"The opposite of hard work is quality work. Quality work may be done quickly, but it is never pushed. It arranges itself around the goal of doing something as well as it can be done, and it finds its own pace.
Another opposite of hard work is playful work. Like quality work it may be done quickly but is never pushed. But playful work is indifferent to quality, or even to success. When you're doing playful work, you don't care if it ends in total failure, because you're having such a good time that you would look forward to doing the whole job again.
Playful work blurs into what I'll call active fun, like playing a sport, which blurs into passive fun, like watching TV. So where does "idleness" come in? The word implies that you're doing nothing, but nobody is ever doing nothing. Even meditation masters are focusing their consciousness. When we talk about "idleness" we're really talking about potential idleness. The freedom to do nothing is the foundation of the freedom to do anything.
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http://ranprieur.com/Also check out Ran's Work/Play compass.
http://ranprieur.com/images/workplay.png
