Ravi Gupta’s office is sparsely decorated, with a single handwritten index card on his desk that reads: “Bring Joy.” It is simple, almost austere, but deliberate. This past week, Alysa Liu returned to the Olympic stage, skating with unmistakable joy, radiating it to admirers around the world, and winning gold.

Growing up, my family dutifully watched the Olympics. As a family of aspiring yet unambiguous non-athletes, my parents used these moments to show us what it takes to become champions. Between events were profiles of a certain kind of athlete the sports world loves to celebrate: the relentless grinder, the one who sacrifices everything, and bleeds for the gold. Women’s figure skating, especially, was dominated by those who started young, practiced obsessively, improved technically, performed stoically, and executed flawlessly. Discipline. Sacrifice. Precision. These were the values my tiger parents hoped to instill in my brother and me.

Alysa Liu gained international attention in 2019 as the youngest U.S. figure skating champion at thirteen. She was dazzling, technically precise, and seemingly fearless. As a teenager, Alysa was landing combinations that seasoned competitors struggled to complete. She was again a national champion in 2020, and by the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, at sixteen, she represented Team USA on the sport’s biggest stage.

Yet something was missing. After placing sixth in Beijing and earning bronze at the World Championships, she walked away almost without fanfare. At an age when most elite athletes are just hitting their stride, Alysa packed away her skates, enrolled at UCLA, and set out to discover who she was when no one was watching.

In January 2024, Alysa returned to a public skating session, not to train or compete, but to reconnect with the sport. The jumps came back: the double axel, the triple salchow. It was as if her body had quietly remembered everything. More importantly, something else returned, too. “I was peak happiness out there on the ice,” she later said in many interviews. She returned not for medals, but because skating brought her happiness.

Her comeback is more than a sports story. It is a reminder to all of us that winning is not always about medals, rankings, or recognition. Sometimes, the truest victory lies in rediscovering why we started in the first place. This time, her skating carried a different energy. It wasn’t fueled by proving doubters wrong or chasing records. It was powered by the love of the craft.

Hard work is often misunderstood as relentless suffering. However, top performers recognize it as devotion: showing up when progress is slow, refining details others overlook, and trusting that consistency compounds over time. Still, hard work alone is not enough. When effort becomes disconnected from joy, it grows heavy. Joy is what makes discipline sustainable. Joy is what allows us to fall, laugh, and try again. Joy transforms pressure into possibility.

If you work hard without joy, you might reach the top but not recognize yourself when you get there. If you only chase joy without discipline, you might feel happy but never realize your full potential. The magic happens when the two converge.

Hard work builds skill. Joy builds resilience. Together, they build champions.

Winning, in the narrow sense, means standing atop a podium, but those moments are fleeting. The applause fades, and the medals are set aside. The most meaningful success comes from committing to your work and, as Ravi’s index card reminds us, bringing joy to it. When you do, results often follow. Even when they don’t, you have already won in the ways that matter most. Ultimately, what endures is the person you become when you bring joy and pursue excellence.