What it means to play at work, while others work at work?

4 min readJun 29, 2021

“Find work that feels like play.” “Thanks to the internet, we’re going back to an age where more and more people can work for themselves.” — The Almanack of Naval Ravikanth by Eric Jorgenson [1].

A year ago, I was in search of generating a passive income for myself, as I burned out my corporate salary every month with a metropolitan lifestyle. It is hard to disagree that my corporate job in the forensic investigations was no less fun as compared to someone working in the media and arts industry, where your creative minds are always ignited and there is a new creation every time you sit to work. However, at the end of the day a corporate job is a “corporate job”.

My mother and I were constantly intrigued by many successful internet entrepreneurs who would make good money via YouTube, Instagram and Facebook. This whole concept of small businesses and selling via the most powerful tool — The Internet got us both all gung-ho about finding out the right product we could re-sell/ drop ship, etc. While we were in the search of our entrepreneurial entry, it is important at this point, for you to know that we were always very creative and always focused on creating ‘out of the box’ gifts whether it is a wedding, farewell or birthdays.

Therefore, as I was pushing my mother to think of a luxurious yet one-of-a-kind gift as a memoir for my best friend’s wedding, we stumbled upon creating a memoir that was made up of semi-precious stones . The whole creation got me really thinking of scaling this to a workable business idea and create a bespoke gifting platform. That, there and then was the birth of our first venture — Gift-A-Story. Our idea, was bring forth the story behind every relationship, achievement, occasion through our bespoke gifting range.

As there is always the creation and the creator, in our business model there was a third — the thinker! You’re right, that’s my role. As bad as my hands are at art and craft, that’s how well I could and thankfully am able to ideate and re-create a unique gift, that tells your story! Every gift is exclusively made for a specific requirement and will stand to remain as the only one ever made.

Starting a new business is like getting into a relationship, it requires quite a lot of attention, patience, understanding and above all, it takes accepting responsibility. There is generally a lot that happens behind the scene for setting up even a virtual store, but fortunately, it was a great start for us, as we got quite a few initial orders, all thanks to my mom’s credibility for her arts and craft. However, as much as you being to relish the taste of new bucks in your pocket, it is that hard to manage a pet project staying in two different cities among the creator and thinker, and yes, the only two employees/owners of the business. However, the magic the business created between us, mother and son, overtook all bottlenecks that we faced.

The number of calls that went in brainstorming and procrastination, dreaming big to pinching realities, more pocket money to allocating capital expenditures, marketing to fighting over designs, all of the drama was worthy, with Amma being a part of my first business venture.

Thanks to my life-changing pandemic situation (for more understanding, read my previous blog [2]) today, it is more about both of us sitting in a room, sipping chai and creating something new and exciting. The smile, happiness and the thrill that every customer gets on being surprised with our bespoke memoirs is the energy that keeps us driven towards creating a masterpiece every time we sit to work.

From delivering gifts in around our city, to gifts being delivered across the continent gives us utmost faith in trusting ourselves and building something new every day. Yes, this play at work leads to depressing situations such as being low on followers, some really dull months in terms of orders, some unforeseen events in transit but nevertheless, the point here is it’s considered play for us. Something that we love, care for and something that we cherish and live fully with.

So in all, I’m saying all small businesses or working for yourself might not really be the next hot thing, or might as well just fail. But the point here is to love what you do, trust in what you create, push to improve yourself every single day, give respect to your stakeholders and trust in process.

— — — — — — — — — And the play will follow.

What it means to play at work, while others work at work?

Written by Saketh Supraz