How 10 Elements of Joy Improve Your Outlook and Performance

… a legacy upgrade conversation with Ingrid Fetell Lee gets into the topic of joy and the influence of your surroundings on your emotions and well-being. You may be hacking your body and mind, but are you embracing joy along the way? This episode shows you how—and explains why it’s essential. You’ll also find out the difference between happiness vs. joy. Fun Fact: While you may be able to fake a smile, you can’t fake joy.

Ingrid brought joy into the popular culture conversation with her book, “Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness.” She’s a designer, author, TEDtalk speaker and founder of “The Aesthetics of Joy.” Her work empowers people to find more joy through the purposeful and emotion-driven design of their environments.

She’s identified 10 elements of joy that resonate with nearly everyone.

1. Energy: “Our color vision is not an extravagance, but an integral sense that relates directly to our survival—in particular, our need to find sources of energy.”
2. Abundance: “A sparse environment acts as an anesthetic, numbing our senses and emotions. The abundance aesthetic does the opposite. It wakes the senses up. It brings us to life.”
3. Freedom: “A side effect of having more open space is that it allows greater freedom of movement.”
4. Harmony: “Joy is wild and free, but sometimes it’s also very organized.”
5. Play: “Our notion of work is rooted in an industrial economy that values efficiency and structure at the expense of joy and creativity.”
6. Surprise: “The god of good taste demands sacrifices, and it’s always the weird, quirky, awkward parts of ourselves that are first to be thrown on the pyre. Yet the weird, awkward parts are where the surprises lie, and, therefore, a great deal of joy.”
7. Transcendence: “People seem to have a natural attraction to things that float and fly. .. Floating things offer a vicarious kind of transcendence.”
8. Magic: “During my research, I was surprised to find that magic has played a pivotal role in fueling innovation and progress, though history is often silent on this point.”
9. Celebration: “Put simply, big things express big joy.”
10. Renewal: “In renewal, we find a kind of resilience, an ability to bounce back from difficulty be reigniting the optimism and hope that rises within us when we believe that joy will return.”

Ingrid’s research into joy has yielded surprising results about how it shapes our internal and external lives. She talks about that research in this episode, along with more surprising ways that joy can improve your mental and physical performance, too. She explains how to recognize, feel and incorporate more joy into your everyday life.

FREE JOY RESOURCES: Downloadable guides: 50 Ways to Find Joy Every Day and Joyspotter’s Guide