Work Like Your Dog: Fifty Ways to Work Less, Play More, and Earn More
272
Work Like Your Dog: Fifty Ways to Work Less, Play More, and Earn More
272eBook
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Overview
It's a smart and savvy strategy to becoming a more creative, productive, and dynamic employee.
Work Like Your Dog is an inspiring call to "come out and play" at work. Dogs seem to have endless energy and tackle tasks with enviable enthusiasm, and Matt Weinstein and Luke Barber believe that most people could take a course from their ca-nines. By learning to play more at their jobs, workers can "lick" difficult challenges, take pleasure from tasks previously dreaded, reduce their levels of stress, and recharge their creative side.
People spend more time working, thinking about work, and traveling to and from work than all other waking activities combined. Employees are asked to do more for less--making their work lives more exhausting and less satisfying. More hours are far from the answer; honing a sense of frolic and fun is. This book is a launching pad for fifty fun lessons about frolicking your way to success:
Don't be afraid of being the fool. Be prepared to take risks; your new experiences may well lead to new contacts or new accounts and, if nothing else, will make you feel wonderful.
Celebrate every success, not just your own but your coworker's new account, brilliant idea, or anniversary.
You'll help release tension, underscore positives, and keep people aware of challenges conquered.
Use humor to solve problems. Create a swearing room, where you and coworkers vent frustrations. Use a joke to diffuse verbal abuse from a customer. Humor can help you stay focused on the most important aspects of your job and prevent the worst aspects from getting the upper hand.
Why choose stress? Almost every situation can provoke either stress or laughter. If you choose the highway of humor, your job will be more enjoyable and you'll work more effectively.
And many more suggestions, stories, and ideas to unleash your playful professional and keep you from barking up the wrong tree.
Weinstein and Barber's advice comes from seminar attendees and hundreds of corporate clients, such as American Express, IBM, Federal Express, and AT&T. This book shares the wisdom from these employees and from twenty-plus years of helping people enjoy their way to success.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780307568564 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Random House Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 07/29/2009 |
| Sold by: | Random House |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 272 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Luke Barber is a professor of philosophy at Richland College in Dallas, Texas, where he teaches both philosophy and ethics. His in-novative teaching has earned him recognition by the National Institute of Staff and Organizational Devel-opment as a master teacher. His previous careers as a child evangelist, a navy seaman, and a 100-mile ultramarathon endurance runner have given him a unique perspective on learning to laugh and play with life's problems.
Read an Excerpt
1
Treat Work as a Game
Many years ago I had a strange dream in which the ancient philosopher Plato called me on the telephone. Collect. This guy calls me all the way from Athens, Greece, in 375 B.C., and he has the nerve to reverse the charges.
Big spender that I am, I accept the call.
In the dream, Plato tells me that he has been asked to make a speech at Aristotle’s birthday party and he doesn’t have any ideas. He wants to know if I can help him out. So I give him the line “What, then, is the right way of living? Life must be lived as play.” He was very excited by the idea and promised to call me back and let me know how it all worked out, but he never did.
Several years later I was thumbing through Plato’s Dialogues and was astonished to discover that precise quote. I told some of my colleagues about it, and they insisted that I must have subconsciously known about Plato’s statement before my dream, even though I had no conscious memory of it.
I myself think the guy ripped me off.
Now, I’m not altogether sure what Plato meant when he used those lines, but I know what I meant. I meant that the best way to live a joyful, healthy, low-stress life is to choose to see work as a game and ourselves as the players. And whatever happens on the job is just a part of that game.
What are the characteristics of a successful game? First, it should be fun for the players and enriching to their lives, or what’s the point of playing? Second, it should have a set of rules and strategies governing it, which we can study in order to play more successfully. This book is intended to be a guidebook for playing the Game of Work.
Let’s use tennis as an example. If you are playing a game of tennis and your opponent smashes an ace by you, you have a choice. Clearly there is nothing you can do about the fact that you have been aced—that, as they say, is history The choice you have is how you respond to the situation.
If you are really playing tennis as a game, then you move over to the other side of the court and wait for the next serve. It doesn’t help you or the game to stare at the ground and complain. It doesn’t help to smash the turf with your racquet and start making excuses for yourself. As a game player, you need only move to the other side of the court, and—because this is the way the game is set up—you get another chance.
This, I know, seems incredibly simple and obvious. Yet, when our life at work serves us an ace, many of us act as if it’s the end of the world. Even the smallest of problems or mistakes can get blown completely out of proportion. We spend all kinds of time and energy living in the past, analyzing, criticizing, making excuses, worrying, and generally making ourselves miserable. What we really need to do is to move to the other side of the court. The game of work lets us try it again. We have the power to choose how we respond to the aces life serves us.
If you treat your work as a game, then as soon as you’ve been served an ace you can begin to look at the possible responses available to you. You can start by saying, “Well, I certainly loused up that easy sale!” or “That was definitely the worst deal I ever made!” or “Now I can kiss that promotion good-bye!” But if you want your work life to be a joyful game, then you have to start moving forward from there. You have to remember that your goal is to get to the other side of the court and to get on with the game of work.
You can ask yourself, “What can I learn from this so I won’t make the same mistake next time?” You can remind yourself that you want to be a person who is constantly growing and improving yourself, and you can’t do that if you never take any risks and never make any mistakes. Instead of whining, complaining, or beating yourself over the head with your racquet for messing up, you can say to yourself, “Hey, nobody’s perfect— how can I learn from my mistakes if I never make any?
2
Turn Work into Play
From time immemorial, frustrated parents have said the same thing to their children: “Let’s play a game called Clean Up Your Room!” Although this popular attempt at parental manipulation seldom works, it does express a wonderful idea—that hard work can be fun and that anything can be turned into a game.
Dr. Ernie Lavorini is a master at bringing play to his work. The first thing I noticed when I walked into Dr. Lavorini’s dental office was a large sign on the reception desk that said, BE KIND TO MY EMPLOYEES. I LOVE THEM ALL. ERNIE
The employees in Dr. Lavorini’s office have gone river rafting together and have made company outings to places like the racetrack, the water slides, and the Renaissance Pleasure Faire. Every year they all go holiday shopping together and then out to dinner—funded by the office. “It’s so much fun to go into the city at Christmastime,” says Ernie. “We never tire of it. We all love the way San Francisco looks lit up at night.”
One time Dr. Lavorini even arranged for his employees to be “kidnapped.” A bunch of his friends arrived at the office with pillowcases over their heads, herded all the employees into their getaway cars, and spirited them away for a day at the beach.
“But what about all your patients?” I asked Ernie dubiously.
“Oh, the receptionists were in on it.” He laughed. “It looked like we had a full day booked, but actually there were no patients scheduled.”
Most people don’t associate the idea of fun with a trip to the dentist. But Dr. Lavorini tries to make even that unlikely venue an upbeat experience for his patients. One day when I needed to have some emergency dental work, Dr. Lavorini said to me, “You need a crown on one of your teeth. But I’m going to show you how to turn a have-to-have situation into “a get-to-have situation.” Ernie explained that he could put a tattoo on the crown, a picture of anything I wanted. And since the crown would be on one of my back teeth, completely out of sight, no one would know about it except for me. And it would be a completely painless tattoo, since he would make it directly on the crown, before it was fitted on my tooth.
I chose a comet—a silver star with a blue and yellow tail streaming out behind it. And I smile every time I look at it—in fact, every time I even think about it. It’s not that easy to look at, actually—I have to pull my lower lip down with one finger, squeeze up close to the mirror, and squint out of one eye. But it always looks great. And if tooth, comet, astronomy, or tattoo ever come up in conversation, I can always count on an amazed reaction from anyone I dare to show it to.
Let’s put this into perspective: if Dr. Ernie Lavorini could turn something like dental surgery from a have-to-have situation into a get-to-have situation, then how hard can it be to do the same thing with some difficult situations in your own job? How can you turn some task that you dread into something that you get to do? The trick is to bring the elements of a game into your work—to learn to play with your job.
In every office, for example, there are some jobs that no one wants to do but that must be done if the office is to function smoothly. One day Cathy Fleming, the vice president of operations for the Sacramento, California, firm Women Incorporated, thought to herself, “Since somebody has to do it anyway, why not make a game out of it?” So she wrote out eight such tasks on slips of paper, tasks like taking money to the bank, taking mail to the post office, cleaning up the office kitchen, changing the toner in the printer, and refilling the fax machine and the copier with paper. Then she placed each of the slips of paper inside a balloon and inflated all the balloons. One by one each of her coworkers got to pop a balloon and—voilà!—discovered her task for the day.