Joy Is a High-Stakes Game: Why Choosing It Changes Everything

There’s a quiet kind of power in someone who has walked through fire and can still smile—not from denial, but from depth.

That’s the kind of energy Kyle Negrete brought into our conversation on Making the Impossible Inevitable. Not performance. Not polish. But presence—the hard-earned kind that comes from choosing to stand in the storm without outsourcing your peace.

At one point in the episode, Kyle said something that stopped me cold:

“Happiness is driven by externals. Joy is driven by internals. Joy is an inside job. Joy takes flipping guts.”

We live in a world obsessed with happiness—metrics, upgrades, dopamine hits. But joy? Joy isn’t as marketable. It doesn’t come from winning, or recognition, or things falling into place.

It comes from what we choose when they don’t.

Joy Requires Grit

Kyle lost his mom to breast cancer at age 12. A few years later, he nearly died in a car accident that threatened to steal his dream of playing football. Then came back surgery, career pivots, spiritual liminal space, and—through all of it—a relentless inner drive not to survive, but to transmute.

He put it this way:

“Lost my mom at 12? I’m all in. Back surgery? I’m all in. Bad diagnosis? I’m all in.”

That’s what joy sounds like in real time. Not naive optimism. Not spiritual bypassing. But an active decision to show up for life when the script breaks.

It’s the difference between letting the chaos define you… and choosing who you want to become inside it.

The Alchemy of Ownership

One of the most powerful shifts I’ve seen in high-performing leaders—military, business, family—is when they stop narrating their lives from victimhood and start narrating from agency.

Kyle could’ve stayed in the loop of grief and grind. He had every reason.

But he told me:

“I could make every excuse in the book to say, here are all the reasons why things didn’t end up the way they did. But when I look at my life at 35 years old—I wouldn’t change a thing. Because it created substance in me.”

Substance. That’s what joy does. It roots you. Anchors you. Gives you back yourself.

Joy Isn’t Cheap—That’s Why It Matters

Let’s be honest: it’s easier to keep sprinting for outcomes. To tie your worth to what you produce. To numb out the grief, the disappointment, the “what ifs” with another achievement.

But that’s not leadership. That’s emotional avoidance with a LinkedIn banner.

Real leadership is owning the story, scars and all—and then choosing to rise from it with heart intact.

That’s joy.

It’s not loud. It’s not always celebrated. But it’s the only thing I’ve seen that can carry a leader through the impossible and still leave their soul intact on the other side.

Your Move

If you’re walking through something right now—personally, professionally, spiritually—and it feels like the ground underneath you is shifting, pause.

Not to escape.

But to ask: What if this moment is asking me to choose joy? Not because it’s easy… but because it’s true?

What if the gutsiest move you could make today is to stay open?

To say, even now: I’m all in.