Risk Judgment to Gain Joy
People love joy, but they don’t respect it. Especially on weekdays. Joy is an indulgence most people struggle to justify (“I know it’s silly, don’t judge me!”), apologize for spending on (“I couldn’t help myself!”), and fail to make time for (“Sorry, I’m swamped!”). Joy is for when you pause real life - weekends, vacations, stolen moments.
You might assume that a chain of roadside gas/grocery stores might not be too invested in the people they hire to pump the gas or stock the chips. But Quik Trip found that when their employees enjoyed themselves - when they saw value, saw purpose, they took pride, took initiative. And the company shone because of it. “We are a fast-paced happy bunch that provides great customer service while selling food, snacks, and gasoline to a diverse base of hungry, thirsty, and gasoline needy customers!” Happy. That’s what a roadside convenience mart leads with. A store where customers and employees have little choice. You’re out of gas, there’s a gas station. You’re hungry, there’s a snack. You need a job, there’s a paycheck. It’s not a place for comparison shopping. And yet, Happy, is what they choose to value.
When it comes to careers and companies, we’re accustomed to draining all the color out of the experience and looking at hard cold facts - not warm fuzzy feelings. We want to be taken seriously, so we take work seriously. The idea of taking joy seriously is hard for many people to wrap their heads around, because you risk looking frivolous, flaky, immature. You risk the reputation you’ve built at home and/or work. You risk that awful feeling of being judged. But what I’ve seen is that embracing joy leads to exactly the sort of life and achievements worth admiring.
Joy and Work are not enemies. For most people they’re just in a dysfunctional relationship. Like siblings, with each feeling like they need to steal time from the other, Work belittling Joy, and Joy throwing up its arms and abandoning Work to its unhappy fate. But the healthy version of their relationship looks very different. When these two aspects of your purpose collaborate, Work feeds Joy and Joy fuels Work. Every fire needs air. You need to give yourself, your friends, your team, the space to let the air in to fuel that fire. Step back. Take a breath.
This is not to say that joy makes things easy. The difference is you don’t mind the difficulty so much. One of the things I became aware of is there’s a difference between work and effort. Work is Effort+Resistance. That combo gets you wishing you could be somewhere else, doing something else, with someone else, all wrapped in the urge to procrastinate or call in sick. Play however is Effort+Joy. It’s not easy to learn to tango, think through a chessboard, or restore a hot rod. Yet, we enjoy the effort.
Joy is one of the most powerful divining rods for locating one’s sense of purpose and uniqueness. Find what brings you joy and you’ll find a way to make the world a richer, more interesting place. Yet so many people have been trained out of listening to or for their joy - especially in any context beyond indulgence. That’s why one of the key aspects I’ve found in creating a successful Make Believe Time activity is mixing joy and effort. We try to show what it feels like to balance the two, so that it becomes increasingly familiar and people can appreciate what it feels like when efforts are infused with the magic of joy. Then they can begin to find their way back to it on their own in their careers and personal lives.