â Daniel posted a Note a few weeks ago saying:
âThe worst person to compete with is someone having a brilliant time.
That kind of energy is annoying because it doesnât need permission.â
It appeared in my feed on the same day â Rebecca Spilter published a post about building income from her fractional work, including the jobs that simply need doing even when theyâre no fun.
That got me wondering whether fun really is a competitive advantage, or just something we like saying before turning it into an inspirational LinkedIn post.
I should admit where I started: I desperately wanted âyou cannot compete with someone whoâs having funâ to be true. Who wouldnât want enjoying yourself to put you ahead?
Thereâs privilege baked into the question too. For plenty of people, work is about survival. Enjoyment barely enters the calculation. So I went looking at the research. đđ»
New here? Millennial Masters shares lessons from founders whoâve built and grown companies. Subscribe for ideas on AI, leadership and the decisions that rarely come with a playbook.
Fun at work isnât one thing
Research into fun at work is surprisingly new. Karl and Peluchetteâs 2006 study was an early attempt to define workplace fun. They found that employees who experienced more fun reported greater job satisfaction, and that satisfied employees rated their organisationâs customer service more positively.
â Tews, Michel and Stafford found a messier picture. In a study of 195 restaurant servers, organised fun was linked with stronger sales performance, particularly among older employees. Manager support for fun was linked with lower turnover among younger employees, but also with poorer sales performance regardless of age.
So fun doesnât simply equal better performance.
The results also depend heavily on where the research takes place. Studies tend to examine particular workplaces such as restaurants, hospitality businesses or call centres. We donât have decades of evidence across every kind of work showing that making work more fun automatically improves performance.
What matters more is where the enjoyment comes from.
The work itself matters more
In 2008, â Adam Grant studied what happens when people enjoy their work and care about who benefits from it. Across two field studies, people who experienced both showed greater persistence, performance and productivity.
Grant has since talked about âshallow funâ and âdeep funâ. Shallow fun is the foosball table or office party. Deep fun comes from getting absorbed in difficult work that matters to you. Itâs the kind of work where you can lose track of time because the problem itself has your attention.
That gets much closer to what interested me about Danielâs original line. Having fun doesnât mean making the work easier. Sometimes the difficulty is part of why you enjoy it.
When enjoyment becomes an advantage
Enjoyment can become an advantage, especially in work where judgement matters. Think about the work where there isnât an obvious answer. You have to make decisions, solve unfamiliar problems and keep going when your first attempt fails.
Alysa Liu retired from competitive figure skating at 16, returned in 2024 on her own terms, won the 2025 World Championship and then Olympic gold in 2026. Liu has spoken openly about rediscovering how much she enjoyed skating once the pressure around it changed.
That doesnât mean every training session suddenly became enjoyable. Elite sport still involves repetitive practice and days when nothing works. She came back wanting to skate again.
Fun canât replace skill, effort, fair treatment or well-designed work. Enjoyment can help people persist and learn. If you enjoy difficult work, youâre more likely to stay with it long enough to get better at it.
You donât need another games cupboard
Trying to manufacture fun for other people only gets you so far. A drink after an all-hands or a Eurovision sweepstake might help people connect. It canât compensate for badly designed work. People need room to develop their own humour and rituals without a manager engineering every moment of enjoyment.
What matters more is the work people actually get to do. Look at who gets difficult problems they can genuinely own. If your most capable people spend most of the week doing predictable work, another social wonât change much. The same applies to you.
Instead of asking how to make your week more fun, look at the problems you genuinely enjoy getting stuck into. Which ones hold your attention? Where does your judgement actually matter? Then check whether youâre protecting enough time for that work or letting admin swallow it.
Keep some work worth enjoying
Most jobs will always contain work youâd happily avoid. Rebecca was right about that. Sometimes the invoice needs sending or the awkward email needs writing. No amount of research into motivation changes it.
The question is what sits alongside those jobs. The research gives us a reason to notice the difficult work we genuinely enjoy and protect some room for it.
Enjoyment can keep you interested long enough to get better. Over time, that becomes hard to compete with.
This week â Look at your calendar and find one piece of work where thereâs no obvious right answer and your judgement matters. If youâve started treating it like another chore, give yourself enough time to get properly into it again.
đ€ Daphne Mavroudi-Chocholi writes â All the Margins, for people who are accomplished, stretched, and quietly asking themselves whether this is really as good as it gets. She has built and turned around businesses across neuroscience, AI, accessibility, and pet care, led teams, managed boards, and made difficult decisions without a manual. â Connect with Daphne on LinkedIn.
Yes. Thereâs an âenduranceâ aspect to this - which I believe is what Adam Grant is also alluding to as a consequence of deep flow work
Really enjoyed working on this one and satisfying my own curiosity as to whether âyou canât compete with someone who is having funâ is really the hill we all seem to want to die on :)