Instead, we are drawn to activities in which we find joy. We can’t always explain why, but some activities seem to contain ingredients that breathe life into us, that lift us up out of ourselves to reveal something finer, more resilient, and more creative. Each of us is different, of course, so each of us finds this joy in different activities, yet each of us knows this feeling. And when our work does indeed bring us this joyful ingredient, when we do indeed feel love, even, for what we do, then we are truly magnificent.

We’re going to take a longer look at love; not to drag you away from the hard realities of the world of work, or to dismiss the demands and discoveries of reliable data, but instead to dive deeper into both. In doing so, we’d like to share the truth that—more than striving for balance between work and life—love-in-work matters most.

Love-in-work is less of a mouthful than eudaimonia, for sure, but it might also sound soft, idealistic, and far removed from the real-world pragmatism of the freethinking leader. If it does, then bear with us. Because love—specifically, the skill of finding love in what you do, rather than simply “doing what you love”—leads us directly to a place that is the epitome of pragmatism.

The same is true for you. There’s a little bit of you that your organization can never touch, never know, never see, and certainly never feel. And yet it’s this part of you—the loving, feeling part of you—that makes you feel alive at work, able to do things that surprise and delight you, things that are ridiculously good, unexpectedly made, astonishing to your team, and that light you up from the inside.

Ballet, as you know, is an unremittingly technical and demanding craft, but if you build technical craft on a loveless foundation, you net only burnout, because technical mastery absent love always equals burnout. Burnout isn’t the absence of balance but the absence of love.

During the Search Inside Yourself two-day training program, we sometimes show a video to give participants the experience of compassion. The video features a young woman singing the “Star-Spangled Banner,” the U.S. national anthem, before an NBA basketball game. During the early part of the song, the woman forgets the words and freezes in embarrassment. One of the basketball team’s coaches, Maurice Cheeks, steps forward and joins her, so she is no longer standing there alone. He seems to barely know the words, and singing is clearly not his forte, but his support helps to jog her memory, allowing her to continue and complete the song, which ends in celebratory cheers throughout the arena. Each time I watch this video — and I’ve now seen this clip more than twenty times — I still feel the woman’s terror and embarrassment, and I also feel moved by experiencing the compassion of another person boldly stepping in to help her during her vulnerability and distress.