Watched any elite sports recently? Top athletes seem to be visibly, deliberately having fun.
Take Alysa Liu. After burning out and retiring, the child prodigy made a comeback at the 2026 Winter Olympics. Her carefree attitude and joyful grin won her a legion of new fans – and the top spot in figure skating. Eileen Gu also found herself on a podium after hitting pause on modelling and Stanford to deliver three medal-winning performances – and even more quick-witted clapbacks.
At the recent Men’s Football World Cup, we saw the same phenomenon. Erling Haaland spent his spare time shopping for cowboy boots, making memes and acquiring a taxidermied Raccoon. Lamine Yamal’s talent was only outshone by his on-field antics with the cutest little brother of all time. And, after bagging a win, Jude Bellingham stood motionless in a stadium full of people singing his name, absolutely savouring the moment.
Why do they stand out? Because elite athletes have traditionally followed the same strict formula: sacrifice everything in the pursuit of greatness. Many even hate their sport.
And they’re not alone. A lot of us have adopted the exact same playbook in our careers, accepting burnout as a reasonable (necessary?!?) consequence of high performance. Fun, joy, meaning? The first things to go when the going gets tough.
That’s a problem.
Burnout isn’t a badge
Burnout is the label applied to the physical and emotional exhaustion that comes from prolonged, unmanaged stress.
It’s not just working hard. Burnout is the consequence of pushing through without ever stopping to recover – or to remember why you’re pushing in the first place. It’s about relying on sheer willpower to keep going until you drop.
That attitude is based on an underlying belief that we really need to reexamine: success and suffering go hand in hand. We treat joy as a privilege, something we need to earn. We believe it makes us soft, unserious, unambitious.
Less than 0.003% of us make it to the Olympics. It’s brutally hard – yes, even harder than your job. Elite athletes are some of the highest performers, and we learn so much from their approach to feedback, development and failure.
So when they start deliberately choosing joy, it’s worth paying attention.
No version of exceptional skips hard work; you gotta put in the hours. But staying exceptional? It’s a lot harder when you’re relying on sheer force of will. Turns out, joy is a performance-sustaining drug – it enables us to push harder for longer, without running the tank dry.
What athletes do differently
We’re not about to tell you to ‘job your love’ – we live in the real world too. And, we have no doubt that Liu spends a lot of time grinding away in mind-numbing training sessions. She knows it’s not all good times and gold medals, but she’s mastered a really powerful skill: the ability to influence at the edges.
She picks her own music and eats food she loves. She backs off when she needs to and ramps up when she doesn’t. She even dropped her highest-difficulty jumps. And, when asked what she was most looking forward to at the Olympics, she talked about her four younger siblings getting their first overseas trip.
She doesn’t do less work; she just controls how the work happens.
Influencing at the edges
We know you can’t control everything either. When bills need to be paid, sacrifices need to be made. But regardless of the demands on our time and energy, we can influence how much of that motivational joy we experience. Here are three simple ways to do just that:
1. Celebrate small wins
Whenever we talk about celebrating success, we’re invariably met with the same response: “I’m a high achiever so I never stop to celebrate”. We disagree with that mindset, and so does Gu. Our favourite of her many excellent quotes is “you can control how you think, and therefore you can control who you are.”
Our brains are wired to fixate on the negative, so it takes effort to focus on the upside. At Powrsuit, we celebrate Friday wins every week on Instagram. When we go out for dinner, we all share pits and peaks. Regardless of how you schedule them, small, regular hits of positive emotion build resilience more reliably than an occasional big celebration. Even if all you’re celebrating is a beautiful sunrise.
2. Take control where you can
Day to day, you probably aren’t able to choose the work you do. That doesn’t mean you can’t choose how you do it. Find ways to use your superpower, build genuine relationships, take walking meetings, protect your lunch break, get to the gym session, eat the biscuit, set aside time for your development, or laugh.
Small joys compound.
3. Prioritise recovery
Ever been invited to something you enjoy but didn’t have the energy to go? When we’re tired, great opportunities feel draining – even if we say ‘yes’, we’re not bringing our best selves.
Athletes know this better than anyone: real rest isn’t cleaning, planning, or admin; it’s downtime that restores you. Don’t wait for your next holiday to get it; make rest a daily habit. A short walk, two minutes staring out the window, a book that has nothing to do with work. Netflix. Breathing. Craft.
Burnout isn’t the price of great work
If gold medallists can find room for joy during their most demanding moments, the rest of us probably can too. It may just be the difference between surviving and succeeding.
30 second action:
Identify your pit and peak from the last few days (hit reply to share them with us!).
