A typing lady has discovered that pretending to have fun at work will reward her a lot. Her name is Willie Gordon and she lives in Elmhurst City, Illinois. She told the following story in a letter:
"We had four typists in our office a **** and often worked overtime because the workload was so heavy. One day, one of the assistant managers insisted that I retype a long letter, and I told him that he could just make a few changes and didn't need to retype it all. I told him to just change it, not to retype it all, but he said that if I didn't retype it he would hire someone else. I was so angry that I had to pretend I liked it and retype the letter in order to keep the position and the paycheck. As I did it, I realized that if I pretended to like the work, then I really did like it to some degree, and that's when my work sped up. This work ethic endeared me to everyone, and later a supervisor asked me to be his personal secretary because he understood that I was more than willing to do some extra work without complaining.
"As it turned out, I realized: the change in my mental state had done wonders for me."
Professor Hans Wissinger says you can't just sit there and wait for happy feelings to appear; instead, you should get up and start learning how happy people move and talk. He says, "Pretending to be happy won't turn an introvert into a happy extrovert in 30 days, but it is the first step in the right direction."
Miss Gordon is using the "pretend" philosophy of Professor Hans Sungsingh, who teaches us to "pretend" to be happy. Psychologists have also suggested that we might want to pretend to be happy sometimes, and most people who do so are able to change their state of mind and, with it, their destiny. It has been proven that pretending to be happy is very effective, and you may initially feel that it is fake, but with more practice, the fake feeling will naturally disappear.
Pretending to be happy is never a bad thing, but it's important to act like it. Let's say you're having a really bad day and you want to pretend you're happy, think about how you'd do that. At least put a smile on your face! In order to be a successful pretender, you must try to think of something pleasant to energize your smile, and slowly the happy things will keep coming, and eventually you will find yourself going from unhappy to pretending to be happy, and from pretending to be happy to being happy.
We know that one of the main causes of fatigue is boredom. I think it's easy to imagine something like this: suppose you have a young girl living in your neighborhood, and when she comes home from work her whole body is exhausted. She has a sore back and a headache, so she goes to bed without dinner. Then the phone rings and it's her boyfriend calling, asking her to go dancing. The girl's eyes light up and she immediately leaps up, puts on her most beautiful dress and dances until late at night. Tired? Not at all. She was so bright and happy that she didn't even sleep, and her mind was still full of the lively music!
Is it possible that the girl's exhaustion at the end of the day was just an act? No, she was indeed exhausted because she found work boring and life boring. The streets are full of people like that, and it doesn't have to be just your neighbor, it might be you.
It has already been said that the emotional factors contributing to fatigue outweigh the purely physical ones. Once upon a time, an experiment was conducted to prove that boredom is indeed the main cause of fatigue. That experiment involved administering a series of apparently boring and uninteresting tests to a group of students, who all turned out to be lethargic, complained of headaches and sore eyes, and some even felt a stomach ache. Were these imaginary ailments? No. After detailed examination, it was found that people do burn oxygen in their blood more slowly when they are bored. By the time one encounters something interesting, functioning is immediately back to normal.
When we do interesting things, we don't get tired as easily. For example, when I went on vacation to the Canadian Rockies, I fished and chopped wood all day long, but I didn't feel tired at all because I was having fun and had a sense of accomplishment, otherwise I would have been tired and laying down at 7,000 feet above sea level doing all this.
Columbia University's Prof. Edward East Dick did an experiment in which he kept a group of young people awake for a week, engaged in interesting activities. After a detailed study he made the report, "Boredom is the real cause of slackness."
If you're a laborer, what really wears you out is not the work you've done, but the work you haven't done yet. For example, do you remember the last day when you weren't doing your best work? People kept interrupting you, letters weren't answered, appointments were canceled, there was trouble everywhere, and nothing was right all day. You -things- didn't work out, you came home from work looking like you'd come back from a war and your head was about to explode.
The next day everything is right again. Your workload is 10 times what it was yesterday, and you come home feeling like a triumphant warrior. You must have experienced this, I have.
While I was writing this chapter, I took the time to go see a musical comedy that had one of the best aphorisms in it that said, "People who get to do what they love to do are lucky guys." What makes them lucky is that they enjoy more energy and joy and less worry and fatigue as a result.
Where your interests lie, your energy lies. It is far harder to walk 10 blocks with a nagging wife than it is to walk 10 miles with a knowing lover.
But what can be done about that? Perhaps you might want to take a look at the following stenographer's approach. She works for an oil company, and several days a month she has to do a most boring routine: organizing various data tables. She was so bored that she instinctively balked at the job and decided that she had to make it seem interesting. How to do it? She had a daily race with herself. She counted the tables she had organized each morning and decided that in the afternoon she would surpass the morning's record, and tomorrow she would surpass today's record. In this way she outperformed all the other stenographers in the same department. Did she get anything for doing this? A raise? A promotion? Praise? Nothing. But it did help her avoid boredom-induced burnout and keep her mood energized. And because of this bittersweet mindset, it allowed her to do more happy things in her spare time.
I happen to know this story is true. I married that girl.
A decade or so ago, there was a young man who also found his job boring. He worked as an operator in a factory where he was responsible for turning screws while standing at a lathe. The job was so boring that it made him want to quit, but he was afraid he couldn't find anything else. Since he couldn't quit, he decided to have some fun and started to compete with his coworkers to see who could work faster. As a result, the foreman was so impressed with his efficiency that he soon transferred him to a better position, and as a result, he rose through the ranks, and today he is the boss of a large company. If not for that set of bitter-sweet skills, perhaps he is still in that small factory to turn the screws, and how to have today's remarkable achievements?
Kay Denton, a famous radio news commentator, also told me about his bitter-sweet experience. When he was 22, he worked on a cattle ship, feeding and watering the cows, and so he sailed across the ocean to Europe. When he first arrived in Paris, he was so broke that he almost ended up on the street, but he finally found a job selling physical slide projectors when he read a job posting in an English-language newspaper.
So he began selling his products door-to-door on the streets of Paris, without speaking a word of French. But in his first year he earned $5,000 in commissions, making him one of the top-performing salesmen in Paris that year. More importantly, that one year's experience taught him more than four years of college. He says that since he's done that job, he thinks he could even sell the Congressional Record to a French housewife.
The year's experience gave him a concrete, nuanced understanding of life in France that has proved immensely helpful to his reporting in hindsight.
That said, perhaps you're wondering how he could sell anything when he didn't know French. He asked his employer to write a sales pitch, memorized it, knocked on the door, and when the housewife answered, he recited a string of strange, foreign-accented French. He will give the product to the housewife over, and people ask questions, he shrugged his shoulders and said: "I am an American ...... American ......" and then he took off his hat, pointing to the top of the hat glued to the French cheat sheet. This move usually amuses others to the point of laughter, he also followed the laugh, and take the opportunity to take more products to her over, like this the chance of a deal is much more.
Mr. Kay Denton said it seemed like a lot of fun, but it wasn't easy at all. He told me that the only thing that kept him going was his determination to make it fun. Every morning before he leaves, he looks in the mirror and gives himself a mental speech:
"If you want to make a living, you have to do this job, and if you have to do it, why don't you do it happily! Why don't you imagine that every time you ring a doorbell, you're standing on a stage with an audience waiting to see you perform? Isn't it? Your job is just like a stage performance, so why not make the most of it?
Mr. Kay Denton told me that the spirit of the speech encouraged him greatly, giving him the courage and confidence to forge ahead in an unfamiliar Paris, and ultimately, a bright future.
The spirit of the speech is a powerful one, and should not be taken lightly, for it has a very psychological basis. By speaking to yourself mentally, you can direct your thoughts to a positive and optimistic level, and you will be filled with motivation. After all, it is the human mind that forms the human life, and whether it is good or bad is up to you.
Keep your thoughts on the right track, and your job won't be so unbearable. Your boss wants you to be interested in your work so he can make more money. But never mind what your boss thinks, happy work is all about you. Think about it, even if this job is not to your liking, it could be the same with something else. It's all up to you. If you're happy, you're living, if you're not, you're living, so what do you think?
--Quoted from the Yanbian People's Publishing House, "Human Nature's Advantages"