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Hi,
We think that joy follows success, but actually the opposite is true. Success follows joy, and that’s the only way it can ever happen. Even if it could happen the other way, if you succeed without joy you’re stuck in a life you don’t want, or worse, even hate.
Why is this true? When you enjoy something, two things are happening:
- You like the action. That doesn’t mean you’re happy about it, but you at least appreciate it.
- You get a positive feedback loop from it. You put in energy, and more energy than that comes back to you in one form or another.
If, for instance, you go to pet a dog and it bites your leg, you might still love the dog, but I doubt you would enjoy the experience. Similarly, if you’re doing something you hate, I doubt you’d say you enjoy it, even if you’re very good at it.
Both things must be true, and if they are, then you can win. As Emily Sundberg says: “You can’t compete with people having more fun than you.”
Hapitalism is built around the idea that the actions you enjoy are the actions that will also make you the most money.
Not every action you love will work as a business, but there’s at least one little bit inside your heart that does.
In fact, when our business stalls, it’s almost always when we’ve turned away from those actions because we feel guilty things are so easy, and instead do the hard things our Puritan Work Ethic drilled into our head is where real work happens.
The problem is those things that feel like pushing a rock through hummus aren’t working. If they were working, then they would be working. The less something works, the more it feels like work to our messed up brains.
I have coaching calls all the time with stalled creators who don’t know why their business stops working, to which I ask two questions:
- What are the three things you know work in your business? These are almost always things that feel fun to them, and are always inside their zone of genius.
- When was the last time you did any of those? The answer is almost always a long time ago, and usually because they thought it was too easy.
The Hapitalist framework starts with joy as the most important predictor of success. It’s the thing that, when properly channeled, makes the right opportunities find you, the right actions feel natural, and the right results compound over time.
We build your whole business around an Easeful Joy Loop that multiples every time you go through it, producing more and more joy (and money) each time you spin it.
Easeful doesn’t mean effortless. It doesn’t mean you never push through something hard or uncomfortable. It means the overall current of your work is moving with you rather than against you, or even standing still.
When the loop is running correctly, things click, opportunities show up that feel almost too well-timed and he work feels exciting. You finish a project and instead of collapsing, you find yourself thinking: that was fun. How do I do that again?
When it’s not running correctly, you feel that too. The same amount of effort produces less, and opportunities feel like obligations. You’re executing the right moves on paper but something’s off underneath.
The difference in actions that work and ones that don’t is called your Return on Energy Investment (ROE). This more you spend in your highest ROE activities, the more effortless your business feels, and the faster your Easeful Joy Loop spins.
The Three Dimensions of a good life
To understand what the Easeful Joy Loop is optimizing for, you need to understand what “joy” actually means in this framework. In their book Life in Three Dimensions, researcher Shigehiro Oishi identified three distinct dimensions of a good life, and all three matter:
- Happiness is the felt quality of your life. This comes from how good it feels from the inside, moment to moment. It’s warmth, pleasure, ease, delight. It’s the stuff that makes you smile while you’re in it.
- Meaning comes from purpose, coherence, and significance. It’s the sense that what you’re doing matters, that it connects to something larger than the task in front of you, and that your life is building toward something worth building toward.
- Psychological richness is the dimension most people overlook. It’s variety, complexity, and perspective-shifting experience. It comes from a life that is interesting; not merely pleasant, not merely purposeful, but genuinely surprising and alive.
Through this, we’re producing a process to notice, identify, and capitalize on opportunities that fit at least one of those three dimensions without overindexing on any of them.
Happiness without meaning or psychological richness becomes hollow and fragile. It’s pleasant on the surface but ultimately unsatisfying, like a life lived in a comfortable bubble that never really goes anywhere or means anything.
Meaning without happiness or psychological richness becomes martyrdom. It’s a life of relentless purpose that grinds you down, where you’re so committed to the cause that you forget to actually enjoy being alive or let anything surprising in.
Psychological richness without happiness or meaning becomes novelty addiction. You end up chasing the next interesting experience, perspective shift, or rabbit hole, but never feeling good or building toward anything that matters, just a collection of moments that don’t add up to a life.
Too much of even a good thing is not good, so the quest is for balance. From this, we develop our own Easeful Joy Loop.
The stages of your Easeful Joy Loop
Admittedly, this next part is going to have a lot of Hapitalist jargon in it. I’ve tried to link out to the bits that need more explanation. If you get confused, just let it wash over you. This is more vibes than anything, and there’s a cool graphic at the bottom that explains it all.
