Welcome to Nobody Told Me. I'm Laura Owens.

And I'm Jan Black. It is a joy to welcome our guest on this episode, Ingrid Fettel Lee.

Ingrid is the author of a wonderful new book called Joyful, the Surprising Power of Ordinary

Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness.

Ingrid, welcome to the show.

We are so excited to talk to you today about the idea of joy.

I'm so excited to be here. Talk to us a little bit

about how you became interested in the concept of joy. Well, it happened by accident, really.

I was studying design. I was in my first year of graduate school in design, and I was at my first year-end review.

And this is, you can picture the scene.

I'm standing in a room.

I have a table, and I have all the things that I've made over the course of the year laid out on that table.

And this panel of professors standing in front of me, and they sort of just look at my work for a while and they don't say anything.

And then one of them says, your work gives me a feeling of joy.

And that was such a, for me, it sort of hit me in such a strange way because I thought, you know, I spent most of my life hearing that joy was something that comes from within.

And so for someone to say that I had made something that made them feel a sense of joy, it confused me.

And so I asked the professors, you know, how do things create joy? If joy is this intangible and amorphous feeling,

how do things produce that feeling in us? And they kind of hemmed and hawed and they couldn't

really answer the question. And so that sort of sent me off on my own exploratory journey to see if I could answer it for myself.

And what did you find and how did this book come about?

Yeah, good question. So I set off, one of the first things that I did was I just started asking

people about the things that brought them joy. I thought, okay, if things

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