Getting through the grind isn't about grinding harder. It's about knowing when to laugh.

MBA school has a lot in common with running a $20M fabrication shop. Long hours. Relentless pressure. The creeping sense that you've been in the same meeting for three weeks.

Late in the school year, our cohort had a ritual. After enough draining work — reading, analyzing, presenting, repeat — we'd pack up and head to the school pub for a round of BS Bingo.

Here's how it worked. The group picked a corporate topic — something suitably jargon-laden. One person stood up and delivered five uninterrupted minutes of pure consultant-speak: synergies, value levers, paradigm shifts, the full repertoire. No coherent argument required. In fact, the less coherent the better. Then the group voted on the winner.

It sounds ridiculous. It was. That was the point.

After a few rounds, the tension broke. The work didn't get lighter, but the people carrying it did.

Every operation has its version of the 162-game season.

That's how many games an MLB team plays in the regular season. Not the playoffs — just the grind to get there. Players work through all of it: bad weeks, long road trips, slumps, games in July that feel like they mean nothing.

The ones who last don't do it on willpower alone. They use humor. Different uniforms on the field. Impersonating each other's batting stances. Getting a laugh in the dugout when the game is 2-1 in the seventh and nobody's watching.

Your plant runs the same kind of season. Not 162 games, but close enough. Projects stack, quotes go sideways, equipment picks the worst possible moment to quit. There are weeks where nothing moves.

Willpower gets you through some of it. A pressure valve gets you through the rest.

You're probably thinking: I don't have time for games. My crew is here to work.

Nobody's suggesting you run pub nights on the shop floor.

But consider what actually happens when a team is deep in the grind and nobody acknowledges it. People go quiet. Communication gets short. The small frustrations that normally roll off start sticking. Eventually something blows.

A little humor doesn't slow a team down. It prevents the pressure from building to the point where it does. That's not soft — that's operational.

I recently came across a website called How to Professionally Say.

The creator's description: "A simple static website for common phrases we might want to say to your colleagues but want to make it sound more professional."

Want to say "I told you so"? The site gives you: "As per my prediction, this outcome does not come as a surprise."

Want to say "that's not my problem"? You get: "I believe this falls outside the scope of my current responsibilities."

Spend five minutes with it and you'll start mentally translating every frustrating email you've ever received.

This is a tool. Use it with your team.

Here's how: at your next weekly meeting, when you hit a friction point — a vendor who won't commit, a scope dispute that's gone three rounds, a schedule that keeps slipping — ask someone to translate the situation using the site. Read it back out loud.

You'll get a laugh. More importantly, you'll defuse the moment enough to actually solve the problem.

That's all BS Bingo was doing for us in business school. Not avoiding the hard work — recharging before doing it. The laughter lowered the temperature in the room. Then we got back to it.

The best operators I've worked with understood something the productivity industry keeps missing: teams don't run on process alone. They run on energy. And energy has to be replenished.

Your 162-game season doesn't have an off switch. But it does have a pressure valve. Most operators just forget it's there.

One next step: This week, pull up How to Professionally Say with your crew — or just use it yourself the next time you're drafting a difficult email. One shared laugh is more useful than another meeting about the same problem.

Further reading:

• Humor, Seriously — Jennifer Aaker & Naomi Bagdonas (Currency, 2021). A research-backed case that humor is a leadership tool, not a personality trait — and that teams who use it outperform the ones who don't.
• The Culture Code — Daniel Coyle (Bantam Books, 2018). Coyle's fieldwork inside high-performing teams shows that the small, seemingly frivolous moments of connection — humor included — are exactly what holds a team together under sustained pressure.
• Grit — Angela Duckworth (Scribner, 2016). The long-season argument in research form: sustained performance requires more than talent. The operators who last have learned to manage their energy, not just their output.

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