own life. In a late-night burst of inspiration, I grabbed a Sharpie and a Post-it note and wrote nine simple words: What would this look like if it were fun? I stuck the note to my computer monitor and went to sleep. By the time I spotted the note on my monitor the following day, I’d forgotten that I’d put it there. I’d just got back from work and was making a start on re-learning some biochemistry pathways for my medical exam. I sat down with my usual grin-and-bear-it expression. But when I saw the Post-it it got me thinking. What would this look like if it were fun? The first answer came to me immediately: if this were fun, there would be music. I realised that memorising tedious biochemistry pathways magically became a lot more interesting with the Lord of the Rings soundtrack playing through my headphones. Suddenly, music became one of the most important ways for me to bring more playfulness into my work. I also began to apply this method at work. At the time I was on my Geriatric Medicine placement, where the doctors’ office was a small, scantly decorated room in the corner of the ward. On one particularly gruelling afternoon, when I was sitting in the office with an enormous list of tasks before me, I decided to apply the ‘musical fun’ method. I didn’t have any speakers with me, so I grabbed a bowl from the kitchen and put my phone in there to use as a makeshift speaker. I opened up Spotify and spent the rest of the day doing my tasks with the Pirates of the Caribbean soundtrack playing at a low volume. The effects were transformative; it just felt better. ‘What would this look like if it were fun?’ has now become a guiding question in my life. And it’s surprisingly easy to draw upon. Think of a task that you don’t want to do right now, and ask what would it look like if it were fun? Could you do it in a different way? Could you add music, or a sense of humour, or get creative? What if you set out to do the task with friends, or promised yourself a treat at the end of the process? Is there a way to make this draining process a little more enjoyable?  EXPERIMENT 4: Enjoy the Process, Not the Outcome There’s another way to find fun in everything you’re doing, and it doesn’t even involve rewatching children’s films from the mid- twentieth century. In fact, it’s best demonstrated by a 5ft 7in Spanish teenager with bleached blond hair. In August 2021, Alberto Ginés López stepped onto the podium as the inaugural gold-medal winner in sport climbing at the Summer Olympics in Tokyo. Over the preceding weeks, the world had watched, transfixed, as he completed a series of astonishing physical feats on the multicoloured walls of Tokyo’s Aomi Urban Sports Park. Most impressive of all was the speed climbing – where you clamber up a wall as fast as possible, spider-style. Lopez reached the top of the wall in a dazzling 6.42 seconds. But as the crowds watched Lopez and his fellow climbers scramble up the walls at dizzying speeds, they also noticed that this was quite an unusual sport. It wasn’t just that the competitors tended to look rather more bohemian than your regular track-and-field athletes, with locks of colourfully dyed hair and brightly coloured harnesses. They also seemed to be more relaxed. Rather than avoiding eye contact and watching tensely as their competitors took to the walls, many of the climbers seemed to be chatting jovially at the bottom, and even sharing tips. When they did take to the walls, their faces displayed none of the agonised intensity that most sprinters or even footballers tend to exhibit. In fact, they seemed to be positively enjoying themselves. Those climbers hint at our second way to find the fun: by emphasising the joy that comes not from the outcome, but the process itself. According to the Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced ‘chick-sent-me-hi’), the biggest difference between climbing and, say, football, is that most climbers are completely immersed in the process (climbing the wall) rather than the end result (winning the game). The pioneer of the study of ‘flow’ – that state in which we’re so immersed in a task that the rest of the world seems to melt away – Csikszentmihalyi first developed his theories while watching climbers in the Alps as a teenager. Csikszentmihalyi argued that if we can we learn to focus on the process, rather than the outcome, we’re substantially more likely to enjoy a task. But how? It might be easy enough for rock-climbing, which is inherently fun (to some, anyway). But what if you find yourself in altogether more mundane, or even unpleasant, situations? Arguably, this is where the power of focusing on the process becomes even more powerful. Because with a little creative thinking, you can find joy in any process, however mundane it might seem. Take the story of Matthew Dicks, today a world-champion storyteller and bestselling novelist. Years before he published his first book, Dicks worked in McDonald’s. And he hated it. ‘The days felt endless,’ Matt once told me. ‘It was the same routine over and over again. Taking orders, flipping burgers and handing out fries. There was no excitement, no spark, no challenge.’ And so Dicks decided to see if there was any joy to be had, not in the job’s outcome (his infuriatingly meagre pay cheque), but in the process instead. He landed on a classic tactic: upselling. ‘Some days I’d decide it was BBQ Sauce Day,’ he recalls. ‘So for the rest of the day, I’d add a mini sales pitch to each order I took. The customer would order a Big Mac and fries, and I’d ask them if they’d like any sauce with that. If they said no, I’d smile and say, “Well, I’d really recommend the BBQ sauce – there’s nothing that beats that.” Usually at this point, they were a little taken aback, and they’d say, “Ok then, I’ll take the sauce.” If they still didn’t bite, I’d say, “That’s ok, but you’re really missing out. My last customer was reluctant but when she tried the sauce she knew she’d made the right decision.”’ Dicks says that the effects of these little changes in his routine were unexpectedly significant. They were the kind of mini tasks that might, in his words: ‘just make the customer’s day a little better, and definitely made me feel more energised on days that felt like they were dragging’. And they worked. Dicks found himself looking forward to his shifts, eager to see how many people he could convince to try the BBQ sauce. The process was not inherently enjoyable. But Dicks had created a way to enjoy it. And in doing so, he had found the fun in an uninspiring situation. LOWER THE STAKES If adventure and fun promote our ability to play, there’s a related, similarly potent factor that reduces that ability – stress. To understand how, let’s turn once again to this chapter’s most unfortunate experimental subjects: white rats. Alas, these rats were in for a less enjoyable afternoon than their brush-tickled counterparts that we met earlier. On this occasion, scientists from Columbia University took a group of rats at various different stages of development and placed a mesh on top of each one so that it was restrained and couldn’t move freely. Then they left them there for thirty minutes. Unsurprisingly, this proved pretty stressful. Before being restrained by the mesh, the rats were messing around with each other, play-fighting and touching each other’s napes. But after the mesh was released, the researchers found that the rats’ play behaviour completely disappeared. Instead, the rats stayed huddled in groups not playing at all. (Thankfully, the play behaviour returned to baseline levels an hour after this stressful restraining experience.) Studies on humans, though blessedly less nasty than the ones on animals, have found similar results. Children are more likely to play when they’re in a comfortable, non-threatening environment. And studies of adults in the workplace have found that the feeling of relaxation promotes playful behaviours, as well as promoting creativity and wellbeing. These studies, and countless others, prove something that most of us instinctively know to be true: when we’re stressed, we’re less likely to be playful. And our creativity, productivity and wellbeing tend to suffer too.  All this hints at our final ingredient of play. For play to flourish, we don’t just need to seek out adventure and find fun. We also need to try and create an environment that’s low-stakes and that fosters relaxation. And we can start to do that by reappraising how we think about failure. EXPERIMENT 5: Reframe Your Failure In 2016, a NASA-trained engineer named Mark Rober recruited 50,000 people to try out a new computer challenge. He wanted to prove that anyone could learn how to code, he told them. And so he set them off on a series of relatively easy coding challenges. In fact, the experiment was more complicated than Rober let on. The key difference came when the participants made an error. Half of them (group 1) received an error message when they wrote code that failed to execute properly: ‘You have failed. Please try again.’ The other half (group 2) got a slightly different message: ‘You have failed. You’ve lost 5 points. You now have 195 points. Please try again.’ Everything else about the two groups was identical. This small distinction made an astonishing difference. Group 1, on average, made twelve attempts to solve the coding puzzle, and had a success rate of 68 per cent. Group 2, on average, made just five attempts to solve the puzzle, with a success rate of 52 per cent. The first time I heard about this experiment I was astonished. Purely because there was an arbitrary, meaningless ‘penalty’ of five points for failure at the puzzle, the 25,000 people in group 2 (from all around the world) made, on average, less than half the number of attempts at the puzzle than those in group 1. As you might have guessed, Rober’s interest wasn’t really in teaching people to code. He was most interested in how we think about failure. His aim was to show that we’re hugely, disproportionately impacted by negative consequences – even arbitrary ones. And these consequences make us afraid of failure, even when we needn’t be.  But what if there was a different way to look at failures? One that allows us to see them as inevitable, and maybe even fun? This is what Rober was trying to work out. Having worked at NASA for nine years, then at Apple as a project designer, before switching his focus to becoming a science educator on YouTube, Rober’s experiment proved what he’d already noticed in the world of work: that success isn’t down to how often you fail. It’s about how you frame your failures. In a talk where he shared the findings of this experiment, Rober asks: ‘If we could just frame our learning process so that we weren’t so concerned with failure, how much more could we learn? How much more could we succeed?’ Rober knew that getting a computer programme to work invariably requires a process of trying, failing and trying again. These supposed failures are not really failures, they’re ‘data points’ that we need to figure out how to succeed. In the course of writing this book, I’ve often felt moved by Rober’s insight. Because his study offers a useful insight into how to reduce stress and, in turn, how to create an environment where you can play. Imagine what your life would look like if you received five proverbial points for failing, rather than losing five like in the experiment. Imagine what would happen if people cheered you on for a little stumble rather than humiliated you. Imagine how you’d approach things if you treated them as experiments, where failure would be just as valuable as success. Might you now see the game of life slightly differently? Suddenly, the stakes are lower. And suddenly, you can afford to play around a little. If your goal is to find a fulfilling career and your hypothesis is that a corporate role might be fulfilling, then your data collection process might be to sample careers through internships and job placements. With an experimental mindset, an internship that you end up hating wouldn’t be a ‘failure’ or a ‘waste of time’; it’d just be another data point to help you realise that that’s not what you want. If your goal is to build a successful business, then your data collection process might involve testing different business ideas, products or services. With an experimental mindset, a product launch that doesn’t meet expectations wouldn’t be a failure or a disaster; it’d just be another data point to help you refine your strategy and better understand your target market. No failure is ever just a failure. It’s an invitation to try something new. And if your goal is to develop meaningful relationships, then your data collection process might involve going on dates, attending social events and engaging with new people. With an experimental mindset, a date that doesn’t lead to a second one or a friendship that doesn’t blossom wouldn’t be a failure; it’d just be another data point to help you understand your compatibility. No failure is ever just a failure. It’s an invitation to try something new. EXPERIMENT 6: Don’t Be Serious. Be Sincere Once we’ve reframed our failures as data points, it becomes easier to eliminate the stresses that stop us approaching life with a sense of play. But there’s a final method that’s just as powerful – one that I learned from the world’s unlikeliest Buddhist guru. Born in Chislehurst, Kent – an unremarkable suburban district of southern England – for the first few years of Alan Watts’ life he seemed destined to become a bank clerk, or maybe a lawyer. He developed an interest in East Asian religion after experiencing a mystical fever dream as a child. It would change his life. Over the next fifty years, he became a leading authority on Eastern philosophy, publishing multiple bestselling books on what Zen and Daoism can teach us about the universe. When I first stumbled upon Watts’ lectures a few months into writing this book, I was immediately struck by the profundity of his way of seeing the world, and how well that perspective fitted in to my theories of feel-good productivity. And in particular, a simple phrase for which he would become famous: ‘Don’t be serious. Be sincere.’  In one famous lecture, ‘The Individual and the World’, Watts outlined a key mistake we make in understanding the world. He quotes the early-twentieth-century English writer G. K. Chesterton: ‘In frivolity there is a lightness which can rise. But in seriousness is a gravity that falls, like a stone.’ This, he said, was true of people who understood Zen. He summarised it thus: ‘There is a difference between being serious and being sincere.’ What did he mean? Well, consider playing a board game – Monopoly, let’s say. No one wants to play Monopoly with someone who takes the game too seriously. We’ve all played those games; the serious person cares a little too much about winning, and they suck the energy out of the room. Their obsessive quoting from the rulebook regarding whether you’re really allowed to collect £200 for passing GO via a Chance card gets in the way of everyone else’s fun. But neither do we want to play a game with someone who’s completely uncaring. Those people don’t engage with the game, and don’t make an active effort to play to the best of their ability. They don’t congratulate you when you manage to get out of jail, even though you refused to pay the £50 exit fee and instead went for the bold, daring strategy of rolling a double. They’re no fun either. No, the most fun people to play games with are people who play sincerely. They take the game seriously enough to be fully engaged in the experience, but not so seriously that they become fixated on winning or losing. They’re able to laugh and joke around, to make light of their mistakes, and to enjoy the company of their friends without becoming overly attached to winning (or the rules). There’s a lot to be gained from treating our work and our life with this approach too. I find that in moments when I feel stressed, anxious or drained by my work, it’s easy to forget to be sincere and to flip towards being too serious instead. In these moments, the stakes feel overwhelming. But there’s a way to lower them. The trick is simple: when you feel like your work is draining or overwhelming, try asking yourself, ‘How can I approach this with a little less seriousness, and a little more sincerity?’  If you were approaching a difficult project at work sincerely rather than seriously, you might focus on the process of completing each task, rather than becoming fixated on the end result. You might also seek out the input and collaboration of others, rather than trying to tackle the project on your own. By doing these things, you may find that it’s easier to approach it in the spirit of play, and that you’re better able to stay focused and motivated throughout. If you were approaching a job interview sincerely rather than seriously, then instead of becoming overly nervous and stressed about the outcome, you might focus on being present and engaged. You might also try to connect with the interviewer on a more personal level, rather than simply trying to impress them with your credentials. By doing so, you might be more likely to approach the interview with lightness and ease, and to come away from the interview feeling more confident and satisfied with your performance. And if you were approaching writing a book sincerely rather than seriously, you might decide to throw a detailed homage to World of Warcraft into the very first chapter – illustrating to your future readers that even when creating something as significant as your first book, you can treat the process with levity. By doing so, you’d hopefully help the text create a sense of fun, even while holding forth on the science of productivity. You might end up able to stress less and play more. I’m not the only doctor to think so. In the medical drama Grey’s Anatomy, Dr Derek Shepherd, the handsome neurosurgeon played by Patrick Dempsey, has a ritual at the start of each of his operations. He greets the team, puts some energising music on in the background and says, ‘It’s a beautiful day to save lives. Let’s have some fun.’  IN SUMMARY Seriousness is overrated. If you want to achieve more without ruining your life, the first step is to approach your work with a sense of play. There are three ways you can incorporate the spirit of play into your life. First, approach things with a sense of adventure. When you step into the right ‘play personality’, every day abounds with opportunities to see life as a game, filled with surprises and side quests. Second, find the fun. Remember Mary Poppins: there’s an element of fun in every task, even if it isn’t always obvious. Try asking yourself what this would look like if it were fun, and then build your projects around the answer. Third, lower the stakes. Failures are only failures when you think they are – and not every problem need be approached with such a straight face. So what would it mean to approach your work with less seriousness and more sincerity?  CHAPTER 2 POWER In September 2000, Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph attempted to sell their fledgling company, Netflix, to the CEO of Blockbuster Video. It went extremely badly. The pair had bet on what they thought was a revolutionary model for video rentals. Customers could log in to a website, order DVDs and receive and return them through the post. But while they’d poured everything they had into the company, they were haemorrhaging cash. They had over a hundred employees, but only 3,000 paying customers. And they were on track to lose $57 million before the year was through. They wanted out. So after months of calling and emailing, they finally secured a meeting with Blockbuster’s boss, John Antioco, at the company’s headquarters in Dallas. It was a big opportunity: a $6 billion publicly traded company with over 9,000 stores worldwide, Blockbuster dominated the American video market. But the meeting went dramatically off the rails. At first, Antioco and his general counsel, Ed Stead, were friendly and polite. They listened carefully as Hastings and Randolph explained why Blockbuster should buy Netflix: a new type of video rental for an online world. But then, Antioco asked the big question: ‘How much?’ ‘Fifty million.’ There was a moment’s silence. And then Antioco burst out laughing. Fast-forward ten years and Blockbuster Video had filed for bankruptcy: unable to keep up with the pace of the transition to online video, the company had gradually closed the majority of its stores before finally going bust. Fast-forward another ten years and Netflix – by then an online streaming service – was valued at a market cap of $300 billion and universally hailed as one of the world’s most innovative companies. The transformation of Netflix from a company that was literally laughed out of the room by Blockbuster’s CEO to one of the most valuable businesses on earth seemed unlikely. How did they do it? Well, there are a few answers. Some credit the vision of Hastings and his team. Others their fortuitous timing in launching just as the internet took off. But the most common explanation for Netflix’s success is more simple: culture. As Netflix was first getting off the ground, Reed Hastings hired Patty McCord as Netflix’s chief talent officer. McCord had previously worked in human resources at a few other tech companies, and she wasn’t happy with the traditional approach to people management. She wanted to create a culture where employees felt able to take control of their own work. Hastings worked with McCord to create a set of values that would guide the company’s culture, including a focus on freedom and responsibility. This subtle shift was transformative. McCord spearheaded a radical shift in the way Netflix approached its staff. She got rid of traditional policies like vacation days, set work hours and performance reviews, and gave more autonomy to employees. As long as employees met their goals, they could do what they liked. This approach was met with some scepticism at first. But as the company grew and flourished, it became clear it was working. Netflix’s culture not only helped the company attract and retain top talent, but also led to better ideas: rather than relying on traditional methods of market research and focus groups, Netflix let their creative teams take the lead in developing and producing new shows and movies. The result was some of the most remarkable TV and film of our time. McCord summarised her focus on freedom and responsibility in a simple word: power. It’s a tricky term, and one that can have negative connotations – conjuring up images of totalitarian dictators, horrible bosses and shadowy hallways where people do whatever they can to grab and hold on to control over others. Some might see the word ‘power’ and think, ‘That’s not me.’ If you’re one of those people, I want you to start thinking differently about power. When McCord used the word, she meant a sense of personal empowerment: the sense that your job is in your control, your life is in your hands, and that decisions about your future are yours alone. This power isn’t something that we exert on others; it’s something we feel, the energy that makes us want to shout from the rooftops: ‘I can do it!’ Power is our second energiser; a crucial ingredient in feeling good and being productive. And best of all, it’s not something you seize from others – it’s something you create for yourself. BOOST YOUR CONFIDENCE Our journey into the science of power begins in a lab filled with several dozen exercise-averse volunteers. This group of twenty-eight female students had been brought together precisely because they did not exercise particularly often – a fact that some scientists at the University of Illinois Urbana- Champaign thought presented a research opportunity. In their study, published in the International Journal of Behavioral Medicine, they set out to test a simple hypothesis: that our confidence in our athletic abilities has a huge impact on what those abilities actually are. At the beginning of the experiment, all twenty-eight students were asked to cycle on a stationary bike for a fixed amount of time while a device measured their heart rate and VO2 max (the amount of oxygen your body can absorb and use during exercise). Once the exercise session was over, the researchers split the students into two groups based on their performance on the exercise bike. After a brief cool-down period, they told students in group A (the ‘high confidence’ group) that, relative to other women of their age and experience, they were among the fittest. The students in group B (the ‘low confidence’ group), meanwhile, were told that they were among the least fit. And then both groups of women were left to stew for a few days. The truth was, the whole thing was a ruse. The ‘high confidence’ group wasn’t actually better at exercise and the ‘low confidence’ group wasn’t actually worse. In fact, they’d been randomly allocated into the two groups and their performance on the exercise test had nothing to do with the message that was delivered. What the scientists were really interested in was the next stage: three days later, the participants were asked to come back to the lab to exercise for about thirty minutes and asked to rate how much they enjoyed this new session. The results were striking. The researchers found that those in the ‘high confidence’ group – who had been told how very fit they were – enjoyed the exercise session a lot more than the ‘low confidence’ group, who had been told they were unhealthy. This was even truer for exercise that was more intensive and challenging; when the participants were asked to cycle harder and for longer, the difference between the two groups became even more stark. When the going got tough, those who believed they could do it – regardless of their ability – were the ones who actually could. And, crucially, the students who were primed to be more confident ended up enjoying the exercise a lot more too. This study was exploring a simple question. How does our level of self-confidence affect our performance? The answer to this question – along with those of many such studies before and since – is simple: a great deal. Feeling confident about our ability to complete a task makes us feel good when we’re doing it, and helps us do it better. The origins of this insight can be traced back to the Canadian- American psychologist Albert Bandura. Born in the tiny town of Mundare, Alberta in 1925, by the time of his death in 2021 Bandura was one of the most influential psychologists in history. That influence was, in large part, down to an idea that he introduced in 1977 and one that would make him famous: self-efficacy. Drawing on his research over the previous decade, Bandura argued that it’s not just our abilities that are important in human performance and wellbeing; it’s how we feel about our abilities. Self-efficacy was the term he coined to describe such feelings, referring to how much belief we have that we’re able to achieve our objectives. Believing you can is the first step to making sure you actually can. To oversimplify just a little, self-efficacy is psychology jargon for confidence. And taking steps to boost it is the primary way we can build our sense of empowerment. In the half-century since Bandura introduced the concept of self-efficacy, hundreds of researchers have shown that the higher our confidence in our own abilities – the higher our self-efficacy – the greater those abilities become. By 1998, psychologists Alexander Stajkovic and Fred Luthans were able to state (on the basis of 114 studies involving almost 22,000 study participants) that Bandura was right. Believing you can is the first step to making sure you actually can. EXPERIMENT 1: The Confidence Switch The idea of self-efficacy is intriguing, but maybe not that surprising. Of course our levels of self-confidence affect our abilities, you might think. Anyone who’s ever seen an egotist charm their way around a room, thanks solely to an unwavering faith in their own brilliance, can attest to that. But what’s more surprising about self-efficacy, perhaps, is quite how malleable it is. Because from the moment Bandura began investigating the science of confidence, he noticed something else striking: that self-efficacy is easy to teach. After decades of research, he concluded that confidence isn’t something you’re born with; it’s something you learn. In the years after he introduced his revolutionary idea, Bandura would go on to identify a few simple tools that can have a transformative impact on self-efficacy. Take the power of verbal persuasion. Bandura was fond of pointing out a simple truth about self-efficacy: that the things you say often become the things you believe. As such, the very act of hearing small positive interventions, like ‘You can do it!’ or ‘Nearly there!’, can have a remarkable effect on our self-confidence levels. Usually, we imagine that the source of these uplifting phrases will be our family, friends, colleagues or personal trainers. What’s more intriguing is that we can also deliver these messages to ourselves. In 2014, scientists at Bangor University published results from a study into the power of self-talk. Each participant was tested on their ‘time to exhaustion’ – that is, how long they could cycle for before they felt unable to go on. Then, like our previous group of exhausted cyclists, they were left to ruminate for two weeks. This time, however, the second stage was different. When they returned to the bikes after a fortnight, they were divided into two groups. One got a positive self-talk intervention, where they were shown a series of motivational phrases, like ‘You’re doing well!’ and ‘You can push through this!’ and chose four of them to tell themselves while cycling. The other group got no such prompt. Surely such tiny acts of self-motivation couldn’t single-handedly transform the participants’ performance, the scientists thought. Except it turned out, they could. The group that got the specific ‘self- talk intervention’ ended up significantly reducing their RPE (‘rate of perceived exertion’, or how effortful the cycling felt) at the 50 per cent mark, and noticeably improving their TTE (‘time to exhaustion’) when cycling. The other group performed exactly the same as they had previously. This study shows that simply by becoming your own hype team you can dramatically impact your own productivity. In the years since I read it, I’ve come up with a few specific ways you can do so. My favourite method involves what I call ‘flipping the confidence switch’; in other words, challenging yourself to behave as if you’re confident in your task, even if you’re not. The method is even more simple than it sounds. The next time you’re not feeling good enough to take a chance, simply ask yourself, ‘What would it look like if I were really confident at this? What would it look like if I approached this task feeling confident that I could do it?’ I used to use this trick extensively when I worked as a walkaround magician at balls and parties at university (yes, I was that cool). My job would be to dress up in a tuxedo, go up to groups of partygoers and offer to show them a few magic tricks. Even though I’d practised my tricks ad nauseum (just ask any of my friends), I’d still be absolutely terrified at the idea of approaching a group of strangers, interrupting their conversation and stumbling over my words as I offered to show them my favourite card trick. In those moments of self-doubt, I’d take a deep breath, and internally flip the confidence switch. I’d remind myself that I was just playing the part of a confident magician, and even if I didn’t feel at all confident internally, I was going to act as if I were both confident and competent. Without fail, the shift in my attitude made a huge difference; I’d walk up to groups of strangers with a smile and a slight swagger, my lines well rehearsed, and I’d come away from each group feeling relieved that the strategy had worked. I’ve often surprised myself at quite how impactful this method can be. Just for a moment, it’s enough to turn an amateur magician into a professional. A terrible amateur musician into a guitar hero. And a nervous public speaker into the most charismatic orator. Next time you’re feeling like a task or project is particularly difficult, ask yourself, ‘What would it look like if I were really confident at this?’ Just by asking yourself the question, you’ll visualise yourself confidently approaching the task at hand. The switch has been flipped. EXPERIMENT 2: The Social Model Method Verbal persuasion wasn’t the only method Bandura came up with for boosting self-confidence. He was also interested in the way we get confidence from the people around us. My favourite study showing how this works comes from the Clemson University Outdoor Lab. This is not your ordinary science laboratory, mind. Nestled on a wooded peninsula by Lake Hartwell in South Carolina, the lab boasts a series of wooden cabins, hiking trails and water-sports equipment – with not a petri dish in sight. But the recreational veneer of the lab hides its serious scientific function. Over the years, the laboratory has been the site of many pioneering psychological experiments. Like the 2007 study of thirty-eight children, aged six to eighteen, who were invited to use the university’s climbing wall. When they first arrived at the lab, the students were told that their objective for the day was to make it to the top of the rock-climbing wall (one of the main features of Clemson’s Outdoor Lab). It was a daunting prospect; most of them had never even seen a climbing wall before. The scientists who were running the study were interested in which students would complete the task – and what might make them more likely to do so. Unbeknown to the children, they’d been split into two groups before their arrival. Group 1 had been shown a short video of someone climbing up a wall that looked very similar to the one at the location, while group 2 hadn’t been shown any videos at all. In every other way, the groups were identical. Amazingly, just watching that video had a dramatic effect. Even though both groups of climbers were given the same instructions when they first arrived at the wall, the group that watched the ‘model’ rock climber ascend the wall they were about to tackle ended up doing a lot better. They felt more confident about their rock-climbing abilities, enjoyed the activity more and performed better. Why did this small change make such a big difference? If Albert Bandura were to comment he’d probably attribute it to something called the ‘vicarious mastery experience’. This is when you witness or hear about someone else’s performance related to a task that you’re going to undertake yourself. You see other people’s examples, and it boosts your confidence. Most of us have experienced vicarious mastery, even if we didn’t have the words for it. Picture this. You’re struggling with a big research project at work. You’re the only person working on the task and it feels daunting. After a few days of alarming unproductivity, you start to conclude it’s not only hard – it’s impossible. As you get more and more convinced that what you’re attempting is completely unachievable, you get further and further off target. Now imagine the same task, except this time, before starting the project, you saw someone else present their research project on a similar theme. The content of their presentation is entirely different to yours. But this time, you know that this kind of task isn’t impossible – you’ve just seen someone else pull it off. You’ve become more confident that the task can be mastered. Vicariously. Bandura argued that being surrounded by other people who show persistence and effort in overcoming challenges can increase our own feelings of self-efficacy because they demonstrate to us that these challenges can be overcome. In the words of Bandura, ‘Seeing people similar to oneself succeed by sustained effort raises observers’ beliefs that they too possess the capabilities to master comparable activities to succeed.’ Like positive self-talk, we can integrate these vicarious mastery experiences into our own lives. My favourite way is by consuming different forms of content created by my role models. I’ve found that my sense of confidence increases substantially when I read books, listen to podcasts or watch videos with stories of people succeeding in the areas in which I want to feel more empowered. For example, while working in hospital, I’d often listen to the RCP Medicine podcast, produced by the Royal College of Physicians, on the way to work. Hearing about how different doctors approach different diagnoses and management would give me a boost of confidence that would carry over into my job. When I was building my first online business, I spent a lot of time listening to the Indie Hackers podcast, which featured interviews with entrepreneurs who’d built incredible one-person online businesses from their bedrooms. They talked about the challenges they’d faced and how they’d overcome them, which boosted my own confidence when it came to dealing with similar challenges. And in my new life as a writer, I find that watching, listening to and even conducting interviews with successful authors does more to boost my own feelings of ‘I can do this’ than almost anything else.  If they can, you can too. It’s a toolkit anyone can draw upon. Find people who are going through the same challenges as you and spend time with them – or find other ways to hear their stories. By immersing yourself in vicarious success, you’ll be building a powerful story in your own mind: that if they can, you can too. LEVEL UP YOUR SKILLS Anakin Skywalker begins his journey as an eight-year-old on Tatooine who races drones to try and make enough money to feed his family. Over the next three instalments of Star Wars, he learns to use the Force, trains with the lightsaber and grows into one of the most powerful Jedi in the galaxy. Katniss Everdeen begins her journey as a sixteen-year-old from District 12, where she hunts illegally to provide for her mother and younger sister. After she volunteers to compete in the deadly Hunger Games, we see her becoming a skilled archer and strategist, forming unexpected alliances, and leading a rebellion against the oppressive Capitol. Despite the odds always being against her, she becomes a symbol of hope and resistance to the whole nation: the fabled Mockingjay. And in a personal favourite, Avatar: The Last Airbender, our protagonist Aang starts off as a kid from a small village, struggling to control his powers over the element of air. Through the series, he explores the world; we see him eventually growing into the powerful Avatar, with mastery over all four elements (earth, air, water and fire). At the end of the series he even saves the world from destruction in an epic showdown with the Fire Lord Ozai. These three narrative arcs, among thousands of others in stories and tales across millennia, illustrate a way we can boost our sense of power. Each main character begins their story as a young, inexperienced apprentice. Over time, we watch, read or hear as they overcome challenging obstacles and grow as people – each one of their successes contributing to the next, and the next, and the next.  Our friend Albert Bandura has a catchy name for the way these learning experiences compound – enactive mastery experiences. Enactive mastery is the flipside of the vicarious mastery we’ve just encountered. According to Bandura, an enactive mastery experience refers to the process of learning through doing. Learning through doing is one of the most powerful forces in human psychology. It’s the second key strategy if we’re to build our sense of power. Why? Because the more we do something, the greater our sense of control. We learn. We level up our skills. Our confidence grows. And we empower ourselves. EXPERIMENT 3: The Shoshin Approach What’s most interesting about these learning experiences is that they can be built into your life with relative ease. Even in areas where you feel like you’re making no progress whatsoever, you can harness the potential of enactive mastery. I learned my favourite way to do so from the story of Phil Jackson. Most basketball fans will know a little about Jackson already. They might know he was the coach who transformed the culture of the Chicago Bulls in the 1980s. They might know about how, as head coach, he led his team to so many NBA championships in the 1990s that it started to get a little embarrassing. (Six, if you’re interested.) Or they might know that it was Jackson, more than any other coach, who helped turn Michael Jordan into a legend. What they tend not to know, however, is the unlikely origin of Jackson’s sporting philosophy: Zen Buddhism. Zen is a branch of Buddhism that emphasises the practice of meditation as a means to spiritual enlightenment. Zen encourages individuals to look inward and discover their own path to understanding the nature of reality. It was, according to Jackson, integral to every success he ever had. One Zen concept that came up time and again in Jackson’s coaching practices was the Japanese word shoshin, which roughly translates as ‘beginner’s mind’. Shoshin refers to a state of mind in which we approach every task and situation with the curiosity, openness and humility of a beginner. It might sound odd that adopting a beginner’s mind helps you become more of an expert in that field. Surely a beginner is someone who, by definition, has no idea what they are doing? However, shoshin can have a remarkable impact precisely because it allows us to see things afresh. Think about a skill you’ve spent years learning. You probably have a set way of doing it; if you like to draw, you know which part of a portrait you prefer to start first. If you play sport, you probably decided long ago which position on the pitch best suits your talents. Your experiences have made you much more set in your ways than you once were. A beginner, on the other hand, has none of these preconceptions. A beginner is more willing to try things out, even if they might fail. A beginner will start with whichever part of somebody’s portrait tickles their fancy. And a beginner is happy to start off playing anywhere on the field, even if they might make a fool of themselves. They’re more willing to make mistakes, and these mistakes are precisely what’s needed to learn. When we try to see the world with a fresh perspective, we can maintain this learning process long after it would usually stop. To the Chicago Bulls, this meant approaching each moment with an open mind, free of bias towards any set path or strategy. And according to Jackson, this was the foundation of his team’s success. So how can we integrate this beginner’s outlook into our lives? The answer starts with giving yourself some simple reminders. If you’re in the world of business, shoshin might mean embracing innovation and experimentation, reminding yourself that ‘masters’ become limited by their beliefs in what’s been done and how, while beginners seek new approaches to problem-solving and explore new markets or opportunities. Or if you work in creative fields like writing or music, shoshin might mean deliberately maintaining your interest in different techniques, and pushing yourself to collaborate with people with different styles. Beginners don’t hold strong beliefs about what will work, they just try. By letting go of the idea that we know everything, or somehow should, we actually feel more powerful. In this way, shoshin can help us approach challenges with a greater sense of curiosity, humility and resilience – and help us to learn. EXPERIMENT 4: The Protégé Effect While studying for my psychology degree, I was pleased to learn that older siblings tend to have, on average, slightly higher IQs than their younger siblings. I’d long wondered why I found my little brother so annoying when we were kids. Now I knew. Scientists have tried to come up with various explanations for this phenomenon over the years. Could it be that parents tend to invest more time and energy into their firstborn children than their siblings? Could it be that firstborn children are more likely to engage with adults, which helps develop their vocabularies? Or could it be that parents are more likely to have higher expectations from their first child than from any subsequent children, which nudges firstborns to try harder in school? The jury’s still out, but one interesting explanation stems from a study carried out by researchers at Stanford’s School of Education in 2009. The researchers brought sixty-two 8th-graders into a biology class, where they were randomly assigned to one of two groups. The first group was told to study and learn the material as they normally would, with the goal of performing well on a test at the end of the class. The second group was told that they would be teaching the material to a computer-generated avatar, and that their performance would be evaluated based on how well their digital ‘student’ learned the material. At the end of the class, both groups took the same test to assess their mastery of the material. Strangely, the researchers found that the students in the second group, who taught the material to a computer-generated student, learned better than the students in the first group who’d studied for the test alone. In identical circumstances, with identical material, the people who had to teach others about a subject would learn the material better themselves. The researchers named this phenomenon the ‘protégé effect’. In the years since, researchers in the field of human intelligence have suggested that perhaps older siblings on average have higher IQs and perform better in school than their younger counterparts because of this very phenomenon. Older siblings take on the role of teacher or mentor to their siblings: older siblings (like me) often help their younger siblings (like my brother) with homework, answer their questions about the world, and share their own experiences and insights, however dubious. The protégé effect hints at another way we can boost the number of learning experiences in our lives. As the philosopher Seneca said, Qui docet discit – ‘He who teaches learns’. And once you understand the power of the protégé effect, it becomes surprisingly easy to take on the role of ‘teacher’ in almost any role. Say you work in software development; you might offer to mentor a junior developer or intern. By explaining complex coding concepts and best practices to someone else, you’ll be forced to think more deeply about them yourself, leading to a deeper understanding and improved skill level. Or say you work in sales. You might offer to train new sales reps or host workshops for your team. By sharing your techniques and strategies with others, you’ll be able to refine your own skills and gain new insights into the sales process. And you’ll also be helping to develop the skills of your colleagues, which will ultimately benefit the entire team. You don’t need to be a guru. You can just be a guide. And if you’re concerned that you’re not ‘qualified’ enough to teach someone else, it’s worth remembering that the people we learn from best are often the ones who are just a step ahead of us in the journey. So anyone can become a teacher. You don’t need to be a guru. You can just be a guide.  TAKE OWNERSHIP OF YOUR WORK Starting in the early 1970s, the psychologist Edward Deci became intrigued by a simple question. What motivates people to do hard things? This was a theme that had fascinated him since the very beginning of his career. Just one year after completing his PhD at Carnegie Mellon University in 1970, he published an influential paper in which he asked people to solve a puzzle called the Soma cube (a little like a Rubik’s Cube). He found that those who were offered a financial reward for solving the puzzle were, weirdly, less likely to enjoy the task and were more likely to give up solving the puzzle after the reward was removed, compared to those who weren’t offered any money at all. The material reward seemed to make people less engaged with a task, not more. This led Deci to conclude that the offer of a material reward can, peculiarly, decrease motivation. When, in 1977, Deci met another young psychologist, Richard Ryan, the pair embarked on a professional relationship that would transform how the world thinks about motivation. Over the next twenty years, Ryan and Deci developed a completely new way to think about why we do hard things. Their contribution culminated in 1981 with their statement of ‘self-determination theory’. Until that point, most scientists had thought that motivation was mainly driven by incentives like rewards and punishments. But Deci and Ryan showed otherwise. They encouraged readers to see motivation falling on a spectrum, with ‘extrinsic’ at one end and ‘intrinsic’ at the other. Intrinsic motivation comes from the inside: driven by self-fulfilment, curiosity and a genuine desire to learn. Extrinsic motivation comes from the outside: driven by pay-rises, material rewards and social approval. But these forms of motivation were not equal. According to self- determination theory, intrinsic motivation is substantially more powerful than extrinsic motivation. Lasting motivation comes from within.  But that wasn’t where Deci and Ryan’s theory ended. Because they also showed that intrinsic motivation is something that can be built up. As early as the 1980s, they were demonstrating that intrinsic motivation can be enhanced by a handful of forces, chief among them our sense of ‘autonomy’. In layperson’s terms, that’s a sense of ownership. And it’s our final contributor to the sense of power that energises us and our work. Deci and Ryan argued that when people feel they have power over their own actions, they’re much more likely to be intrinsically motivated to engage in them. That’s why the Soma cube experiment found that monetary rewards reduce people’s motivation. They don’t feel like they fully ‘own’ the task – but that they’re undertaking it for some external reward. Their sense of control declines, and so does their sense of motivation. This rings true in our own lives. Our need for control is why we hate being micromanaged by our bosses and our parents. Our need for control is why we love to decorate our bedrooms when we’re kids (or design our homes as adults). And when our control over our lives is taken away – if we end up in prison, or shackled to a job we don’t enjoy – it can have disastrous consequences for our physical and mental health. The trouble is that taking control isn’t always straightforward. Sure, some of us have jobs in which we have plenty of ownership over our day-to-day lives. Successful entrepreneurs have autonomy over the direction of their business. Digital nomads are free to trot around the globe, working from any cafe they come across. Others don’t and can’t. A hotel receptionist has to stand at the desk to greet and welcome guests – he can’t just choose to work from home. A junior doctor on the hospital ward has to see all the patients on the list – she can’t just decide to ignore the patients who are rude to her. But what makes the concept of ownership so powerful is that you can integrate it into almost any situation. All too often, when we find ourselves in a situation we don’t like, we start feeling fatalistic. ‘I don’t like where I live, but it’s not in my power to move.’ ‘I don’t like where this relationship is going, but it’s not in my power to alter it.’ ‘I find this work boring, but it’s not in my power to change it.’ Sometimes, we’re right: there is nothing we can do. But often we have more agency than we realise – if not over the whole situation, then over parts of it. We have control even when we don’t know it. EXPERIMENT 5: Own the Process My favourite example of humans’ remarkable ability to take ownership of bad situations comes from FiletOfFish1066. In June 2016, the gentleman behind the Reddit account FiletOfFish1066 made headlines for getting fired. He’d been working as a software developer at his company for six years, where his work mostly involved testing software in the quality assurance department. It was deeply boring. All he did was run the same old tests on the same old software, following the same old scripts every time. So FiletOfFish1066 came up with a plan. Without alerting his boss, he spent the first eight months of his employment programming software to automate his job. From then on, the custom programs he’d written worked on autopilot, running the quality-assurance tests perfectly. His boss never checked on him, because everything was going well. As he wrote in a post on Reddit after being fired: ‘From around six years ago up until now, I have done nothing at work. I am not joking. For forty hours each week I go to work, play League of Legends in my office, browse Reddit, and do whatever I feel like. In the past six years I have maybe done fifty hours of real work. So basically nothing. And nobody really cared.’ Unfortunately for FiletOfFish1066, over half a decade into his ingenious plan someone at IT figured out what was going on and reported it to his boss. He was sacked for having the audacity to automate his own job. I’m not suggesting that FiletOfFish1066 was someone with an impeccable career strategy – nor that he was a paragon of virtue. But I do suspect that FiletOfFish1066’s actions hint at the first way we can build our sense of ownership, even in situations in which we have little independence. When we can’t take ownership of the situation, we can still take ownership of the process. When we can’t take ownership of the situation, we can still take ownership of the proc