What were your summers like as a child? Like myself, most people I know looked forward to summer as a time when we were free of the demands of school and spent our days finding enjoyment in just about whatever we pleased. I was fortunate that my parents could provide for summers that seemed carefree and even magical. I have many fond memories of family vacations, long days wandering around with friends on bicycles, and exploring the wooded areas where I grew up. I also spent large spans of time at summer camp, where there were nearly endless opportunities to keep occupied with all sorts of activities designed to keep me engaged physically and mentally and geared towards fun. It seemed then that my joy was found in the absence of work. Joy was what I expected to find on weekends and during holiday and summer breaks from school.
I recall that some classmates seemed to find more joy in their academic pursuits than I did. They were more dedicated to their studies than I was. Or perhaps more afraid of the consequences of not achieving at a high level. But for me, work was not where I found or sought my joy. And that perception carried forward into my adult life.
How many people, does it seem, are unhappy with work? They either dislike their jobs or the people they work for or with. Some workers are disengaged, punching the clock and doing what little they can to get through the day. Their work quality and overall performance generally reflect the lack of joy they find at work. And organizations populated with such workers seem to be rife with dysfunction and steeped in mediocrity.
You can see people who seem to find great joy in their work – and perform exceptionally well. But what about organizations that have people who are highly engaged? What differentiates those who thrive at work from those who struggle? Why are some people conscientious while others seem not to care? Is it just a function of individual personalities, or is it something else?
How many people, does it seem, are unhappy with work? They either dislike their jobs or the people they work for or with.
It seems unlikely that high-performance organizations, places where people are highly engaged, committed to producing exceptional results, and genuinely care about the organization’s well-being, are a function of random selection. There clearly is something deliberate at play.
You can trace the behavior of highly effective people to something in their attitude. It generally isn’t that some people find hard work and personal sacrifice to be fun. But they lean that way regardless. The pursuit of fun or being entertained doesn’t rise to the level of causing people to be conscientious. Conscientiousness is a function of your sense of what is right or wrong; it’s your conscience at play.
This ties closely to having a clear understanding of what is necessary. The feeling that we must do something is a function of purpose and the sense that it is worth whatever extra effort is required simply because it is the right thing to do. The meaning you make of things drives your being conscientious or not. The meaning we create around things is always a matter of choice. It may not seem that way, given that we all have well-formed habits of thinking or beliefs that guide your relationship with the world around you. Meaning is a product of your mind at work. Your mind is constantly making meaning out of the sensations you experience. It is a meaning-making machine.
Your brain is the organ that supports your mind. Beyond making meaning, your brain controls your body’s functions and systems. The activity of the human brain can be observed with things like functional MRIs – but the function of your mind is entirely imperceivable to anyone but yourself. Your thoughts might stimulate parts of your brain that can be observed, but your thoughts are invisible.
Your values and your beliefs lie within your mind. What you believe to be true might result from what you have been told by others or by your own experiences. Your mind doesn’t distinguish what you experience from what you imagine. When you are told something is true, you imagine it might be. When you refuse to believe something is possible, you might observe it firsthand and still choose not to believe your own eyes. Your beliefs are a product of what you learn or allow yourself to learn, and your values are simply how you prioritize your beliefs.
Back to work, do people who enjoy their work do so because of their beliefs about work and their values that place work as a high priority among their values? It seems so but may not be entirely that simple.
You might believe something you must do is necessary and still find no joy in the task. People forced into hard labor may understand that the threat of punishment is sufficient to cause them to do what they are told to, but no threats will force you to enjoy that work. If your purpose is to merely stay alive, you might do just about anything. You value your life and see survival as a powerful purpose that causes you to endure.
Clearly, the beliefs that may cause you to perform do not directly correlate to finding joy.
Beliefs do help us define pleasure and happiness. What we define as pleasure, from simple distractions from routines we find tedious or unrewarding to the physical sensations of pleasure you might experience through things like eating, exercising, or sex, are all manageable by your beliefs surrounding those activities. You can resist certain pleasures knowing that the negative consequences outweigh the benefits. And you might even learn to find pleasure in things you believed you didn’t like.
Happiness is also a function of your beliefs. The things that make you happy don’t necessarily match what your friends or spouse find makes them happy. You might like the beach, and they prefer the mountains. You like sushi, and they prefer steak or perhaps fruit salad. They like baseball, and you would rather read a book. The things that make you happy might be a function of your habits – or even some spontaneous reaction to something unexpected. More importantly, what makes you happy is subject to change. Happiness seems to be fickle. The things you did with an ex-lover, for example, might be something you loved then and cannot stomach now.
Joy is different. Unlike pleasure and happiness, which are transitive emotions triggered by what you feel at any given moment, joy is something you can cultivate.
Human joy is closely tied to the kind of meaning that informs your sense of purpose or the things that bring value to your life. For most people, the greatest sense of value we experience is in the value we create for others. It is how you might describe the feeling of being in love or why you volunteer at your local church or community center.
The social sciences have explained the benefit of emotional intelligence as a function of high-performance individuals. Those who can defer gratification and experience empathy tend to work better with others and are likely to be more successful in what they pursue. There is an offshoot of emotional intelligence that speaks to why some people find enormous benefit in the contributions they make. The old saying that it is better to give than to receive speaks to emotional intelligence in that it involves empathy and deferred gratification. Still, it also speaks to the greater benefit of the satisfaction you feel when you are contributing to the welfare of others. It speaks to the generosity of spirit and the altruism in the world as positive (or perhaps even necessary) human traits.
Human joy is the product of a deep sense of satisfaction you experience when you accomplish something you know to be significant or meaningful. You can experience moments of overwhelming joy when you selflessly prepare yourself to do something that provides value beyond your own needs or interests. Enriching others brings you joy.
Human joy is the product of a deep sense of satisfaction you experience when you accomplish something you know to be significant or meaningful.
Work has a unique connection to joy. When you devote yourself to being fully competent, meaning doing what it takes to be able to accomplish what must be done, you exponentially increase the likelihood that you will accomplish meaningful things. Moreover, even when you aim for things that may not be possible, by making them necessary, you might still find great personal satisfaction through your efforts.
Organizations that are comprised of competent people tend to attract other competent people. Those who are biased towards accomplishing fully worthwhile things tend to want to be with people like themselves. And such organizations are invariably nurtured by highly competent leaders.
Competent leadership means that the leaders serve the organization’s worthy, indelible purpose (WIP) – and understand their role in being stewards of that cause. They understand that the organization makes the leader successful and that their success depends on creating other competent leaders whose focus is to determine what is necessary and demonstrate what is possible by their example. That fosters conscientiousness within organizations and cultivates the level of performance that reaps the accomplishments that transform work into joy, and hard work into MoJo, moments of overwhelming joy.
