Being an adult mostly sucks. We have responsibilities, bills to pay, and live a life of stress. I think this happens because there are many preconceived notions of what it means to be an adult and of how an adult is supposed to behave. If you look closely though, being an adult, is being the opposite of a child. But that is just the wrong frame of reference.
The saying that we can learn a lot from children is an understatement. There are so many things we can learn from children, but one we can learn, or re-learn from them, is the power of play.
There is a misconception that in order to be a proper “adult”, you have to be “serious.” But seriousness is not synonymous with matureness. We learn to be reserved and restrain from showing our ideas to our peers out of fear of embarrassment. But as the Ted talk will show, being playful and being serious aren’t mutually exclusive. You can be playful and still be a mature adult. The same goes the other way. There are many “serious” grown mammals out there that are also very immature.
The Ted video is a very insightful talk by Tim Brown about the importance of play in “creative work” environments. He explains that as adults we forget to play and argues that that’s why in design firms and companies like Google, you see a lot of “symbols of play.” This is because they understand that having fun, experimenting, and role playing helps people come up with better solutions to problems.
