Type 2 Fun (3 Min Read) | Vol. 214

July 31, 2026

“A lot of what we do just isn’t real fun, but it needs to be done. And you can either laugh at yourself or you can whine about it. I think laughing at yourself is much more healthy than whining.” – Dr. Rainer Newberry

Type 2 Fun

I recently went fly fishing in Colorado with my friends Austin and Shawn. We were kicking around ideas, as writers do, on the drive. Somewhere in there, Austin introduced us to “Type 2” fun. It’s the idea that a little suffering makes a great story.

Roller coasters are Type 1 fun, he shared. Fun in the moment but we rarely talk about it later. Type 2 fun is that time you got lost in the woods, soaked by a thunderstorm, and were sure a bear wasn’t far behind on the trail. But you’ll be talking about that day years later. 

Type 2 fun has been adopted by the climbing community. Those nuts who think it’s “fun” to almost die scaling Denali. But the concept originated in a classroom.

Dr. Rainer Newberry taught field geology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Alaska is buried in snow most of the year, so his students learned in a short, soggy window. Cold. Wet. Miserable. If they were going to learn to love geology, they had to learn to love being, well, cold, wet, and miserable.

So around 1985, he started calling it Type 2 fun on his “Fun Scale.” Type 1 fun is fun while it’s happening. Roller coasters, as Austin put it. Powder skiing. Margaritas. Type 2 fun is miserable while it’s happening and fun in retrospect. Marathons. Alpine climbing. Geology in Alaska. Type 3 fun isn’t fun then or later. You just look back and wonder what you were thinking.

The phrase escaped the classroom. A climber picked it up from Newberry on a hairy field trip in 1993 and passed it to a writer, who blogged about it. Now it’s everywhere.

Newberry had no idea. Decades later, a reporter tracked him down to tell him his phrase had gone global. He was politely impressed, then went back to talking about rocks.

He wasn’t trying to coin a phrase.  He was trying to keep his students from quitting.

We spend a lot of energy trying to make work Type 1. Easier. Smoother. More comfortable. But nobody tells a story about the quarter where everything went according to plan.

The catch is that Type 2 and Type 3 feel identical while you’re experiencing them. Both hurt. Both take everything you’ve got. They are hard to tell apart. 

Three things make the difference:

1. Choice. Did you pick this? Chosen hard builds people. Assigned hard grinds them down.
2. Completion. Can you see the far side? Hard with a finish line is a season. Hard with no finish line is just your life now.
3. Connection. Does it connect to something you care about? Hard in service of something is worth it. Hard for its own sake is just hard.

Leaders manufacture Type 3 all the time. We don’t mean to. We just forget the ingredients. We assign the stretch project instead of offering it. We launch a “temporary” push and never call it done. We ask for the effort and skip the why.

Same work. Same hours. Same difficulty. One version makes people. The other breaks them.

Your team is in something hard right now. Most teams are. The question isn’t whether to make it easier. It’s whether they chose it, whether they can see the end, and whether they know what it’s for.

Get those three right and a year from now, they’ll be telling the story. 

One question to ponder in your thinking time: Is the hardest thing on my plate right now Type 2 or Type 3 fun? 

Make an Impact!
Jay Papasan
Author | CEO | Coac