Please Mix Business With Pleasure!

You shouldn’t mix business with pleasure. Or at least that’s what we’ve all been told. And with regard to office romances (which is a topic for another blog) it might even be true. But I want you to reconsider whether separating your personal pleasure from business is such a good idea, and perhaps inspire you to think about pleasure in a different way.

Like all other creatures, we are built to seek out pleasure.  We find some of our pleasure in the same predictable ways as other creatures (sex, food, etc.) and in some uniquely human ones (Sex and the City episodes, Jackass, etc.) And much of modern industry — Hollywood, Facebook, McDonald’s, the Kardashians — is built to capitalize on these urges.

However, as Americans, we seem to minimize the vital importance of satisfying our need for pleasure.  In other cultures, it’s given higher priority, and perhaps it’s our Puritanical roots, but here we have come to think of fun and enjoyment as secondary priorities behind work and industriousness, indulgences, or even outright sources of guilt. It’s no accident that we refer to our secret sources of enjoyment (or that we keep them secret at all!) as our “guilty pleasures.”

The best example of this mindset from my own experience was from my childhood on the farm.  Farm life is all about work and very little play.  The ethic was very clearly that you must get all your work done before you have fun.  As any farmer will tell you, his job is difficult and exacting, and I wonder if the hardworking farm ethic were tempered with just a little higher priority for enjoyment if it wouldn’t be less so.

My point is that because as humans we are wired to seek pleasure, then in order to function at our highest level of performance, we must leverage that powerful urge. We need to see it as complementary to, not in opposition from, our work, and that as a necessity it demands a higher priority than our culture has taught us. Unfortunately, incorporating pleasure into our lives in a healthy and productive way is more difficult than it seems (and might even be the reason that pleasure has gotten such a bad rap in the first place…).  After our self-denial we tend to overindulge. We believe that if we have a weekend of fun and squeezing in as much pleasurable activities then we are good to go.

There are a few obvious issues with this strategy. One, we are all different and have varied needs of everything, and pleasure is no different. The bottom line is that you have to gauge for yourself what is peak performance and what is the secret recipe in order to create that magical place where you are energized, creative and in the “flow.” Pleasure strategies can be a great way to help you get there. I am a walking experiment with this idea in my life. Since I make up my own schedule, I have the freedom to try different strategies and see what works the best. In my case I am an experience junkie so I need lots of variety. Therefore what is pleasurable this month may not be the case next month. Variety and stimulation are keys to me feeling pleasure filled.

Think of it this way: you are trying to figure out ways to maximize your productivity. If getting a 20 minute massage in the middle of the day is going to give you two great ideas that make you 20k over the next month, doesn’t that make good business sense? I have found that going to the gym in the middle of the day gives me a boost of energy and I am far more productive than I would be if I hold off and workout late in the day. Try it yourself with these three steps:

• Make a list of all the fun, pleasurable activities that get you excited. You want to look forward to them, enjoy them. Pleasure is best maximized in small increments. If we do something that gives us pleasure for too long or in excess it has diminishing returns. Just think about how you’ve felt after overeating versus having a small delicacy that you savored.
• Map out a way to insert these into your daily life, try one a day, or three a week.
• Track your productivity or how you feel afterwards.  What impact did your treat have on your output and your ability to do great work?

Make pleasure a part of your strategy. See if it makes a difference. It has made me more creative, more energized and has increased the quality of my work. I see that it’s a way to tap into my zone of genius in a healthy and efficient way. Try it and see if you see a difference you may find that it has surprising and pleasurable results.