What is deep work?

Why deep work matters

The three laws of deep work

Deep work isn’t just about work

The underrated skill of daydreaming

The hidden value of exploration, part I

The hidden value of exploration, part II

Why you need to laugh more, part I

Why you need to laugh more, part II

Why you need to take play more seriously

What is deep work

By now you’re perhaps beginning to understand and appreciate the role that lifestyle plays in enabling us to do our best work. How being more open to new ideas and experiences ultimately deepens our capacity to produce, which is why we have our FLOWN Almanac or Quests, for example.

These things are not just a resource for interesting tidbits of information or activities that we can enjoy participating in, they’re actually a tool that we can use in order to enrich and enhance the fruits of our deep work practice. Speaking of which, I wonder what you'd say if I was to tell you that humour can also play a significant role in all of this.

See, think about your standard knock-knock joke or some witty one-liner. What you're perhaps beginning to notice is that what allows the punch line to work is that there's usually some kind of double meaning or implied gap, and it's been left to the audience to connect the dots between.

For example, I used to work in a shoe recycling store – it was soul-destroying. Or I'm trapped in a same-sex relationship, the sex is always the same. Or I can give you the cause of anaphylactic shock in a nutshell.

Admittedly, I'm definitely no comedian and all jokes are actually courtesy of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, so I take no credit or blame.

My point is that what allows a joke to be funny or, depending on your take perhaps just mildly amusing, is that two notions have usually been brought together in a surprising or humorous way whilst crucially being left for the audience to infer the connection. So do you see? It’s bisociation again.

And so, the play then is in the associative work that you, as the hearer has to do in order to get the joke. So this is why humour is so often so incredibly culturally specific, it's why a joke ceases to be funny the moment that it requires explanation because it can only work by relying upon what the audience is able to infer, the link that you, as the hearer, are able to create.

Now, as you might imagine, with there being this kind of strong parallel between the workings of humour and those of creativity, it inevitably leads to there being a relationship between the two.

What's really interesting is that it's not just that creativity is able to generate humour, but humour and more specifically laughter has actually been shown and proven to enhance and empower creativity, making it a tool that we can actually integrate into our own working practice.

Now, of course, the most obvious questions to emerge out of this will be how exactly do we do this? Or perhaps more interestingly, just how far do these benefits of humour go?

Why you need to laugh more, part I

What Next?