Pleasure vs Enjoyment..from Flow

I am reading Flow at the current moment. I came across this wonderful concept regarding difference between pleasure and enjoyment.

I used to think they are the same but the author made an imporant distinction. Pleasure can be felt with out enjoyment with help of chemicals but enjoyment can only be experienced with investment of attention.

Enjoyment leads to learning. Another wonderful example he pointed out is the learning and enjoyment experienced by children, how growth and enjoyment are correlated.

Same person grows up to be an adult who seek extrinsic reward for everything they learn and there stops his learning, hence enjoyment and pleasure before his only positive experience. 

Several succesful people have expressed the same notion in their interviews and biographies. For example Steve jobs learnt caligraphy with no expectation of extrinsic reward, he did not know any way caligraphy would benefit him not did he even get college credit for doing it. He  just enjoyed learning caligrpahy. But later on in this skill formed the basis of type setting in PCs..

Another exmaple from my life is, I was blogging about ODI and wanted to start a professional blog, because I enjoyed the experience of blogging not as much as I would like to but writing creates a sense of flow and it makes me happy. My friend asked why do you do it, do you get any monitory benefit. I never thought about why until he asked I could never put a finger on it but when I read abotu flow.. I could make it out. 

Apps for Small businesses- Services business Idea

This is an email I wrote to my close friend Prasoon on Aug 2012

Business Idea.

Goal: To provide business apps (Email, surveys, Calender, Gtalk for connecting with customers, CRM) to un-served business customers such as mom and pop stores.

Every small businesses like the mom and pop srotes would like to have their own business email addresses like service@superlaundry.com, orders@cornerestaurant.com it gives them a professional demeanor.

What stops them from getting these things? because every small thing like hosted email costs money if they want something decent. Rest of the things are crappy just used to forward emails to their personal addresses.

We can provide cost free business apps like GMAIL, GOOGLE CALENDER, GTALK and Several CRM solutions (to maintain their contacts) for FREE to these customers..

Actually Google does this it provides everything free for upto 10 users. Anything more they will have to pay.

CALENDER: They can have their own google calender which they can publish events notifications and people can subcribe to their calender.

GTALK: Maintain personal realtionships with customer and be available to answer any questions, instead of revealing your personnel address.

CRM: Many CRM solutions can easily integrate with their mail and calender which are free where they can run their campaings, etc..

I implemented a solution like this for a non-profit synagouge instead of paying to a third party developer I just created it in a jiffy and they have ti for free.

Think about it.

The Experience project - Record your first time.

I came across a quote a while ago and it really started to influence me. You might have read it.

"When was the last time you did something for the first time"

So, I started  going down the memory lane and started to jot down all the shit I tried out in the City, I was impressed but I had a feeling I might have missed something. For  few activities I blogged down how I felt and I missed out on lot of activities. So, Other than blogging I did not find any platform where I can record an experience. Facebook timeline demonstrated the value of people's proclivity to travel down the memory lane and resurrecting their old thoughts, events etc.. May be people would want to record their experience or not. I don't know. But personally I feel, if given an easy platform to record how they felt, the emotional simulation, dopa-mine rush, etc.. may be they would want to. I am not necessarily saying write an essay but simply record the event with the help of a few questions in Q&A format with a photo or a video.. This way they can travel down the memory lane and reminisce.

The business aspect would come from exposing them to the experience of the day. Advertise clubs etc..

Thinking back about it..It will not be an experience recording platform but a community which drives people to experience new things. 

One way to get inspired to do participate in new experience is to read others experience or  just reminisce on your experience bring back that first time feeling which will push you do more. 

As the science of happiness says best to way to spend money to buy experience why not immortalize it.