Ingrid Fetell Lee on the 6 Ways to Make Your Company More Joyful

Female Founders Fund
Female Founders Fund
5 min readDec 11, 2018
Ingrid Fetell Lee, Founder of The Aesthetics of Joy and Author of “Joyful”

Ingrid Fetell Lee studies joy for a living. During the final review on her graduate design portfolio at Pratt, one of her professors told her, “your work gives me a feeling of joy,” which she wasn’t quite sure how to process, because it seemed impossible for joyful work to also be serious. Still, she was intrigued because joy was so intangible, and yet she’d somehow captured it without realizing.

While our culture is obsessed with the concept of happiness, joy is defined as “an intense momentary experience of positive emotion, one that makes us smile and laugh and feel like we want to jump up and down.” At our CEO Summit, Fetell Lee explained that joy is different from happiness, which relates to how we feel over time. Instead, joy is how we feel in the moment.

Following her professor’s comment, Fetell Lee asked herself how tangible things were able to create joy, a question that would take her ten years to answer. To dive deeper into this connection between tangible objects and this fleeting feeling of joy, she asked people what made them feel joyful. She discovered that things like cherry blossoms, bubbles, and swimming pools, treehouses, hot air balloons, googly eyes, rainbows, rainbow sprinkles all translated to joy. Later, she found patterns in these things — rounded edges, pops of bright color, symmetry, a sense of abundance and multiplicity, and a feeling of lightness or elevation.

“When I looked at it a certain way, I realized that though the feeling of joy is mysterious and elusive, we can access it through tangible, physical attributes, or what designers call aesthetics,” she said at the summit. “These patterns were telling me that joy begins with the senses.” Once she identified ten of these patterns, she started seeing joy everywhere she went, because for the first time, she knew what she was looking for.

Here are some of Fetell Lee’s tips for infusing your company (or your company’s product) with more joy:

Find your own joy

Though it can sometimes be challenging to find space for joy with the stress of running a business, it’s important to carve out these small, joyful moments for yourself. Fetell Lee suggests keeping a joy journal of all the moments when you laugh, smile and take stock of your surroundings. Physically seeking out joy is also key. “Go to a place you know brings you joy and immerse yourself in it.”

At the office, she suggests asking your team what brings them joy and starting a team dialogue about it.

Decide how you want people to feel

“People rarely remember what you said or did, but they remember how you made them feel,” Fetell Lee said, citing the oft-quoted truism. “Think about when you’re starting a project how you want people to feel.” In other words, find a way to work joy into your product or service. Once you define how you want people to feel, think about what makes you feel that way. If you want people to feel light, think about what makes you feel light — is it flying kites, is it cotton candy? Then, consider how to translate that feeling into your own business through design.

Work joy into your habits

“Exactly the feature that makes habits so sticky is the feature that makes them fall off over a period of time,” she said. In other words, the rote repetition of habits makes them inherently less exciting, so the more times you perform them, the less likely they are to stick. “We start losing our feelings towards them. That’s exactly what makes us feel itchy after a while and want to try something new.” However, scientists have discovered that “when you build joy into a habit from the beginning, people are more likely to keep up with the behavior and meet their goals.” So, if you’re looking to work your product into users’ habits, how can you add an element of joy that makes every single use joyful?

Spread joy on social media

“When people share a moment of joy with each other, it actually makes the person receiving that believe that this person is going to be there for them when times get tough,” Fetell Lee said, “So sharing the little moments of joy can be a conduit to building strong relationships.” Those relationships don’t necessarily need to be with a human. They can also be with a brand, perhaps via social media. “When you’re putting these lighthearted things out, they can seem really small in the moment, but they’re cementing the relationships and communities of people you’re reaching.”

Give yourself and others permission to be joyful

In the wake of Fetell Lee’s viral TED talk earlier this year, women have reached out to her and told her they have felt judged by their aesthetic choices, like wearing bright colors. “One woman said when she goes shopping, people ask her if it’s for her child,” Fetell Lee said. “One woman was told she would sell more of her art if she reined in the aesthetic decisions in her own life.” However, it’s proven that people working in colorful environments are more productive and alert. So if experiencing joy isn’t reason enough to introduce the aesthetics of joy into the workplace, productivity certainly is.

Celebrate the little victories

When one of our F3 CEOs asked how to incorporate joy into the office without a large budget, Fetell Lee suggested celebrating the everyday victories. “Celebration doesn’t need to be lavish,” she said. “It can be a confetti toss.”

These tips are only the beginning. There are so many other ways to introduce joy into your startup. If Fetell Lee’s “aesthetics of joy” project were to have a takeaway, it would be that by infusing our lives with more joy one moment at a time, we can work towards being happier overall. “What I learned is that even though we’re often told the physical world and the emotional world are worlds apart, the physical world can be a powerful resource to us in creating happier, healthier lives.”

Read more insights on joy from Ingrid Fetell Lee’s recently published book “Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness.”

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Published in Female Founders Fund

News about female founders and women in VC from a seed-stage fund that invests in the exponential power of exceptional female talent.

Written by Female Founders Fund

An early-stage fund investing in the exponential power of exceptional female talent.

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