Charlie Hoehn is an author, keynote speaker and expert on the power of play. Charlie worked for three years with Tim Ferriss, the author of The New York Times bestseller “The 4-Hour Work Week,” and helped Tim edit and launch the #1 New York Times bestseller The 4-Hour Body. Charlie currently functions as the head of video for Book in a Box. He also hosts the Author Hour podcast, which presents the best ideas from new books through conversations with authors
Charlie is an advocate of play and believes some mental illness can be treated naturally through the activity of play. He is the author of the bestselling book “Play It Away: A Workaholic’s Cure for Anxiety.” He also authored the book “Recession-Proof Graduate.”
Charlie has given speeches at military bases around the United States, including the Pentagon, with a special focus on how to prevent suicide among soldiers. He has been featured on NPR, Fast Company, Harvard Business Review and Forbes, and has also given four popular TEDx talks.
1) In your book “Play It Away,” you wrote, “My entire life revolved around work, life stopped being fun.” Now, more than ever, the lines between work and life are non-distinct. Especially in the sense that work and play are intertwined and many do not have the luxury of truly clocking off anymore. With this in mind, how can someone make adjustments — or at least be more mindful — that they’re heading for trouble?
Well, I really believe more than ever that it is a mindset shift. It’s a choice to approach any given moment playfully — with a joyful spirit. This was actually reinforced recently when I talked to an author named John Leland, who wrote, “Happiness Is a Choice You Make.” He wrote that book studying the lives of six different New Yorkers who were over the age of 85. He tried to find the most diverse group of people that he possibly could in New York. He was trying to get a really diverse representation of this age group. He was expecting to write about their age-related challenges. What he was really shocked to find was how all of them chose to be joyful and present about each day and to find the happiness in it.
To answer your question specifically, it is to choose to remain as playful as possible as often as possible — to approach things through the lens of fun. There was research done a while back introducing a work-task to a few different groups of people, but the researchers did it through different lenses.
For instance, they said to one group of people, “This is a task that you’ll be paid on for performance and for how well you do.” Then another group was introduced to the same task but through the lens of, “This is a game. It’s a puzzle. You’re supposed to have fun with it. Just enjoy the process.” In the study, the second group spent almost double the amount of time on the task, because they enjoyed it. The framing of the task was the only difference.
2) Given the power of play, what are some innovative ways to foster play for someone that has seemingly lost the ability?
I love this question. If you have lost opportunities to play, which happens to pretty much every adult — we get recess taken away from us now after elementary school, which is a very deflating moment — but there are really simple things you can do, starting with just going on a walk in nature and just noticing the design of the trees and the design of nature all around you. It is a very simple but very grounding activity that is really, no pun intended, a breath of fresh air. You can make this activity into a playful thing.
Instead of mechanically going through your day, you can find opportunities to be playful in interactions. One of the things I have come to realize is every interaction can be a playful interaction.
I use to robotically go through the motions of my day. If I was paying by check at a restaurant or buying groceries at Whole Foods, I was just like, “Great, thanks,” and I moved on. Now, I try inviting the people that I interact with into a little playful interaction.
For instance, I’ll never forget being at the grocery store checking out and the cashier asked for my credit card, something that had happened hundreds of hundreds of times before. I remember pulling out my credit card going to hand it to her. As she reached for it, I just pulled it away from her playfully. She looked at me for a split second kind of confused and then had a big smile as soon as she realized I was just playing with her.
It was just half a second. It’s so small and sounds so insignificant and I’m not recommending people just go around messing with their cashiers or waiters and waitresses, but any interaction with others can be like that, and it’s really simple and easy to do. You treat people like they are already your friends and they tend to reciprocate that energy back to you.
It is an invitation to play. Animals do this really well. If you go to a dog park, you can watch dogs do this so effortlessly. They bow down the front legs and that is just a playful invitation.
My wife and I try to do this every opportunity that we can, including arguments and fights. I remember we got into an argument about something. Both of us were really heated and at some point, we both realized how ridiculous it was that we were arguing about whatever it was. I cannot remember who, but one of us suggested, let’s switch roles and pretend we’re the other person. Both of us exchanged roles and pretended we were each other. We played over-exaggerated versions of ourselves, which was hilarious.
This was something I even incorporated when I was really in a bad phase with anxiety. I was struggling with panic attacks and it was just not fun. It was miserable, but I remember it was at that time that I was trying to incorporate play into every element of my day. I remember saying all of my worries out loud in funny voices — playful mocking voices. I just kept doing it until those thoughts were no longer scary to me. It was ridiculous and kind of embarrassing to do, but it was really effective. It worked for me.
3) Given that minimalism is currently in favor, I am surprised that more attention is not spent on the benefit of reducing intangible baggage. You describe that as, “removing your anchors.” Why do you believe removing anchors in one’s life is important?
The analogy goes: if you’re a boat and you’re trying to get across a lake and you have anchors tying you down, you’re never going to get across the lake or at least you’re going to go very, very slow. To me, anchors are things that are continually pulling your energy down into a lower state, whether that’s depression, fear, anxiety, whatever. For instance, if you’re continually around people who frankly are on that same wavelength themselves, it is really difficult for you to move up.
There’s a saying, you become the average of the five people you most closely associate with. I’ll give you a personal example. I have a good friend of mine who for the past few years, I’ve tried to help. It just recently dawned on me that he is not helping himself. In fact, he’s viewing our conversations almost as validating his feelings. I came to realize I am not helping him; instead, the lack of change was negatively affecting me. I had to let him go do his thing and figure things out. When you are constantly surrounded by these types of people, it becomes difficult to move yourself up.
Regarding internal anchors, journaling is extremely helpful — even just doing it once a week is so beneficial. It shines a light on your subconscious thoughts. It gives you a safe space to talk about the things that are bothering you. Whether it’s money, whether it’s friends, work, whatever. I try to journal once a week. I find it enormously beneficial.
In conjunction with journaling, I also like reframing. Reframing starts to train your mind to look for the silver lining. It can make a bad situation not only more tolerable, it can make it into something that eventually you are grateful for. I know people who have gone through the worst stuff. I’m friends with people who have spent significant amounts of time in prison, who’ve been sexually assaulted, who grew up in severe poverty. Not everyone falls into this category, nor is this always the case, but for many of them, those experiences either created a superpower in them of some sort or it was a significant pivot point to a greater level of consciousness.
On a grander level, all of our lives are stories. We are the hero of our own story. In every good story, there are obstacles to overcome. The hero’s journey is to overcome those obstacles.
4) Being a parent introduces into your life commitments that are truly unknown (in my opinion) until you are in the thick of it. How has play helped you in your new role as a father? Has play come in handy as a coping mechanism to the inherent stressors of parenthood?
I truly believe that there is no greater long-term benefit, both for the parent and the child, than having a loving and playful relationship. Being able to play as a kid helps you develop empathy. It helps you develop skills. It helps you develop deep relationships. It helps you develop compassion.
As an adult, it is remedy from the daily stresses of life. The only way I communicate with my 8-month-old daughter is playfully. Interacting with children, you tend to meet them where they are. It would be ridiculous if I was trying to explain the finer technical points of Final Cut Pro to my daughter, but nothing gets in the way of playing with her like I’m 8 months old.
Shonda Rhimes gave a TED Talk about how play helped her decompress from a year of being burned out. I found her talk validating — furthering the narrative that play helps people — but I noticed in her talk that she mentioned not being able to easily play with her kids.
In her talk, Shonda confesses that she is not able to let herself easily get into kid mode, but in my opinion, it’s not that she can’t do it. It’s that she hasn’t given herself permission to do it. She hasn’t fully integrated the idea into her life.
I’m really glad I took a few years of improv training and got pretty good at doing improv. I don’t think there’s any practice that’s more beneficial to the health of your relationship with your kids, the relationship with your partner, even your relationship with your colleagues — or if you’re a speaker — with the people who watch you speak.
Improv training allows you to get comfortable in the moment and say yes to whatever is thrown your way. It’s what Buddhism teaches. You just accept what life is handing to you at that moment, and someone with the mindset that Shonda described, they’re saying “no” to what is happening. They’re not allowing themselves to get into a certain modality because they’re so bought into a fixed identity — an identity that is impeding their ability to return to the playful mindset of a kid.
That’s how you connect with people. You get in their zone.
Regarding my marriage, my wife and I do a “marriage meeting” every week. A major reason a lot of marriages fall apart is a lack of communication about important things going on in the partnership. So much can change, even in the course of the week that the two of you have to stay on the same page.
On the other hand, if you are bringing up challenging topics all throughout the week, it can make for a very stressful week. We limit certain conversations to once a week. We dedicate a few hours to this meeting. One of the questions we ask is, “What do we have planned this upcoming week for our individual social lives and our own mental health?” A lot of the time, what we build into our week is play.
One of the reasons we are married is because we make each other laugh. We have fun with each other. We enjoy each other’s company. We’re a pretty playful couple as it is. I remember one of my co-workers — he’s a younger kid in his early 20s — he said, “You’re one of the first married couples I’ve met that really just seem to be great friends.” I don’t think you can have a great friendship with somebody if you’re not playing together. Growing up, your friends weren’t people that joined you at networking events. Your best friends growing up were all people that you played with.
I believe you need to build play into your marriage — if you can’t have some of these harder relationship conversations playfully, then you never really feel safe with your partner. You feel like you’re getting judged. It becomes more difficult to diffuse hard situations.
The reason we have comedians, the reason telling jokes is a really highly valued form of social currency, is because it’s the way we bring up hard, painful things and move through them together. It is a form of doing things playfully.
5) In your new book Play for a Living, much of the content is quotes from people who found joy in their work. I imagine you have amassed these for some time, given your passion for this topic. Which is a quote about play that stands out to you?
So many of the quotes in that book really just talked to me; I did not set out intentionally to make the book or to get all those quotes. I just kept running into great quotes by some of my favorite people — people that I really deeply admire for the work that they did (or do).
From the first quote in the book, which is Mark Twain’s, “When we talk about the great workers of the world, we actually mean the great players of the world,” to the second quote in the book, which is Thomas Edison’s “I never did a day’s work in my life. It was all fun,” which to me, that really stands out.
I wanted that quote up at the front of the book because Edison’s story is remarkable. He had 10,000 failures when trying to invent the light bulb. Somebody famously asked him, “What is it like to have 10,000 failed attempts?” He said, “I don’t have 10,000 failed attempts. I figured out 10,000 ways to not make a light bulb.” To him, his work was play.
Earlier I talked about how you stick with a task longer when you perceive it as play. No one could have been paid enough money to try to make a new invention 10,000 times. They’d tap out after 100, or whatever. That’s an insane amount of tries. Edison had over 1,000 patents to his name. He’s considered the most prolific inventor of all time.
I think of people like him, of Steve Jobs, of Leonardo da Vinci, as these relentless players, people who just could not help themselves. Also, with people like Steve Jobs, he also had the aspect of his personality that was fiercely competitive. He had the one-two punch of those two strengths in his personality.
To wrap up, I love the philosophical quotes of Alan Watts about just living life. He has had a rise again with millennials through YouTube. He says, “Instead of calling it work, realize it is play,” which again, is just a reframing of what it is you’re doing — that if you make the choice, each moment of your life can be viewed as play.