Love Joy First. Lead With It. Everything Else Will Follow.

I've had Alysa Liu's gold medal performance on repeat in my house since last week.

I don't usually watch figure skating. But her performance is the most perfect embodiment of leading art with joy that I've ever seen.

She glided onto the ice in a golden dress, ponytail flying, and proceeded to skate the performance of her life. No visible nerves, no tension, no weight of the moment on her shoulders. Just a girl who showed up to a party she threw for herself. And beamed the entire time.

From artist to artist, it was deeply captivating. I couldn't look away.

She described her feelings on the ice as "calm, happy, and confident." She won Olympic gold, the first American woman to do so in 24 years, but reflected: "I don't need this. But what I needed was the stage, and I got that."

I've been thinking about that sentence ever since. Because most of us spend our whole lives conditioned to chase the medal. She was there for a feeling no medal can replicate: the aliveness of doing what you were made to do.

—

For as long as I've been studying music and voice, my teachers have been trying to tell me something I couldn't quite receive. They'd say it in different ways, at different moments, with varying degrees of exasperation: you need to relax- you're too focused on the mechanics. You've already worked hard on the technique. Now let it go. Lead with emotion. Lead with joy. The technique will come naturally.

I'd nod along, understanding the words without understanding the thing itself. Because how do you not think about technique when you're in the middle of executing it? When you're trying to hold a note, manage your breath, open your resonance; how do you simultaneously forget all of that and just feel?

When I watch Alysa Liu embody this feedback, I think I get it.

She didn't become a gold medalist by showing up in Milan and hoping joy would carry her through. The technique is there-drilled into her body at a cellular level, across thousands of hours of practice.

But when she stepped onto that ice, she wasn't thinking about any of it.

She was thinking about Donna Summer. She was thinking about the stage. She was thinking about how much she loves to be there.

And because her technique was so deeply trained, it showed up for her anyway. It had no choice.

When you've done the work, the work takes care of itself. Your only job in the moment is to show up with joy.

That's the paradox my teachers were pointing at. You work your hardest in practice so that in performance, you can forget the work entirely. At some point, effort stops helping. And the only thing left is trust. Trust that the work you've already done will carry you.

The technique becomes the container. Joy becomes the thing you pour into it.

Because every artist and athlete knows, the truth is if she led with pressure instead of joy, her performance would be a lot more tense and a lot less freeing. Mistakes would have been more likely to happen. Your mind and body are different when you're nervous- and it's never in your favor.

—

Watching Alysa made me reflect on my own journey with joy, and why I do the things I do in my free time: Opera. Musical theater. Language learning. Travel. Art. Cooking. Photography. And more, always more.

None of these are career moves. I'm not training to become a professional performer, a chef, a linguist, or an influencer. There's no end goal, no monetization strategy. I do them because they spark joy. Because this is my version of play.

I've never said that out loud before… describing my hobbies as "play." We live in a culture that worships productivity and quietly punishes rest. Participating in real, purposeless, joyful play can be met with judgment and shame, as if joy needs to justify itself with a credential or a career to be worth your time.

In some of my younger years, I followed this ridiculous belief. I got so good at optimizing my life that I accidentally optimized the joy out of it. I monetized my interests or dropped them entirely. I forgot what it felt like to do something just because it made me happy.

Coming back to play changed that. It brought me brighter days, a healthier mind and body, a version of myself that felt more present, more grounded, more alive. Ironically, the things I do for no productive reason at all have made everything else more productive.

You don't need a reason to pursue joy. Joy is the reason.

—

And joy is much more powerful than people realize. Because it isn't just an artistic truth. It's a physiological one.

In singing, tension is the enemy of the voice; the more relaxed you are, the higher and cleaner those notes become.

In sports, tension is the thing that slows you down. The athletes who look the most effortless aren't coasting — they're just not carrying unnecessary weight.

In public speaking, tension stiffens you. Ease is what makes you magnetic.

In connection, tension creates distance even in the same room. Joy makes strangers feel like they've known you for years.

Joy isn't what happens after you do great work. It's what makes great work possible.

—

So here's what I'm taking into the rest of 2026, crystallized by one golden dress on an Italian ice rink.

Do the work. Put in the hours. Learn the technique with patience and rigor and humility. And then, when it's time, put all of that down. Step into the light. Remember why you started. Lead with love. Lead with joy.

Because I don't want to be someone who's technically proficient and privately miserable.

I want everything I touch to carry my fingerprints and my joy in equal measure.

Someone whose joy is the first thing people feel when they walk into a room she's in.

Someone who makes you want to go home and pick up the thing you abandoned- the instrument gathering dust, the language app you deleted, the dream you quietly talked yourself out of.

Watching Alysa reminded me that seeing someone who genuinely loves what they do is one of the most quietly contagious things in the world.

Joy, offered freely and without apology, is its own kind of revolution. It changes what other people feel when they're around you.

And this isn't just for artists. It's not just for singers or skaters or anyone with a stage. It applies to work, to every connection, to every corner of life where you're trying to build something or become someone.

Grow, get better, take your craft seriously, but never let the grinding crowd out the joy that made you want to do it in the first place. That's my commitment to myself.

I'm choosing to love joy first.

Leading with it.

And I trust the rest will follow.