Genuine joy is forged in the crucible of challenge, not in the shallow waters of easy satisfaction

This story is part of The Peak Singapore’s Power List. The list is an annual recognition that celebrates and acknowledges individuals who have demonstrated exceptional leadership, influence, and impact within their respective fields and the broader community. 

Our theme for this year is Joy, honouring business leaders who have contributed to spreading happiness, enhancing well-being, and uplifting the spirits of those around them. This theme responds to recent global challenges, highlighting the need for resilience, compassion, and, most importantly, joy in our lives to navigate uncertainties with grace and efficiency.

If I were to give you an offer: You would start a company with two friends and develop a new product specialising in making games realistic. Your company would be successful, going for public listing and eventually growing 591,078 per cent from the IPO. Would you take it?

The catch is that there will be two decades of nonstop setbacks and lowlights with only rare highs. It will be filled with stress, uncertainty, loneliness, and “ample doses of pain and suffering”.

A bit like “staring into the abyss and eating glass”. There will be adoration and invitations to every conference in the world, but it will only come 20 years later. Would you still take it? How much joy are you willing to forgo to do something worthwhile?

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The secret to happiness

Society and academics have poured time and money into exploring the happiness question. The world’s oldest longitudinal study is singularly dedicated to this. Happiness labs are created in companies to make joy a consideration. Countless bestsellers on the topic have filled the bookstores. 

We know that the correlation between money and happiness stops at a threshold where even doubling or tripling doesn’t make a difference. We know that the joy we feel with badges of achievement is, at best, fleeting before we revert back to baseline and chase another on a hedonic treadmill. We know that fame is prison.

Despite these insights, the secret to happiness remains surprisingly straightforward: relationships. It’s the time you spend with the people you love, the friendships you forge, and the memories you make.

Yet, we don’t spend time on it — not for a lack of knowledge but a lack of intention. It is true that if you were to travel with your family for a few months in a year, it would make you happier, but you probably still wouldn’t halt your new biotech startup to do it.

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Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman was convinced that we don’t actually want to maximise happiness. We would rather go through some hardship to chase something less joyful and more worthwhile: satisfaction.

Students who get good grades do things that sacrifice joy to achieve it — social connection, time off, and taking breaks. Chief executives and entrepreneurs go through high levels of depression and loneliness to make their ideas come to life.

Marie Curie spent nearly 16 hours a day at the laboratory for the breakthrough discovery of polonium and radium. Warren Buffett was so engrossed in work to become the world’s best investor that he was largely a “disengaged, silent presence” at home.

When told he was described as a boss who is “demanding” and a “perfectionist”, Jensen Huang — the Taylor Swift of tech — thought they fit him “perfectly”. “If you want to do extraordinary things, it shouldn’t be easy,” Huang posits.

Now, the true test

The hard thing about hard things is that they are never enjoyable before and during the trying, even though there may be a worthwhile payoff after. We are also very bad at knowing how hard things will pay off after trying.

But, of course, the thought experiment at the beginning of this article has an obvious flaw. It assumes that success is guaranteed as part of the offer. In reality, very few succeed at what they do — even when measured against the standards they set for themselves, let alone transform the world as Jensen Huang did.

The true test of joy, then, is this: Would you sacrifice joy for most of your life to try to do something worthwhile, even if you know you will fail?

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Deathbed wish research is one way of determining what truly matters at the end of our lives. Over the years, most people about to die regretted not spending enough time with their loved ones, which corroborates the happiness research. Many use this to argue that your work time is ultimately worthless. 

But they forget that one of the most common regrets is, in fact, the path not taken. Even if taking risks was full of “pain and suffering” in the short run, the inactions in the long run filled more regrets for the living. 

That was how I felt when I first published my non-fiction book, Sang Kancil, in 2023. The high at the beginning normalised to the baseline, and I no longer remembered the sales numbers, signings, ratings, or reviews.

Writing a book was a bit like chewing glass, except it also involved staring at the wall and questioning your abilities. No one would say that the long publishing process was joyful. But it was something that I do not regret doing precisely because it was difficult to do. 

In the Disney sequel Inside Out 2, the central emotion character, Joy, was eager to protect the protagonist, Riley, from other emotions as she turned into a teenager. Upon her futile efforts, she realised that “maybe you feel less joy when you grow up”. Only in the end, when Joy surrendered to other emotions — sadness, anxiety, embarrassment, envy, and ennui — did it start to truly glow. At that moment, the story told a higher truth: Joy is not felt in the absence of other emotions; but because of them. If true, it is only with the full embrace of everything that comes that we can truly experience a deeper, more lasting sense of happiness.

For more stories on The Peak Power List, visit here.