What Work Actually Energises You?

Choosing a life you don't need to escape from, and work that feels like yours is the answer.

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You can want more and still live now.

Last week, on a walk with coffee in hand, I came across a post from a creator who was about to lock herself in a room for a year to build her dream life.

I understood the feeling completely. I’ve done my own version of the locked room. Four months of saying no to friends, doubling down on projects, treating sacrifice as the price of admission for something I wanted badly.

But standing there reading her post, the question that came up for me wasn’t whether she was working hard enough. It was a different one entirely.

What work actually energises her

Because that question, the one we so often skip straight past in the rush to build and prove and grow, turns out to be the most strategic one you can ask.

The Question We Skip

When we talk about building a business, we talk a lot about effort. About consistency. About showing up. What we talk about far less is which work actually fills you up versus which work quietly drains you.

That distinction matters more than most productivity advice will tell you. Research from organisational psychologists consistently shows that people produce their highest-quality, most creative work when they’re in a state of energised engagement, not disciplined endurance. Teresa Amabile’s decades-long research at Harvard found that inner work life, the quality of your moment-to-moment experience doing the work, is one of the strongest predictors of creative output and long-term performance.

So the question isn’t just: am I working hard enough? It’s: am I spending enough time in the work that makes me come alive?

For me, that work is writing. Creating and building in public. Connecting with people who are in the middle of a real transition. When I’m doing that, hours pass without the weight of effort. When I’m doing other things, things that look productive from the outside but feel hollow on the inside, I can feel the slow leak.

Your version will be different. But you already know what it is. You’ve felt the difference between the two.

The Creator Behind the Curtain

A few years ago, I worked closely with a creator I genuinely admired. She had a large, loyal following. She’d published books. She was on Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube; she seemed to be everywhere at once. From the outside, her life looked like the one I was trying to build: clients, time with family, a business that appeared to run beautifully on its own.

Then I started working with her and met the team.

There were twenty people behind what looked like one person’s effortless output. A content manager, a video editor, a Pinterest strategist, an assistant, and email marketer. You get the picture. The version I’d been watching, the one I’d been measuring myself against, had never been one person at all.

Here’s what struck me most, though. Even with all that support, even with a team handling the things she didn’t want to do, she still described parts of her week as exhausting. She’d built a machine that looked successful from the outside, but she’d also built herself into tasks that didn’t energise her. The team handled distribution. She still had to create content she’d stopped enjoying.

Volume without alignment is still a drain. That’s true whether you have a team of twenty or you’re building entirely on your own.

You are further along than you think. You are comparing your beginning to someone else’s infrastructure, and drawing conclusions about effort when the real variable is something else entirely.

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Lifestyle First, Revenue Second

There’s a version of success that gets sold loudly online. The biggest revenue number. The fastest growth. The most followers. And those things aren’t wrong to want. But they’re not the only metrics worth building toward.

The builders who last, the ones I watch with genuine admiration, tend to start from a different question. They’re building toward a specific life, not just a specific income. They want mornings that feel unhurried. They want to write about things that genuinely interest them. They want clients they enjoy talking to. They want to earn well, yes, but they want to do it through work that doesn’t hollow them out.

That’s a strategy. Knowing what lifestyle you’re building toward tells you which opportunities to take, which to decline, which platforms suit your temperament, and which growth tactics will wear you down in six months. It’s a filter, and filters save you enormous amounts of time and energy.

The question to ask yourself before you add anything new to your plate: does this take me toward the life I’m building, or away from it? Does this energise me, or drain me?

What the Numbers Actually Showed

Last month, I gained 500 new subscribers in a single month on Substack. I want to tell you what I was doing, because it probably doesn’t look like what you’d expect.

I was writing Substack Notes from intuition. Following what felt true that day. Sharing what was genuinely alive for me, without a content calendar, without a formula, without asking what would perform best.

Several of those Notes went viral. People found them and subscribed because something in the writing felt real to them.

That’s the link between energised work and growth. When you’re writing from a place of genuine engagement, when the work is the kind that fills you rather than depletes you, readers can feel it. It comes through in specificity, in warmth, in the quality of attention you bring to the page. You can’t manufacture that with strategy alone.

I’m not saying intuition replaces structure. I have a clear sense of what I write about, who I write for, and what I’m building toward. But within that structure, following what energises me is itself the growth strategy. The two things aren’t in competition. If you want to read more about how that month unfolded, I wrote about it in full here.

How intuition brought me 500+ subscribers in one month (without forcing it)

What This Looks Like in Practice

Doing more of the work that energises you isn’t about only doing what’s easy or comfortable. Some of your most energising work will also be the most vulnerable, the most exposed, the most uncertain. That’s fine. Energising is different from easy.

It’s about paying attention to the signal your body gives you when you sit down to work. The writing session that stretched into three hours without effort. The conversation with a client that left you thinking for days. The essay that practically wrote itself. Those are data points. They’re telling you something about where your real capacity lives.

Practically, start here. Look at your last two weeks of work. Sort every task, every piece of content, every client interaction, every admin job, into two columns: energised and drained. Then ask: how do I do more of the first column and less of the second? Even a 20% shift in that ratio changes how your business feels to run.

A slow business built around energising work is sustainable. A fast business built around draining work has a ceiling, and you’ll hit it sooner than you think.

You Can Want More and Still Live Now

Building something meaningful doesn’t require locking yourself away from your current life. Your intuition doesn’t get sharper in isolation. It gets sharper when you create enough quiet to hear it, and when you keep returning to the work that makes you feel most like yourself.

The goal isn’t the biggest number. The goal is a life that feels like yours, funded by work that you’d almost do anyway.

That’s what you’re building toward. Take your time getting there.

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