8 quotes about fun

It's kind of fun to do the impossible.
Walt Disney (1901 - 1966)

In all large corporations, there is a pervasive fear that someone, somewhere is having fun with a computer on company time. Networks help alleviate that fear.
John C. Dvorak

Getting there isn't half the fun - it's all the fun.
Robert Townsend

I think we're having fun. I think our customers really like our products. And we're always trying to do better.
Steve Jobs (1955 - )

The man who does not work for the love of work but only for money is not likely to make money nor find much fun in life.
Charles M. Schwab

Funny is an attitude.
Flip Wilson (1933 - 1998)

I never did a day's work in my life. It was all fun.
Thomas A. Edison (1847 - 1931)

If you obey all of the rules, you miss all of the fun.
Katherine Hepburn

Rats

When times get tough, many people turn serious - this is no time for girls'

giggly nights out or to go paintballing with the guys. Or is it? Some researchers believe that horsing around may be better in the long run than hunkering down. Play, they say, not only frees up your mind, it keeps you nimble for when the unexpected happens. "It's a survival drive that we have minimised in our culture," says Stuart Brown, a psychiatrist who founded the US National Institute for Play in Carmel Valley, California.

People are wrong to regard play as just a frill, says Marc Bekoff at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He studies play behaviour in social carnivores such as wolves, coyotes and dogs, and believes that it allows individuals to try out new things because they can make mistakes without penalty. "Play encourages taking reasonable risks," he says. "It allows you to be flexible and creative." Brown agrees. "The search for novelty and the desire for something fresh is a hallmark of the state of play." And of course novelty and freshness are also central to creativity.

Brown sees play as a special biological state, like sleep. It seems to be important throughout the human life cycle, but particularly so in childhood.

In this respect we are like other social species. Sergio Pellis at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada, put juvenile rats in cages that allowed them to sniff, groom and interact with others, but not to engage in rough-and-tumble play. These animals grew up unable to adapt to novel situations, says Pellis. Brown's studies of adults who were deprived of play in childhood reveal similar damaging effects.

At the very least, then, we should equip the next generation for the inevitable recessions of the future by encouraging water fights and inviting imaginary friends to join in.

Everything can be turned into fun.

For a few people, fun is work. I think athletics, music bands members, etc.
They are the ones who didn¹t have to look for a job, but managed to get paid for what they enjoyed doing. For whatever reasons, many people didn¹t get their dream job. If you can¹t turn your passion into a job, does that mean you can¹t turn your job into fun?

My belief is that everything can be turned into fun, and here are some examples that spring into mind.

Turning recycling into fun :

It has always been hard to convince people, especially the youngest ones, to act for the planet.
Struggling to make students recycle their coffee cups, industrials had the idea to turn it into a game.
They created a ³reverse vending machine² and installed it in schools. When returning a cup after finishing their drink, people had 1 out of 10 chance to win a freebie or a token for a free drink.
People liked it and started to return their own cups, but also cleaning tables around from cups left by others. Recycling became an accepted and fun process, and sales have even been boosted by the chance to win a free coffee.

Turning fundraising into fun :

It¹s hard to raise money, even if a cause does worth it. People won¹t give money for the sake of it, so how to make them enjoy giving away money?
Associations had a good idea: make people give money for what they like.
That¹s how they come with the creation of fundraising events: people are willing to pay more for a nice dinner or to attend a festival, and will even feel better knowing that funds raised will go to charities.

Turning sport into fun :

For most people, sport means fun. Not for everyone. However everyone has to make physical exercise to keep fit. But over the last years, new methods have been created to engage more people doing exercise: gamers can spend more time playing and keeping fit with the Wii, clubbers and music addicts get some fun out of music spinning class, etc.

Turning learning into fun :

Some studies that were conducted on memory found that, on the whole, we tend to remember what we learned in pleasant situations and we tend to forget what which was learned during unpleasant or stressful situations.
So how to make learning a more pleasant experience, both for kids and adults?
The solution was to build teaching methods on games and play activites. This idea proved success for years : geography met success thanks to Carmen SanDiego, kids learned how to read and count with Sesame Street:
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjxnQBCkxHA), etc.

The same kinds of methods have been implemented more recently for adults.
Companies started to use ³serious games², sort of videogames with specific rules that uses entertainment to further government or corporate training, education, health, public policy, and strategic communication objectives.
(Examples: companies like IBM and DELL created virtual worlds to provide employees with immersive training experience.)


There is for sure a way to turn your job into fun, you just need to find the best way to do it.

Chance favours the prepared mind

"Chance favours the prepared mind." That was Louis Pasteur's mantra, and new research suggests he may have been on to something. Interestingly, though, the "prepared mind" may be more flypaper than bear trap.

John Kounios at Drexel University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Mark Jung-Beeman at Northwestern University in Chicago were interested in knowing what was going on in the brain in the run-up to a eureka moment. To find out, they scanned the "resting" brains of volunteers as they waited to be told what the experiment entailed. Then the researchers gave them anagrams - "MPXAELE", for example - and afterwards asked them to indicate whether the solution had just come to them as an insight or if they'd had to work it out. Comparing the activity in volunteers' resting brains, Kounios and Jung-Beeman found clear differences, with those who reported using insight seeming to let their minds wander. They had more activity in their right hemisphere, which is associated with processing loose associations, and more diffuse activity in the part of the brain that processes vision (Neuropsychologia, vol 46, p 282). The researchers suggest this may allow them to sample their world more broadly for connections that could trigger an "aha" moment.

Joydeep Bhattacharya at Goldsmiths University of London has also found that an unfocused brain is most likely to generate creative solutions. He gave volunteers particularly difficult word association puzzles: finding the word that unites "skirts", "black" and "put", for example. Bhattacharya monitored their brain waves as they worked themselves into an impasse. Then he dangled a clue, the first letter of the unifying word - in this case, "o".

The clue was enough to deliver the answer for people whose brain activity during the test had revealed a lot of slow alpha waves and few high-frequency gamma waves - the sort of pattern you would find in someone relaxing with their eyes closed. By contrast, people who had shown little alpha but a lot of gamma activity - normally linked to focused thought, consciousness and higher reasoning - still didn't strike upon the answer (PLoS ONE, vol 3(1), p e1459). "Whether the clue would be successfully utilised depended crucially on their prior brain state," says Bhattacharya.
He now wants to know whether deliberately putting your brain into a relaxed, defocused state could increase creativity. A recession-busting way of doing that might be simply to take a shower or go for a walk in the woods.

From New Scientist

Fun = amazing

When people have fun at what they do, they can do amazing things.

Companies started to understand this, and some of them implemented management policies that proved to be successful.

An interesting motivation technique (usually called Innovation Time Off) is used at Google. All Google engineers are encouraged to spend 20% of their work time (one day per week) on projects that interest them. Some of Google's newer services, such as Gmail, Google News, Orkut, and Adsense. originated from these independent endeavors.
In a talk at Stanford University, Marissa Mayer, Google's Vice President of Search Products and User Experience, stated that her analysis showed that half of the new product launches originated from the 20% time.

The powerful relations between creativity and play

At the 2008 Serious Play conference, designer Tim Brown talks about the powerful relationship between creative thinking and play. He reminds us how important it is to keep our sense of childhood.

Watch the Ted talk here.

Motivated dogs

Training your dog can be a bit boring. So lots of people have started doing heelwork to music. Because you're having fun and enjoying yourself, this immediately goes down the lead/leg to the dog and the dog gets motivated and enjoys itself too.

It's now even an event at Crufts (for the people who make up super fancy routines). Here's a guy and his dog doing heelwork to Thriller.