Play Can Cure Your Burnout And Even Get You A Nobel Prize

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When physicist and Nobel laureate Richard Feynman burnt out he figured he can lower his expectations since he wouldn’t be able to achieve anything anyway.

What happened next surprised him.

Without any expectations, he started to observe how things worked and later try to explain how they work from a physics perspective.

“I went on to work out equations of wobbles. Then I thought about how electron orbits start to move in relativity. Then there’s the Dirac equation in electrodynamics. And then quantum electrodynamics,” he writes.

“It was like uncorking a bottle: Everything flowed out effortlessly. I almost tried to resist it! There was no importance to what I was doing, but ultimately there was. The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate,” he says.

The research comes loud and clear – play contributes to creativity.

In their novel writings, Freud (1926), Vygotsky (1978), Huizinga (1955), Piaget (2001), Winnicott (2001), and Turner (1982) described play as a natural path to creativity. More recently, Russ (1999) and Dansky (1999) summarized empirical psychological studies which support that play fosters the creativity of children and adults alike. In two acclaimed biographical studies on exceptional professional creativity, Csikszentmihalyi (1997) and Gardner (1993) found that a common characteristic of their subjects was that they maintained a playful attitude toward their work throughout their careers.

Play can not only reenergize you but it may lead to some important discoveries.

Who knows, maybe even get you a Nobel prize.