Why Joy in work is the fuel we need

We tend to think success will make us happy. What if it's the other way around?

There are a lot of big, important motivations bound up in work. Pure enjoyment can seem like a trivial part of the mix.

And there are a lot of people out there ready to tell us that purpose, or hustle, or influence, are the one and only route to success that will inevitably bring us joy.

But what if it isn’t primarily success (on any measure) that gives us joy in work?

What if it’s the other way round?

Maybe it’s the glimmers of joy in work that enable our inner storytellers to see the coherence, the progress, the glory in what we are doing.

Maybe that’s the fuel that we most need to push us to do more and try harder?

And if that’s true, doesn’t that give us a double reason to follow the joy in our work? And to be active participants every day in refuelling it?

The case for joy

For the vast majority of human experience, work for most has been dangerous, painful, and pitifully rewarded.

For many, that’s still true, and many communities around the world still suffer from outrageous perils and constraints in the path of simply earning a living.

In our own orbits, we will each know people whose lack of work, or support in their work, makes joy almost impossible to access in their work.

If you have access to joyful experiences in your work, it’s a huge privilege.

But it also seems to be something of a fading art.

Gallup State of the Global Workplace report for 2024 suggests that engagement at work is the exception, not the rule. 62% of employees describe themselves as not engaged, and 15% actively disengaged.

And this has a broader ripple of people’s emotional lives. Only 21% of workers who do not enjoy their work rate their lives as "thriving". Work alone is unlikely to make us happy – but not enjoying our work will inevitably bring us down.

And zooming out a little, we can see this as part of a wider economic crisis.

Across so-called advanced economies, there’s an alarming slump in economic productivity – despite the advent of a spate of technology that was supposed to liberate the workplace. Surely there’s a scent of joy collapse in that phenomenon?

I’ve observed this clearly in my own professional sphere of marketing, which has made huge efforts to change itself in the last two decades - particularly focused on professionalisation, and efficiency.

Many of those efforts to professionalise were sorely needed, simply to create a safe and welcoming environment for everyone to work in. And yet at the same time, the drive for efficiency has unquestionably dampened the fire of empathy, creativity and collaboration that is fundamental to the industry’s output, and its attractiveness.

Put simply - marketing used to be fascinating and fun. If it’s not, what is it for?

At the heart of this industry, and the broader economy, we have people who are doing on average no more than 2 hours and 53 minutes of productive work per day, and often not enjoying it.

This is an urgent problem to solve, and we can’t wait for our employers, our governments, or the economy, to solve it.

Where do we find the joy?

The work Stories we tell ourselves: rags to riches

“Choose a job you love, and you don’t have to work a day in your life.”

Confucius / Mark Twain / Ecclesiastes

The obvious solution to a lack of joy in your work, is to seek work in what gives you joy.

For me, that is music. And this week, I’ve been finding joy in the back catalogue of the legendary, and now departed, musician Quincy Jones.

Jones was able to find extraordinary success in multiple places – as a composer, producer, and at a very young age as an unbelievable arranger on pieces like this…

Quincy Jones had a complicated personal life, but a simple professional mantra:

“When you do music for money, God walks out of the room.”

This embodies a way of life that was purely creative, and semi-mystical in its pursuit of creative breakthroughs.

This is an entrancing story (with an absolutely transcendent soundtrack). It’s the rags to riches story of talent unrecognised, and in the end entirely triumphant.

The narrative rests on the principle that giving yourself entirely to your talent and your craft is the route to happiness.

Now, if you are harbouring a secret Jones-like talent, I implore you to follow it – but despite my deep love of making music, I certainly am not!

In fact I do some of my very best, and most fulfilling, day-to-day work when I am able to keep it in perspective, give the task its proper level of importance, and do a great job without getting drawn too far into the depths of obsession.

Believing this doesn’t mean we have nothing learn nothing from Quincy Jones’ focus on intrinsic motivation, and the joy of creativity. But the narrative of total dedication can be unhelpful, even harmful, if we swallow it wholesale.

Alternative Stories: the tragedy, and the comedy of work

With the rise of bingeable TV franchises, we’ve seen a huge leap in the volume (and quality) of stories of the workplace.

And excluding stories of vocation, like those of great artists or heroic emergency workers, we see two prevalent bodies of work: tragedies, and comedies.

These include some of my very favourite TV programmes of all time, in part because each immerses so deeply and realistically in both the joy and pain of work, with so many moments that I recognise and feel deeply.

At their best, they include moments that illuminate how a moment that happens in work can act as a powerful catalyst for broader joy in your life. (If you’d like this idea explained properly, you will never beat the episode ‘Forks’ from The Bear. If you’ve seen it, watch this clip to revisit…if not, please just go and watch it).

Yet in aggregate, what do these stories tell us about the effect of centring our lives around our work, as Don Draper, or Michael Scott, or Shiv Roy, or Carmy Berzatto do?

They tell us that building joy entirely on the foundation of our perception of success at work will either destroy us, or it will trap us.

Perhaps imagining a story with work alone at its heart is inherently dangerous.

Work as a story ingredient, not an arc

We all have an inner storyteller, and that storyteller will get drawn to simple narratives. Like your own rags to riches story.

I’ve been drawn into this sometimes - a very ‘straight-line’ concept of the career, that’s focused on promotion and advancement. And while that’s sometimes paid off in the short term, the small number of decisions I made entirely on that basis have tended to draw down on my reserves of joy, and slowed my momentum.

On the other hand, every now and again I’ve made a big decision that drew on a clear recognition of what would give me and my family joy - for example our decision to move to the US, sight unseen, in 2010. Simply the best professional decision of my life, on every dimension, even though it seemed at the time like a leap sideways into the unknown.

Decisions in favour if joy rarely involve avoiding difficulty, or struggle (in the follow-up to this, we’ll talk about the idea of Struggle as a companion to joy, not the opposite of it.)

But being more genuinely oriented towards those moments of joy, to growing and topping up my fuel tank of joy, led both to a happier life, and to a greater stock of meaningful success.

I talked about this in greater depth in a recent interview with an ex-colleague and good friend Emma Saddleton for the WACL Futures Network, which you can listen to here…

Link to the episode: https://shorturl.at/eRB0v
Link to the show Pass It On: https://shorturl.at/FQzMU

I don’t want to claim that my experiences represent universal truths about work - but from reading a vast amount of literature, and speaking to a lot of people, it’s clear that for a lot of people, more of an orientation towards fun, learning, togetherness, enjoyment and all the other things that represent joy at work is not just desirable in itself, but a crucial driver of longer-term success.

A framework for re-fuelling your joy

The idea of having a formula for happiness is a huge over-reach, and when I see one, I feel unbelievably sceptical.

But if joy in work is crucial fuel, then the amount of joy that our working year, week or day generates is an important thing to monitor. And surely, we should do whatever we can to be active participants in our stock of joy?

And that means constantly returning to the practice of joy in work.

But it’s hard. When the world, and our calendars, and the state of the economy, and the organisations we work within, feel so restrictive, how do we fuel our joy?

Well, if you’d like some stimulus on ways to think about that, that I’ve gleaned from some fairly extensive reading this month - that will be the next piece - a framework for Refuelling the Joy.

See you there, late this week, for Part 2: Refuel the Joy…

At LookUP, we specialise in creating experiences in teams and organisations, bringing people together to grow through the power of story.

From inspiring ‘LookUP Lift’ sessions, to Story Series, to collaborative Sprints around Vision, Culture and Selling Stories, we are experts at re-injecting the Joy into work.

If that’s something you want to explore for your team, get in touch via matthew@wearelookup.com or caroline@wearelookup.com.