What the puck is happiness? | 4 min read

Hey underdog

Happy Sunday, hope you’re enjoying the hockey playoffs as much as I am.

The story

My wife sent me a photo of a black, round, rubber disc wrapped in white cloth tape, marked with a date.

You don't see these often. Not at her age. These are typically reserved for 9-year-olds scoring their first goal in tyke hockey, or 19-year-olds in their first pro season, or the kind of milestone moments that end up on a highlight reel. First goal. 50th. 500th.

Yet there she was, in her forties, holding her special puck. On top of the world.

How'd she get here?

About three years ago, my son declared we needed a minivan.

My daughter had just started playing hockey, and between me, her, and my son (who plays as both a player and a goalie), we were already hauling around four bags. My wife—a marathon runner, triathlete, highland dancer, and hurdler—was the only one without a hockey bag. Did she feel left out? She never said so.

Then a friend put together a Sunday night skate. Women only. No experience required. No goalies. Anywhere from 10 to 20 women show up at 9 pm with more enthusiasm than ability. We cobbled together equipment from friends and Facebook Marketplace. She ended up in my son's too-tight skates and a pair of high-calibre hockey pants that made her look like the pro she wasn’t. (In Toronto's west end, those pants carry a reputation. People see them and expect something. She proved them wrong.)

She had a blast. New friends, new skills, new reasons to be exhausted on Monday morning. We now had five hockey bags piled in the back. She wasn't a minivan mom; she was a true blood hockey mom.

When the season ended, she signed up for a skills session. An instructor watched her strive and struggle and helped her improve. By the following season, her Sunday night teammates noticed. One of the more experienced players pulled her aside, "You should try real hockey.” That meant goalies, scorekeeping, and referees.

My wife knows how to challenge herself, but this was a different zone entirely. In the weeks before her first game, she peppered the kids and me with questions:

• How do I know when to come off?

• Where do I stand in their zone — wait, our zone?

She showed up anyway. Her team was a mix of experienced moms and their 19-year-old daughters. She wasn't strong. She came home dizzy from trying to keep pace. But she came home happy.

In her second game, a teenager grabbed the puck, charged up ice, and fired it across to the forty-something woman driving toward the net.

She shoots. She scores!

The teen wrapped the puck in white tape and wrote the date on it.

A week later, my wife texted me: "To add to your Saving Sundays ideas — I keep thinking about that feeling I had right after I got my goal and the way the team celebrated it. It's giving me a non-stop dopamine hit."

So, where does that dopamine actually come from?

Here's what's happening: inside the hockey bag.

Learning anything new is genuinely uncomfortable. It’s not because you're doing it wrong, but because your brain is working in a sudden-death playoff overtime.

In the early stages of getting a new skill, your prefrontal cortex is manually (this ain’t AI) controlling movements that experts perform automatically.

You feel clumsy and exhausted because, much like AI, you’re running expensive mental software. That's not a flaw. That's just what the beginning looks like, neurologically speaking.

Most people hit a comfortable level of competence and stop there.

Curiosity leads to competence

Psychologist Anders Ericsson called this the OK Plateau—the place where "good enough" becomes the ceiling.

What my wife did, almost instinctively, was refuse that ceiling. The skills session. The organized league. Each step was a choice to stay uncomfortable when staying comfortable was an option. That's the whole game.

From competence, you gain confidence.

Now, it's not just about getting better. It's about who you become in the process. James Clear writes in Atomic Habits that the most durable changes happen when you shift your identity, not just your behaviour. There's a difference between "I'm trying hockey" and "I'm a hockey player." That puck isn't just a memento. It's an identity artifact.

The team wrapping it in tape said, "You belong here." This is real. You are one of us.

And the goal itself? It meant more because of everything that came before it—the borrowed gear, the nervous signup, the games where she was clearly the worst one on the ice.

Research consistently shows we assign more value to things we work hard for. Easy wins don't stick the same way. The effort isn't the obstacle to the reward. The effort is the reward.

The Pebble

This is from the show Adventure Time. It hangs in my kitchen. You can watch the first five seasons here, and I highly recommend the show

The challenge
Pick one thing you've wanted to try but talked yourself out of because you'd be bad at it, because you feel too old, because everyone else seems to already know what they're doing.

Now find the Sunday night version of it. The no-goalie, nobody's-keeping-score, show-up-in-borrowed-gear version. It exists for almost everything. A beginner pottery class. A recreational soccer league. An open mic with a five-minute limit and a forgiving crowd.

You don't have to be good. You just have to show up.

The puck comes later.