A retired man moves near a junior high school. He spends the first few weeks of retirement in peace and quiet. However, when a new school year begins, three young boys beat on every trash can they encounter every day on their way home from school.Finally, the man decides to take action and walks out to meet the boys. He says, “You kids are a lot of fun. I’ll give you each a dollar if you’ll promise to come around every day and do your thing.” The kids continue to do a bang-up job on the trashcans.

After a few days, the man tells the kids, “This recession’s really putting a big dent in my income. From now on, I’ll only be able to pay you 50 cents to beat on the cans.” The noisemakers are displeased, but they accept his offer.

A few days later, the retiree approaches them again. “Look,” he says, “I haven’t received my Social Security check yet, so I’m not going to be able to pay more than 25 cents. Will that be OK?”

“A freakin’ quarter?” the drum leader exclaims. “If you think we’re going to waste our time beating these cans around for a quarter, you’re nuts. We quit.”This was a joke that I got some days back on a RSS feed, but I did not laugh after reading this but it got me thinking instead…

The moment we take away fun from what we do and start doing things for returns, the entire perception changes… now the effort is usually defined by the returns we are getting out of it and not by how much we enjoy doing it !!!

When I put myself into this position, I see myself doing most of the things because I enjoy doing them and not because I want some returns to come from them… having said that I really like the returns too in forms of money or attention or praise, but the bottom line is that how much I enjoy doing it, does not change !

I hope to continue living this way !