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.

And in case you’re wondering, the data reveals that, for most of us, the problem of loveless work lies less in the fact that our job is too constricted and more in the fact that we can’t figure out how to weave. The ADP Research Institute’s global engagement study revealed that only 16–17 percent of workers say they have a chance to play to their strengths every day, whereas their surveys of a representative sample of the US working population reveal that 72 percent of workers say, “I have the freedom to modify my role to fit my strengths better.” In psychology we refer to this as an attitude-behavior consistency problem—we know we can modify our roles to fit ourselves better, but most of us simply don’t.

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.

Think back for a moment on that someone you know who lived a full life. You get the sense, don’t you, that they were on to something. That they had somehow cut through all the noise, and tuned themselves into a signal only they could hear. And they didn’t do this in spite of their work. Rather, they seemed to be doing it through their work. Their loves and their work were inextricably linked.

In their telling, “work” does not simply mean “job.” It is not merely manual or knowledge labor. Instead, “work” is anything of value they created for someone else.

No, you won’t ever find the perfect job, a job you love 100 percent of the time. You won’t ever “do only what you love.” But you can —every single day—find some activity or situation or moment or event that you love. It might be the thinnest of red threads, but you can find it.