Joyful Insights

The must-read analysis of the key insights from "Joyful" by Ingrid Fetell Lee — presented by Athena.

Maybe you’ve been told that you have to make your own happiness — true, to some extent — but the natural world that surrounds us is actually our most readily available and renewable source of joy.

For anyone that has found joy watching flowers bloom or a baby animal frolic, Ingrid Fetell Lee has written a book that explains why some settings make a person feel delight and others promote feelings of anxiety. In Joyful, she shares her belief that joy comes from the outside world, as well as from within, and guides readers on a journey to harness all that’s abundantly available to them to bring more joy into their lives.

As a graduate student at the Pratt Institute, where Fetell Lee was studying design after a successful career in branding, she first began investigating the nature of joy. A deeper dive into the topic led her to develop her 10 aesthetics of joy: energy, abundance, freedom, harmony, play, surprise, transcendence, magic, celebration and renewal. Fetell Lee’s research took her around the globe, meeting artists, designers and others to learn their secrets to finding and creating joy, but the core wisdom she extracts relates to discovering joy in the everyday — which is easily accessible to us all if we open ourselves to it.