The Secret? Performing Out of Joy Instead of Fear or Need

Norway's Erling Haaland Shows Us How to Get the Most Out of Ourselves

Fun is the greatest performance enhancer. And Erling Haaland is showing us how and why.

Before taking on Brazil, Erling Haaland told his teammates: “No matter what happens just smile and enjoy it. Just live in the moment because we did everything we can... just enjoy playing football.”

Then he scored twice and Norway knocked out a 5-time World Cup champion...

Haaland is having a blast. He’s known as the “smiling assassin,” joking around with teammates and opponents before unleashing. Just days before the biggest game of his life, a World Cup quarterfinal against England, Haaland was spotted golfing in Florida. Some fans were annoyed. Shouldn’t the joint-top scorer at the World Cup be locked in?

They’re missing the point... Haaland is one of the most dedicated athletes on the planet. He calls himself a 24/7 athlete, with 10 hours of sleep a night, blue-light glasses to help out, saunas, ice baths, you name it. The man treats recovery like a profession. The golf and the jokes sit on top of one of the most disciplined operations in sport. And that’s the point... dedication and fun work in concert. They not only co-exist they feed off one another.

Our image of elite performers is often one of stoic seriousness. We mistake being serious for being dedicated. They are not the same thing. And confusing them has consequences.

How The Best Actually Are Fueled:

I conducted a survey of 2,000+ performers, including Olympic medalists, pro athletes from every major sport, actors, and more. I asked them a series of questions:

1. When did they perform best and what prevents them from doing so?

Performing out of a place of joy, fun, and curiosity beat stoic, serious, gritting it out 11 to 1. When I asked what advice these world-class performers would give their younger self? “Enjoy it, have fun, don’t take it so seriously” dominated. Only a single person in the entire survey said to be more serious. When asked why they compete, joy/fun was the number one response by far.

The preventors? Expectations, overly concerned with outcomes, letting others or themselves down, and feeling like they “had to” instead of wanting to. They performed up to their potential when they felt secure in who they are and what they’re doing, when their motivation was from joy, instead of fear. They felt free to perform. As Josh, an athlete turned entrepreneur, reported, “When I was where I wanted to be, pursuing what I wanted to pursue out of joy. When I wasn’t worried about if I would succeed, rather I was seeing what was possible and simply learning and adjusting if I fell short. That’s where the magic is.”

It’s not the first time I’ve run into this answer. As I outlined in my recent book, in 2023 I sat down with three superstars to discuss how to achieve peak performance. Chris Cassidy is in a group that only includes three people in history. He started his career as a Navy SEAL, before becoming a NASA astronaut and spending a collective 378 days in space. Roberta Groner was an average college runner who took a decade away from sports to work and have children. Upon her return to competition, as a full-time nurse and mom, she placed sixth at the World Championships in the marathon. She accomplished that at 41, an age often considered past our athletic prime. Olav Aleksander Bu is a science whizz who revolutionized training in the endurance world. When we sat down to chat at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics conference, I was sure the conversation would head toward how to use science to innovate. After all, we were at the mecca of data analytics in sports.

After an hour-long discussion, we ended up elsewhere. “It’s about love,” stated the physiology guru Bu. “The human element is key.” Cassidy echoed his comments, discussing the impact of teamwork, connection, and purpose. Groner outlined that her key for going from a mediocre to world-class was “finding joy.” It sounds nebulous and unmeasurable, but here were three people who had pushed the bounds of what is possible at the highest level, all conveying the same message. They all put in tremendous work; they wanted to be great, but they found the balance to not let their striving get in the way. The late Kobe Bryant echoed the same sentiment when asked what quality all the greats share: “It’s love... And it’s a pure love. It’s not the fame. It’s not the money.... it’s not even the championships.”

It’s why when I asked in my survey, what advice the world-class performers would give their younger self? "Enjoy it, have fun, don't take it so seriously" dominated. Only a single person in the entire survey said to be more serious.

The Passion to Perform

Psychologist Robert Vallerand found this out decades ago. He found that nearly all performers have passion. But there are two kinds. Obsessive passion: your self-worth is on the line, you NEED to win. Harmonious passion: you love it, it fits your life, mastery. Both could lead to elite performance, but obsessive tended to lead to burnout and a growing fear of failure.

In an aptly titled study, “A meta-analysis of the dark side of the American dream,” psychologists Emma Bradshaw, Richard Ryan, and colleagues reviewed over 100 studies with 70,000 participants. They found that when individuals’ extrinsic aspirations dominated their intrinsic ones, it was “universally detrimental” to their well-being. It’s not that we need to have solely intrinsic motives. It’s the balance that matters. When we tip too far to the external, we languish instead of thrive. When winning is all that matters, it might work in the short term, but over the long haul, we increasingly play out of a place of fear. And perform worse.

Joy isn’t soft. It’s rocket fuel.

Want proof that it runs the other way, too? In 2018, Kate Courtney won the mountain bike world championships, the first American to do so in seventeen years. As Courtney told me in an interview, “My superpower is being able to grind.” But what often makes us great can transform into our worst enemy. Heading into the 2020 Olympics as one of the favorites, her cycling performance fell apart. She finished fifteenth.

Worn out and disappointed, Courtney didn’t do what most athletes do in those moments, double down and work harder; she went the other direction. To rebuild her motivation and to have a better relationship with a sport she loved, she went toward joy and mastery. “When you have a more well-rounded life, it doesn’t take away, it doesn’t distract you as an athlete. It makes you stronger and better.”

Courtney found her joy in training and competing again. She moved from being ranked twenty third in the world in 2021 to eighth in the summer of 2023. Joy wasn’t a consolation prize. It was the intervention.

Joy is an expansive emotion. It frees us up, we get to explore our potential and play to win. Just look at a toddler... You know the best way to get them out of losing-it tantrum mode? Curiosity. If you get them curious about something, a funny noise, flickering light, etc., the tantrum fades. Curiosity is the antidote to fear and losing it. It opens us up to explore. That’s the basis of fun.

It’s why you see Eliud Kipchoge smiling at mile 23 of the marathon. Or Steph Curry smiling on the free throw line... They understand that while for some, bearing down may work, for far too many it pushes us into do-or-die mode. And despite what you hear on social media, very few perform well there. It’s a mistake I saw all the time as a coach: the tight, grim athlete who trained perfectly and raced terribly.

Contrary to what’s often proclaimed, holding the game lightly doesn’t make you fragile. Learning how to lose better doesn’t mean we aren’t passionate or don’t care. It allows us to perform at our best. From a place of love and striving to get better, instead of fear, shutting down, and a lingering negative emotional hit.

Far too often, we think that if they are laughing around, joking, smiling, it means they aren’t serious, that they don’t care. That’s BS. Fun is the fuel. It’s what allows us to be locked-in without tension. It’s the nuance that sprint coach Bud Winter noticed decades ago: to sprint your fastest, you have to give maximum effort while relaxed. It’s the same here. To be dedicated, to get locked-in, we have to have fun doing it. It’s what puts us in seeking mode, hunting for goals with teammates we care about, because that’s what we know and love to do.

This is the shift I wrote a whole book about: moving from fear-based avoidance to joy-based pursuit. It’s about fulfilling your potential in a world that continually signals that you aren’t good enough—not because success is what defines our self-worth but because we find joy in the pursuits.

The Norwegian secret hiding in plain sight

Haaland is the product of a system built on this exact idea.

Norway doesn’t allow for official scorekeeping until the age of 13. They dissuade early national travel teams in favor of local leagues. You can’t even post the results of youth games online without being fined. As Tore Ovrebo, Norway’s director of elite sport, put it, “We think the biggest motivation for the kids to do sports is that they do it with their friends and they have fun while they’re doing it and we want to keep that feeling throughout their whole career.” Their youth sporting model can be summed up with their chosen slogan: “Joy of Sport for All.”

Keep that feeling throughout their whole career. Watch Norway row an imaginary Viking boat at midfield after knocking out Brazil, and tell me it didn’t work. Or just look at Usain Bolt or Alysia Liu and see that when we’re having fun, the performance just flows.

Fun is the best performance enhancer there is. Dedication and joy can co-exist. In fact, they feed off each other. We knew this as kids. Somehow we got sold a story that seriousness was the solution, taking all the joy out of the pursuit in the name of a result. That may work in the short-term, but over the long haul it degrades the very thing that makes us special: that joyful passion for a pursuit we once loved.

Or just listen to my 3 year old... when she saw Haaland, she asked “Is that Elsa’s brother?”

That might be the best theory for his superpowers we get...

-Steve

Bonus: How England and Norway Should Deal with the Heat of Miami

How do England and Norway handle the heat and humidity of playing in Miami? I got you covered. Here’s what I’d do if I was advising either team.

Here’s my view as an exercise physiologist who has spent a lifetime in Houston, TX...

Playing soccer in that heat will decrease performance by a lot. It’s currently supposed to be around 90 degrees with high humidity in Miami for game time.

In one study on the Champions league, when a game was played above 21 deg C/70 F, when compared to cold conditions, high speed running dropped by 12% and sprinting dropped by ~11%.

In data tracking the 2014 world cup, in the hottest games, high intensity running was about 8% less, and the total number of sprints declined by 10%.

At the 2025 Fifa club world cup, for every 1°C rise in air Wet Bulb Globe Temperature, players covered 0.18 m/min less at high speed and 0.34 m/min less at moderate speed.

In other words, it impacts players performance, especially ability to make high speed runs, significantly. Add in the humidity, and I’d expect an even further decline.

How does heat and humidity impact performance?

It’ll increase fatigue, and make cramping and dehydration way more prevalent.

We used to think you just go close to a critical core body temp and then you fatigue a lot or get catastrophic damage. Modern models tell us that our brain anticipates it, and helps influence fatigue by increase perception of effort to try to slow us down. So our fatigue occurs well before we reach critical moments.

From the early moments, we’ll pace and slow down from normal conditions. Think of it as our brain doing a rough estimate of the slope of the increase and trying to slow us down to decrease the rise.

All the while, less blood flow is going to our muscles, and more is diverted to our skin to help dissipate heat. So your heart is doing double duty — feeding the muscles and cooling the skin — which is a big driver of the strain.

The humidity makes it much harder and worse. Why? Because the mechanism we use to help cool us off, sweating and evaporating that sweat, doesn’t work. It’s too humid. So even at the same heat, the effort will feel much much harder.

What do you do about it if you’re England or Norway?

1. Acclimatization

All teams have been training in the US in hot conditions, and most have employed some strategy to get used to it. That’s good.

Ideally you need about 2 weeks of training in hot conditions to get all the changes that help (increased plasma volume, shifts in sweat rate, etc.) So this should help.

But you never truly adjust all the way. Performance still suffers compared to cool conditions. It still feels miserable and hard…and like death. I’ve been training nearly my entire life in Houston…and the summers still suck… They just suck a little less than if you’re adjusted.

2. Pre-Cooling

During their warm-ups, athletes should wear an ice vest to help keep body temp down. You don’t want to start at an already really elevated body temp to start the game. Ice vests are something that are very common in distance runners competing in hot environments.

Other strategies that work are ice baths pre-performance and the cooling glove.

It might sound crazy to jump in an ice bath pre-performance, but it’s one of the strategies that elite marathoners used in preparing for the world champs marathon in Qatar.

The cooling glove is something that I used 15 years ago with athletes competing at US champs in Sacramento. It was developed at Stanford and it works by cooling your palm, which has a network of blood vessels that essentially work as radiators to help manage temperatures. You stick your hand in this glove with chilled water circulated through it. Blood flowing through the palm’s AVAs gets cooled by conduction, returns to the heart, and lowers core temperature far more efficiently.

One of the keys here is if you make the hand too cold, it backfires. The blood vessels clamp down, and blood flow gets restricted. It’s why you need the glove and not just tons of ice. And you typically use this at the end of your warm up for a short bit.

In research, these pre-cooling strategies significantly improve performance and time to exhaustion across a number of studies. It boosts 5k performance by about 1 to 1.5%.

I used some of these with an athlete who got 6th at the World Champ marathon in Qatar. They are necessary.

3. Cooling During It

Think of it like this, if we can slow that rise in temperature OR make ourselves feel a little better during it (which some research shows we use perception of effort as kind of the collective prediction governor.)

It’s why you’ll see runners during a hot marathon wearing a hat with ice in it, or that’s been soaked and frozen. It’s why you’ll see them dump cold water on their head and face, or even drape an ice cold towel around their neck at an aid station.

This is where hydration breaks come into play.

Cold towels, dumping water on face, and even taking ice slushies will help. There’s research that shows consuming an ice slushy helps with temperature control and performance in runners.

The hydration breaks should be thought of as cooling breaks. Half-time is an even bigger chance to cool down.

It’s a constant battle. Which is why most of the research and practical experience says use multiple methods to try to fight the heat.

4. Hydration

You’re going to lose a lot of water and electrolytes sweating like crazy during the match. At some point, dehydration can impact performance, though contrary to older thinking we don’t need to replace every drop of fluid that we sweat out. And contrary to conventional wisdom, electrolytes are not the primary cause of cramping.

But fluid intake and even electrolytes are still important because they help defend against the drop in plasma volume and blunt the rise in perceived effort. Adding in sugar will help with hydration and combat some fatigue. Consuming some caffeine during half-time will help with the increased perception of effort during the later half of the match.

5. Pacing and Subs

If you get too fired up and try to play like normal, you will be screwed. That’s the equivalent of the marathoner who doesn’t adjust their pacing due to the heat. That means starting a little more strategically, and using the subs at the right time with those players who are going over the edge. Because once you get close to that edge in heat, performance can suffer quickly. Use your subs strategically...and keep those subs cool!

SO there you go. It will impact everyone. And it’ll make the last part of the match feel tough. Your legs will feel sluggish and non-responsive, effort will be through the roof, and your brain will try to convince you that you’re miserable and to slow down, walk, and don’t make that run at full speed.

How the teams manage could be a key in a tight game. I didn’t see Norway use cooling vests during warm-up the last hot game, so we’ll see who does what and if they follow the best practices or go for it on their own.

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