A few weeks ago, a message landed in my inbox that made me do a small, embarrassingly enthusiastic happy dance in my kitchen. Nell Derick Debevoise Dewey was writing a Forbes feature based on a Substack live we did together.
My career has thus-far spanned 20+ years, and I’ve been working with entrepreneurs, delivering rebrands, creative direction, art direction and thought leadership at a pretty high level for well over a decade of that time.. I’ve helped founders rebuild brands from the ground up, consulted on colour for companies and founders whose names you know, and spent the last several years building a platform around the idea that joy isn’t a reward for after the work is done (and it’s fuel for success, not a conflicting priority).
But seeing your name in Forbes for the first time is a sweet flavour of joy I wasn’t entirely prepared for.
Beyond the giddiness of ticking this ‘featured in milestone’ off my wish list, it also feels like some sort of vindication for every pitch I’ve sent out that got lost in the ether.
Nell, who is one of the most genuinely curious (and brilliant) people I’ve encountered, reached out to talk about joy, and along the way our conversation centred on the difference between comfort and joy, and why they can often be opposites.
Comfort vs. Joy: why they’re not the same thing
The article’s central premise is one I find myself returning to constantly in my work: that happiness and joy are not synonyms, and that our cultural obsession with comfort (which we conflate with happiness) is one of the main reasons so many people find themselves feeling joyless despite having, by most measures, perfectly comfortable lives.
Comfort is typically the absence of friction…. but for true joy, friction is often a pre-requisite.
This uncomfortable (appropriately enough) truth that I’ve been circling as I’ve been working on the Joy First book sits at a particular ‘battleground’ I call Comfort vs Challenge. Battlegrounds are the key areas where our access to genuine joy usually gets blocked in our daily lives. In this case, we opt for the known, the safe, the frictionless, and then wonder why life feels like it’s happening to us. It’s hard to ever feel truly alive, when you keep yourself comfortable all the time.
Nell’s article explores this tension from a leadership angle, the way high-achieving people in particular can mistake the optimisation of comfort for the pursuit of a good life. And what I was able to bring to that conversation was the colour psychology lens, which is perhaps an unexpected angle on a leadership question, but one that I think landed pretty well.
What colour has to do with comfort
One thing that I think is important to mention about colour in relation to this conversation, is that our colour choices (in our homes, our brands, our wardrobes) can be some of the most honest reflections of whether we’re choosing comfort or choosing joy.
The dominance of grey, white and neutrals in our interiors isn’t neutral at all. This is almost always a comfort choice: Neutral reads as safe. It won’t clash with anything, won’t demand anything, won’t require you to commit to anything. The problem is that it also doesn’t do much for us. Environmental psychology research is fairly consistent on this: spaces stripped of colour and warmth don’t soothe the nervous system the way we thing they do. They don’t add, they numb… creating (at best) a kind of low-level blankness… at worst a clinical sterility that can actively mess with our nervous system and harm our sense of peace and ease.
Compare that with a space that has warmth and texture and colour, a Fireside room (to use the personality type language I use in the Colour Brand® method), where the walls have been painted something that required courage, where there are objects that carry meaning, and in the soft furnishings there are some layers of texture and pattern. Those rooms don’t feel numb, and they aren’t frictionless… They feel inhabited. Alive. And for most of us, that’s actually what we’re reaching for when we say we want to feel good at home (even if we don’t know how to explain it or create it).
This is what I mean when I talk about colour as a gateway to joy. Not just ‘colour as decoration’, and not even just ‘colour as self-expression’ for its own sake, but colour as the daily, cumulative choice to intentionally pursue more aliveness (even when it’s not the ‘safest’ choice).
Why this Forbes article is so exciting now
This Forbes feature matters to me because it’s a milestone, and a joy to throw that forbes logo in my ‘as seen in’ – but the timing is important, because the Joy First book is coming. I’ve been building an argument about joy as strategy, about the Joyconomy as we navigate real cultural and economic shift, about colour as a serious psychological tool rather than just an aesthetic nicety, and these arguments needs to be heard in rooms I haven’t been in yet. Nell’s piece puts this conversation in one of those rooms.
It also matters because Nell (who is also a Citrus grad) is doing really important work on the intersection of leadership and joy (through what she calls ‘subtraction activism – which I adore), and being in conversation with her in this way, is such a joy and an honour.
But mostly this conversation matters because the question the article was asking, whether comfort and joy are actually the same thing, is SUCH an important one for us to be asking loudly and more often. We have built entire industries around selling people comfort in the name of joy. Wellness, productivity optimisation, lifestyle minimalism. All of it promising that if you just get the friction out, you’ll feel good. And what I see, in the founders I work with and in the research behind the book, is that the opposite is often closer to the truth.
Joy often lives on the other side of discomfort. And getting good and getting more uncomfortable more often, is a great practice for creating space for more spontaneous, deep and meaningful joy in our lives.
Read Nell Derick Debevoise Dewey’s Forbes article: Comfort and Joy Are Not What You Think
If you’d like to explore your own relationship with colour (and what it might be telling you about your comfort vs joy dial), the Brand and Colour Personality Quiz is a good place to start. And if you want to go deeper on the Joy First framework, including the six Battlegrounds where joy tends to get blocked, the Joy First Podcast is where that conversation lives.
with love, xx Nic
