I find the best way to keep my mind focused on something that might be called work is to find ways to turn it into play. Or at least this is what I tell myself when I need to justify all the time I spend playing when I should be getting something done. The easiest way to convince myself that I am playing productively is to tell myself I’m playing with ideas that some day may be brought into practice in the real world.
On occasion, I have even managed to translate an idea into a set of actions with impact in corners of the world where people like that sort of thing. So it is not too difficult for me to trick myself into believing that the idea I play with today may wake up tomorrow as an action or a plan – perhaps even as an enacted plan, dragging behind it something suspiciously similar to a concrete result. Everyone needs a dream, don’t they.
Anyway, I like this ‘today’s play = tomorrow’s work’ theme so much that I have chosen ideapractice as the label for my approach to leadership, learning and transformation.
The Ideas in Practice blog is a space where I play with ideas as I try to figure out how to translate them into something that can be practiced to bring about meaningful change in the real world.
© Dana Cogan 2008, all rights reserved.