Redefining Winning: What we found in ‘The Future is Play’ webinar
On Friday, we hosted our second online panel talk in collaboration with the youth-first creative agency Youth Beyond Borders. Delving into the concept of ‘play’ was a challenging task to embark on, given its instinctive nature and the fact that we rarely give it conscious thought. But because of this, it was also rich for discussion, allowing our guest speakers to think about their lives, careers and hobbies in ways they had never before, which many of them pointed out.
And, while each of their individual experiences differed greatly (from doing content creation for the Premier League to improvising jazz viola over jungle records at raves), for all of them, play was hugely important. In fact, it was the reason for engagement with a particular sport or craft, and the reason for continuation.
Yet this often gets lost or forgotten in a world driven by numbers, metrics and optimisation; a world where our success as an artist is measured by how many followers we have and our ability as a runner is compared against others on Strava.
What we found, therefore, was that each of our guest speakers was trying to react against that culture by incorporating a more holistic approach to success, one that values the journey and what is gained along the way, over the result. In other words, play in itself is the win.
And they are doing that by viewing success through the lens of four key shifting mindsets:
Spontaneity
Instinct
Imagination
Purity
So what does this really mean? And how is it playing out on the ground? Below we’ve put together a top-line summary of how our participants were embracing each of the four key mindsets. To find out more about how these are changing youth culture and the behaviours behind it, shoot us an email via info@onro.ad, and we’d be happy to talk through our findings in more depth over a call.
Spontaneity
To our guest speakers, spontaneity meant possibility. It was the endless potential of a chance encounter. The adventure that comes from taking a different running path to usual. Or the innovation that comes from experimentation. When we give ourselves up to spontaneity, we open ourselves up to that which is outside of our normal perspectives and routines, which leads to discovery.
But, so often, spontaneity (and all that comes with it) is framed in opposition to productivity. By veering off the usual path, away from what we know works, we might delay the time it takes to get a result. In both the art and sports world, where we are constantly placed in competition with one another, this might seem scary. Which is precisely why it is taking active effort to fight against these established norms and ways of thinking.
Instinct
Spontaneity was also considered a pathway to instinct because, when we are not following a set of rules and allowing chance to take over, we become reliant on all that we have left: our instincts.
Of course, in the modern world, we have moved further and further away from our instincts. On the whole, we live according to a set of socially acceptable standards (we eat, sleep and play when it is socially acceptable to do so). Smartphones, social pressure and responsibility prevent us from connecting with those raw and unfiltered emotions and desires because they take us out of the present moment. But immersing yourself in the present moment, without the pressure of hitting certain targets or KPIs, is when you get the best results and, more importantly, have the most fun. For our speakers, accessing this instinctive flow state is the ultimate goal, not the results or success that follows it.
Purity
For that same reason, there was a sense that play and the flow state were almost sacred. ‘Pure’ was the word used by Rashad (23-year-old footballer and content creator). Play is something that should be kept separate from the burdens of normal adult life, for it to remain as it was when we were children: innocent, instinctive and spontaneous.
One way in which our speakers were maintaining this balance was by compartmentalising the different facets of their lives, ensuring that they always had moments for pure play (and that these were not interfered with by a demand for progress).
Imagination
And finally, young people today are redefining winning by putting more emphasis on what imagination means within this context. As AI threatens to take more of our jobs, imagination is the one key skill we can hold on to because, where AI is literally driven by numbers and algorithms, we have the power to think outside of that box.
For Jaa (21-year-old photographer), this meant imagining how and where play could fit into his life in unexpected ways, and seeing what comes out of that. For Charlie (20-year-old trail runner), this meant finding new routes and pathways on her runs that might not necessarily be conducive to her winning the next race, but fuel her passion for the sport and remind her of the reasons she started trail running in the first place.
…
By centering these four mindsets and channeling them into their lives and passions, our four youth speakers were widening what it meant to win, drawing attention away from the result, and finding appreciation for the journey and the unforeseen places that might take you.