Abul Kalam 🦩

Our modern school system removed the leisure, and much of the pleasure, out of learning. The word "school" comes from the Greek word schole. It means leisure. Sir Ken Robinson spent his life studying creativity in schools and concluded that instead of fueling creativity through play, schools can actually kill it: "We have sold ourselves into a fast-food model of education, and it's impoverishing our spirit and our energies as much as fast food is depleting our physical bodies. Imagination is the source of every form of human achievement. And it's the one thing that I believe we are systematically jeopardizing in the way we educate our children and ourselves." Then we enter the workplace and it gets worse. Modern corporations were born out of the same Industrial Revolution. Their entire reason for being was efficiency in mass production. They looked to the military for inspiration. The language stuck — employees on the front lines, working for a company (a military unit). The industrial era is long behind us. Those structures are not. We grow up believing play is trivial, a waste of time, and unnecessary. Stuart Brown, founder of the National Institute for Play, studied the play histories of 6,000 individuals and found that play has the power to improve everything from personal health to relationships to an organization's ability to innovate. His conclusion: "Nothing fires up the brain like play." Key breakthroughs in thinking have almost always taken place during play. -Isaac Newton. -Watson and Crick. -Shakespeare. -Mozart. -Einstein. The Nonessentialist thinks play is trivial. The Essentialist knows play sparks exploration. You weren't taught to play as a child. You picked it up naturally. Maybe it's time to pick it up again.