Long before he became a storyteller and a novelist, Matthew Dicks worked in McDonald’s to make ends meet after he left home for college. Seven McDonald’s over 13 years, to be precise.
“The days felt endless,” Dicks said. “It was the same routine over and over again. Taking orders, flipping burgers, and handing out fries. There was no excitement, no spark, no challenge.”
To make his job less painful, Dicks would invent challenges and see if he could upsell his customers with extra items. No one asked him to do it, and selling more products wouldn’t change his hourly pay. He recalled:
Some days I’d decide it was BBQ Sauce Day. For the rest of the day, I’d add a mini sales pitch to each order I took. The customer would order a Big Mac and fries, and I’d ask them if they’d like any sauce with that. If they said no, I’d smile and say, “Well, I’d really recommend the BBQ sauce–there’s nothing that beats that.” Usually at this point, they were a little taken aback, and they’d say, “Ok then, I’ll take the sauce.” If they still didn’t bite, I’d say, “That’s ok, but you’re really missing out. My last customer was reluctant but when she tried the sauce she knew she’d made the right decision.”
These mini-games energized him. His off-script sales pitch would occasionally delight his customers. On some days, Dicks even looked forward to his shifts. Working at the fast food restaurant remained uninspiring, but he created a way to play and enjoy himself.
This story makes me realize I have recently invented a game for myself in my day job. My game is to use the fewest possible words with anything I write, like memos and emails. A few weeks ago, I was tasked with updating a document only a few people would read. The previous version was acceptable but unorganized: The long paragraphs of plain text were circular and difficult to read. I rewrote the whole thing with bullet points, bolded subtitles, and consolidated multiple paragraphs into a table with four columns and 50 words.
Even though this task was rather unimportant, I found the effort—the game—rather rewarding: I slashed the document length by half without saying less, and I know whoever reads the file in the future will find it more pleasant than before.
“Nothing fires up the brain like play.” Dr. Stuart Brown said in his TED talk, “Play is more than fun.” Brown founded a curious organization called the National Institute for Play, which promotes the benefits of play to kids and adults. His studies of thousands of people show that play can benefit health, relationships, and innovation. Above all, it engages our brains and makes us happier.
Greg McKeown, who wrote about Brown’s research in his book Essentialism, sums it up beautifully:
When we play, we are engaged in the purest expression of our humanity, the truest expression of our individuality. Is it any wonder that often the times we feel most alive, those that make up our best memories, are moments of play?
As adults, though, we don’t always get to do the clearly fun things like sports or board games—we must also do the work we don’t enjoy. Most people wouldn’t associate working at McDonald’s with play. What to do then? Dicks’ story suggests a trick: approach a job with less seriousness, find an unexplored angle, and design a new game no one has thought of or cares about.
Weirdly, this approach reminds me of the Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl, who wrote in his book Man’s Search for Meaning:
Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.
While Frankl’s poignant writing was about his agency amid extremely limited choices in a concentration camp, his description surprisingly matches Matthew Dicks’ story. During that period of his life, Dicks had to work at a place he didn’t enjoy to make a living, but he chose to exercise his freedom amid the less-than-ideal conditions: Make it a game, and focus on the BBQ sauce.
“A little nonsense now and then is cherished by the wisest men.” —Roald Dahl