This post is part of a series exploring what it really means to love our work. Make sure to check out the table of contents for other posts in the series.

Success as excellence. Being excellent at our work won’t necessarily contribute to our happiness. The world is filled of excellent pianists, engineers, cooks, lawyers and doctors who have managed to work hard and achieve excellence despite not loving their careers at all.

To the usual conformist reasons that people use to force themselves into work they don’t love, being excellent at it can add to the social pressure contributing to choke the motivation for quitting.

As I will argue below, one of the conditions for work to contribute genuinely to happiness is that we enjoy, in a very particular way, to practice — doing the work itself. And usually people who enjoy practicing achieve high levels of excellence, because they joyously get by with the insane number of hours of practice necessary for it.

One of the reasons why people usually love practicing and become excellent at what they do is that their work is well aligned with their natural strengths and talents. But again, excellence comes about as a byproduct of them simply enjoying the work they do.

Truly excellent people usually are very humble and seem to not care much about their position of excellence. They seem to know deep down that excellence is defined by comparing their performance to others, and therefore can only deliver a similar sort of superficial satisfaction to that provided by prestige.

Wanting to become excellent in our work can be a powerful motivator, but when we focus too much on it, we can shoot ourselves in the foot. Mindfulness is a great mental state for becoming productively engaged with work. And it’s hard to be mindful at the work at hand if we’re obsessed with becoming excellent.

Becoming obsessed with excellence can lead to perfectionism and other forms of self-sabotage that can kill our joy for work and motivation altogether.

Success per se Regardless of whether we define success as high income, prestige, security or excellence, work cannot genuinely contribute to our happiness if we think of it as a means to achieve an external goal.

The euphoria of success, even during the biggest achievements, is transitory. It will last a few days at most. Most of our time at work is spent making progress towards a goal.

Not even rock stars have the privilege of enjoying constant euphoria at their work. Seriously. Look carefully at your favorite one while performing live and you’ll notice that even during the pieces that transmit incredibly electrifying emotion to the crowd, they seem to be quite cool and collected.

For work to contribute significantly to our happiness it has to provide us with a reward that is both more immediate and more continuous over time than the euphoria of success.

The feeling that we must aim for at work is what psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi calls “flow”.

Flow is the feeling of being totally immersed in an activity, being engaged to the point that it seems to be no effort involved in the activity whatsoever. Time flies by. We are “in the zone”.

Csikszentmihalyi’s seminal studies found that people achieve flow when they perform activities that are challenging, yet closely matched to their abilities.

That’s the most important reason for being clear about our strengths. Flow comes about as a result of using our natural talents and abilities, so it feels like an empowering expression of our true selves.

Also, the subtly energizing flashes of gratification (even brief moments of euphoria) that come with every step in the right direction towards reaching a goal will be much more frequent when we are working in harmony with our natural strengths.

And the cherry on top is that it will be much easier to achieve big goals and success if our work allows us to flow on a regular basis.

In my next post I’ll contrast the feeling of flow to the notion of “having fun at work.”

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