Joy

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I’ve been on a journey for the last year and a half. If I were to summarize that journey, I’d say that I have been focused on trying to marry my work with one word: Joy.

I think for the previous 15 years, I was focused on words like Accomplishment or Useful or Valuable. I wanted to feel those things. Something shifted about 5 years ago, and since then, I’ve been on a journey to find a different relationship with work. At some point, I settled on the word Joy as a north star. 

It sounds kind of crazy, I know. Joy? At work? I mean, if you think about it, how many people in your life are truly joyful about their work? 

To answer that question, you have to define the word joy. 

Here’s the definition I’ve come up with: Joy at work is when you would do the work regardless of whether someone paid you. You would do it even if no one was noticing you or your work. It is something you would do anyway in your free time or if someone gave you a week off. You would do it out of love. Out of joy. 

I stumbled on this definition by watching my brother who has always been sure of what he wanted to do (at least it seemed like it to me, his younger sister). He works in Hollywood as a writer, director, and showrunner. At various times in his career, I’ve encouraged him to take a break and rest, and the fascinating thing to me is that his version of a break is writing a screenplay. You cannot stop him from creating stories — it is what he loves to do. I know for sure he would do it if no one was paying him. I have always found it inspiring. 

Another definition is in this post by Adam Grant: 

A job that makes you feel alive.

How many people do you know who truly feel that way about their work? 

I have been able to come up with three people and two maybes including my brother. Out of all the people in my life, I can only think of three people that I know would keep doing what they were doing regardless of whether they were making money doing it. How many can you think of? 

My people are actually all in different fields and some of their jobs sound... boring... to other people. I’ve come to believe that joy does not come from the nature of the work itself. I think finding joy in work comes from knowing yourself. Fundamentally, it comes from finding an alignment between your strengths (what you are exceptional at) and what you love doing. And then finding work that fits in that Venn diagram. 

To be clear, I’m a strong believer in strengths-based management, so in many ways, what I’m saying is an extension of all of that. The basic gist of philosophies like that (Molly style) is that people have innate, stand-out strengths and the only way to become extraordinary is by identifying and focusing on your strengths, not trying to improve your weaknesses. I would extend that by saying that the greatest impact you are going to have on the world is by finding the intersection of what you love doing and what you are extraordinary at — by finding joy. 

As I said to a friend recently, in every job search, there are two sides: there are the jobs that want you and there are the jobs you want. What we want early on in our careers is to feel wanted — to feel like we are valuable. The muscle we develop early in our career is the muscle of the job search — getting jobs to want you. As you get farther along and start to be known for things, jobs just show up, and you can get enchanted by being wanted AND knowing you’d be exceptional at the job. As you get more senior though, the much harder part of the equation is the jobs you want. It’s tough to distinguish sometimes, mostly because it’s nice to be wanted. It’s nice to be recruited and pursued. (The parallels between work and dating never end...) That feeling is so intoxicating that it’s hard to stop and ask whether it’s a job you want or just a job that wants you. 

When I was deciding at some point about a job (one that I probably shouldn’t have accepted), a friend of mine asked me a very simple question. He said, “Are you excited about the day?” It stopped me in my tracks. I had already accepted the job in my head, but I hadn’t stopped to think about whether I was excited about what I was going to spend my hours doing. I knew that I was excited to have the job. More specifically, I was excited to have had the job. I had what my friend and I have now fondly dubbed A LinkedIn Crush on the job — I was excited to tell people I had the job — for people to think I was fancy and cool. But that is an entirely different excitement than being so energized by your work that you are delighted when Monday rolls around. Being excited to change your job status on LinkedIn is obviously a different motivation than looking forward to the hours of your day almost every day of the week. 

That has become my sub-definition of Joy: work I look forward to every day. I always go back to that question: “Are you excited about the day?” 

I know it requires a lot of privilege (of all types) to pursue joy at work. For many, the opportunity to make a risky career move is simply not available, and encouraging someone to do so in the name of joy sounds trite and unrealistic. It’s only possible to prioritize joy if your and your family’s basic needs are met. If you can’t put food on the table or have a mountain of student debt to pay off, joy is usually not going to be a priority. 

But I also see examples of the opposite. People who found wealth because they found joy. One of the greatest, most obvious examples is Warren Buffett. Someone who started doing what he is now world famous for because he loved it AND he wanted to make money. He became the best in the world at it and built one of the largest companies of our time off of that. That is an oversimplification of a very long story but if you simply ask whether Mr Buffett would do what he is doing if no one was watching the answer is undoubtedly yes. 

Seeking joy is a privilege in so many ways AND it can also be a path toward your most powerful and lucrative career. The most brilliant, world-changing people I know, for the most part, do what they do out of love. And many of them started from nothing. 

At the same time, I see senior-level executives who stay miserable in their roles for years. Even though they have the financial means and privilege to make a change, they don’t. This makes me curious about what hidden scripts and psychological hurdles keep us stuck and make it challenging to pursue joy. So many of us were raised or trained to believe that “a job is a job” and that you should never expect to ever use joy and work in the same sentence. Asking the question forces us to look hard at what we have been doing — at what we’ve built our careers on — and ask how we ended up doing it. 

Do we really love our work? Would we do it if someone wasn’t paying us? If no one was watching?

I have come to believe that demanding joy in work takes immense courage. It takes courage to walk away from a well-worn skillset and risk feeling like a beginner; to cope with the FOMO of turning down projects you know you would knock out of the park, but would make you unhappy; to muscle through the uncertainty of a changing identity. 

If you want to take a baby step, just start by measuring your joy by the hour. This is a tool that a coach gave me a couple of years ago. At the end of the day, rate your hours on a 1 to 10 scale of how much energy, joy, or aliveness the meeting or the hour gave you. For me, it was the beginning step to realizing some of the things that bring me the most joy and then trying to figure out how to do more of those things. 

The last thing I will say is that joy is a journey. You start on a path to marry joy and work, and one of the things you are bound to discover along the way is things that DON’T bring you joy. You have to be willing to try, experiment, fail, and learn. And even once you’ve found it, as you grow and change, what brings you joy changes too.

But if your goal is to figure out the highest and best use of your time at work — the things that you are uniquely meant to bring to the world — I cannot recommend a North Star word more highly than Joy.