CEO Friday: Don’t Forget to Have Fun

Awesome people have more fun working than most pople have playing. It’s because they work hard on things they care about, with people who share their passions. They kill bugs like others catapult birds. They don’t need sudoku because they have SQL. Hard work is naturally fun work, if you’re in the right environment, with the right people.

But work-fun is very different than play-fun, and as surprising as it might sound, when you’re so busy with the former you sometimes forget the latter. If that sounds familiar, my suggestion to you is: Don’t forget to have fun. Play-fun. Schedule it in. Take advantage of it when the opportunity arises. Set aside the deadline for a moment and go do sommething stupid. Your compiler can wait, but once those moments are gone, they’re gone.

This mantra occurred to me recently upon learning of our billboard. Getting a billboard is a long, painful, and expensive process. We debated it forever, discarded countless concepts, payed an enormous deposit… and then forgot about it and got back to work. But then one day, we heard rumor that it was there — and we were having lunch only a few blocks away! We had huge deadlines looming before us and couldn’t reasonably spare the time for a field trip. But you don’t get a second chance at seeing your startup’s first billboard. This is what it was like for us:

It’s a little thing, perhaps. But I’m glad I was there when we saw our first billboard for the first time. It’s one of those opportunities that only comes once. Don’t forget to have fun, and you won’t ever forget it.