Leisure's Not a Luxury. It's a Requirement for Top Leaders

ARTHUR C.

BROOKS: I'm a classic striver.

I work really hard.

I want to put points on the board every single day.

You know what I'm bad at?

Leisure.

Now, I know what you're thinking.

Leisure is chilling on the beach.

And you're probably not very good at leisure, either, if you're watching this video.

You're watching content from HBR because you want an edge, man.

I completely get it.

But here's where we're wrong, fellow strivers.

Leisure is a serious business.

A very famous book written in the middle of the 20th century called Leisure,

the Basis of Culture, by Josef Pieper, German philosopher-- he was a great philosopher.

And he said that we need to be great at leisure.

By that, he meant that we need to be strivers at leisure, too.

And that meant not being lazy.

He talked about leisure

as being a serious thing in

which we're not compensated by the world,

but which enriches us and makes us better.

You don't need work-life balance.

You need work-life integration.

And the way to do that, to be better at your job,

is also to be better at your "not job."

The three parts of leisure

that make you truly excellent are all about learning things you don't have to

learn,

deepening your relationships for which nobody pays you, which is to say,

not on the clock, and becoming spiritually or philosophically deeper than you once were.

Those are the three areas of leisure

that you can dedicate yourself to to get better at

and watch your happiness

and your effectiveness and your productivity

and your creativity truly grow.

And those are great goals for any striver.

I know you plan out your work.

Every striver does.

Every minute is accounted for, right?

And the trouble is

that they don't like the time

when they're not working precisely

because it's so unstructured,

feels like it's frittered away.

I talk to people all the time who say, boy, at work,

I'm unbelievably productive.

But then I come home, and I'm exhausted.

And I just waste all my time-- zoom, zoom, zoom-- scrolling through social media.

And I feel bad about myself.

The answer to that is to take seriously your leisure time like you take

your work.

That means real assignments and real goals,

like having objectives that you're trying to focus on to be better than you

once were so that you're looking forward to get home not to do more

work and not to fritter away your time on social media,

but to read that book that you've always wanted to read.

I promise you that

if you set aside The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky-- you probably always wanted

to read it.

Everybody did.

It's so great.

It's a complete page-turner.

And you say, as soon as I get home from work,

I'm going to dig into that book.

That's something that has the dignity of every striver's work calendar.

And you can dedicate it to your leisure.

And you can love both.

You can go too far

and suck all the joy out of this

if you say to yourself,

I'm not going to sleep until I've read 35 pages of The Brothers Karamazov

by Dostoyevsky,

then pretty soon, you won't look forward to it anymore.

It has to be something that doesn't become a chore,

it doesn't become something that's a task that sucks the meaning out of life,

per se.

One of the ways

that you can test this is to see whether

or not you're truly getting enjoyment from something.

And if you are,

then you're going to want to be more structured about it.

You're going to want to do it in a serious way.

You're going to want to get after it.

You're going to want to schedule it.

But if it actually becomes something that you're not enjoying anymore,

then you know that you've actually gone too far.

That's how you figure it out, not too hard.

Can leisure be unproductive?

The answer, according to Josef Pieper, who wrote Leisure, the Basis of Culture,

is no because if you're doing something that's inherently generative and good, that's productive.

That doesn't mean it's work itself.

You don't have to turn your leisure into a job.

But it has to be something where you have personal growth.

Maybe that's total and complete relaxation.

Maybe that's going on a retreat, where you're sitting in meditation or in prayer,

or you're getting serious about deepening your relationship outside of the confines of any

of your work responsibilities.

But that's productive.

It's just a new way of seeing what productivity actually is.