Available from Amazon.com

While many people think that playing or goofing around is analogous to wasting time, Dr. Robert Brown, coauthor of a book called Play and founder of the Institute for Play, has found that play is extremely important for our success. Dr. Brown has collected more than 6,000 “play histories” of people from all walks of life. One of the things he discovered is that creative and successful people have very rich play lives. What is play? According to Dr. Brown, “Real play has no purpose.” You do it for its own sake. Real play draws us to it; we don’t need to be talked into it. Furthermore, once people start doing it, they tend to want to keep on doing it and they lose track of time. An anecdote from the book Getting to Yes illustrates what Real play is all about. “In 1964, an American father and his twelve-year-old son were enjoying a beautiful Saturday in Hyde Park, London playing catch with a Frisbee. Few in England had seen a Frisbee at that time and a small group of strollers gathered to watch this strange sport. Finally, one Homburg-clad Britisher came over to the father: ‘Sorry to bother you. Been watching you a quarter of an hour. Who’s winning?'”