Anyone who knows me, knows I like to have a LOT of fun and that I really don’t take day to day life all that seriously. I can definitely put in some focused attention and get the job done and while I do that often, I don’t let it happen without any element of fun.  Fun is something I think so many people are lacking in life and its especially true about the workplace.  Many workplaces are places of sterile positioning and power struggles that you can’t just work together as a team, have fun doing it and still make great accomplishments.  In fact, I challenge you with the statement that any workplace that has fun doing their work, will get a lot more done because of the engagement between people and simply because people enjoy their work more when it is something they like to do.

Fun in the workplace comes in many flavors and obviously what I consider fun won’t necessarily be the exact fit for you or your workplace but my examples and suggestions here can easily serve as ideas for building your own fun work environment.  Not surprisingly, most elements of fun in the workplace require some imagination and fortunately, imagination and fun both lead to more innovation and ideas sharing among co-workers.  This is one of the many great impacts fun has on an organization as well, especially in one where design, innovation and new ideas are an important part of the company’s success.  It certainly is in mine and so fun brings even more than its most obvious personal benefits by also encouraging the visual and imaginative mind to do more than what is required for day to day tasks.

Elements of Fun

Personal enjoyment

Everyone wishes their jobs to be something they enjoy and fun adds an element that creates that feeling of enjoyment.  If the workplace is fun, you will ultimately like your work more and put more effort into it and be happier with the job. A good job helps make a person happy and can add a lot of fulfillment and personal enjoyment to a person’s life.

Sparks creativity and imagination

Fun in the workplace can come in many forms and many of those, such as humor, games, jokes, competitions, interesting challenges or systems with prizes require new ways of thinking, wit or cleverness, teamwork or challenge and other activities that trigger new ideas, thinking and creative work. Many people simply consider anything creative to be fun (I’m one of those people) so tasks that involve these elements are often close associated or even sparking new creativity, innovation and imagination among those involved.

Can be a strong change proponent

So fun will trigger people to think about have more fun, often improving systems and processes or tasks along the way to make them both effective and fun in the process. This creativity is a wonderful partner to fun when it triggers ideas and rally’s support for change.  Change is scary to many people and so making change part of something that is enjoyable takes the fear out of it and it helps to support the change instead of add fear to it.  The ideas that come from fun programs then often encourage or reinforce even more change and it can continue to feed on itself if the systems are dynamic enough to let fun steer some of the work tasks and processes.

Engages teams and cross functional teams more easily

Most things that are fun in the workplace will only be successful if they are done with multiple people and when people have a chance to work together or compete with one another doing it.  Many of the systems and programs I’ve seen that are fun are when multiple departments or teams come together.  This can be anything from team building exercizes or job sharing to competitions or social events.  Activities that bring people together from multiple areas that do not generally work together are more social, and even if the activities are entirely work focused, the new social aspect is fun, and engages people more than without these activities in place.  And its this engagement between teams then that really starts to benefit the organization as the company works more and more integrated among its people instead of in silos or separate areas.

Builds personal relationships faster for more effective teamwork

The engagement between teams just above obviously happens within teams as well and the advantage of this is that personal relationships are build faster among teams when they are having more fun in their work.  People interact more and communicate much more frequently during fun activities and ultimately, when they know each other better.  People with closer relationships understand one another well and can be much more effective as a team than people who do not know each other well.  This is the case in all areas of life and it works well in the workplace as well.  Fun in the workplace is simply an element that can encourage this to happy and provide the environment needed to allow effective teamwork.

Increases employee loyalty and lengthens employee service time

People who are happy doing something tend to do more of it or to do it longer and so this is certainly true when it comes to work.  If you like your job and work because you have a lot of fun doing it, you are more likely to stay. People who are more likely to stay, will provide more value to an organization through gained expertise, strong relationships and teamwork with colleagues and by reducing overall training time and learn curve ratios compared to their delivered results.  All can be had by using fun in the workplace to keep wanting to stay!

Examples of Fun in the Workplace

These are just some of the things I have experienced in my work environments or know of that help to promote a fun work environment:

• Encouraging and allowing people to personalize their workspace with personal items, signs, posters, favorite team jerseys, flags, objects, gadjets or any other simply items.
• Keeping formalities out of day to day business and making daily communication informal, interesting and lively.
• Ensuring that staff meetings and group meetings are upbeat, lively and exciting.  Leaders must bring energy and enthusiasm to their teams and make it obvious and visible.
• Diverse personality types is advantageous for many reasons, but especially for adding fun, since you get more variety in the type of people working together when you have a mix of personality or behavior types.
• Managers and leaders must allow and promote fun themselves so that all employees know it is not only allowed, but encouraged.
• Jokes and humorous stories should be regularly available by postings, newsletters, and in scheduled meetings.
• Create and support an active social club to organize events, games and sports for all to participate in outside of work.
• Have the social club coordinate monthly social lunches and BBQs.
• Encourage simple, harmless practical jokes around the office
• Use team names and nick names for people based on their work or areas of expertise
• Play on people’s reputation with words, encouragement and tactful teasing
• Ensure high amounts of teamwork without individuals becoming too self situated in their roles
• Rotate job functions within teams to experience varying styles and personalities in repetitive tasks

Risks with Fun in the Workplace

There are of course some risks with adding more fun in the workplace and while they should not be ignored, they can easily be mitigated and controlled.  The most easily occurring risk could be that jokes and practical jokes get out of hand or unprofessional.  It is very important to know that any humor must be clean and clean from any prejudice, racism or sexism.  If this is monitored and correctly quickly when it is visible at any level, the humor can be kept professional and fun without the risk of hurting feelings or attacking anyone’s character.

Another obvious risk is that fun can be a distraction to actually getting work done and it can sometimes seem like a waste of time where pressing deadlines and tight schedules just don’t allow any time for fun.  I’d definitely argue against this thought process since I’ve seen how much more productive people are (including myself) at times of stress when there is some fun still to be had in the workplace.  The ratio of time to let the workplace be more fun instead of stagnant, is well worth the small number of hours lost considering the increased productivity, loyalty and imagination that the fun aspects of work bring out in people.  The benefits easily outweigh the risks and with attention and clear expectations about fun and time spent having fun in the workplace, it can properly be managed and encouraged to make all employees enjoy their work a little bit more!

Posted by Mike King under Business | 4 Comments »

Maximize Your Free Time to Create New Wealth & Purpose

Author: Robert Pagliarini

It is a total joy to share books with my readers and especially books that I learn a lot from or that I can really connect with.  The book “The Other 8 Hours” does both of those things for me and so it is my pleasure to tell you how great this book it.  Robert contacted me to offer me a free copy with hope that I would review here at LearnThis.  I was excited by the description and title yet apprehensive when I don’t have it recommended by many people since it is a new book just out.  Long story short, I loved the book and will definitely recommend it as one of my favorites.

The Creative Spirit

The book explores personal development by specifically focusing on what you do with the 8 hours or so every day that you are not working or sleeping.  It focuses you and inspires you to make that time available to become a Cre8tor, a person with a drive to create new opportunities, that generate more wealth and purpose and happiness in your life.  The book has 4 main sections in it:

• Get a Clue
• Get More Time
• Get More Money
• Get a Life

All of these sections have chapters to explore each statement and there is actually quite a lot of depth to each topic.  Pagliarini covers everything from examining the life leeches that exist around us taking away from the available time that COULD be ours to a fantastic set of resources with each chapter that can kick start any Crea8tor channel you want to pursue.  There are strong messages in each of these four areas and I’m fortunately enough to have experienced many of these in my own life so have explored and even executed many of the challenges put forward.  I certainly have not however, collected such a strong, consistent and enjoyable text to read from all these lessons and clearly Pagliarini has down much in his own life to experience these as well AND he has done an immense amount of research to back things up with statistics.

Another aspect that is unique in this book that I really enjoyed are there being many 1 page short stories and examples of people who have taken these techniques and put them into action, each showing the major benefits to be had as a result.  I found the stories to be quite enjoyable clips to read and put much of what is written into real life context that is easy to relate with.

Get More Time

The tips on getting more time are absolutely timeless and powerful.  There is so much in here that I agree with as a productivity lover it was simply fun to read, yet there was also much to learn from even with the countless hours I’ve put into this area already myself. One example of this is termed “boosting” and used to describe taking on a second job or side job that is so mindless or easy that you can use it to actually study or work on other things while getting paid.  It gives two benefits, some extra income to use for creative channels or to catch up on debts as well as to further yourself in new knowledge areas, business plans or others such needed Cre8tor work that is difficult to make time for.  While I don’t plan on taking on any second mindless jobs myself, I will certainly use and share this concept again, some people come to mind to me for this right now.

He includes what I can easily say is the best 18 pages I’ve ever read on the powers that grip us in life and suck our time away from us.  Everything from TV watching or being disorganized to doing more than is necessary.  There are 24 items lists in this section with the typical common behavior and then a short straightforward solution that anyone can use to tackle that problem.  If you take nothing else out of this book, take this, as you will find yourself creating more time and increase your productivity, which obviously I’m a big fan of doing!

Get More Money

This section of the book is brilliant and clearly the main content as it covers in superb clarity 10 separate suggested channels or areas to follow as a cre8tor that can bring in new wealth and opportunities to make a better life for yourself.  The examples of course continue throughout and each of these channels are outlined with many ideas on what they might look like, how you can start, a typically process map for executing it and then a great set of resources to get started in each one.  This is absolutely packed with great content and again, easily makes the book worth buying just for these chapters alone.

Get More Life

Finally after touching on all the great aspects and opportunities, Pagliarini covers what many critics want to see.  What makes all this difficult is life.  Life gets in the way and needs to be managed better to even dare take on few work in our other 8 hours.  This section helps here and has many compressed lessons on productivity, habits, goal setting and other great techniques to manage all this and actually get it all done.

Conclusions

There are a few sections scattered through the book that talk about purpose and legacy and what you can do that is bigger than yourself but I must say this was the only thing I was a bit disapointed in.  Everything I thought was quite finance centric and the overall read of the book to me was about making more money.  That is an overall message though, not the only one.  So much is covered this is likely just a personal feeling.  I am really quite impressed by this book and am certainly going to check out more from Pagliarini as certainly has a best seller here if I had to make any guesses.  It’s a fantastic book that I encourage anyone to read.  It truly applies to to anyone with even the slightest desire to get a little more out of life or to change your current circumstances.  I still have many references and websites to check out from several chapters that will keep be coming back to it for the next little while.  I know each of you will enjoy it as well.

Note: I always avoid reading other’s reviews once I start a book as I know that lets me write the most objective review I can.  I’m happy to see that after writing this, I just checked out the reviews for it on amazon is its getting 5 stars across the board as well.  So, go check that out the reviews if you need to see more or to buy the book.  Also, check out the book website at TheOther8Hours.com.

Posted by Mike King under Book Reviews | 4 Comments »

I’ve been thinking and writing a lot more about creativity lately and today my thoughts brought me to the subject of art.  Art is one of those things that seems so subjective and person its hard to really define.  Most people when they think of art, think of the traditional styles of art, like drawings and paintings, perhaps music or even sculptures.  To me, art is much more than that, it is not in the things you produce as an artist but actually in the process of creation.  Art, therefore, is really anything that is created.  It is still subjective since it is a personal reflection or process to create something but it is wrapped around the process of creation, not the end product.  The creation itself is what drives an artist to do what they do, not only the end product itself.

What is Your Art?

What led me onto this subject is my graphics business.  Its a business that lets me create visual content and end up with an animated 3D piece of art.  I used to have much more desire to make this a full time career because it was my most significant area of creativity and art in my life and I love it.  Still do in fact.  The difference now is that I’ve learned that there are many other areas in my life where I can be just as creative and find art in that creative process as well.  This includes my writing here at LearnThis.ca and it includes my engineering work in design, architecture and managing of people.  The art is in all of that as well.  More importantly I’ve found art in creative actions with my thinking, my feeling, my relationships and my spirituality.  All these areas now I find myself using my creativity to produce change.  Change in myself and change in others around me.  That realization lets me look at creativity and art in everything I do, not just in a few fixed products or actions.

The Art of Change

Think of all your actions, all your passions, everything you spend time in life creating.  Maybe your art is not in some traditional sense but instead in the art of change?  I know that personal development and life learning require change and if change can be sparked by creativity, then embrace your creative actions, extend them in all directions of your life and see the results in your own personal art of change!

Posted by Mike King under Learning | 20 Comments »

Please jump back to the first two articles in this series if you missed them.

• The Imaginative Mind: Mental Creativity
• The Imaginative Mind: Social Creativity

This article explores how the mind and it’s imagination is useful for innovation.  Innovation to me is about the pollination of ideas. Not only that they are spread to others but also how that innovation provides gains and benefits compared to what was used or available before hand.  I’ve explored how your own mind’s creativity can be enhanced as well as the creativity powered by a social atmosphere and now this explores how that kind of creativity can be put to use for improvement through innovation.

Incremental

The first area of application where creativity from an imaginative mind can drive innovation is in incremental improvements and change.  This is a popular one for me and obviously through my writing here at LearnThis since personal development is largely about incremental change.  Those active in it strive to innovate new methods and teaching styles to reach and expand their influence to bring that incremental change both into our own lives and the lives of those we connect with.

Many businesses also look to gain from incremental innovation by building continuous improvement programs and training.  It’s a crucial part of change and adaptation that every strong business should have.

Radical

The next level of innovation intensity is that involving more radical change.  This is needed when larger systems / beliefs change or when a change has a much bigger impact to a person or organization.  The radical aspect of this is sometimes seen as shocking or unexpected as well since it requires outside the box thinking and improvements to be put into place.  It is much more than simple or continuous incremental changes and it requires a major step change to jump from one way of doing things to another.

Radical innovation is something that is risky and requires some courage to create.  It’s far outside any comfort zones and it isn’t something you can hide under the surface whether its a personal innovation or not.  Radical innovation will be seen by others and have enough impact on your life that the change will be a significant one.

Revolutionary

The final kind of innovation is a revolutionary one.  This level of innovation is so large that it causes change well beyond your direct environment or self and causes a wave of change well beyond the circle of direct influence.  Revolutionary thinking is of course thinking that encompasses each of the other types but what sets it apart is that it is for an innovation that affects a wide group of people, an entire region or perhaps a whole industry or market.  It is such a massive change that once it is in place, its very difficult to go back since the new innovation engrains itself into society and the lives of those within.

Take Creativity Personal

So, I hope this short series on the imaginative mind and creativity sparks you to look at where you allow your creativity to surface in your life but also how far you are willing to take it.  We all have creative thoughts and so its what you do with them and how you let them work in your mind that will drive change around you and in your life.  Don’t settle in and suppress your imagination, instead, embrace it, activate it in your own mind, in your social sphere around you and turn those innovations into action!

Please, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this topic or any of your own creations or innovations.

Posted by Mike King under Learning | 14 Comments »

This article continues with the topic of the imaginative mind and today I’ve cover another look at creativity, but from the social aspect this time.  If you missed the last article, here it is:  The Imaginative Mind: Mental Creativity

Cycles of Creativity

Creativity is very much a process, not a single event and so there are cycles of creativity in our actions and thoughts.  Some days creativity just flows and others, it seems so distant.  These cycles exist within our minds in all the same areas covered from the previous section on mental creativity but now we’ll look at it these cycles in a larger social environment.  The same type of cycles where creativity is obvious, encouraged, built on, extended and heavily supported occurs in all kinds of social arenas.

• friendships and relationship
• organizations and clubs
• businesses and work groups

Even larger segments like geographic regions, industries, municipalities or media exposure groups can experience these up and down cycles of creativity.  All of these cycles occur because of creative influence that either inspires or suppresses creativity throughout that social sphere and it cascades the effects.  The same reasons why brainstorming is useful to the mind to spark new ideas and keep associations active in the mind applies here to social creativity.  Each idea feeds the ideas of others, expanding the creative impact to larger groups.  Things that stifle creativity make a similar impact by slowing down or eliminating the connections for creativity to grow.

Impact on the Mind

Understanding how these cycles impact our work, lives and environment gives us a more accurate model to predict and control the swings that social creativity is impacted by.  Keeping active with the actions that spread creativity and avoiding some of the typical problems areas that kill creativity works in a social environment to ensure the imaginative mind has a sandbox to explore.  I believe the mind is at its best when learning, growing and building itself and it can only do this to its fullest when the imagination is active with as many options for creativity as possible.

Contributing to Creativity

There are a number of ways to contribute to social creativity.  The ones I think have the biggest impact are the following:

Eliminate Criticism and Complaining

Criticism and complaining are really the quickest things that kill creativity.  Criticism can emotionally shut down a person so quickly that the only creative thoughts they will have is of escape or revenge.  It is something that naturally transforms our minds into a completely new state unless we learn to handle criticism and control our response and state of mind consciously.

The social impact this can have can reach many people at once and unfortunately this bad behaviour can also be quite contagious.  The best thing you can do with these items to contribute more to social creativity is to eliminate criticism of others, of ideas and of actions.  The same goes for complaining since it encourages a very negative thought process not helpful in activating the imagination in any way.  Obviously eliminating these is not easy, but they can certainly be reduced and they can definitely be done in private at least in order to minimize the influence to any audience available.

Brainstorming

While I covered this in the previous article on mental creativity it is certainly applicable here in a social atmosphere as well.  Brainstorming in a group activates the imagination of the whole group and quickly allows ideas to germinate with each other and spread between everyone’s minds.  It can be done as a group on purpose with a specific topic or goal in mind or it can happen through other media with no initial intention of doing it!  Social media and viral systems are perfect examples of this as a group gains access to shared thoughts and ideas, they become enabled to share more themselves which continues to feed the process.  This type of social brainstorming happens a lot with online social groups like twitter and stumbleupon , as with all the other social networks.

Asking Questions – Question everything

Questions come about from curiosity and of course curiosity broods creativity.  Therefore, questions are a powerful action to contribute more to creativity as well.  Everything a person questions, they can learn from and gain some kind of insight from.  Questions about how and why something is how it is, leads to seeing more pieces of any puzzle and that puts the mind into a state where it has to think beyond the logic to imagine the solution before all the pieces are understood.

Questions are a huge part of a healthy learning process and they will trigger the mind to explore and wonder with curiosity at things.  I’ve written about using questions for learning and training others in this article here, Using the 5W Questions to Provide Training .  Questioning the things around you has other benefits as well, it is a useful tool to expand your relationships as well.  This is because it shows curiosity to another person.  Read about that here, Open Ended Questions .

Avoid Perfectionism

My final point in looking at social creativity and the ways to contribute to it is to avoid perfectionism.  Perfectionism slows down any creative process and it quickly strangles any new ideas from emerging as it keeps the attention on an original subject or topic while it is closely scrutinized and perfected.  There is some room to explore perfecting something with a creative look, but it is usually too focused on one thing where new ideas have no place to be explored until the first topic or item is first perfected.

Getting past perfection so that more ideas can be explored gives way to identify more possibilities and have more options to approach things with.  This applies in everything from simple day to day life plans and tasks, to complex engineering design problems or even social planning. The Pareto principle is useful with social creativity as well and that is where you apply the 80/20 rule.  Perfectionist try to get things to that 100% level and they spend most of their time and effort making very little progress once past that 80% point.

So, next in my next article, I’m going to explore how the imaginative mind is applied for innovation, which I consider to be the application of creativity.  If you are not signed up yet and don’t want to miss any future articles, please sign up for my RSS feed here or by email here .

Posted by Mike King under Learning | 15 Comments »

Creativity is one of my most favored traits and any activity with creative components is one I can easily value.  My engineering role in designing software, developing others as a manager in new and creative ways and my writing and 3D graphics I create on the side are all examples of how I enjoy letting creativity spill out in life.  I personally believe I’ve been crafted with the gift of creativity (as is everyone) and so there is great purpose and value in employing creative tasks in your life.

There are many ways to explore creativity and it really is a part of any learning experience and new task so its an endless topic, which excites me a great deal because ultimately, the exercise of writing about it is also a creative exercise.  This article looks specifically at how one can build an imaginative mind using creativity.  An imaginative mind is one that can visualize beyond direct input and one that can explore things outside of the immediate reality and vicinity.  To me, this is a great ability and one I am quite passionate about so, lets explore it a bit deeper!

Initializing Thoughts

Our thoughts are nearly continuous and tuning in to them can be done specifically for creative juices.  Often we suppress our own ideas or thoughts in a split second without ever letting it surface to a voice or considered item.  We often put a validation screen on our thoughts and bias everything we let surface by the judgments we assign or expect others to assign to that thought.  This limits our mental creativity and kills a thought that would otherwise become the start of a great associative linking of thoughts and advanced creativity.  We need to let any thought be developed and explored as our mind makes the neural connections and associations with more and more thoughts.  This can happen in moments or it may take hours but it most imaginative if you let a thought continue to build and linger, don’t dismiss it or kill it on purpose.  Ever.

Brainstorming

Putting the mind to an exploratory session like this is also known as brainstorming.  Brainstorming is often considered something you do in groups and while that is true, it needs the same guidelines in your mind to let the imaginative mind explode with its full capacity and creativity available. Brainstorming at its best means that anything thought of on a given topic is valid.  Anything goes. Any idea is considered no matter how obscure or off-base it may first seem to the logical mind.  Logic is often the nemesis of creativity as we tend to judge our ideas and thoughts the moment they begin and we simply don’t give our imaginative mind a chance to develop them.

1. Explore as many possibilities as you can
2. Any idea is worth exploring at least for a short time
3. Sometimes you need to give ideas time and let the subconscious work away

Outside the Box

The other effect our logical mind has is to keep us bounded into what seems reasonable.  This unfortunately has a very negative consequence on our imagination as its very difficult to explore outside this box of reason or box of logic.  The logical mind is bounded by what we know as well so anything outside this box is suppressed by any logic at first consideration.  It’s important to get by this and let the creativity and idea be unbounded and originated from well outside the box.

The imagination is an amazing thing and you can certainly allow it to take hold of you in visualizing, day dreaming or full on dreaming.  We’ve all experienced the power of the mind’s creativity in dreams and its possible to enable that same creativity in waking life if it’s practiced and repeated instead of suppressed.  Let your mind wander, have fun with it, just imagine what that seemingly crazy idea might actually be like if you explore it further in your mind.

Posted by Mike King under Learning | 17 Comments »