Two different contracts
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A month ago, during planning for a leadership session, my colleague commented, ‘They don’t seem to find joy in their work.’
I replied, ‘What if they’ve never experienced joy?’
The room went quiet as we thought about the consequence of that being true.
The term joy comes up a lot in leadership. We tell people to pursue it and we write it into keynote addresses, but in that moment, one question was front of mind:
Could you define what joy means to you?
Not happiness. Joy.
When I ask the same question to leaders, I get a pause. Then a few attempts that circle back to happiness. They talk about promotions, successful exits and maybe their child’s first steps. These are good and real things but not quite the answer.
Most leaders can name what makes them happy. Almost none can define joy with any precision. And yet we’re told we should pursue it, even race to find and hold onto it.
I used to think the difference between happiness and joy was minor, maybe even linear or semantic. But I’ve come to believe that they play a more crucial role in leadership than we might think and here’s where I’ve landed.
Two different contracts
Happiness is a response to circumstances. Joy is a relationship with time.
Happiness arrives when things go well. It’s contingent. When a deal closes, happiness arrives. When the deal falls through, happiness retreats. You can apply that to nearly any circumstance and that idea of happiness is important but borrowed. You and I don’t own it.
Joy is different.
Joy is available even when things are hard, when the outcome is uncertain and even when the work is unglamorous and the progress is invisible. Joy doesn’t wait for circumstances to improve. I think it exists underneath them.
When the window blew open
I didn’t understand this for a long time because I was too focused on happiness in the form of the next milestone, the next win, the next proof point that I was doing something that mattered. And because I was optimising for happiness, I kept needing the circumstances to cooperate and when they didn’t, I felt the absence of something I had real trouble naming.
The first crack of light came through watching my children grow.
There is something about watching time move through a child, the speed and irreversibility of it, that teaches you things no amount of leadership development can. You start to notice that the moments you’ll remember have almost nothing to do with the outcomes. They’re about presence and showing up and the accumulation of ordinary things that turns out, looking back, to have been everything.
I glimpsed joy there. But I didn’t fully understand what I was seeing.
I’ve mentioned this before and I won’t labour the point, but the window blew open with a life-changing panic attack.
I won’t dress it up. When your body decides that the way you’re relating to your own life isn’t working, it is not subtle about it. It doesn’t write you a memo or schedule a performance review. It stops you.
What came through in that moment and the weeks that followed as I processed what happened wasn’t about a pressure to perform. It was clarity about time and the relationship I had, or didn’t have, with the hours and days I was living through.
Comedian Jimmy Carr offered me a frame that I’ve used ever since.
He defines the meaning of life in five words: Enjoy the passage of time.
It sounds almost too simple. But sit with it for a moment.
Not to achieve the most. Not to accumulate the most. Not to be the most admired, the most successful or the most decorated. To enjoy the passage of time.
Which means the question isn’t: Am I happy right now? The question is: Is my relationship with time getting better as I get older?
It’s a powerful reframe.
Here is something worth knowing.
Across OECD countries, average life expectancy is 78 years for men and 83 years for women.
If you’re a 44-year-old male, it means you have roughly 408 months remaining. Roughly 468 months if you’re a woman.
Pause on that number.
Most leaders I work with spend enormous energy on five-year plans, grand visions, and quarterly targets. But they have no equivalent clarity about their most finite resource: time.
The months don’t stop while you’re figuring it out.
Casting votes
I’ve come to find joy in the pursuit. Not the arrival.
The effort I find joy in, being a parent and a husband, a brother, coaching and creating, isn’t designed to be easy. I know that and I’ve stopped expecting it to be. But I also know I’m good at it. And there is something that happens when you hold both of those things simultaneously: the difficulty and the capability. You stop needing it to be easy to feel okay about doing it.
Every time I show up and put my best foot forward, whether in a coaching room, at the dinner table, on a hard phone call with a CEO who needs to hear something they don’t want to hear, I’m casting a vote for the person I want to be.
The life I want to live.
The calm I want to carry.
Because joy is the accumulation of those votes over time.
This applies at work. It applies in marriage. It applies in friendship, in parenting, in the way you treat the people around you who will never appear in a business result or a performance review. Joy doesn’t live only in the professional. It lives in the full shape of a life.
There’s a distinction worth making here.
We’ve told people for decades to do what they love. It’s well-intentioned advice that frequently leads people somewhere confused.
In my experience, joy doesn’t come from doing what you love. It comes from doing what you’re genuinely great at and committing to getting better at it. Mastery, even partial mastery, produces something that love alone doesn’t. It produces a kind of settled confidence and a sense that you belong in the work.
And that settled confidence, not arrogance or certainty about outcomes, but confidence in your own capacity to show up well, is what produces calm over time.
I use a short formulation with clients that I’ve come to believe deeply: Leadership equals perspective.
Not experience or intelligence or network or track record or the size of your last exit.
Perspective.
Because a leader who can’t hold perspective, who loses the long view inside the short-term pressure, who catastrophises a setback, who confuses a difficult season with a failed life, is a leader whose joy is permanently hostage to circumstances. They’re back in the happiness trap. Dependent on outcomes.
Perspective is what allows you to hold the difficulty and the capability at once. It’s what makes the paradox workable.
This is why exercising perspective isn’t a one-time act. It’s a practice.
When achievement feels hollow, perspective is the tool that reframes it: what did I build, not just what did I produce?
When difficulty feels insurmountable, perspective is the tool that holds it: what does this look like when I look back in five years?
When grief or regret arrive, and it’s only a matter of time until they do, perspective is what keeps them from becoming the whole story.
What I see is that the leaders who have cultivated this don’t seem less affected by hard things. Instead, they seem more able to carry them without being defined by them. It’s the difference between being moved by something and being flattened by it.
If the actuarial data holds, you have somewhere between 400 and 600 months left. The exact number depends on your age and your biology. The question it raises depends on you.
Joy isn’t waiting at the end of a hard season, and it isn’t the reward for a career well-executed or a life well-managed. It’s available to you right now, in the paradox of knowing the work is hard and showing up anyway. In the vote you cast, every day, for the person you want to become.
The months are moving whether you’re in relationship with them or not. Every day you show up in the work, in the marriage, in the hard conversations and the ordinary ones you’re casting a vote. Not for an outcome. For a way of being.
That’s what joy is, a direction you keep choosing.
Is your relationship with time getting better as you get older or are you still waiting for circumstances to improve before you let yourself find out?
PS If this essay helped, Episode 168 (How CEOs can communicate commitment to work without damaging family, leadership or growth) from my podcast is worth a listen. Tune in on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
Work with Phil
CEO Coaching — For CEOs who want to lead with clarity and grow their business without sacrificing what matters most. A tailored 12-session experience across three dimensions: scaling you as a leader, elevating how you lead others, and building conditions for sustainable growth.
I've spent 20+ years leading, building and recovering businesses and coaching CEOs doing the same. I work with a small number of people at a time. If the timing is right, let's talk.
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