Microdosing Joy at Work

I wrote this post on my birthday (last week), and the main rule for birthdays—along with Mother’s Day and Father’s Day in our household—is that you get the day 100% off from childcare responsibility. 

I like spending time with my kids, of course, and raising them provides a lot of meaning in my life. But I haven’t seen them at all today, and it feels pretty damn great. Instead, I went to the gym, had a huge stack of pancakes for breakfast, and, uh, tested the gas pedal on my car. (Still works!)

The other thing that happens when I’m released from childcare responsibility is that my mind shifts into a freer, more expansive mode in which I can, for example, write a blog post in one shot.

The mental shift from temporarily removing my parental responsibilities reminded me of this point: The things that give us meaning don’t always give us joy. 

In particular, I’m thinking about how we’re often told by society to do what we love for work. And for some of us, that means jobs serving others or jobs intended to make the world a better place. But while these roles may provide meaning, they don’t always provide satisfaction. 

I’ve met a lot of nonprofit leaders, for example, who know they are making an impact and living in accordance with their values. But day-to-day, their jobs are a strain because they’re filled more with fundraising and administrative duties rather than with serving those they got into the work to serve. That means they make an impact in an intellectual sense day-to-day, but they don’t get the emotional impact from the work.

In another example, I know a finance executive who’s motivated by a goal to fund research on a health topic that’s affected his family. While that purpose gives meaning to the work, it’s only felt strongly once a year—when the annual bonus is paid and he can put the money into savings. On a day-to-day basis, the job brings the same frustrations and hassles he would experience if he didn’t have that philanthropic goal at all.

Moreover, I once met a chief marketing officer of a public company when she was looking for an executive coach. Within 20 minutes of talking, she realized that many of her frustrations came from the fact that almost all of her time was spent on the “chief” and “officer” parts of her title—e.g., executive meetings and earnings reports. Very little was spent on the actual “marketing”—interacting with customers and trying to understand their needs. 

That is, day-to-day, she wasn’t involved in any of the joyful activities that drove her passion for marketing in the first place.

When I talk to people experiencing this gap between where they get meaning and where they get joy, we often focus on:

If you had to design your most engaging, most energy-giving day, what activities would you do? 

How often do you need to do each of those activities to feel good?

What can you do now to bring just a little bit more of it into your day-to-day life?

Essentially, I’m asking them to identify ways to microdose the activities that will make them feel good and sustain their energy. Some have a tough time even identifying the joy-giving activities in their roles because they’ve been so focused on impact and what an executive is “supposed” to do. 

And because of that, the toughest part of making a change for the better is often being comfortable being selfish. It’s the education leader saying, “I’m going to spend an hour in the kindergarten class just helping out—not because it’s the best use of my time, but because I enjoy the kids.” Or it’s any kind of executive saying, “I’m going to work on a pet project that lets me get my hands dirty, even though someone else could do it more efficiently.”

While it’s a short-term tradeoff, all of that helps leaders maintain the energy they need to keep pursuing their long-term goals.

Leadership Wisdom

On Netflix’s The Chef Show, actor Jon Favreau and chef Roy Choi meet and cook with other chefs. In one of the episodes, they work with restaurateurs Mary Sue Milliken and Susan Fineger. They had an interesting exchange in which Mary Sue and Susan articulate both this challenge and the self-knowledge it takes to find ways to fit joy into their daily lives:

Susan: “37 years we’ve been business partners. ’81 [is when] we opened.” 

[…] Jon: “And you still like cooking together?”

Mary Sue: “We love cooking.” 

Susan: “That’s our favorite.” 

Jon: “You get to cook a lot, or is it hard?”

Susan: “Not as much as we’d like. Too many meetings (running the business of the restaurant).” 

Mary Sue: “But if I don’t cook everyday, I just am not happy. I gotta touch food. I gotta do something. Even if it’s just I go home and make soup.”