You don't usually find the words work and fun in the same sentence. When you do, it's only in those special cases, like the guy who works at the jumping castle store. Otherwise, work usually gets the bad rep. I'm here to say that, although work may not necessarily be fun a lot of the time, fun is necessary for you to be able to do your absolute best.
This is true for sports, academics, music, or any other job. I always think of the Mary Poppins quote "In every job that must be done, there is an element of fun. You find the fun and SNAP! The job's a game!" Although this may not be very practical in most situations, there is some truth to it. Your work is only as fun as you make it. I personally do not find sports fun, except for maybe the occasional soccer game with my family. However, I know many who do and say that their game is not the same without it. They do their best when they are having fun.
From experience, I know that I learn way better when I find something fun in my schoolwork. In middle school, my mom would have me memorize a long bible verse every month. She did the same with poetry in high school. At first, I was very bored with it and struggled to get the verses memorized. I found a solution to this by accident. Everytime I had to sit down and work on my memorization, I would find myself daydreaming and sometimes doodling rather than even looking at the words. I decided to try illustrating the bible verses and sometimes just drawing a picture for every word. Since I am a very visual learner (and love to draw, besides), this helped me memorize them very quickly. When I got to Biology, which has tons of definitions to be memorized, I tried the same strategy and it worked!
My chemistry teacher drew on the idea of fun in learning and had us make ice cream and carbonated lemonade in class. I will always remember that certain chemicals can raise and lower boiling and freezing temperatures and that different chemicals solubility rates can be raised and lowered with different temperatures.
Here's something funny I found on Pinterest. It's called "gummy bear motivation" :). When you have a long passage in a book to read, you place gummy bears all over it. When you reach a gummy bear, you get to eat it! See you can have fun in learning!
Any musician will tell you that, when music is your passion it is FUN pretty much all of the time! And no, by fun, I don't mean FUN. as in the band, even though they are great :)
True it can be a pain to have to practice all of those hours "some nights" (sorry, I had to :D), but overall, it is SO much fun! Starting off sometimes, though, you need a little motivation. You need to find something to make it fun. When I was little, my teacher was very good at this. He had an analogy about a song I was learning being like a double-stuffed oreo (if any of you remember those). The song had four sections- The beginning, two middle sections that are the same, and the last that is just like the beginning. When I played through the whole song (a monumentous occasion at my level and age) I got an oreo. Once I figured out that playing the song well and fast several times got my mom to give me more oreos, I was off with leaps and bounds. As I got older he would incorporate games ino my practice routine. If I stumbled on a part of the song, we would stop, roll the dice and see how many times I had to repeat that section correctly. This would lead to mastery. Every student's favorite game (besides the oreos), was the ball drop. This game taught us to watch our teacher carefully during performances for timing and synchronization. My teacher would drop the ball and everytime it bounced, we had to pluck the string on our guitars at the exact moment it touched the ground. This sounds simple enough, but once the bounces get shorter and quicker, it get's pretty tough. This game helped alot with our group performances. Every note became perfectly synchronized with each other until we sounded like our goal of one guitar.
Now that I'm older, I provide most of the fun and motivation in my playing. Now, just the playing itself has become its own reward (especially if you play fast!). I enjoy practicing and learning new pieces that I really like. That is in and of itself fun for me.
As you can see, work can be fun. you just have to take the time to find it.
(Okay, for this blog post, I did the unthinkable. I put in pictures from an unoriginal source. For anyone wanting to cause any trouble, I got these from imgur- gummy bears, and imgfave- FUN. I do not own these photos. I only put them in to serve my purpose. Please do not sue me :) thanks - Mara)
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