Matt Phelan measures happiness every day. He’s studied the data from over a hundred countries, written books about it, built a company around it. But when you ask him how he defines success for his podcast, he doesn’t mention joy at all.

Instead, he talks about following the energy. About surfing versus crashing. About the ten years he spent “going upstream when I should have been going downstream,” fighting against the natural flow until he realized he’d wasted half his time—five years out of ten.

“I estimated that I wasted about 50% of my time over 10 years. So I estimated that I wasted 5 years of time.”

The shift came when he stopped trying to convince people who didn’t want to change and started working only with those who were already leaning in the direction he wanted to go. The difference wasn’t in the work itself—it was in alignment with what wanted to happen anyway.

For podcasters, this cuts to something we rarely discuss: the relationship between sustainable creative practice and authentic happiness. Not the manufactured happiness of download metrics or listener testimonials, but the deeper contentment that comes from working with your natural energy instead of against it.

Phelan’s insight is that happiness can’t be a target without losing its power. The moment you start optimizing for joy, measuring it, making it the goal, you’re back to going upstream. You’re treating happiness like a business metric when it’s actually a byproduct of alignment.

This shows up everywhere in podcasting. The hosts who burn out are often the ones chasing happiness directly—trying to make every episode perfect, every conversation magical, every piece of feedback positive. They’re swimming against the current of what podcasting actually offers: messy, real, sometimes boring human connection.

The podcasters who stick around for years? They’re usually following something else entirely. Curiosity. A need to process their own thinking out loud. A genuine desire to understand how other people see the world. The happiness comes, but it’s not the point.

When Phelan talks about “following the energy,” he’s describing a way of working that trusts the process more than the outcome. In his business, that means working with clients who are ready to change. In podcasting, it might mean pursuing the conversations that genuinely interest you, even if they don’t fit your brand. Or releasing episodes on your own timeline instead of forcing consistency that makes you resentful.

The paradox is that this approach often creates more of what we thought we were chasing directly. Better conversations. More engaged listeners. Work that feels sustainable rather than draining. But none of those things can be the goal—they have to emerge from the work itself.

Maybe that’s why so many podcasters quit just when things start getting good. They’ve been measuring happiness instead of following it. Swimming upstream instead of letting the current carry them toward something they didn’t know they wanted.

This field note references the Podtalk episode “Happiness with Matt Phelan,” published March 5, 2024.