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The Joy List: Discovering What Brings You Joy and Intentionally Building Your life Around It
A friend shrugs on a January morning hike and says, almost casually, "Just trying to get through the year, I guess."
Matt Smith kept walking. But that answer stayed with him.
The Joy List is for everyone who has ever found themselves managing life rather than living it — getting through the week, the quarter, the year — not miserable, not thriving, just managing. It is a book about the difference between happiness, which comes and goes, and joy, which can be built deliberately and returned to again and again.
At the center of the book is a simple you have 11 things — specific, personal, yours alone — that reliably produce genuine joy when you experience them. Most people could not name them. And because they can't name them, they can't build their lives around them.
Through honest personal stories — a dog's smile that drew unexpected tears, a first child born in a small house on Lewis Street, a mountain summit shared with a friend who didn't know she could make it, a Scottish girl's list discovered inside a used book decades after she wrote it — Matt Smith walks the reader through what joy actually is, what gets in the way of it, and how to find it with enough precision to put it on a list and start living from it.
Along the way the book draws on the research of Dacher Keltner on awe, Robert Emmons on gratitude, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on flow, and the Harvard Study of Adult Development — not to pile on frameworks, but to confirm what the stories already that joy is not accidental, not reserved for the lucky, and not as far away as most of us believe.
The Joy List is memoir, personal development, and practical guide in one. It will ask you to pay attention to your own life in a way you probably haven't before — and then give you the tools to do something about what you find.
You are not broken. You just haven't written the list yet.
Matt Smith kept walking. But that answer stayed with him.
The Joy List is for everyone who has ever found themselves managing life rather than living it — getting through the week, the quarter, the year — not miserable, not thriving, just managing. It is a book about the difference between happiness, which comes and goes, and joy, which can be built deliberately and returned to again and again.
At the center of the book is a simple you have 11 things — specific, personal, yours alone — that reliably produce genuine joy when you experience them. Most people could not name them. And because they can't name them, they can't build their lives around them.
Through honest personal stories — a dog's smile that drew unexpected tears, a first child born in a small house on Lewis Street, a mountain summit shared with a friend who didn't know she could make it, a Scottish girl's list discovered inside a used book decades after she wrote it — Matt Smith walks the reader through what joy actually is, what gets in the way of it, and how to find it with enough precision to put it on a list and start living from it.
Along the way the book draws on the research of Dacher Keltner on awe, Robert Emmons on gratitude, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on flow, and the Harvard Study of Adult Development — not to pile on frameworks, but to confirm what the stories already that joy is not accidental, not reserved for the lucky, and not as far away as most of us believe.
The Joy List is memoir, personal development, and practical guide in one. It will ask you to pay attention to your own life in a way you probably haven't before — and then give you the tools to do something about what you find.
You are not broken. You just haven't written the list yet.
180 pages, Kindle Edition
Published May 30, 2026
About the author
Matt Smith
130 books19 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
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