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Coming up next on Passion Struck.
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not the entirety of who I am.
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And I think that approach has actually benefited my work life.
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It has allowed me to draw better boundaries and be more conscious and intentional about the hours that I am giving to my work.
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It has allowed me to have better relationships in my community and ultimately to be a more well-rounded version of who I am.
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Welcome to Passion Struck.
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Hi, I m your host, Jon R. Miles, and on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance of the world s most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you.
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Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself.
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If you re new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays.
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We have long-form interviews the rest of the week with guests ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes.
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Now, let s go out there and become Passion Struck.
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Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Episode 361 of Passion Struck, consistently ranked by Apple as the number one alternative health podcast in the world.
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Thank you to each and every one of you who come back weekly to listen and learn how to live better, be better, and impact the world.
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In case you missed it, earlier this week, I interviewed Dr. Gabrielle Lyon, whose groundbreaking research and evidence-based approach have revolutionized the way we think about muscle and its impact on our lives.
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In our interview, we discuss Dr. Lyon s new book, Forever Strong, a new, science-based strategy for aging well, which provides a blueprint for rebooting your metabolism, building strength, and extending your life.
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And if you re new to the show, thank you so much for being here.
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Or, if you want to introduce this to a friend or a family member, we have episode starter packs, which are collections of our fans  favorite episodes that we organize in convenient topics, like behavioral science, episodes on veterans, women who are at the top of their game,
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spiritual, physical, and mental health, and so many more.
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Either go to passionstruck.com slash starter packs or Spotify to check them all out.
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I also wanted to say thank you for your ratings and reviews.
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And if you loved today s episode or that one with Dr. Gabrielle Lyon, we would appreciate you giving it a five-star review and sharing it with your friends and families.
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I know we and our guests love to see comments from our listeners.
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Now let s talk about today s interview.
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Many of us are reevaluating our careers, either by choice or, let s face it, by necessity.
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Rather than fixating on the ideal job, we are now taking into consideration how a job fits into our lives, including meaning in the world, values, time management, and future plans.
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On the other hand, employers leverage the idea of the unicorn dream job to keep workers endlessly pursuing the next big thing into their 30s, 40s, and 50s.
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Businesses manipulate our pursuit of the perfect job through cleverly worded job descriptions, enticing perks, and desirable benefits.
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The notion that dream jobs actually exist is continually perpetuated by society, often linking it to attending the right school and obtaining the ideal internships.
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Consequently, those who lack a dream job or fail to work towards one
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may feel as though they are losing in the game of life, feeling depleted, burnt out, and exhausted, among other things.
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During today s interview, author, journalist, and designer Simone Stolzaw, author of the new book, The Good Enough Job, delves into how work has become all-consuming in so many people s lives and why it s so challenging to detach from it.
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Drawing from his extensive research and interviews with individuals from various industries, including Michelin, Star Chefs, Wall Street bankers, and overwhelmed teachers, Stolzoff illuminates what we forfeit when we hold work to a higher standard than just a job.
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Instead of treating work as a calling or a dream, he asks, how can we redefine work as a part of our life rather than our entire existence?
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Stolzoff poses the important question, what does it mean for a job to be good enough?
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In our interview, Simone and I discuss why our loyalty to our jobs did not shield us from being laid off or protect us from dealing with bad bosses and toxic work environments.
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Instead, it failed to provide adequate support for working parents, especially mothers, during the pandemic s worst times.
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Simone brings attention to the falsehoods that we and our employers propagate regarding the significance of our labor.
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He presents a compelling argument for taking back our lives in a world where work takes center stage.
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Simone s work has been featured in the New York Times, the Atlantic, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and numerous other publications.
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He is a graduate of both the University of Pennsylvania and Stanford.
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Thank you for choosing PassionStruck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life.
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Now, let that journey begin.
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I am so excited today to welcome Simone Stolzoff to PassionStruck.
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Welcome, Simone.
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Thank you.
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It s a pleasure to be here, John.
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Today, we re going to be discussing your brand new book, A Good Enough Job, Reclaiming Life from Work.
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I wanted to congratulate you on that.
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Thank you.
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Yeah, it s my first time going through this whole rigmarole, so it feels nice to at least be on the other side of the publishing process.
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Well, as I opened up your book, you dedicate it to your parents for modeling lives beyond work.
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And our parents and upbringing greatly influence who we are and create also some of the biggest hurdles that we sometimes run into.
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I m going to start out with this story.
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I remember when I was living in Spain in my twenties, my Spanish friends would often say to me that you Americans have it backwards.
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Our livelihoods become our lives.
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instead of working to support the lifestyle we want.
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For them, work was not a reflection of their identity.
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And I wanted to ask you, how did your Italian heritage teach you some of the same lessons?
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Yeah, it s a great question.
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So I m Italian American, my mom s Italian, and my dad s American.
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And I think part of that cross-cultural comparison was what led to some of my interest in exploring sort of how work culture and how society influences the way that we think about work.
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In my mom s hometown, for example, every day around 1pm, the whole town shuts down for what s called a riposo, which is Italian equivalent of a siesta, a break in the middle of the day.
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And I think having experienced that growing up and spending time growing up both in Italy and in San Francisco, where I m from and where I live now, showed just how much these cultural factors influence our scripts that we take to our working lives.
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I had a very similar
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experience to you in Spain.
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I remember I was in a hostel and I asked this Chilean guy, what did he do?
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And he looked at me as if I had asked for kind of the balance of his bank account.
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He was like, you mean for work?
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Like, why are you Americans so obsessed with work?
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And I really do think it is a cultural script.
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And I think later we can maybe debate
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What are the pros and cons of having such an internalized work-centric culture?
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But I do think it is very regional and it depends on the place.
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And even within the US, there s a lot of variance depending on whether you re, for example, in a large metropolitan city or in a more rural area.
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I think we all have different scripts that we take to our working lives.
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Well, you re right.
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Whether we re going to a social gathering or we re meeting someone new, all of us have been asked that dreaded question.
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What do you do?
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And I heard actress Hillary Swank give one of the best answers to the question when she was asked.
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And she said, when someone asked me that, I say that I m a storyteller.
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And she says, because whether I m playing the role of mother, actress, producer, philanthropist, or director, what she s trying to do is to tell stories that change people s lives.
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And I thought that was so interesting because for the most of us, as you brought up in the States, it implies not who you are, but how do you make your money?
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It s always troubled me when I get that question.
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Well, I think it s different strokes for different folks.
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And I think the point that I make in the book is that some people work doing what they love or work in a way that is a reflection of who they are and their identity.
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The majority of people work as more of a means to an end.
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The majority of people, even in the US, this country that has such a work-centric point of view, the majority of folks don t work to self-actualize.
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They still work to survive.
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this kind of canonical piece of American small talk, what do you do, I think is not the most damaging question to ask people.
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There isn t necessarily something wrong with being at a dinner party and trying to figure out how someone spends the majority of their hours.
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But I think it s important to recognize that work is just one of the things that we do all manner of things.
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And so one thing that I ve taken to is starting to try to ask people,
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what do you like to do as opposed to what do you do?
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And just inserting those two additional words can give people a little more agency to answer that question as they see fit.
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The good enough job
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is a very interesting title for a book.
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How did you come up with it?
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I think there s two sort of points of origin.
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The first is the good enough job relative to the dream job.
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I am particularly smack dab in the middle of the millennial generation.
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And millennials in particular have been raised on a script of follow your passion and search for that dream job out there.
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And if you haven t found it yet,
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keep searching.
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But I think that recipe can lead to a lot of disappointment to think that there is this one sort of job out there that is perfect for you.
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And if your job isn t all the time perfect yourself, then you should continue to search for it.
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And the second is a reference to this British psychologist and pediatrician named Donald Winnicott, who did a bunch of writing and research in the mid-20th century, and he was observing this idealization of parenting.
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He saw these parents that were looking to be the perfect parent and going out of their way to make sure that their kid did not experience any negative emotions or pain.
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And if their kid inevitably did feel sad or frustrated or angry, the parents would take it extremely personally.
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As opposed to this kind of perfect parenting approach, he proposed this idea of good enough parenting, or more specifically, the good enough mother, who
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he thought would create a framework and a mentality that would actually benefit both the child and the parent.
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The child would be able to learn how to self-soothe and take care of themselves to a certain extent, and the parent wouldn t get lost in their children s emotions.
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And so I ve been observing a similar sort of perfection-oriented approach to our careers and our working lives.
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And similar to crying toddler, a job is not always something that is in your control.
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And borrowing some of Winnicott s wisdom, I think an approach that values sufficiency over perfection can actually set us up to be a lot happier, a lot more fulfilled, and have more balanced lives outside of work as well.
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I recently had on a personal branding expert named Rory Vaden, who you may or may not have heard of.
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Rory has this saying that I really like that we are best positioned to serve the person that we once were.
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And you describe yourself in the book as a workist.
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And I was hoping you could give us a little bit more background on why you labeled yourself that way.
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Yeah, thanks for the question.
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So first and foremost, just to take a step back, workism is this term that was coined by my colleague Derek Thompson at The Atlantic.
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And it refers to this idea that people are treating work akin to a religious identity.
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So, as opposed to just looking to work for a paycheck, they re now looking to work for a community and a sense of purpose and a means of self-actualization and transcendence.
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And Thompson argues that this is a relatively new phenomenon, more common among, say, my generation than my grandparents.
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I labeled myself as a workist, someone who prays at the church of the religion of work, because that was my mentality too.
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I spent my entire 20s looking for that perfect job.
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I worked in four different industries.
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I worked in tech, and I worked in design, and I worked in advertising, and I worked in journalism, all the while looking for that job that I felt could make me the fullest version of who I was.
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And I say that I m a recovering workist because now, on the other side of 30, as I think about my future and where I m at now in my career, I ve taken an approach that really treats work as one part of who I am, not the entirety of who I am.
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And I think that approach has actually benefited my work life.
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It has allowed me to draw better boundaries and be more conscious and intentional about the hours that I am giving to my work.
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It has allowed me to have better relationships in my community and ultimately to be a more well-rounded version of who I am.
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I think there s probably tendrils of workism that creep into every corner of society.
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And I think many of us can relate to that tendency of looking to work as being our sole source of identity and meaning.
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And I argue that it isn t necessarily a bad thing to treat work as part of who you are, but
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When it becomes the sole sense of your identity, the sole sense of meaning in your life, it is a very narrow platform to balance on.
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It s risky.
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And especially in the last few years, as we ve seen with the pandemic and layoffs and furloughs, it can create the conditions in which people are set up to have a identity crisis or go through a period of existential reckoning if that job were to no longer be there for one reason or another.
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Well, thank you for sharing that and I m glad you went into defining workism.
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I was going to ask you coming up, but I think you gave a great overview of what it is.
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I wanted to tell a little bit of my own personal story because I think it might help the listeners as well as also you to
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perhaps asked me questions along this interview, coming out of high school, even at that early an age, had this desire that I wanted to accomplish so much success.
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And I find looking back, I was valuing all the things that don t bring you happiness.
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And these were materialistic positions, title, money, all the things.
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I found myself coming out of being an officer in the military,
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and charting this new course in life and it led me to go into strategy consulting, then big four consulting, where I was rapidly going up the ladder.
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Next I was in fortune 50s eventually getting to become
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a C-level executive, and I remember as I was in my early 40s, I had reached this point where I was in a crisis.
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I was starting to feel numb.
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I was burned out.
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I was stressed out.
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And all of a sudden, I just found that what I had been doing all these years wasn t bringing me joy, wasn t bringing me fulfillment.
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And I remember it was around 2012, and I decided to go see a career coach.
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And he said, John, I have to tell you something, and don t take this the wrong way.
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You ve been living your life as if you ve been on a stool.
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However, that stool has one support, and it s your career.
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And that s how you ve defined your identity.
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And he said, what happens
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to that analogy is if anything ever happens to that pillar, that whole stool collapses.
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And he said, instead, what I want you to start pondering is start building your life around a stool that has multiple pillars underneath it.
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And those pillars should be different aspects that make up your identity, of which your career is just one.
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Because if you ever go through a career change or something like that, you ve got the other things, you might wobble a little bit, but it ll still give you the support that will bring you more meaning and passion in your life.
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And so that simple exercise really led me on the path to doing what I m doing today.
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And to look at spirituality, emotional health, well-being,
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et cetera, et cetera, as other elements that define my identity, but I thought that was important to share.
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Yeah, you re a very wise career coach.
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I think that s a really important lesson to internalize and particularly for Americans where work can crowd out all these other aspects of our lives because we don t just give work our best hours, we often give work our best energy as well.
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And
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I think the military example is poignant.
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There s a psychologist from the 20th century named Eric Erickson, and he s a grandfather of a lot of the identity theory of like how identities are formed.
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And he was the first to coin the term identity crisis.
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He did so in response to the study that he did with
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military veterans coming back from war.
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And these veterans used to have this very clearly defined job, this clear kind of hierarchy in the ranks of the military, and they knew their place in the web of things, and then would come back and try and integrate to civilian life and couldn t figure out how to do so.
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It would send them into this
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existential spiral.
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And the cause in a lot of ways was, in your words, the veterans were living life with just one leg of their stool.
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And the process of redetermining who they were in the context of civilian life was building those other legs and rediscovering those other aspects of themselves that might have been dormant in this period of work life.
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And I think this is something that we can all relate to.
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There are
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are probably times in our lives where we have lost ourselves, whether it s in work or an activity or something else.
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And I think not just for resilience, but just to be able to develop these other sides of who we are, it s really important that we keep that stool metaphor in mind.
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I really loved the way that you wrote the book, and I have my own book coming out.
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And coincidentally, we both organized the way we wrote it in a similar way.
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We both used examples of people that we interviewed to illustrate the points that we wanted to make through the chapters.
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In your book, you use examples of Michelin chefs, Wall Street bankers.
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entrepreneurs, software engineers to illustrate their stories around common myths that pervade modern work culture.
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Can you tell me a little bit about how you came up with that idea and approach for the book?
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Yeah, so my background is as a journalist, as a reporter, and I always love telling people s stories.
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And obviously, as I ve mentioned a little bit, this is a topic that s near and dear to my heart.
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It s something that I ve wrestled with of trying to right-size workplace in my life.
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But I also knew that this is an affliction that was not individual or unique to me.
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And I think across the economy and across the world, really, there are people that are wrestling with these similar sorts of questions of how much of myself should I give to my work.
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And so the format of the book, as you mentioned, every chapter follows a different individual and
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So there s a librarian, there s a Wall Street banker, there is a Michelin star chef, there s a software engineer that lives in a van in the Google parking lot.
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And through each of their stories, I explore a theme around the working world.
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So for the software engineer, for example, it s around the question of where we work.
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it s an office s roles in our lives.
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For the Wall Street banker, it s about the question of status and success and why do we chase these totems of status and what is the double-edged sword of trying to live for these external sources of motivation.
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And so that s the format of the book and hopefully together all of these different vignettes weave to tell a larger story about how we as a society might be able to think differently about how we treat our work.
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I m not going to go through every single one of them because obviously I want people to buy your book.
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But I do want to go through a couple of them.
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In chapter one, you introduce an entrepreneur named Divya, who has found her way onto the Forbes 30 under 30 list.
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Her company is doing extremely well.
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However, she is not her identity is entirely tied to her job.
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And I was hoping you could explain what happened to her.
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The story of Divya is the story of fine dining restaurants and what sacrifices and trade-offs we often make in order to find perfection.
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And I think what is particularly illustrative in her story is
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this tension between Divya and her mentor, who is a celebrity chef.
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He s very well known.
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In this first chapter, I use pseudonyms just to protect the privacy of these individuals.
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The short story is that Divya was a young, recent culinary school grad and goes into business with this very accomplished three Michelin star chef.
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And through their relationship, you get the peaks and the valleys of a work-centric life.
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So they start the entrepreneurial journey, they start this company, they get a lot of press.
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Divya in particular is running the day-to-day operations of the company, whereas her mentor is a brand or the name associated with it.
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And then I won t spoil the ending, but there, it all comes to a head and there s this big sort of tension.
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between the two of them and their relationship and how it affects the outcomes of the business, and Divya is forced to step away.
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And it shows, like, the intoxication of work and how it s so easy to get wrapped up in treating work as your everything.
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and also the potential risk of that approach if something were to sour.
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One of many examples, but I think what really stuck with me from Divya s story is she ends up taking some time away from the company that she herself started
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And it was through that period where she wasn t defined by her work or her relationship to her mentor at all, where she was able to rediscover all these other aspects of who she was, which I think is something that we can all take to heart in terms of the importance of not just treating time off as a means to getting back to work or
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vacation as just a way to recharge so we can be more productive when we re back on the clock, but the importance of diversifying the sources of identity and meaning in our life and so we can be more well-rounded and investing in other things beyond our professional.
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What s interesting, it reminded me of an interview I recently did with Will Gadara.
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If you re not familiar with him, he was the co-owner of Eleven Madison Park,
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which ended up becoming the number one restaurant in the world.
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He tells the story of how when he first took it over, the restaurant was a brassiere and they started to make incremental changes to it.
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And after three or four years, they get this invitation to go to England.
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where they are going to be featured as one of the top 50 restaurants in the world.
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So they go into this room and it s all these restauranteurs who everyone looks up to.
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All of them are Michelin restaurants and they re guessing that maybe they ll get number 32 on the list or number 41 on the list.
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But when they start the countdown at 50, they are the first person who s mentioned and
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Instead of looking at it as, oh my God, we re part of the top 50, they looked at it as we re the worst people in the room.
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And so coming out of that, he comes up with this idea that every one of those restaurants has done something pioneering and they have not.
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So he comes up with this concept of hospitality.
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And where I m going with this is for the next
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number of years he and his co-owner, the chef, are just consumed by providing the highest level of hospitality that they possibly can.
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They eventually reach a point where they become the number one restaurant in the world, but then he ends up selling his steak in it so that he can focus on things that bring him more meaning.
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And I thought that there were a lot of parallels between the two stories.
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Yeah, for sure.
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And interestingly enough, Will and I share not just a publisher, but an editor.
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And so my editor was also editing that book as well.
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It s a very interesting question about what does it take to achieve excellence?
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And in many ways, Eleven Madison Park is a paradigm of what fine dining can be in the world and
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The question is, does it take a certain level of obsession or does it take, for lack of a better term, work-life balance in order to achieve that level of success?
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And the question is, maybe.
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I think that s where I come down at the end of the day.
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But I m reminded of this quote from David Foster Wallace, where
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He says, there s no such thing as not worshiping.
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We all worship.
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The only choice we get is what to worship.
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But whatever you end up worshiping will likely eat you alive.
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If you worship beauty, you ll never think you re beautiful enough.
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If you worship power, you ll always feel insecure about losing that power.
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If you worship work, you ll
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never feel content with the level of output or achievement that you have.
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And I think that s really important to keep in mind is that even if you have achieved
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levels of on-paper success, it doesn t necessarily equate to fulfillment or happiness, which I think is what Will found.
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I can t tell you the number of people I interviewed for the book that have achieved every level of on-paper success that you can imagine.
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from high school valedictorians to high earning 20-somethings to people that have achieved every single totem of status that we dole out in society, only to recognize that the view from the top isn t all that it was cracked up to be.
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I can maybe tell the story of the Wall Street banker that I profile a little bit later,
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At the end of the day, if we are not diversifying the sources of meaning in our lives, it s very easy for our gods to be falsified, which I think is the case for many people that are just motivated by extrinsic recognition or reward.
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That s something I definitely found in my own life as well.
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I remember my long-term aspiration was to be CEO of a company and I finally got the opportunity to lead a software company.
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And once I got there, I really came to the realization that I had been building this thing up to be this pinnacle of everything I dreamed about.
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And when I got there,
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I didn t feel the fulfillment or sense of meaning that I had hoped.
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Instead, I felt overwhelming stress and pressures coming at me from all sides and just found myself working 100 hour weeks to try to turn this company around while all the time it wasn t bringing me joy.
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And so I think with that backdrop, maybe I will have you talk about the Wall Street banker.
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The Wall Street Banker is a story of this man named Kay He.
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And it is perhaps like the most cliche story in the book.
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Kay is a Cambodian-American, first-generation.
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Work ethic was instilled in him as an early age.
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and he achieved what the writer David Brooks called the resume virtues.
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He was the valedictorian of his high school.
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He was admitted into Yale.
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At Yale, he started thinking about what are the most lucrative career paths, and so he basically narrowed it down to engineer, lawyer, banker,
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or finance person and decided to join BlockRock, which was at the time the largest asset management company in the world.
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He rose the ranks at BlockRock, became one of the youngest ever vice presidents that they had ever named at the company.
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By age 30, he had a seven-figure income.
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He
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owned an apartment in New York, everything was looking good on paper.
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But inside, he told me of this feeling that persisted, like a pebble in his shoe, that he wasn t on the right path.
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And it came to a head in this pivotal scene that I ll save for the book.
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But basically, he had his come to Jesus moment, a sort of crisis of faith of the path that
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He was on and decided to leave it all behind and he moved to California and now in the most cliche way possible, he lives on Palm Tree Line Street and he surfs every day and he s become a teacher and an internet entrepreneur.
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I went down to visit Kay and spend some time with him and I think what stood out for me is that
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His life on Wall Street or his life until his mid-30s could be defined by chasing what the market valued.
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He went to the most prestigious schools, he sought out work that paid the most, and he didn t actually consult what he valued.
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And I think that is what left him at a place where he was ultimately unfulfilled with all the achievement.
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But
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On the other side of the spectrum, there s the idea of just pursuing what you value without consulting what the market values.
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And I think that is risky as well.
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I think that leads people to situations where, for example, they re taking on lots of student debt in order to pursue a graduate degree in a field of study that might not actually have many employment options on the other end.
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or artists or musicians that are so preoccupied with how they re going to pay rent that they re not able to actually focus on the creation of their art.
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And so how I knit out is you have to hold both of these things as if you have one piece of paper in each of your hand.
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And the piece of paper in your right hand says, what does the world value and care about?
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And the piece of paper in your left hand says, what do I value and care about?
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And I think there s risk on indexing too far on either end of the spectrum.
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And our work in thinking about what role work plays in our lives is to try and hold both of those ideas in our minds at the same time.
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Well, the way that you just described that is very much how I felt that rock in the pebble of my shoe and that I was being called to do something quite different from what I was doing.
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So I saw a lot of parallels in that chapter to my own life.
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And I wanted to touch on this and 2010 behavioral economist, Daniel Kahneman wrote a paper examining 450,000 responses to a Gallup Healthways survey.
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In this paper, they found that emotional well-being and life evaluation have different correlates.
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Income and education are most closely related to life evaluation, but health, caregiving, and loneliness are stronger predictors of daily emotions.
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And it was interesting because in the paper, they concluded that more money does not necessarily buy more happiness, but less money is associated with emotional pain.
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And I found it to be an interesting finding and I wanted to see if you ran across any similar things in your research.
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Totally.
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It reminds me of famous Kanye West line, having money isn t everything, but not having it is.
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And I think that Kahneman finding is very well publicized.
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And there s also other things that have become common knowledge around above $75,000.
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There s diminishing returns to how much fulfillment or happiness more money gets you.
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I think it s important to not discount the role that money plays in a stable and fulfilled life.
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Especially at the lower end of the spectrum, money matters, and I think it s important to be clear-headed about that.
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In the book, I advocate for perhaps taking a more transactional approach to work.
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which is to say that, first and foremost, work is an economic contract.
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It s an exchange of time and labor for money.
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And I think the more clear-headed we can be about that, the better.
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It might sound crass to be advocating for a more transactional approach to work, especially because we ve been told that work should be a source of meaning, it should be a calling, it should be an identity.
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But
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I think first and foremost, it s important to understand that the reason we work is to be able to pay for our lives.
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And I think having that approach can be freeing, both for companies that are able to focus on having clear expectations of what good work looks like, and for individuals that can openly talk about compensation and money without making it feel like they re somehow undermining
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the company s best interest.
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Certainly work can be more than that.
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I have made some of my best friends through work.
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It has been a great source of meaning and identity for me.
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But I think first and foremost, it s important to understand that work is an economic contract.
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In terms of the Kahneman study, I talked to folks across the income spectrum.
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I spoke with fast food workers in California.
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I spoke with kayak guides in Alaska, with stay-at-home parents in Copenhagen, and people like Kay, who are at the top end of the earning spectrum.
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And as you might expect, there wasn t a direct relationship between how much money people earned and how fulfilled or happy they seemed.
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I think the one common thread of all the people that I spoke to that seemed to have a healthy relationship with their jobs is that they all had a very clear sense of who they were when they weren t working.
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which is to say that not all of them took up knitting, for example, but they had a clear identity perhaps as a generous friend or as someone who is involved in their local community.
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One more just example to tie up this point is I spoke to a number of folks that are part of the chronic illness community where they have chronic health issues that sometimes interfere with their ability to be productive or to work in the way
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that they should.
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And this one woman, Liz Allen, told me that because she wasn t always able to rely on her body s ability to be as productive as she wanted it to be, she began to define herself based on her evergreen characteristics.
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thinking about things like, I am generous with my time, or I am a loyal friend.
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These things that no boss or market could influence, but are actually core and innate to who she was as a person.
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And I think that s very wise and important wisdom to carry on is how can we all think about
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the things that make me or you that are separated from the ways that we earn a living or make money.
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As I was reading the book, I always like to look at the endorsements.
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And as I was looking at them, I was pleasantly surprised that one of them came from what I m assuming is a mutual friend, New York Times bestselling author Liz Fosley.
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And actually has Liz on the show last year to discuss her latest book that she did with Molly called Big Feelings.
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And I wanted to use that as a segue to ask you, why does the expectation that work will always be fulfilling come with these big feelings leading to things like suffering, burnout, and stress?
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It s a big question for a mind like Liz s.
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I think the first reason of why this is a risky mentality or risky approach is that a work-centric point of view can neglect other parts of who we are.
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We are not just workers, we are also neighbors and siblings and friends and citizens.
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And if we just think about ourselves from the professional lens, it leads to an underinvestment in these other aspects of ourselves.
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The second I d say is just about the expectations it creates.
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If you think about happiness as the sort of difference between expectations and reality, if you re expecting work to always be a dream or always be perfect,
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it creates a lot of room to be disappointed.
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And I think a lot of people around my age, millennials in their late 20s, 30s, and early 40s are experiencing this firsthand, where they were raised with this script or this expectation that work is going to be a dream, work is going to be a passion, work is going to be
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a joy.
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And when that isn t always the case, when you re confronted with the monotony that exists in every line of work, it can lead to a lot of suffering and disappointment.
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And the third is the reason I mentioned earlier is that your work might not always be there.
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I spoke to so many people who often by no fault of their own lost their work either because of
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economic circumstances or the pandemic or furloughs.
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And if you are putting all of your identity eggs in the work basket, and then that basket gets taken away, what s left?
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Liz and Molly, in their first book, actually, they advocate for what they call caring a little bit less about your job.
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In many ways, like other spiky takes or points of view,
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On the surface, it may seem, wait a second, I don t want to not care about my work.
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I work more than I sleep or see my friends.
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I work more than I do anything else and how I spend those hours matter.
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And I agree.
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And also, I also agree with Liz and Molly s advice of like, how can you create some level of healthy detachment?
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so that you re not rising and falling with your professional accomplishments and riding this roller coaster that is solely based on your output.
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And I just add on that, okay, if you care a little bit less about your job, what can take that space?
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How can you channel your ambition into other aspects of your life?
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Maybe it s being a great caretaker of plants or being
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a great friend to someone who really needs it or getting involved in the local politics of your town or your neighborhood or community.
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I don t think ambition or caring about labor is necessarily a bad thing, but I don t think that all of our energy necessarily needs to go into how we pay rent.
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I thought it was a great endorsement as well, because in addition to the books that she s written, she s also an executive at Humu who is actually trying to help solve employee disengagement.
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And I think a lot of what s going to solve it is to provide these employees around the world with more balance in their life, which will bring them more fulfillment.
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I did want to now ask you a couple of philosophical questions.
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I did want to ask you, do you know who Bob Waldinger is?
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Tell me about it and tell our audience about it as well.
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Bob is the current director of the Harvard Study of Adult Aging, and he recently came out with a book called The Good Life, which has become a New York Times bestseller.
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In it, he s talking about the study that s examined the lives of a group of Harvard graduates and a group of men who are on the other side of the railroad tracks and much less privileged.
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And what it shows clearly is that it s not our career or money that define us, but instead it s human connections that bring ultimate happiness.
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Bob told me a decade ago he surveyed a large group of millennials from around the world and asked them.
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what they thought would bring them the most happiness.
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And the number one answer he got, I think it was above 90%, was that it would be money followed closely by success.
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And then a decade later, he then went and did the survey again, thinking that over a decade, that the answer would be different.
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But what he came back with was pretty much the same findings.
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And what I wanted to ask you is, what do you think is driving this constant pursuit of our career to give us meaning?
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I love that study, and the Harvard Happiness Study is one of the best of all time, I d say.
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And I think what Bob and others have defined as the most important factor that leads to meaning and happiness is what they call social fitness, being able to have those relationships and those regular practices, as you might going to the gym, that keep us connected to those around us.
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And I m wary to prescribe
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the best sources of meaning for other people.
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For me, I obviously derive a lot of meaning from my partnership and my romantic relationships and my friendships and my relationships with my family.
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I think it s important to cultivate a sense of active leisure.
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Often when we devote so much of our lives to work,
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We come home and all you want to do is up on Netflix or turn your brain off.
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But in order to find meaning in other sources of your life, you need to give time and energy to them.
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I ll give you an example.
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I m Jewish and I had a Passover dinner with my family and
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I could feel that religious identity within myself balloon because I was investing time and meaning into the people that make that meaningful and the practices and behaviors that make that meaningful.
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And that s a lesson that we can all take to heart, which is our non-work identities
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First, they need time and energy in order to grow.
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And if we want to cultivate different sources of meaning in our life, we must figure out ways in which we are regularly giving our time and attention to things other than work as well.
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Thank you for that answer.
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And Simone, in the book, you bring up capitalism a number of times and you write that capitalism is more than just an economic system.
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It s a philosophy that a person s value is based on their output.
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Productivity is more than a measurement.
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It s a moral good.
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And my question here would be,
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I just brought up millennials earlier, and I ve been reading numerous articles on the fact that millennials and Gen Z are actually turning their backs on capitalism.
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And I wanted to ask you if you found that also to be true in your research and what was leading that to happen.
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I think we re at a really interesting moment when thinking about capitalism and its role in our life.
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I think there s a lot of social cachet right now with being anti-capitalist.
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There are the subreddits of anti-work movements and lots of online rhetoric about the ways in which capitalism is ruining the world.
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I think it s important to think about how we individually have internalized a lot of the metrics that matter and the incentives of capitalism.
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I think I experienced this firsthand in the process of writing the book.
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didn t have a manager, I didn t have someone telling me how I should be spending my time or how I should be spending my hours, and yet I still felt that I was tethered to the sense of feeling good when I hit my writing goal for the day
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and feeling crappy when I didn t, or measuring my own self-worth based on my output.
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And I think a lot of us have internalized this hustle culture that is so pervasive surrounding us on a daily basis.
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And I think in order to unlearn some of these practices,
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I m not necessarily advocating for burning it all down.
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The famous line of capitalism is the worst economic system we have.
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It s the worst economic system in the world, except for all the other ones.
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We haven t necessarily found a better, sustainable way.
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of organizing commerce and labor at the scale of a country.
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But I think it s important to find arenas or aspects of our life that aren t determining value based on market forces.
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So for example, I play a lot of
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pick up basketball.
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And when you re playing on a basketball team, people don t necessarily care about your last performance review or what happened in the context of your workday.
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Like worth and value is determined based on how good of a teammate you are and how good you re playing in this other sort of arena apart from work.
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I would advocate for people to find other realms of their life, whether it s a pottery class or a weekly potluck that you have with your family that is divorced from market forces, that doesn t measure value based on how quickly or how big you grow.
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I think those are the types of micro-interventions that we can make in our life that allow us to cultivate a sense of worth and identity beyond just what can be quantified or measured by the market.
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Throughout the book, you also outline some practical tips about how the reader can reclaim their lives.
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One of them is to invest in active forms of leisure where you say, if you want to diversify your identity, don t default to watching TV or playing on your phone, but instead invest in relationships, hobbies and activities.
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Another one was this concept of fine opportunities to trade money for time.
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And it s an interesting one for me because I ve had a couple of renowned scientists on the show, most notably Cassie Holmes, who put out a book last year called Happier Hour.
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And in it, she talks about the sweet spot for time that actually leads to more happiness.
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And I was hoping you could talk just a little bit about what your research
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discovered about happiness and its link to free time?
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Yeah, I m a big fan of Cassie and her research.
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I think one of the most illuminating findings from her book is there s actually an optimal amount of free time to have over the course of a day.
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We often think free time, just more of it is better.
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But in Cassie s research, she found that if we have too much free time, it actually leads to feelings of ennui or listlessness.
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And I think that s really important to keep in mind.
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You can sit on the beach for a day or two or maybe a week or two, but ultimately there needs to be some activity in your life if you want to derive sources of meaning.
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The research around free time, in addition to Cassie s work, there s a lot that s come out of Harvard that has found that if
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Parents in particular can take micro interventions or investments and say hiring a babysitter for an hour a week to be able to go on a walk with your partner or finding different little ways in which you can outsource time intensive activities in order to have a little bit more free time in your life.
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It s a great predictor of happiness.
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In the US in particular, there s this idea that we should always be trading time for money.
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Historically, the wealthier an individual or a country has gotten, the less time they work because
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well they can afford not to put simply, but the U.S.
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is an outlier in many ways, especially compared to a lot of our peer-developed world nations.
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Some of the largest increases in work time in the past 40-50 years have come from the highest earners in the U.S.
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because instead of trading more money for more free time as is customary, a lot of Americans have traded
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their free time for more work.
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And it s one of the great ironies of success is that often when you ve done good work, it just creates more work for yourself.
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I would advise people to just think about that natural tendency to fill all of their unoccupied space with work, especially knowledge work, and seep like a gas and fill all the corners of your life.
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And thinking about how you can create protection and boundary
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around that free time and so work isn t having an outsized impact in your weeks and your days.
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Simone, I have really enjoyed this conversation today and I was hoping for the listener, in addition to purchasing the book, if they wanted to make contact or learn more about you, what is the best way for them to do so?
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Yeah, I d say the best way is to go to the good enough job.com.
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That s a centerpiece of all of the work.
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It s where you can order the book.
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This is obviously my first book.
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And so I would really appreciate you checking it out.
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I actually just yesterday finished recording the audio book as well.
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So if you d rather have it read to you and you re not sick of my voice by now, that s an option as well, but you can go to the good enough job.com and find me there.
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Well, great.
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Well, Simone, thank you so much for giving us the honor and privilege of having you here on today s show.
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Thank you so much, John.
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It s a pleasure.
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I thoroughly enjoyed that interview with Simone Stolzoff, and I wanted to thank Simone and Penguin Random House for the honor and privilege of having them appear on today s show.
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Links to all things Simone will be in the show notes at passionstruck.com.
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Please use our website links.
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If you purchase any of the books from the guests that we feature here on the show, all proceeds go to supporting the show.
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Videos are on YouTube at both John R. Miles and our Clips channel at Passionstruck Clips.
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Advertiser deals and discount codes are in one convenient place at passionstruck.com slash deals.
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You can sign up for my newsletter at either johnrmiles.com or passionstruck.com and you can now purchase my book which is launching in February wherever you purchase books.
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Links will also be in the show notes.
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You re about to hear a preview of the passionstruck podcast interview that I did with Kara Collier who s a powerhouse in the world of health and nutrition.
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As a registered dietitian nutritionist and the co-founder, as well as the VP of health at NutriSense, Cara s expertise is reshaping the landscape of personalized health.
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We do a deep dive into continuous glucose monitoring systems and how it can revolutionize your understanding of your body s responses.
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What I realized was two things.
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One is that the CGM is measuring your glucose continually and the glucose you can essentially think of as the fuel for that metabolic engine.
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So it s kind of the main energy source for our metabolic system.
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So by being able to monitor what s happening based off of different ways you re eating, different lifestyle habits, you could see a lot of information from one input.
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So kind of like the 80-20 rule, if I started to get people to just improve their glucose levels, they started to see all of those benefits start to have that ripple effect.
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So I realized the metric itself was really powerful as a root cause biometric.
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And then the second is that feedback loop, that power of real-time data coming at you.
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Every decision you make, you re going to either get positive reinforcement or negative reinforcement was an amazing and still is an amazing behavior change tool.
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The key for this show is that you share it with family and friends when you find something useful or interesting.
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If you know someone who s grappling with the future of war, then definitely share today s episode with them.
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The greatest compliment that you can give us is to share this show with those that you love and care about.
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In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so that you can live what you listen.
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Now, go out there this week and become Cash Instructor.