The Fun Manifesto

Fun is serious. Fun is fundamental. Fun is as real as your paycheck and as tangible as the taco you had for lunch, and fun can be as important in your life – or more so. Indeed, if fun is missing from your life – your whole life, especially your work – you're missing an essential ingredient for your best performance. I'll bet you already want more fun, but if you want to be more creative and innovative, if you want to perform better and have a better time while performing – you need more fun.

This manifesto is about paying real and serious attention to fun because it's important, and because that fundamental importance hasn't been widely recognized. It's not about turning your life into a funhouse where the party never ends. It's about making your life more productive and creative, about feeling better about getting out of bed because you're eager to see the results of the clever and fun stuff you started yesterday. It's about taking fun out of the small box we've kept it in so fun can make the rest of our lives more memorable.

More specifically, this manifesto is about fun that's both participatory and social. Relaxing on the beach with an umbrella drink and losing yourself in building the perfect kite are often described as fun, but we're talking about the fun that happens in a group that's doing something creative and challenging together. Sitting on the beach is relaxing fun – really, it's simply pleasure. And, while building the perfect kite may be fun, it's solo fun, also known as flow, a term defined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his groundbreaking research in positive psychology. Flow is both important for, and similar to, the fun that's the focus of this manifesto, but it hasn't been neglected as much as its social counterpart . . .

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