You may want to be goal directed and take the serious route, but it doesn’t seem fitting. Smiles on the other hand are infectious. So if you don’t smile as a matter of principle, your career choice is not making people happy.

Have you read the news today? If it doesn’t disturb you, then you need to read it again. I am not sure what the item is that disturbs you, but there must be something. As far as your day job is concerned, no doubt you don’t smile all that much, probably because having fun is not a quality encouraged in the workplace.
Unfortunately, I can’t stop reading the news, but there is always some interest to be had in following the ragged progress of things. And then there are all those “man marries donkey” articles or “goat beauty contests”, that populate the less portentous pages, put there with the intent of making me smile.
Yesterday, as I stood in a queue at a grocery store, I noticed that the cashier was smiling and being friendly continuously. She even managed to crack a smile for me in spite of my creased shirt, three day stubble and hair from hell. I had to check myself as I wondered whether she was on drugs or religion: sometimes smiles can be as simple as natural friendliness. I called and thanked the store manager. I hope that something really good goes her way.
If it doesn’t have some reward, what’s the point of doing it or bothering with it in the first place. A smile seems just about perfect, and I am reaffirming the smile and laughter for myself. Here’s why.
The thing that strikes me about enjoyment expressed as smiles and laughter is that it is seen as a sign of weakness. Perhaps people believe that if you laugh at a situation, for instance, Great Aunt Arabella’s devastation at the loss of a porcelain doodat to a clumsy visitor, you don’t have a full grasp of the situation.
I think, exactly the opposite may be true. If you have the ability to laugh at something that is absurd, it shows that you understand the situation well enough to see the absurdity which, schadenfreude aside, shows quite a depth of understanding. The same obviously holds true for memos about the misuse of office stationery, repetitive warnings about spending too much time in the toilet during working hours, so please don’t take the newspaper with you.
People who take everything seriously are probably unbalanced and won’t make good employees. They might for instance, spend too much time debating obvious productivity gains in the face of change, and slow everything down. They might also be a drain on workplace morale as they frown at people who smile and allow their ambition and ingenuity to seize the moment. But the quality that impresses me the most, is the ability to laugh at yourself, and I don’t see enough of that at all.
OK, so it’s important to be competitive and have everyone take you absolutely seriously. But does that mean you have to walk around in an expensive suit and drive an expensive car as the sole proof of the fact that you know what you are doing? All it might mean is that you are badly overpaid. The ability to smile about something and change the rules or your mind, as you go along, to suite the moment and avert the looming catastrophe, speaks of a certain kind of unbeatable confidence.
People take spontaneous confidence far more seriously than suits and cars, especially now when the infallibility of bankers and bureaucracy have been shown to be dubious at best. There are plenty of schemes that have formalised customer satisfaction with certain types of behaviour, but these don’t work well. “Have a nice day” has been so overused that it now means nothing. The waiter or waitress who shows up with a plastic smile asking if everything is alright makes me want to throw the mushrooms, especially if the mushrooms are the tinned variety, cause for amusement and laughter in its own right, though probably inappropriate and not a good example for my daughter.
For some reason, it seems to be that smiling is a career choice. You may want to be goal directed and take the serious route, but it doesn’t seem fitting. Smiles on the other hand are infectious. So if you don’t smile as a matter of principle, your career choice is not making people happy.

This is column number three hundred. Just seven hundred and one to go and I will be quite a happy chappy. A thousand and one thoughts: that’s my goal.Hands up everyone who remembers all those teachers who tried so hard to discourage kids when they said “I thought...” Can you remember the sniggers from the class as the teacher uttered that standard, brain dead comment about “What thought did when he heard...?” It never stopped me thinking, but it did teach me to keep my mouth shut. Now I am making up for lost time.
Thoughts are extremely underrated.
Here are the three things I know about thinking. Number one, it is a survival technique. Number two, it is progress. Number three, it is fun.
Survival technique? That’s a no-brainer. If we didn’t have the capacity to think, we would be like bees. Bees are held up as a model of productivity, however, put a bee in front of a glass window and it becomes a different story entirely. A couple of moments ago I spent a few minutes watching a bee bump into the same spot of glass wondering whether to chase it out with a piece of paper. I walked away thinking of the sting.
If that bee had the capacity to think about heading right, it might be able to be a bit more productive and wouldn’t die on the windowsill.
If we didn’t think, we would die of doing the same thing over and over again, perhaps starve or succumb to terminally broken noses in doorways. If you still think a bee is a desirable role model, you need to rethink that one. The hive mind goes nowhere. On that note, let’s head into number two, the issue of progress.
Perhaps, if bees had the ability to think, they might even have been able to evolve to the point where they stopped collecting pollen over weekends to chill out with a beer and a braai, or some television.
How would they get this right? By delegating. Pollen could be collected by others. There is only one workforce larger and more rigid than bees: the ants. The ants could be delegated to do the collection in return for honey. That, apart from the conflict between variable schedule rewards and unionisation, seems to be most of the labour equation.
And in third place, most importantly, thinking is fun.
If bees had the capacity to think, they would have console games, books and collections of Swedish art movies, or perhaps more fittingly, lots of copies of the Star Wars Clone War movies. Let’s use the example of the console game. If you have ever played one, you will have come across the level boss.
You will know how frustrating and draining it is to fight the creature umpteen times with absolutely no effect. You will also know that you do it because sooner or later you are going to figure out how to put the sucker down. And that takes thought.
So what it boils down to is that if you don’t think, you don’t progress, you don’t have fun and you run the risk of bumping into things repetitively. I often wonder about those people who do what they have to all week and then head home to the television. Why do they do it? What legacy does such a life produce? How do they measure their ambitions?
For my part, I am still playing the game of thinking, though not for the sake of survival or progress. I am waiting for the level boss of problems to come along, and then I am going to hack at the sucker until it gives in and dies, preferably with a nice point score.
It has to be a game. It has to be fun. I could spend an endless amount of time on setting up a hypothesis and chasing up observable phenomena, but that would be drudge work.
I have noticed that people who think often stare into middle distance, with cryptic smiles, then wander of to do something else. They don’t need much help along the way. They seem to enjoy life more and complain less about the long gaps between weekends.
I have seven hundred and one chances left to stare into middle distance. Stick around and see what happens.