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When I started my first in-house job as legal counsel at the Boston Globe, I was running on interrupted sleep and more coffee than I care to admit. My son was four months old, and I was still running Thirst in the background. And I was coming back to full-time legal work, learning media law, contract law, and everything else in-house practice entails, after a multi-year pause in my legal career to build my own company. None of it was anything like anything I'd done before.

And yet, from the start, I had a great time.

Coming back to lawyering after time away meant I'd had the opportunity to miss it and then rediscover it. The intellectual pleasure of thinking like a lawyer again and of wading into a problem and actually figuring it out, was exciting in a way that's easy to take for granted when you never leave. Every contract I reviewed, every novel issue I got to wrestle with, felt like a valuable opportunity.

Outside of work, life was equally alive. I was running again. Heading out in the afternoons for a run along the Charles River, I felt my body remember something it had been missing for months. And tired as I was, we were loving being a family of three. Coming home to baby snuggles each evening was everything.

What surprised me is that all of that joy made me sharper.

Even when I was tired, I didn’t feel like I was grinding on fumes the way so many lawyers I know describe their experience. I was emotionally energized, at work and at home, and that energy showed up in everything. I was quicker on my feet. More creative in how I approached problems. Better at reading the room, building relationships, and earning trust quickly in an unfamiliar organization. Joy was making me better.

I didn't have a name for what was happening then. Now I think of it as the Joy Dividend.

Most lawyers I know carry around a version of the same mental model, often without realizing it. They assume that joy is a reward. They think that you work hard, succeed, get the title, land the role, earn the seat at the table . . . and then you get to be happy.

It makes sense that we believe this. Law school selected for people willing to defer gratification for years at a time. Law firms reinforced it with the idea of suffering through years of grunt work as an associate in order to earn the golden ring of partnership. You grind now; you enjoy yourself later.

But that model has the causality exactly wrong.

Joy isn't a passive experience waiting for you at the finish line. (And if you think it is, ask yourself what the “finish line” actually is. My guess is that it’s been moving around for years). Instead, joy is an active contributor to how well you perform. When you're energized, you think more clearly. When you feel fulfilled, you make better decisions under pressure. When your life outside work is rich, you're more creative inside it. When you're not running on empty, you show up better in everything you do from negotiations, to your relationships with colleagues, and even a simple redline.

Rather than following success, joy creates it.

And it makes the success even more fun.

A dividend is a monetary return on an investment. The Joy Dividend works the same way.

When you invest time and intention in building a joyful life, whatever that looks like for you, it pays you back professionally and personally in ways that may be hard to quantify, but that are obviously there.

When you invest in joy, you think more clearly. The best legal thinking requires sustained attention, pattern recognition, and the willingness to sit with ambiguity long enough to find the right answer. All of that gets harder when you're depleted and easier when you're not.

When you're happy, you lead better. The lawyers who have the most influence are almost never the most exhausted ones, at least over sustained periods of time. They're the ones who walk into the room with energy — who can listen, engage, inspire confidence, and read what's happening beneath the surface. That energy is a renewable resource— but only if you invest in it.

With joy, you make better judgment calls. Judgment distinguishes the highest-impact senior lawyers from everyone else — that hard-won instinct for when to push and when to hold, when the risk is real and when it's theoretical. But judgment degrades under sustained depletion. You get risk-averse in the wrong ways, or risk-tolerant in the wrong ways, when you've been running too low for too long.

With joy, you see around corners better. Some of my best legal instincts have come when I was most alive — not most caffeinated, not most stressed, but most engaged. When you're full, you notice things.

There's also a compounding effect to acknowledge that will change how you think about this.

When you invest in joy and show up better as a result, you do better work. When you do better work, you earn more agency. You get more leverage to shape your role, choose your projects, shed the work that drains you and pursue what actually energizes you. More agency creates more room for joy.

Which makes you better at your job. Which creates more agency. And so it goes.

The lawyers I've watched build truly excellent long careers, and who keep getting better well into their sixties and beyond, who stayed curious and influential, almost all had this running in their favor. They weren't sacrificing joy to sustain high performance. They were using joy as a performance input. The flywheel was turning, and compounding, and they were getting the return.

You may reasonably be thinking, “Heather, that all sounds great. But I am not the same naturally joyful person you are. So how does this help me?”

Great question!

The answer is that you intentionally and strategically build more joy into your life at home and at work. I have been doing it myself for years.

Here’s how.

The tactics below are organized by what tends to work for different kinds of people. Find the one that fits and start there.