I have done wheelchair races with nursing home residents.
Zamboni tournaments with the cleaning team.
Arm wrestling with patients.
And other things.
They made me happy. They made the people I worked with happy. They made my patients happy.
Like the man whose elbow flexors I had reconstructed, who then wrestled with that arm.
And I am pretty sure they made me better at what I do.
These episodes don’t take from my professionalism, my work ethic or how I treat patients. These little joys are not a break from the craft. They are part of the craft.
We have built a professional culture where allowing yourself to be human and silly and fun at work is treated as a sign you are not serious. That you are not committed. That someone somewhere is outworking you because they are not smiling.
“If you have time to smile at work, you are not working hard enough. Somewhere out there is someone who is not smiling, who is working harder than you, and who is coming for your position.”
I read that recently. I found it unbelievably sad.
But here is what that image actually describes: a person working with a clenched fist and a frozen face, grinding through the day so they can be first. To me this is not ambition but a person engineering their own misery and calling it discipline.
Here is the counter-argument.
You can fake hours. You can fake urgency, and plenty of people do it well. You can fake being busy for an entire career.
You cannot fake being genuinely excited about your work.
It shows itself in what you notice, in the problems you choose or what you are still thinking about on the train home.
You can fake your enthusiasm and make it look like a performance. Whereas real enthusiasm forgets to perform, mainly because it is too busy being really interested.
Over ten years, the person who actually enjoys what they do, will outperform the person with the clenched fist. Every time. And they will still want to be there after all those years.
I have colleagues far up the ladder with nothing left to prove. They will still tell me about a recent tough case or reconstruction with something close to childish excitement. It is genuinely bringing them joy, and it is the most refreshing thing to listen to.
There is a corner of the internet that will tell you holding a regular job means you are an idiot. That you sold your soul.
Real freedom, the story goes, is only available to people selling courses and services from wherever they want, whenever they want. If you are employed, you are the one who didn’t get the memo yet.
It rests on two assumptions, both of which are wrong.
First, we are not all the same. Some people do their best work inside an institution, with a team, with resources they could never assemble alone. The solo path is not the apex of human potential. It is one shape of work, and it suits some people terribly.
Second, and more importantly, it assumes your job sucks.
It assumes employment is a sentence you are serving, not particular circumstances you deliberately chose.
If you choose the branch carefully, and you put in the years, and you get good enough that you genuinely can’t be ignored, you may well end up with work you actually like.
And if you still have hunger for more, the two are not mutually exclusive. Nothing stops you from holding the job and building the other thing alongside it. I have done both.
Depth creates freedom. Pick one trunk to grow before you branch.
Because mastery gives you the leverage to expand into leadership, writing, research, whatever else you are.
The people telling you to quit your job and go solo are not wrong about the possibility. They are wrong about it being the only one.
Grind culture and the gospel of the solopreneur look like they are separate, but they are not. Both are worshipping the conception that work is suffering. They just draw different conclusions. One argues for pushing through and stop complaining. The other one argues for escape and the pipedream of an effort-free alternative.
Neither acknowledges the option that work could be more than suffering but actually rewarding and fun. Both stories only focus on the wrong of it.
And we have become very good at describing what is wrong.
The workplace. The organisation. The health system. Everything upstream that shapes how a day goes.
Naming problems is part of my job. As department head I am supposed to identify these things and work every lever I have to move them. So of course I am part of this conversation.
But the discussion has skewed.
Problem-naming has become the whole conversation, and at some point it starts serving itself rather than the people.
Hearing patients laughing with their caregivers makes me genuinely happy when I look at my department. So are senior residents staying longer to teach juniors through surgical steps, not because they have to, but because they want to.
We have a language for burnout, for toxicity, for structural failure. We have almost no language for joy at work. For the team that made something impossible work because they actually like each other.
And when we never name the good, we start to believe it is not there.
I am not arguing we stop naming what is broken. We should.
I am arguing we also name what is working, what is joyful, what is keeping people at work.
Because if the only story we tell about work is what is wrong with it, we are not describing reality.
We are amputating it.
But teams that laugh together trust each other more. And trust is one of the highest-leverage currencies any institution can have.
In practical terms: faster decisions, fewer second-guesses, less wasted energy on politics, fewer sick days.
So joy is not soft. It is deeply efficient.
Employed work can be fun.
It is allowed to be fun.
And we should say so more often.
Joy is not a reward you collect once the work is done.
It actually is the thing.
When was the last time you allowed yourself to be genuinely silly at work?
To more from life,
Nicco
Sing along for fun at work
