In Episode 6, ADI's Judy Agnew, Ph.D. explains the latest pearl, "It's not what you do that determines fun."
Transcript: Can work be fun? You might think that depends on the nature of the work. If you work as a professional athlete or a musician, it is easy to see how work could be fun. Playing a favorite sport or making music for a living sounds fun to me, but what if you work in a factory making car parts or collecting garbage? It's easy to assume those jobs could never be fun. The assumption is that it's the activity itself that makes work or anything else fun. But as Aubrey points out in another of his Pearls of Wisdom, it's not what you do that determines whether you have fun, it's what happens to you when you do it. In other words, the amount of fun someone has is determined by how much reinforcement is associated with it. A classic example is playing a slot machine. In and of itself this isn't reinforcing. Sitting in a smoky room pushing a button over and over again? But people do it for hours and they pay to do it. What makes it fun and reinforcing is the fact that you occasionally win—that makes it fun and keeps people doing it. If casinos can make pushing buttons for hours fun, then surely we can make almost any job more fun by adding more positive reinforcement.
