Dear Son:
If I were to be asked what is the dominating motive in your life, that is either the strongest influence or that which appears most frequently, I should say it was the desire for fun, to have a good time. There are all kinds of fun, such as competitive sports, cards, swimming, reading, just fooling around, the movies, etc., etc. But if I were asked to define what you considered fun, it would he: doing just as you please.
In short, your idea of fun, as I have seen you over a good many years, is to do just what you want to do when you want to do it. That is to say, fun with you is a matter of impulse, likes and dislikes at the moment, and almost entirely without a plan.
Now fun, and having a good time, may be wholly worth while and an important part of a person’s development, but only if it is guided by certain more important considerations. Fun only on impulse, or fun which consists of doing just what you like to do when you feel like it, is absolutely ruinous to the development of an effective personality. In addition, it kills off, one by one, the activities which a person can enjoy, so that the older he gets the less fun he can have.
Take tennis, for example. Until recently, tennis was fun only when you felt like playing, or could play without too much trouble, or with someone who was not too good, or who, even though a good player, liked you well enough to put up with your game. The more your game improves, the more people you will enjoy playing with and they with you. It will become an increasing source of enjoyment and friendship as the years go on, both with boys and with girls. But in order to improve your game, so as to get more and more fun out of it, it is absolutely necessary to play it on many occasions when you don’t feel like it, or when you would much rather be fooling around with a friend doing something else. You must work for it, you must talk for it, plan for it, play with people you don’t enjoy or who don’t enjoy you; in short you must make yourself go through a certain amount of hell for the time being. To have fun at tennis, it isn’t necessary to become an expert. It is necessary to develop a degree of relative superiority so that you will be increasingly welcomed as a partner by an increasing number of people.
The radio and the movies are two of your chief pleasures. Both of them have merit, but the more time you spend listening to the radio or watching movies, the less time you have to practice the things you should be learning now. Merely watching other people perform will not make you a performer. If you denied yourself these passive pleasures more, and exerted yourself in systematic practice at tennis, art, hockey, music, with which you are now dabbling, you could have much more fun next year, and every year after.
You have some examples already in your own experience. You have had a great deal of fun out of your musical instruments, but your fun was in playing them the way you wanted to play instead of in practicing and the drudgery of mastering music. Consequently, you are having less fun from this source as time goes on and as you find yourself stacked up against people who, possibly with less native talent, have sacrificed some of their fun to painful practicing. The same thing will happen with your talent and enjoyment of art, unless you take it more seriously. In other words, you can’t draw or practice when you feel like it or when it is fun, only, and expect either to get anywhere or to retain your pleasure in it.
At present, you are making a fine effort to get ready for the examinations, and really subordinating many of your fun impulses, quite seriously, to this end. Remember, you are now paying the price for the fun you had, or thought you were having, on the many occasions in the past when you should have been studying.
Even now you have plenty of time for fun and for just fooling around, but your idea of fun, as you told me to-day, is sitting around if you feel like it, and in general, doing what you feel like doing. That kind of fun won’t get you anywhere and will ruin your fun next year and in later years.
You have often complained about my unsympathetic attitude toward your desire to have some fun. You miss the point. I am not against your having a good time. In fact, I believe that right now you are not getting nearly enough fun out of life. You don’t have nearly as many good times as you should be having. The reason I have insisted on your working at certain jobs is not to keep you from having fun but to keep you from wasting your time on the self-indulgence which you consider fun, and to prevent you from falling entirely into the habit of doing just as you please. If you had put your mind and energies to the systematic cultivation of superiority in your studies, in your art, in certain competitive sports, in your social contacts and in social games, I would not be nearly so insistent on your doing certain chores around the house.
I believe that you are smart enough to see the simple logic in this situation, and to realize that what you have been calling fun is too often the poison of self-indulgence. You have shown many signs of the power to control your impulses and to reconstruct your habits. Your recent tendency to play more tennis is such a sign. I believe that your next big step, and probably the most important one that you will ever take in your life, is to change your concept of fun from acts based on impulse to fun based on a plan.
Incidentally, the amount of fun you have is determined not only by how competent you become through practice, but also by how much pleasure and satisfaction you can give to others. The more you do in your games or social contacts of any form, to give others a good time, to make others feel good, the more friends you will have, the more you will be invited out, the more opportunities for enjoyment will come to you. You can make every tennis session you have, for instance, whether you enjoy it or not, more enjoyable for your partner by controlling your outbursts, by not criticizing yourself, and by being complimentary about your partner’s good shots. The same applies to any situation, no matter what it is.
by Henry C. Link, 1936
Chapter 6