Why You Have to Replace Ambition with Play
Originally published by James Altucher on LinkedIn: Why You Have to Replace Ambition with Play
I wish I was as smart as Steven Johnson. I asked him, “What is your one favorite thing that everybody thinks is bad for you that is actually good for you?”
He didn’t want to tell me. “My kids might listen to this later,” he said.
But he told me…
He’s the author of “Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation,” “Everything Bad is Good for You,” and the recent “Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World“— how the idea of “play” more than anything else, is what created the modern world.
[ Click here to listen to the ENTIRE interview with Steven Johnson ]
“I regret saying this a little… but, the assumption that video games are just this terrible waste of time and that this generation is growing up playing these stupid games is really… it’s so wrong,” he said.
He was talking about using play for education reform. “If you think about it, we walk around with a bunch of assumptions of what a learning experience is supposed to look like: listening to a lecture, watching an educational video, taking an exam to test your learning.”
I was gonna puke.
“I’ve been watching my kids play Battlefield 1, which is set in WWI. And it’s amazing.”
“I sit and watch my kids play and ask what they’re thinking about. Because as a grown up who doesn’t play the game you can’t process it. There’s just so much going on in the world. They’re playing this multiplayer game, in this incredibly vivid landscape with a million data points streaming across the screen.”
[Related: All I Want To Do Is Play]
His doesn’t understand it. And his kids don’t understand how he doesn’t understand it… “Didn’t you see the signal I got? And how this one piece of the interface was telling me to do xy and z?”
“All I can see is there’s a gun and a Zeplin. I’m 48,” he said. “Does that make me middle aged?”
We’re the same age.
“We’re old.”
Kids are basically gonna destroy us. We’re the one’s who are going to end up in diapers. They started off there, we end up there.
Unless…
We play, too.
So here’s what Steven found out.
One would ask, that sounds ridiculous: how did “play” create the Industrial Revolution. Or all the wars of the past 500 years. Or all the innovations we’ve seen with the Internet, which was initially funded by the military. What does “play” have to do with it?
Everything.
And that’s what makes Steven Johnson so infuriating. He’ll take two concepts that seem like they have nothing to do with each other and he’ll say, THIS caused THAT!
And I’d shake my head and cry and ask, “How is that even possible?” And then he’ll show me.