On the day after Valentine’s Day in 2015 he published, to very little fanfare, his version of Hozier’s “Take Me to Church.”

If you’ve never seen it, take a moment now to log onto YouTube and watch—it’s four minutes and eight seconds that you’ll never forget. Whether you’re a fan of ballet or not, you’ll recognize it not only as the work of a man at the end of his tether, but also as a pure expression of technical craft and unabashed joy. You see here a man who is taking his loves seriously, interlacing them with craft and discipline, and contributing to us something passionate, rare, and pure. You will see, from the inside out, that this is the fullest, most authentic, and richest expression of this unique person. If the people coming to work on your team could feel more like this, if you could help them take their red threads this seriously—not to make your people feel good about themselves, although that helps, but so they could share more with the world—what a beautiful and lasting contribution you and your team would make.

Not long ago I was interested to read about Marina Semyonova, a great Russian dancer and teacher, who devised a novel way of selecting her students. It was a clever test for mindset. As a former student tells it, “Her students first have to survive a trial period while she watches to see how you react to praise and to correction. Those more responsive to the correction are deemed worthy.”

In other words, she separates the ones who get their thrill from what’s easy - what they’ve already mastered - from those who get their thrill from what’s hard.

Our institutions are not doing it maliciously; schools don’t actively want their students to be alienated and stressed, just as companies don’t want their employees to be lost and inauthentic.

They do it—this building of loveless schools and workplaces—because they think they’re being pragmatic. Schools are designed to produce students who can perform well on standardized tests. Workplaces are designed to ensure that everyone in the same role performs it in the same way, so that products and service experiences are all delivered at the same level of quality.

What value does your unique pattern of loves have in a world where the project of school and work is to create uniform outcomes? To the pragmatist, it has zero value. More accurately, it has negative value. Your unique loves are seen as an obstacle to what schools and workplaces are trying to produce. Success, for them, is tightly linked to when they’ve ground your loves out of you—hence the standardized testing at school, and the prescribed goals, skills, attributes, and career paths at work.

Design a job as though there’s no love in it, and it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy—you wind up designing loveless jobs in which the best have to actually break the rules and regulations in order to find love in what they do. As far as we can, it’s up to us to try to persuade our leaders that this is wrong. That if we can define jobs through the lens of those who love them then higher performance, higher quality, and less burnout are the happy result.

A therapist might have to relax in ways that have more substance than the mindless escapes people often use. When I suggest good movies and books and the study of art history, I am putting together the pleasure of images and the weight of real study. Of course there is time for ultramindlessness, but in general a therapist who is always “on” needs pleasures that themselves are deep and character building.