Generally speaking, when people use the word fun, it's like a placeholder. You know, "How was your evening?" "Oh it was fun."

It's helpful to be prepared to celebrate the tiny things that you can do, where you meet the world and you negotiate an outcome that's quite tiny. But you can still make it feel remarkable.

If you think of play as being in things, there are things that are playable, then it becomes the work of figuring out what a thing can do.

If you think about the contexts in which we talk about things being fun, often there's a certain kind of misery or effort that's involved with it. The difficulty of travel, getting all your bags packed and your work done and navigating the airports and all that. That sort of struggle.

The more you're drowning in familiarity, the better the fun is. It requires less novelty to produce even more gratification. And it's something that didn't come from you. It was about the other thing - the thing you were experiencing, or the people you were with, or the mechanism you were operating, or whatever it might be.

Looking for meaning in the ordinary seems like the most urgent thing that we can do.

You can experience play at work, not because you're messing around or wasting time or something, but because you're looking really deeply and seriously at things and asking what is possible, what can be done with them, what new ideas might emerge?