Your Job is a Video Game Pt 2: The Sandbox Phase
As I have said elsewhere, the early stage of getting to know a new job is similar in a lot of ways to the early stage of playing a video game. You’re getting to know the controls, but you’re also learning the basics of gameplay: in other words, it’s all about coming to terms with your own fallibility.
I’m old enough to remember a time when video games kept a player on rails — none of this “exploring the landscape” tomfoolery. When you played Galaxian or Space Invaders or Donkey Kong, your choices as a spaceship pilot or plumber were constrained. The game kept you on task. Sure, you could just stand somewhere jumping up and down, but is that really freedom (either in a game or in real life)?
In today’s world, players are liberated: you can play Minecraft in hundreds of different ways — it might even be more accurate to say you play “with” video games today, the way a kid plays with blocks or Legos.
The standard 9-to-5 jobs that most of us have are, obviously, neither as entertaining nor engaging as an MMORPG. That is why they call it work. But, at the same time, almost every job also has the potential for that thing that separates humans from ants: invention. Creativity. Exploration.
When you’ve been at a job for a while and you’ve built up some expertise, you reach the stage of legitimate boundary testing. This would be in contrast to what I think of gratuitous boundary testing. I think of this latter category as trying to take more out of the system than you’re putting in. A poorly-policed system invites and rewards gratuitous boundary testing. But you never know when things will shift and you’ll get a pink slip in return for sneaking inventory out the back door (either literally or metaphorically).
Legitimate boundary testing is when you are motivated, even incentivized, to push on the limits of your role in a job and figure out how to bring something new to it.
Without question, there are jobs where it’s problematic to get creative. I don’t want my hairdresser to get wacky and try to cut my hair blindfolded. But if she wants to do it wearing a pirate costume then, yes!, I’m there for it.
A good job, or a good boss, will let you develop and then explore your skills, in much the same way as a sandbox game. Google is famous for its so-called ‘20% Time’ rule, under which employees are allowed to spend up to 20% of their week developing their own projects.
Enjoying your job is about more than decorating your cubicle or having a beer at lunch. Partly, learning to enjoy your job is a matter of embracing the fact that it’s a life sentence: you are going to have to work somewhere for the bulk of your life. And you know what? You should! Even if you are lucky enough to have the means to stop working, work is good for us — it’s healthy.
I’ve always enjoyed the fact that Voltaire 's characters in Candide end up, after all manner of unpleasant adventures, learning that the best thing to do is just work in the garden. Not politics, not religion, just farming.
Once you grasp that work is a good thing — that you should be going to work for a lot of the week — you can start to think about it as an extension of your life and your creativity.
As the world pivots toward knowledge-based industries, employers are breaking out of old-style, rigid hierarchies and empowering people across the org chart to get creative in their roles.
In a recent article on Inc.com, the improbably named Marcel Schwantes dives into this from the employer’s perspective, citing no less an influence than Elon Musk when he says that:
Hierarchy and bureaucracy are now fossils; freedom, collaboration, and transparency are the new normal.
In other words, treat your best people like business owners and give them the freedom to exercise their brains.
Work is not entertainment, but ideally it’s not a soul-crushing nightmare either. It should be a place where you have some freedom to figure out how to build your own castle, your own farm, your own (metaphorical) tunnel system within your working environment.
