Choose the Glow: The Leadership Discipline of Enjoyment

“Oh oh oh oh, oh my Lord, Never made no one like you before… You had to make your own sunshine. But now the sky is opalite, Oh oh oh oh oh…”  

There’s a seductive phrase that does the rounds in entrepreneurial circles: do what you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life. It sounds wonderful on a coffee mug, but I don’t really buy it. Of course, you’ll work. You’ll wrestle with strategy. You’ll second-guess pricing. You’ll wake up at odd hours replaying a conversation that didn’t land. Loving what you do doesn’t remove effort or boredom when traction happens. It does change the texture of the effort, though, and the longevity.

Years ago, my speaking coach, Rich Mulholland, drilled something into me that has never left. The audience in front of you can only have as much fun as you’re having. If you don’t want to be there, they don’t want to be there. So own it, and be like a sitcom actor, and amplify. Energy is not neutral. It transmits. If you are tight, guarded, and going through the motions, they feel it in seconds. If you are genuinely enjoying yourself - curious, playful, alive - they relax into it. The room expands or contracts to match you.

That lesson came roaring back this week in a completely unexpected way. Embarrassingly late to the party… given that I am neither a fourteen-year-old girl nor especially qualified for the core demographic, I discovered “Opalite” by Taylor Swift. The clip that caught my eye was from The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, the day after the song was released. 

The entire audience already knew the song. They were singing it back to her, word for word, less than twenty-four hours after it dropped. That alone is impressive. But what struck me wasn’t the scale of fandom. It was her face. She wasn’t performing joyfully. She was in it, hardly noticing the audience until Fallon told her to look, and then delighted to see that they were there too. Dancing like someone who couldn’t quite believe she’d managed to bottle that feeling into three and a half minutes of music. It looked like someone who loved what she had made.

That’s different from being good at something. That’s alignment.

Opalite itself is a curious metaphor. Unlike a natural opal formed over geological time, opalite is man-made. Crafted. Engineered to glow. It looks luminous, not because it happened by accident, but because someone designed it that way. There’s something deeply philosophical in that. We often speak as though happiness is a weather pattern that either visits us or doesn’t. But much of what lights up our lives is constructed. Designed. Chosen.

That thread runs through The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Stephen Covey’s first habit, to be proactive, rests on the idea that between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is choice. It echoes Viktor Frankl, who observed that even in the harshest imaginable conditions, the ultimate human freedom is the freedom to choose one’s attitude. The Stoics said the same thing in plainer language: events are neutral; our judgments make them heavy or light. Or maybe Marcus Aurelius just didn’t know how to say “sleepless in the onyx night.”

What I saw in that late-night clip wasn’t just a pop performance. It was a modern illustration of that ancient idea. She created something. She chose to enjoy it. And the audience reflected it back to her at scale. Doesn’t hurt that the song is a total earworm.

On Sunday, I was at AJ’s cricket match in the coastal oasis of Melkbosstrand (our boy is undefeated in 7 straight games, I’ll have you know. I know he’s only six, but I see a future). Afterwards, we drove down the coast with Table Mountain ahead of us, the boys in the car, windows cracked open, that song playing again. Somewhere between beach sand and mountain air, it hit me that music can collapse distance. It can lift an ordinary drive into something cinematic. Not because the circumstances are extraordinary, but because the posture is.

As leaders and founders, that posture matters more than we admit. You can run an EOS Level 10 meeting as a chore, ticking boxes because the system says you should. Or you can run it as a living conversation about progress, tension, and momentum. You can build your strategy through Scaling Up as a compliance exercise or as a creative act. Even Atomic Habits reminds us that identity shapes behaviour. When you see yourself as someone who loves the craft, the micro-behaviours change. The tone shifts. The room feels different.

None of this denies difficulty. There are hard quarters. There are brutal market conditions. There are days when nothing seems to move. Loving what you do doesn’t anaesthetise you against that. What it does is alter your relationship to it. It transforms grind into growth. It reframes tension as tuition.

Fun, in this context, isn’t childish. It’s diagnostic. It’s feedback. When you are deeply engaged, when you are curious, slightly stretched, energised… you are usually well aligned between who you are and what you are building. When the fun disappears entirely, that’s information too. Not necessarily a sign to burn everything down, but an invitation to examine the frame.

PG’s Pro Tip:

This week, instead of obsessing over output, ask yourself a more unsettling question: how much fun am I actually having in the core parts of my work? Not the Instagram answer. The honest one.

If the answer is lower than you’d like, experiment rather than escape. Shift the framing of one recurring task. Turn one initiative into a measurable game. Change the environment in which you do a piece of deep work. Gamify the hell out of it. Add music to the commute. Inject curiosity into a conversation you would normally endure.  

You can even use this prompt:

“I feel disengaged in this area of my work: [describe it]. Help me reframe it as a challenge, a game, or an experiment. Give me three mindset shifts and three small behavioural tweaks I can test this week to increase energy and enjoyment.”  

Leadership is energy transfer. Your team will rarely out-enjoy you. Your audience will rarely out-engage you. Your children will rarely out-delight you.

We don’t always get to choose the circumstances. We almost always get to choose the glow.

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