I wonder if scheduling certain amount of unscheduled creative loafing is helpful ... also Coach John Wooden's approach seems helpful. He always focused on doing your best, and not worrying too much about winning or losing (since you can control effort, but you can't control who has happened to show up to compete on a given day). If the satisfaction from doing things is internal (I made this airplane out of legos and it was challenging and fun to do it) rather than external (my airplane is better than so and so's airplane) maybe that is a more sustainable long term approach.
