Find the Joy, Find the Fulfillment

Why Your Life Won’t Change Until You Learn to Love What You’re Doing Right Now

The Café Philosopher and the Electrician’s Revelation

It was the early-1990s, and I was an apprentice electrician working on a high-rise courthouse in downtown L.A. Every evening, after the noise of jackhammers and the smell of burnt wire insulation took over my day, I’d sit at the Elysee Café in Westwood, sipping bad coffee and writing in a cheap spiral notebook.

At a corner table, almost every day, sat a sharply dressed man with slicked-back hair and fancy cufflinks. He always looked busy — writing out invoices, checking printouts, and talking intensely on his phone.

One night, I asked him what he did. “I own this place,” he said. “But this isn’t my dream. My dream is to sell this café for a couple million and retire.”

Then he looked at me and said something that’s stuck with me for over 30 years:

I nodded, pretending I understood. But something about that didn’t sit right.

Even back then, elbow-deep in electrical panels, I was starting to realize something different: I was already in the good part.

I loved learning how circuits worked. I enjoyed the puzzle of running pipe around steel beams and figuring out how to solve problems no one else saw.

This guy wanted joy later.

I had it now — even though I was getting paid less, even though no one cared, even though it wasn’t “cool.”

That was the day I realized something:

Most people waste their lives waiting to be happy. But the real power move? Learning how to find joy in what you’re doing right now.

The Warrior’s Guide to Winning While Doing

1. Joy Is Not a Feeling. It’s a Skill.

Let’s get this straight:

Joy isn’t something that happens to you.​
It’s something you build.​
It’s a choice. A habit. A practice.

And like any skill, it gets sharper the more you use it.

The problem is, most people are stuck waiting for something external to change before they let themselves feel joy:

• “Once I get that raise…”
• “Once I find the right job…”
• “Once I meet the right person…”

That’s not how warriors live. That’s how lemmings live.
​The warrior finds joy in the training, not just the trophy.

You don’t wait to feel joy — you create it.

How? You change how you look at what you're doing.​
Not what you're doing.

2. Joy Comes from Engagement, Not Escape

We live in a culture that’s obsessed with escape.

People scroll Instagram to “relax.”
They drink to “unwind.”
They dream of vacations, retirements, and weekends as their only chances to feel alive.

But that’s fake joy.

Real joy — deep, sustaining, unshakable joy — doesn’t come from running away from the moment.

It comes from diving into it.

I’ve made breaking concrete a Zen meditative practice.
I’ve turned pulling wire into a game of flow and resistance.
I’ve treated running job sites like live experiments in psychology and leadership.

It doesn’t matter how glamorous the task is. What matters is your presence inside it.

When you show up fully — not distracted, not wishing you were somewhere else — even the most mundane task can feel joyful.

That’s the secret: Joy follows attention.

3. Mindfulness Is Masculine

You might think all this sounds soft. Like I’m telling you to skip around in a flower field and hum mantras.

Nope.

This is the kind of joy that forged blacksmiths, warriors, and stoics.

Mindfulness — real mindfulness — is power.

It’s the ability to stay locked into the present moment, even when it’s hard, uncomfortable, or boring.

It’s being able to look at something you’d rather avoid and say, “Let’s go.”

When I was on a job site, freezing my ass off before the sun came up, I didn’t wait for joy to show up.

I brought it.

That’s what men do.

They lead the energy.

4. You Can Turn Any Task Into a Dojo

The mat doesn’t care what your job title is.
The mat just shows you who you are — how present, how focused, how willing.

But guess what?

Every moment in your life is a mat.

You can treat your boring spreadsheet like a kata.
You can treat your dirty dishes like a mindfulness drill.
You can treat your daily commute like a breathing exercise.

This doesn’t mean pretending everything is fun.
It means treating everything like it matters.

Joy doesn’t always feel like laughing.
Sometimes joy feels like grit, commitment, and giving your best.

5. People Will Pay You for the Energy You Bring

Here’s the final truth: joy is magnetic.

People can tell when you love what you do.
They can feel it — in your voice, in your energy, in your results.

You want to get rich?
You want to build something that lasts?
You want to live a life of purpose?

Then start now — by bringing that joyful energy to what you’re already doing.

Don’t wait until you get “there.”
There is no “there.”

There is only now — and how you show up inside it.

Bring joy to the job — and people will throw money at you to help them feel the same.

Putting It On the Mat: The Man in the Mirror

A few years ago, I was coaching a young guy in his late 20s. He was smart, strong, and ambitious — but burned out.

He hated his job.
He hated waking up in the morning.
He thought he needed to quit, start over, or move to Thailand.

I asked him to do one thing first.
Just one.

I told him:

He thought I was full of it.
But he trusted me enough to try.

A week later, he came back with tears in his eyes.

He said:

He wasn’t waiting for joy anymore. He was bringing it.

He said he started noticing the patterns in how his coworkers responded to pressure.

He got curious about how systems broke down and how to fix them.

He started playing little games with himself — how fast he could complete tasks with total focus, how little drama he could cause, how calm he could stay.

It wasn’t his dream job.
But he was becoming his dream self.

That’s what this is all about.

Not escaping.
Not resenting.
But choosing to see the magic inside the mundane.

That’s what makes you powerful.

When you can find the joy in what others avoid, when you can stay grounded while others escape — you become rare.
And rare is valuable.

Challenge for You:

This week, don’t chase joy. Bring it.

Pick the thing you hate most — dishes, spreadsheets, cold calls, traffic — and treat it like a mat.

Breathe.
Engage.
Train.

Because here’s the truth:

Joy is not a destination.
It’s a discipline.

And once you own it, nobody can take it from you.

So ask yourself:

Where in your life are you waiting for joy?​
​What if you stopped waiting… and started training?