Serious with a smile :): Humour is no laughing matter… and a lack of laughing is a serious matter!
/By Duncan Anderson. To see all blogs click here.
Reading time:
Summary: 4 mins
Details: 11 mins
Summary:
IMO one can be serious with a smile.
I’ve found cultivating your ability to be serious with a smile is one key way to enjoy work more, to be more creative and to lower stress.
IMO having the right ‘energy’ at work is crucial, I’ve found ‘serious with a smile’ time one key way to create and propagate good energy.
One lens for types of time
Times of time:
Serious only
Serious with a smile
Smile only
What is ‘serious with a smile’ time?
This is where the smile is part of the serious, not an adjunct. AKA something interesting and humorous about what you are discussing, not a separate humor.
As an example I try to have smiles as part of these blogs. Done well, writing these blogs makes me smile every few minutes.
‘Serious with a smile’ time is normally a low single digit percentage of total time. Eg in a meeting ‘serious with a smile’ time means saying a few things that make yourself and others smile per hour.
Humour taxonomy:
L0: nothing
L1: smile
L2: smile and one “ha”
L3: outright two “ha”s
L4: many outright “ha”s and want to tell other people about the joke.
Detailed definitions
Seriously only = work occurring but no ‘L1: smile’+ happening
Serious with a smile = any normal work activity but with ‘L1: smile’+ as part of the work
Smile only = no work occurring but ‘L1: smile’+ happening
For white collar work not with external clients (ie with internal team members) I believe it is optimal to have a majority of time being ‘serious with a smile’ time. As an example in a hour long meeting you might smile 1-10 times.
I’ve found ‘serious with a smile’ time makes work more enjoyable.
I’ve found ‘serious with a smile’ time can, all else equal, lower stress.
I’ve found ‘serious with a smile’ time can allow greater creativity. IMO looking for humour is often an orthogonal way of exploring a problem space.
I’ve found ‘serious with a smile’ can help with increased stamina. Sometimes you have a 3 hour meeting, zero smiles can mean you finish spent. With some smiles you often finish the meeting content!
I’ve found ‘serious with a smile’ time normally saves time, not takes time. A lifted energy meeting normally has a faster pace. So in 1 hour you might smile 3-5x times but all else equal things move along at 20% faster pace so the couple of mins smiling about the work is a win!
A meeting with no smiles is a sin.
A meeting with a few smiles ‘for the win’.
There are times when it’s optimal to be ‘serious only’ and times when it is optimal to be ‘serious with a smile’
(At the right time) doing ‘serious with a smile’ time instead of just ‘serious only’ time as an input should mean better and more enjoyable output… which leads to a more enjoyable and better culture!
An example of where ‘serious only’ is optimal? EG giving constructive feedback.
Jingle: ‘Serious with a smile’ time is time where having a smile is optimal. IMO consciously cultivating ‘serious with a smile’ time isn’t optional!
Is humour happenstance… Or is laughter learned?
“Hiring Advice: Screen people for a sense of humor. 20-30% are humorless. They’re hard to work with.” - Tucker Max
Life Advice: Learn to laugh, it makes life better. Help provide laughs for others; it helps improve their life… and your life.
Laughter is the best medicine… laughter is the best prevention for needing medicine :)
IMO like almost all mental skills humour is something one cultivates, not something one is born with.
People spend time trying to learn more about the field their job is in (eg education, finance, etc). People spend time trying to cultivate calm through meditation.
IMO one should do the same for humour, consciously try and cultivate it!
I’ve found I’ve been able to smile and laugh a lot more at work. I’ve found this has made work much better!
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Details
Questions that aren’t really questions (a funny way to describe rhetorical questions?)
Who do you like hanging out with? People that make you laugh.
If someone needs to lighten up what do they need to do? Be able to laugh at themselves.
Do you find that with your best friends you laugh a lot?
Do you find with people you don’t know well you don’t laugh much?
Is one of the best hacks to an enjoyable life being able to find the humour in things?
Is a workplace without laughter something to laugh at?
What is funny is how I used to think about funny
23 year old Work Duncan
When I first started full time work post university I really wanted to do a good job. Initially this translated as ‘be as serious as possible as much as possible. No slacking off, work hard only!’
Indirectly I had thought smiling and having a laugh was ‘not working as hard as one could’. Hmmm.
Today Work Duncan
Now I still want to do the best job I can… it’s just that my characterisation of what it means to do a good job has massively changed.
Now I think that to do a good job, yes there are times when you shouldn’t smile and just be serious (eg constructive feedback), however there are significant amounts of time when it’s optimal to ‘be serious but with a smile’ and ‘just laugh outright’.
One could say that my 23 year old idea of doing a good job was laughable… as it didn’t include any laughter as part of doing a good job!
Three types of time:
Taxonomy if time:
Serious only (smiling is a bad idea)
Serious with a smile (having a smile is optimal)
Smile only
Comment:
23 year old Duncan didn’t didn’t know one could be ‘serious with a smile’.
30 year old Duncan knew about being ‘serious with a smile’ but wasn’t very good at it.
36 year old Duncan (today Duncan) tries to proactively build humour ability AND be serious with a smile when it’s appropriate (which I currently think is actually like 75% of the time).
Visualisation time
Get funny or die trying ;P
There are many many studies on how ‘stress kills you’.
I’ve found one of the best antidotes to stress is being able to smile / laugh at a situation.
I’ve found that you almost have a ‘smile tank’, if you’ve had a bunch of smiling in a day then this can offset a bunch of frowning meaning overall yes, a not good thing occurred, but it didn’t ruin your day.
Each day is different but over a year I’m going to hazard a guess I think the following split of time at work makes sense:
Serious only (smiling a bad idea) => 25%
Serious with a smile = 70%
Smile only = 5%
Seriously, I think that being ‘serious with a smile’ can totally change the enjoyment of a work task vs being ‘serious only’.
1. Same task * 2. ‘Being Serious’ = Meh
1. Same task * 2. ‘Serious with a smile’ = enjoyable!
I think this might have been the split of my time at work 10 years ago.
Serious only (smiling a bad idea) => 75%
Serious with a smile = 20%
Outright having a laugh = 5%
Effectively 50% more of my time now is ‘serious with a smile’ AND this has made 50% of time is WAY more enjoyable than it was before.
So it could be exactly the same job with the same people BUT it’s a wildly more enjoyable job if you can have the right amount of ‘serious with a smile’? Yeah.
Comment
A job with the optimal amount of ‘serious with a smile’ should mean much better mental health and as such better physical health and increased health and life spans.
A job with the optimal amount of ‘serious with a smile’ should mean better retention of employees.
A job with the optimal amount of ‘serious with a smile’ should mean better ability to attract new employees.
A job with the optimal amount of ‘serious with a smile’ should mean you have better relationships with people at work.
As such working on your humour ability is a very serious matter ;)?!?
You get exactly the behaviour you allow. You get exactly the mental skills you cultivate.
If you allow poor quality work to stand you’ll have lots of poor quality work. If you foster a work environment that is ‘serious with a smile’ at the appropriate time you’ll have lots of smiling :)
If you deliberately practice improving at a video game you’ll improve. IMO if you deliberately practice ‘humour’ you’ll get better at humour.
IMO one of the best hacks to making a good work environment is the right amount of ‘serious with a smile’ time.
IMO one of the best hacks for enjoying life is to have a laugh.
IMO one of the best ways to be a better friend is to give your friends smiles and laughs.
IMO cultivating your ability to do humour (smiles and laughs) is one of the most important skills to cultivate.
IMO one should meditate each week.
IMO one should blog (write like this) each week - link.
IMO one should try to build humour skills each week.
Humour Ability = 1. Practices making jokes + 2. Will make jokes + 3. Can laugh at themselves + 4. Builds relationships to where can poke fun at each other + 5. Will in a positive sum way poke fun at and laugh with others at work.
Humour taxonomy
-L1: frown (sometimes a humour will miss to the point of getting the opposite reaction intended)
L0: nothing
L1: smile
L2: smile and one “ha”
L3: outright two “ha”s
L4: many outright “ha”s and want to tell other people about the joke.
Comment: do you know who has “ha”s? The person who spends time trying to make “ha”s.
1. Practices making jokes
People like Seinfeld wrote a joke a day - link.
“
He said the way to be a better comic was to create better jokes and the way to create better jokes was to write every day. But his advice was better than that. He had a gem of a leverage technique he used on himself and you can use it to motivate yourself — even when you don’t feel like it.
He revealed a unique calendar system he uses to pressure himself to write. Here’s how it works.
He told me to get a big wall calendar that has a whole year on one page and hang it on a prominent wall. The next step was to get a big red magic marker. He said for each day that I do my task of writing, I get to put a big red X over that day.
“After a few days you’ll have a chain. Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You’ll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job is to not break the chain.”
“
To me this is great ‘deliberate practice’.
At Edrolo we write an email about our week which contains many things, one being ‘work learning of the week’. I decided a couple of years ago that I had to write a ‘humour’ as part of each ‘work learning of the week’.
Initially it was super hard and actually, at times, draining to try write a humour.
But I’ve found this journey of acquiring and improving at almost all new mental skills.
What was once difficult, time consuming, draining and low quality can slowly become easy, take no time, be energising and be high quality.
It used to take me AGES to write one humour for the weekly learning AND be IMO pretty bad (eg just alliteration). Now I see humours all over the place and they can be written as fast as I can type. It’s literally gone from at times 10 mins to try and find a seriously mediocre humour to an implicit subconscious part of writing! I’ll now often chuckle to myself when writing, I almost never used to do that!
Constantly attempting to cultivate humour has 1. Made me see humours all over the place and 2. Be able to make many humours.
Honestly trying to cultivate humour has made work and non work life much more enjoyable. Same hours, same people, same activities BUT more more enjoyable!
I hope it’s clear (and at times humorous) that I try to put humours in the CloudStreaks blogs. I hope the humours are improving.
Some ideas for humour:
Alliteration
Rhyming
Pointing out the absurd
Changing a quote
Juxtaposition
Finding a no-brainer in hindsight
Etc etc
2. Will make jokes
Don’t just regularly practice trying to make humours (IMO daily is best :) ) but also have a place to share them. Eg in your weekly learning put a humour or two.
I’ve found you can make yourself laugh. You can start to see humour everywhere.
Eg I had a knee operation recently. In the discussion about whether to have an operation or not, the surgeon said ‘this needs to be a joint decision’ and I burst out laughing because ‘knee joint operation and joint decision between surgeon and myself’ and the surgeon looked at me dumbfounded! I said ‘joint decision’? I thought it was a standard gag the surgeon had! I’ve found you start to find funny in places you didn't before.
You create funny in places there was none before.
You inspire funny in others.
IOM there is such a fixed mindset about funny. Humour is no laughing matter… because laughing is a humous matter.
My father in jest says ‘who has most toys wins’. DA version: ‘who laughs most wins’?
How to live a good life? Laugh lots! Give laughter to yourself, give laughter to others.
3. Can laugh at themselves
One key way to address some learning you’ve had through humour. Eg I can’t believe I used to think doing a good job meant being as serious as possible and not being ‘serious with a smile’ at work!
Brene Brown has helped popularise the value of vulnerability, I think being able to be authentically vulnerable is a key way to have a strong connection to reality (vs distortion). Basically IMO vulnerability done well is a key way to a better life.
“Vulnerability is not a sign of weakness, it’s a sign of self awareness.” Brene Brown.
Basically sometimes with a bit of humour you can bring up a topic that without humour it’s SUPER hard to bring up.
It just opens space for others to be up front with you but also changes the culture of work :).
It also means people can poke some positive sum fun at you.
“To have a friend first you must be a friend.” To have people be able to poke fun and raise things with vulnerable humour for your, first do with to yourself. Yay!
4. Builds relationships to where can poke fun at each other
Just because you can laugh at yourself doesn’t mean you have the relationship to be able to talk about others' vulnerabilities.
I’ve written about some ways to build work relationships here and here.
One strategy I’ve found to build relationships is through being able to laugh at yourself in front of someone else. I found that I did this with some people but not others… so now I try to strategically laugh at myself in front of everyone and that this can really help build relationships.
5. Will in a positive sum way poke fun at and laugh with others at work
You need to be super careful here but again I’ve found that there are a category of things you can discuss with humour that are real hard without.
Also, that just laughing makes work more fun!
If you only take away one thing
Life with laughing > life without laughing
Work with much ‘serious with a smile’ > work without much ‘serious with a smile’
I’ve found that while it’s not appropriate to laugh in all circumstances, actually the majority of work time it’s not just possible but optimal to be ‘serious with a smile’ mode.
Basically, for me, the percentage of life with a smile or laugh has increased massively vs 10 years ago… because I’ve tried to make this happen.
Making a humour used to involve massive effort, now many times making a humour is effortless and real time. Eg in a conversation.
Spending the time to cultivate humour abilities has had big benefits to enjoyment of work and life… both mental and physical.
You can be serious with a smile: humour is no laughing matter… and a lack of laughing is a serious matter!
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Addendum: Secondary Education Resources - ‘seriously only’ or ‘serious with a smile’?
Obviously, education is no joke… however I find how dry some existing resources are no laughing matter.
IMO we should take learning seriously, we want to care, but we don’t want to care so ‘hard’ that resources are dry to the point of being unlovable.
Caring done well = a resource is loveable = can elicit smiles and possibly a laugh or two.
Clearly a secondary resource isn’t a ‘book of jokes’, but IMO hopefully it can be a ‘book of interesting useful information that at times elicits smiles and even every now and then a laugh’.