Jay Papasan:
We all spend a lot of time and energy trying to make the work and things that we do faster, easier, and simpler. We’re trying to remove the hard. And some would even argue that we’re hardwired to remove hard. If you’ve ever gone to the gym and worked out, your body’s gonna find the easiest way. It’s gonna want to not work as hard. It’s trying to find the easy path.
So, today, we’re gonna make a case for the opposite. How do we insert a little hard into our life? How can we appreciate it a little bit more? Why is it that the hard times tend to be the things that we remember most, and frankly, make some of the things we do more meaningful?
That’s what we’ll explore today. And it’s what my friend, Austin Church, taught me to call Type 2 fun. What the heck does that mean? Well, we’re gonna unpack it today and all the other places we can have type two experiences: work, parenting, maybe even in our relationships. So, let’s jump right in.
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Jay Papasan:
I’m Jay Papasan. And this is The ONE Thing, your weekly guide to the simple steps that lead to extraordinary results
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Jay Papasan:
To help you understand what Type 2 fun is, I’ll explain the fun scale that Dr. Rainer Newberry created, and it’s three types of fun. So, Type 1 Fun is the basic stuff. It’s getting on a rollercoaster, having margaritas with friends, just having a good time, but not particularly memorable.
Type 2 Fun is miserable while you’re in it, but fun in retrospect. So, think about running a marathon or doing an alpine climb or a long hike, or maybe even becoming a field geologist in Alaska, right? It’s hard while it’s happening, but in retrospect, it has meaning and fun.
Type 3 wasn’t fun while you were doing it, and it wasn’t fun after. And in fact, you kind of wonder, “What was I even thinking when we set out to do that thing?” And that’s the kind of important distinction we wanna make. How do we know when Type 2 Fun is slipping into Type 3?
I think most of us experience this at work, right? It’s hard work. We don’t particularly enjoy it, and we don’t look back and say, “Wow, I was really growing then,” or, “I was learning new skills.” There’s nothing that provides a silver lining. And the Type 3 work in particular is the stuff that we want to identify and avoid because that’s one of the ways we prevent veering off a cliff into burnout.
One of the dangers of Type 1 living, where we’re trying to make it easy and remove the hard, is that we can actually be losing some of our natural abilities, and some of our good muscles can be getting weak. One of the things that comes to mind is when I was living in Paris, we were very poor. My roommate was a guy named Brian Justice, who I’ve known since, like, sixth grade. And he kept meticulous track of all of his expenses. He would write them down in his calendar, add ’em up at the end of the day, calculate his cost for the week and the month, but the curious thing was he did it all in his head. And I would watch him adding up all of these receipts in his head, and then writing down the number. And then, he would do it again for the week and the month.
And at some point, I finally asked him, I was like, “Brian, why don’t you just use a calculator?” And he said, “I used to be really good at math. I could just do math in my head. And in college, I started using a calculator. And I realized, I suddenly couldn’t do math anymore. When someone would ask me a question that involved math, I had to use a calculator ’cause I just couldn’t do it in my head anymore. I couldn’t do simple addition, subtraction, maybe sometimes if it was complex, certainly couldn’t do a lot of multiplication and division. Anything that got complex, my brain said, ‘Nope, I can’t do that anymore.'” So, he had consciously chosen to start doing more math in his head to try to rebuild that skill ’cause it’s really useful.
Can you imagine a poker player that couldn’t do math in their head? They have to calculate odds with every single hand and every card that comes down on the table. That’s an essential skill. And there’s a lot of other stuff that you think about that you probably used to be good at until you found an electronic crutch.
Now, I can remember navigating by writing down instructions. We would have to print out little maps, and we would have to look for signs in our environment of what street we were on and where we were headed. Today, we’ve got GPS. My watch vibrates when it’s time to turn left. My phone or my car will tell me where to go. So, basically, navigating our own cities and neighborhoods is becoming a lost art.
Now, this is really great if you’re like my wife. We joke that she’s directionally dyslexic. We can be in the same hotel room for a week, and she will still turn the wrong way to go to the elevator. She was saved by the GPS. But for most of us, it’s a lost art, like how to navigate in the world, because now our phones do it for us.
Think about spell check. Is your spelling really that good or you just rely on Grammarly or some other tool? Now, I’m not saying we need to get rid of all of them. We need to appreciate both what we’re getting and what we’re losing when we use them regularly. That’s the point.
And don’t even get me started on everything we’re potentially losing when we outsource our thinking and our strategic brains to AI. I was hearing from a friend the other day that they were trying to prevent kids from cheating with AI. And so, they would make them take a handwritten test, right? Write this essay in the class, and they would make them write it by hand. They, then, fed those handwritten essays, written with a proctor, right, no chance they used AI, into the machine, and they all tested positive for AI. What did the researchers conclude? That they had been reading and using AI so much that now their natural voice was AI. They had lost the ability to express words in their own way because they were using AI so frequently.
And I mean, I’m a writer, so that terrifies me. But what about if you’re always using AI to manage your budget or manage your travel? Like, some of this is great. It’s a convenience. It’s a skill you don’t need. But a lot of it is our core thinking and strategic skills that make us better businesspeople, that make us better at life. So, we have to kind of approach that and be a little bit wary of when we’re using it too much.
If you remember my conversation with Oliver Burkeman, we touched on this in a high level where people are constantly thinking of everything they can offload to AI, such that even the time they’re getting back from AI becomes filled with more efficiency, where more tasks go to the AI. They can’t even relax anymore. Oliver Burkeman and I went super in-depth on this topic in our episode. The link is in the description below.
So, how do you know if you’re in Type 2 or Type 3 fun? There’s three tests that we came up with, and it’s choice, completion, and connection. So, the first one is choice. Did you actually choose to do this thing? Did you choose to do this fun thing or this adventure or this work, or was it assigned to you? Now, this is a classic, you know, the kid in the back seat getting dragged along to do the things. They never have as much fun in the beginning because they didn’t get to choose it, but they might be surprised and find out they like it.
So, that alone isn’t the core thing, but it is a big part of the decision, especially as adults. Did we choose the work we’re doing, or was it chosen for us? If we have some agency there, it does matter more than a little bit.
The next one is completion. Is there a finish line to this thing? I think so much of what we find hard are the things that don’t appear to have a finish line. If you’re doing a marathon, it’s 26.2 miles. It is hard, but at the end, you can walk across the finish line if you have to. You know that there is an end. In other areas of our life, it’s a lot harder to determine, right? So, when is it over with my work? You know, I write books. That’s hard, but at least there is a page one and a last page. I may not know when that’s showing up, but I know it’s out there. It may be just over the next horizon. We have to have some sense of completion, and we can engineer that into our work.
Now, number three is connection. Is it connected to something that gives it some meaning? Is it about building a relationship? Is it about testing ourselves? So many people go out there to run a marathon, and they’re really just asking the question, “Can I do this hard thing? What will it feel like?” It’s an exploration. And that alone is fine. Sometimes, when it’s chosen for us, we get dragged into some work, and it feels really hard. We can find out later that there was a connection.
I can think of a whole period where I was working in New York City for a boss and didn’t realize amidst how hard it was from dawn to dusk, how much I was learning and growing. So, it was years later that I looked back on that work and went, “Wow, there’s no way I would be who I am today without having gone through that trial.” And there’s so much about life that the meaning shows up later. So, that’s connection. So choice, completion, and connection.
If we only get two out of three, it shows us where we need to work, right? So maybe we know that there’s an end. We know that it’s connected to something meaningful. I’m gonna do this hard thing, and I’m gonna acquire a new skill, or I’m going to get a degree, or I’m going to be able to launch a new course or do this new thing, whatever that is. You’ve got two and three taken care of, but it was chosen for you. Maybe your boss or your partner said, “We’re doing this.” How do we change our mindset around that?
That is one of the key ingredients where we don’t always get to choose the hard things that show up, but we can choose our attitude around them. And the moment we look up and realize, “Hey, I’ve done hard things before, and I came through them fine. And some of them, hey, they make the best dinner table stories. They’re the things that I talk about. Maybe this will end out all right too.” If we go into it with maybe a little bit more curiosity, as Brad Stulberg said, he would say, “Brave new world,” when he got a little fearful, he would just invite curiosity and just say, “Hey, let’s see how this turns out.” And if we can adopt that mindset, hey, maybe we feel more choice in it because we’re choosing to stay in it instead of pull the rip cord and head for the exits.
So, those are the three tests. And when you think about the hard, hard times, can you line up all three on the ones that became memorable and meaningful to you? Can you line up all three on the things that when you didn’t have them, you were just like, “What was I thinking? I will never do that job again,” or, “I will never work for that kind of boss again.” Because you realize there was no completion, there was no meaning, it was just hard for hard’s sake. So, those are the three tests.
Here’s the funny thing. When we have a really hard goal, and for me, I choose writing books, and it’s crazy hard, and I think of that very clearly as Type 2 work. It’s very hard. Some days are absolutely meaning– uh, some days are absolutely miserable. But the end product and the impact it makes is one of the things that I find most fulfilling in life. And so, the more I’ve done it, the more I’ve reinforced that this hard has a payoff. This hard has a completion. This hard has connection to my future self and my future happiness.
And if we do these things on a regular basis, we learn how to do hard better, folks. If you’ve ever seen the amazing speech by Kara Lawson, the women’s basketball coach at Duke, she talked about how to do hard better. And it’s one of those inspirational things. Maybe you’ve had it shown on a YouTube during your last team meeting, or maybe you just watched it on your scroll. But she talked about the importance as a coach of teaching her players not how to avoid hard or make the hard go away, but to do hard better.
And it’s one of the best skills we can earn in life. How do I do hard better? How do I help my people do hard better? How do I help my kids do hard better? And it’s so much about understanding, hey, did they have a choice? Can they choose to lean into it? Maybe it’s not the choice they made, but they can make it the right choice for them. Can they see that there’s a completion? And as a leader, there’s a little bit of an art form here, right? We go from week to week, month to month, quarter to quarter, and at best, we have targets.
It’s really great to use the skills we teach in the book. We call it Goal Setting to the Now. Can you take those really big goals and break them into milestones? Because those milestones, where we wanna be at one year, one month, one quarter, they became little moments to celebrate and say, “Hey, we made it.” Little tiny completions on the path to the big one.
And the research that we shared in the book, some of the most fulfilling moments in life are going through those milestones. When you get to the finish line, it can also be a letdown. And as we get closer to the finish line, there’s all kinds of research that shows that we tend to speed up. Marathoners can run the last hundred yards faster than they’ve run. They see the finish line as it approaches. Even with… think about the punch cards. When you get seven punches in your card, you get a free coffee. People tend to buy more the closer they get to the finish line. It’s like that in life, but we have to have that finish line out there, even if it’s manufactured, so that we know that there is an end to the hard we’re in, because that gives us the ability to kind of suffer through it.
And eventually, if there’s connection, it’ll have meaning. We’ll talk about it, we’ll laugh about it, and we’ll remember it, and hopefully bring the skills and lessons forward in our life.
So to wrap things up, we kind of identified the fun scale, Type 1, Type 2, and Type 3, and we have now related it to work and other experiences, right? You can have Type 1 and Type 2 work and Type 3 work, which is to be avoided, and you can imagine all the other places we can apply it. The three tests between two and three are: Was there choice? Is there completion? And is there connection, right? Did I get to choose to do this or can I choose it along the way? Is there a finish line? And is there something meaningful that I can take away from this? Sometimes we won’t know in the short term, but as we revisit it, we may learn.
So, first off, as individuals, we need to lean into the Type 2, realize what it is and the benefits. We are growing and getting stronger, and you might be manufacturing your next cocktail party tale that brings the house down because of all of the mishaps, but in the end, you did make it. You also get to remind yourself every single time you lean into Type 2 work that you are in fact strong and resilient and can do hard things.
In fact, that’s my challenge for you after this episode. Think of one hard thing that’s on your plate right now and apply the test. Did you get to choose it? Does it have a completion? And is there a connection to it? And then, maybe journal a little bit. Maybe you didn’t choose it, but you can choose it now. “Hey, this was assigned to me, but I can lean into it. Was there a finish line? Can I manufacture one? Is there something that will come from this?” You can look for a connection.
I’ve seen people make connections from the most unlikely things. I have, too. We have looked up later and realized that that weird dinner we had with friends actually was a life lesson. Be willing and curious to be surprised.
So, that’s your challenge. Pick one hard thing that’s currently on your plate and apply the three-part test. Is it truly Type 2 or is it Type 3? And if it’s leaning towards the latter, how can we make it more like Type 2 work? As leaders, we want to make sure that the work we’re assigning to our teams is, at best, Type 1 , if not Type 2 work, and never Type 3, right? So, it’s very easy for us. We have control. Do we allow them to choose? “Hey, I’ve got a special project. Who would like to volunteer?” It might be a part of their job description, but maybe there’s a pool of people that can raise their hands. How do you bring choice into it? Is there a completion? If they’re gonna work really, really hard, do they get to rest at some point, and do they know that?
And finally, is there a connection? If you’re working with younger people or less experienced people, you may have to make that connection for them. “Hey, this is gonna be really hard, but at the end, you’re gonna know more about our customers than anyone else. At the end, you will be able to fill in the blank.” Your experience will allow them to fill in that blank faster versus thinking that there’s no connection to the work at all.
Maybe you’re listening to this and you’re just mired in a season of Type 3 work. My one thought to you is you will make it through. We’ve all been there. We’ve all gone through a season that’s like that, but it is a season. It is not permanent. So, buck up, do your best, and just know that there will be a completion to this season. And on the other side, maybe it’ll transform into Type 2, but it will come to an end and you will make it.
Well, that’s it, everybody. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you’ve enjoyed it and got at least one thing that you can take away and apply to your work or your work with others. If you really enjoyed it, we hope that you’ll subscribe, you’ll share, or maybe even leave us a comment and tell us what you think. We really live for that. Thanks again for listening. We’ll see you next week.
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