How do we find joy

During the beginning of lockdown, two entire, excruciating years ago, I sat down in my East Village apartment, manhattan in hand, and finally began to watch Mad Men. I was hooked on all the same things everyone had been: the partying, the clothes and furniture, the womanizing, the swashbuckling style of presenting ideas.

The more I thought about the show, the more I thought about the theme of man’s relationship with himself. The series finale has a particularly poignant scene with a fellow named Leonard, who’s sharing his story at a retreat Don is attending. He says (bold added):

My name’s Leonard. I don’t know if there’s anything that complicated about me. Which is why I should be happier I guess. It’s good for him, he’s interesting. but I’ve never been interesting to anybody. I work in an office, people walk right by me and I know they don’t see me. Then I go home and I watch my wife and my kids — they don’t look up when I sit down. It’s like no one cares that I’m gone. They should love me, maybe they do, but, I don’t even know what it is. You spend your whole life thinking you’re not getting it, people aren’t giving it to you. Then you realize they’re trying, and you don’t even know what it is. I had a dream I was on a shelf in the refrigerator. Someone closes the door and the light goes off, and I know everybody’s out there eating. And then they open the door, and you see them smiling. They’re happy to see you. But maybe they don’t look right at you, and maybe they don’t pick you. Then the door closes again. The light goes off.

Don gets up and hugs Leonard. Does he finally see himself, deaf to the people who had been screaming their love at him?

My friend Noah recently shared a podcast episode from The Atlantic called How to Identify What You Enjoy. I was having a particularly anxious week and it hit me in the soft tissue.

The host, Arthur Brooks, and his guest, Lori Gottlieb, break happiness down into three macronutrients, as they call them: enjoyment (pleasure + elevation + connection), satisfaction (the reward for a job well done), purpose (doing what’s important to you).

A few highlights:

“A lot of people don’t know, if they had the time, what fun would even look like.”

“The Rolling Stones were half right. You can get satisfaction, you just can’t keep it.”

“When you ask about happiness, people talk about the most painful parts of their lives, when they understood the nature of their own souls.”

“The happiest people have been fully alive all throughout their lives. They’ve grieved, and they’ve recovered, and when bad things were happening and they never thought they’d feel better, guess what, they did.”

“Feelings are neutral. They’re like a compass; they tell us what direction to go in.”

Core to this is knowing yourself. Who are we and how do we know?

A brand’s building blocks can work in a similar way. Ask someone what they want and it’s financial stability; ask a brand owner what they want and it’s revenue. While not wrong, surface goals like these are, ironically, too vague to do much about.

The process of getting to clarity and action often requires questions that make people uncomfortable because each one peels off a layer of armor. Why does that matter to you? What does it allow you to do that you can’t do now? How will you get there? Who will help you?

My friends at Team One recently sent me their book on brand building, Legacy in the Making, which has cases on a dozen or so brands that have a clear sense of who they are. Paradoxically and wisely, the authors write, “Todays circumstances call for… brand building that fosters nimble and resilient brands that are perpetually in the making — neither forgetting the past not getting stuck in it — as the world constantly changes around them.”

Tomorrow’s best brands are being built in the digital world. They’ll try a ton of different things. But they’ll never lose the spark that makes people want to keep coming back to them.

Having a clear sense of purpose (and I don’t mean something lofty and contrived or a stapled-on cause) is a why that opens the door to many hows. Fail to identify our why and we find ourselves sloshing around, chasing bit of satisfaction at the expense of recognizing who we are over time, evolving as we will.