“Two boys, one hour each, 10 bucks apiece.” This was the agreement I struck with my neighbor about hiring his 5th grade son and his friend to weed my garden. Although my own children have long since left the nest, I hadn’t forgotten the raggedy enthusiasm of kids that age.

When the boys come over, I show them how to pull thigh-high garlic mustard straight up to get the root ball, then toss a bundle of stalks over the ledge where I throw leaves and grass clippings. After each boy demonstrates proper weed-pulling technique, I go inside and watch them through the kitchen window.

First they pull one weed at a time and propel it down the hill, holding it like a spear and seeing which boy could throw farthest.

Then they notice a dead branch dangling from a crook in an oak. They peek through the screen door. “Okay if we pull that down?” my neighbor’s son asks, pointing at the dead branch.

“Sure,” I say, curious to watch. For a mere $10 a kid, I was enjoying some of the best entertainment I’ve had in a long time.

They take turns pulling the branch, then join together and strain with all their might. Not a budge.

“We need a strategy,” says my neighbor’s son. “The branch is caught. We have to push it up before we can pull it down.” They push the branch up until they dislodge it, then succeed in wrestling it down. The friend tries to throw the branch down the hill, but the branch, being heavier than he is, throws him down instead.

Then they take a break to hydrate with the cans of seltzer I had given them. Hydrating takes a while.

Then, 15 minutes left, I go out and help them weed the iris bed, which involves pulling up clumps of grass, shaking dirt off the roots, and heave-ho-ing the clumps overboard.

Now I’m beginning to talk like them.

Nothing feels like work. Everything is made into a challenge: the garlic mustard spear-throwing challenge, the dead branch rescue challenge, the hydration challenge, the heave-ho-over-board challenge. Work has become play.

Watching them, it comes back to me, the advice to choose work that you enjoy. As Malcolm Gladwell, bestselling author, says, “It’s very hard to find someone who’s successful and dislikes what they do.”

Or, to quote Mark Twain, who undoubtedly paraphrased Confucius and others, “Find a job you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work a day in your life.”

I’m fortunate to do work I love. I learn from my patients. For example, one patient who just turned 60 told me, “The older I get, the less I’m willing to do what I don’t want to do. If I don’t like what I’m doing, I’m going to change how I do it.”

Another patient, a millennial, described what it feels like to be “in the flow,” being one with the activity he’s doing. When he’s in the flow, a challenge at work feels the same as the challenge of skiing a black diamond trail — exciting!

We all know this as children, but somehow as adults, we forget.

I know I’m fortunate to do work that I feel passionate about. Not everyone is so lucky. But even if you love your work, every job has its tedium. Inspired by the weeders, I had ideas for transforming the tedious parts of medical practice. Clinical charting solitaire — writing medical notes after the clinic day ends. Prior authorization ping pong — medication requests, rejections and appeals bounce back and forth with health insurance companies. PowerPoint parade — decorating PowerPoint slides like colorful floats.

As the boys finish their hour, I survey their work. They had accomplished a fair bit of weeding. There is dignity in work, a job well done.

I ask whether they’d like to work for me again. “Oh yes!” they both say.

“I have to warn you. The next job, putting ProGro on the garden beds, will involve getting very dirty.”

Without hesitation, they reply. “Yes, we’re interested!”

I can only imagine what challenge games they have in mind.

Diane Roston is a psychiatrist and Director of Psychiatric Training at West Central Behavioral Health, and is on the clinical faculty in the Department of Psychiatry at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth.