July 9, 2025 • 55 mins
“Work will always be work. Some people work doing what they love. Other people work so that they can do what they love when they’re not working. Neither is more noble.” This is a quote from Simone Stolzoff’s new book The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life From Work, that’s set to publish in a couple weeks. And regardless of where you fall on that spectrum, whether you live to work, or work to live, Simone makes the argument that there are too many of us who are looking to our jobs to provide fulfillment in ways that are unhealthy. For some our careers have replaced religion, for others it’s a deep meaningful passion they’re looking for, and yet others have replaced their social circle with their office, and friends with their co-workers. We’re asking our work to wear too many hats! So today we have a great conversation with Simone Stolzoff about diversifying our identities, steps that both employers and employees can take in order to help define the ‘good enough job’, and some practical steps we can take in order to create boundaries in our pursuit of work-life balance.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Hod of Money. I'm Joel and I am
Matt and today we're discussing The Good Enough Job with
Simone stoles Off.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
So I'm going to start today's episode a little differently.
Let's start out with a quote. Work will always be work.
Some people work doing what they love. Other people work
so that they can do what they love when they
are not working. Neither is more noble. This is a
quote from Simone stoles Off's new book, The Good Enough Job,
(00:48):
that is set to publish here in a couple of weeks,
and it's actually made by Simone's favorite writer who happens
to be a poet. And after going through this book,
I don't think anything else we could say could actually
encapsulate Simo's book any better. But we are going to
discuss a number of themes from the book, how to
basically diversify your identity. We're gonna talk about the similarities
(01:09):
between work and religion, or maybe the dissimilarities, uh, the
false promise of chasing after status. All of this we're
going to discuss today and more. Simone stoles Off, thank
you so much for joining us on the podcast.
Speaker 3 (01:20):
It's a pleasure to be here.
Speaker 1 (01:21):
Guys, we're glad to have you and some of your
closest friends call you Simo, So we assume just based
on our five minute chat beforehand, we can we're allowed
to call you.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
That is that we switching to sea.
Speaker 3 (01:31):
Yeah, Oh, it's kind of like my cocktail party line.
You know, it's like Simo, It's like Nemo with an S.
Speaker 4 (01:36):
You know, awesome.
Speaker 1 (01:38):
So we'll probably refer to you that way through a
lot of this episode. But Simo, we're excited to chat
with you. And the first question we ask every guest
who comes on the show is what is their craft
beer equivalent? And what we mean by that is, while
you're saving, investing diligently for the future, what is it
that you proactively spend money on that some people might
think is a little weird or you're just thrilled to
spend money in a certain way while you're still handling money.
Speaker 3 (02:00):
Well, yeah, so my craft beer equivalent isn't the most
expensive purchase. It might pile up if you do it
as frequently as I do. But I am a chocolate
chip cookie fiend. I actually need a chocolate chip cookie
every single day for four years of college. It's like
(02:21):
become a little bit of like it's like my brand now,
you know, like my friends like it's like the cookie guy.
But I still love them, you know, And I like
I'm not much of like a chocolate chip cookie snob,
you know, I'm a kind of equal opportunist, from the
famous amos to the artisanal like eight dollars cookie that
I bought the other day.
Speaker 4 (02:39):
Are you baking your own ever?
Speaker 3 (02:41):
Sometimes? Yeah, I don't know. I feel like cookies are
kind of like Beatles songs, Like even the not great
ones are still like pretty good.
Speaker 4 (02:51):
Feel that way.
Speaker 2 (02:52):
If you're mentioning famous amos in the same as like
an eight dollars let me come on, who can who's
actually putting those things down? But I guess you do
not discriminate one.
Speaker 4 (03:01):
Do you ever go off brand like the fake chips
a hole or something like that?
Speaker 3 (03:05):
Yeah, I'll do it.
Speaker 4 (03:06):
I don't know.
Speaker 3 (03:06):
I'm just like easily pleased. It's maybe not best for
like my cultural high brownness, but I like enjoy cookies
in all of their forms.
Speaker 4 (03:17):
No, I love it. Okay.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
One last question about the cookies. Do you have a
favorite for lack of better words, adjunct, Like, what's something
that you like in chocolate chip cookies that may not
necessarily be traditional.
Speaker 4 (03:27):
And if you say, raisins this interviews over.
Speaker 3 (03:29):
Now, yeah, I'm a purist. I think I my like
hotter take literally is that. I like under baked cookies.
I like cookies that still feel like a little gooey
in the middle, and like the closer that you can
get to the cookie dough spectrum without giving yourself sammonilla.
Speaker 2 (03:47):
No, I like that respect. Yeah, the ability to fold
a cookie in half is better than.
Speaker 3 (03:52):
You're getting to like my Italian roots.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
Way, yes, yeah, yeah, I love it all right. That's
something I loves to have into your book on it.
Like you, So you say that you're recovering workest in
the intro it kind of it almost feels like an
AA introduction introduction honestly, But talk to us about maybe
when it dawned on you that you were overvaluing the
(04:14):
role of work in your own life, Like, what is
it that caused you to reevaluate that?
Speaker 3 (04:18):
Yeah, so, you know, I think we're all about the
same age, kind of smack in the middle of the
millennial generation. And I think I was raised on certain scripts.
You know, I grew up with lots of opportunity, which
I'm grateful for, and also this mentality of you know,
I could sort of do whatever I wanted, and it
was just a matter of figuring out what particular career
(04:40):
path or what particular job was the best reflection of
my unique passion and personality. And I spent my twenties
really playing goldilocks with different jobs. I worked in tech
for a few years, and I worked in food for
a few years, and I worked in journalism for a
few years. And it really came to ahead at a
(05:01):
moment when I was choosing between these two particular jobs.
One was to be a staff writer at a digital
magazine and the other was to be a designer at
this global design agency. And on one hand, it's like, oh,
agony is me, you know, like the plight of deciding
between two attractive job offers. But you know, maybe you
(05:23):
guys or some of your listeners have been in a
similar crossroads before, you know. For me, I really didn't
feel like I was choosing between two jobs as much
as I was choosing between two versions of me. And
this sort of like career and decision moment. I was
probably twenty eight or twenty nine really threw me for
an existential loop, and I was wondering, sort of, how
(05:45):
did my identity become so entwined with what I did
for work, what I did to make money? And that
was sort of the first kernel that led to what
became the research project that eventually became the book.
Speaker 1 (05:59):
Nice Well, and yeah, I think probably, Well, I don't know,
maybe some people have not had that, and they're just
nose to the grindstone and they haven't had that moment
of reflection. Hopefully this discussion like that we're going to
have today pushes people to have a little bit of
that at least start to initiate the thought process. Am
I putting too much effort or identity into my work?
(06:19):
But can you give us a brief history lesson about
how we got to the point where careers became so
central to our identity, to our existence. It seems like
it didn't used to be that way, and now careers
are kind of all defining in a lot of ways.
Speaker 3 (06:33):
Yeah, I mean, there's many different possible ways to answer
this question. And maybe if your last name is Miller,
you probably condect to differ that. You know, identity and
careers have been tied together for a long time. But
I think there is something that is uniquely American about this,
and also something that is unique to the last sort
(06:54):
of fifty years or so, and so I think there
are kind of economic arguments. There's political arguments, there are
social arguments, cultural arguments. The historical one is just the
fact that the Protestant work ethic and capitalism we're really
the two strands that entwine to form our country's DNA.
From the beginning, being American was synonymous with your ability
(07:17):
to be a productive member of society or to be
able to work hard. There's also kind of economic arguments.
I think this really differs depending on what side of
the income spectrum you're looking at. On the sort of
lower earning side, wages have been stagnant for the last
forty or fifty years, which means that people have had
(07:38):
to work more just to earn the same money to
buy the same loaf of bread. Has driven a lot
of people to work long hours. On the other side,
there's the tax structure of our country and the way
that employment and healthcare are often tied together that make
the consequences of losing work so dire, and also the
(08:00):
ability to consolidate wealth with the more hours that you
work greater abilities to do so. The argument I really
focus on in the book is the sort of subjective
or the cultural value that Americans place on their jobs.
You know, we live in a country that treats CEOs
like celebrities, and we plaster always do what you love
(08:24):
on the walls of our co working in space. We
parade around our job titles and small talk conversation and
on our social media profiles, and there is really this
sense that.
Speaker 4 (08:35):
You are what you do.
Speaker 3 (08:37):
And I think that is unique to a certain extent
to this age that we're in right now. We're work
is very much in vogue, or maybe in the last
three or so years, with the pandemic hotly contested about
its role in our lives.
Speaker 2 (08:54):
Sure, yeah, and you say it's becoming something that is
churning out to be more global, Like it's essentially become
an American export that other countries are now starting to
follow in our footsteps, sort of like Levi's it's like,
not only do you get the genes, but you also
get our ridiculous work ethic.
Speaker 3 (09:09):
But yeah, I mean, I think the way that I
frame it is like I think workism, which is a
term that was originally coined by the journalist Derek Thompson
in the Atlantic. It's the idea of like treating work
akin to a religious identity. Yeah, the thing that you
look to is just a paycheck, but also for totally
a community, a sense of self worth, a sense of
purpose in your life. I think it's primarily a phenomenon
(09:32):
that is most prevalent among people that have a certain
level of privilege, you know, college educated Americans, But that
doesn't mean that it exists. It doesn't exist in other countries,
it doesn't exist in other sort of class strata. It
just is particularly pronounced for people that have truthfully the
privilege to be able to choose what they want to do.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
Totally. Yeah, absolutely, And you kind of just touched on
something I was going to follow up there with, which
was religion, because you see that one of the problems
is that more folks are trying to get the meaning
out of their job that they used to find in religion.
And so is a solution Should we just go to synagogue?
Should we just go to church more? Does that solve
all of our problems? What is the I guess the
(10:14):
problem or the difficulty in finding or putting our faith
within our jobs, within our careers.
Speaker 3 (10:19):
Yeah, I mean, the data on the religiosity of Americans
is pretty interesting. You know, if you look back to
the height of religiosity in the US and sort of
the nineteen fifties, it's something like six or seven percent
of Americans weren't religious, and everyone else had a pretty
strong association with an organized religion. And there's been this
(10:43):
precipitous decline in the past forty years where today nearly
one in three, almost in the latest data, Americans don't
have a particular religious affiliation, whether they're agnostic or atheist,
or just don't believe in anything in particular. And so,
you know, when you think about the role that religion
(11:03):
plays in people's lives, it is obviously something to believe in,
a potential path to transcendence, but it's also a primary community.
It's a primary source of your identity. And so with
the decline of these organized religions, the need for belonging
and for purpose still remains. And the argument that they
make in the book is that work for many people
(11:26):
has taken on that role. But the problem is that
that's not necessarily a burden our jobs are designed to bear.
You know, this is particularly visible in the past few
years with the pandemic. You know, some people, whether it
was due to layoffs or furloughs, lost their jobs, you know,
and if your work is your primary source of identity
(11:48):
and meaning and you lose it, what's left well.
Speaker 1 (11:51):
And even for folks who didn't lose their job, maybe
they started working from home and that connection to the
culture and to the community of work was sever and
so that kind of changed their relationship how they interacted
with their work as well. So it was seen more
as like a I do this for a paycheck when
I can, and it lost if it's all encompassing nature.
(12:12):
You think that's true too.
Speaker 3 (12:13):
Yeah, definitely. I mean I think regardless of what type
of work, you had changed in some way in the
past three years. And you know, I started reporting this
book before the pandemic. I definitely did not anticipate a
global pandemic helping everyone sort of reconsider their relationship to
their jobs. But it was this huge wake up call
I think for everyone. You know, their job wasn't exactly
(12:35):
what it used to be. And I think people who
were maybe over indexed and looking to work as a
source of identity and meaning in their life. We're left
for a rude awakening, you know. And the main sort
of argument that I make in the book, when it
gets into a little bit more of an editorial section,
is about what you said about the value of diversifying
your identity and sources of meaning beyond just what you
(12:58):
do for work. You know, this isn't just to protect
in the case that you get laid off. But I
think one of the risks of a work centric existence
is that we can neglect other parts of who we are.
Speaker 1 (13:10):
And one other thing I want to follow by I
mentioned how there is a work from home class. I
feel like the pandemic kind of it created a dichotomy, right,
and we saw other people incredibly overworked and theirship their
job changed in a different way if you worked at
a grocery store. My dad, who was stocking shelves in
a grocery store at the ripe old age of sixty eight, like,
that was a different thing, right than what a lot
(13:32):
of other people experienced. A laptop class to work from
any work class. And so it really was kind of
a tale of two Americans and how they relate to
work and everyone was questioning their relationship to work, but
for different reasons.
Speaker 3 (13:42):
I think, yeah, I mean, I love harping on that
term essential worker that was thrown around so often during
the pandemic. It's like we saw that many of these
workers were essential. My partner is an elementary school teacher,
you know, and maybe similar to your father. Her workload
and the risk that she had to expose herself to
increased astronomically over the course of the pandemic. And yet
(14:04):
we still haven't necessarily given these workers that we deem
essential the protections and the pay and the benefit to
ensure that they can keep doing their jobs safely for
us all.
Speaker 2 (14:16):
So you mentioned diversifying your identity. Can you share some
of the benefits of diversifying your identity? Right, So, when
it comes to investing your money, you want to make
sure that you don't have all of your eggs in
one basket. And essentially, what you're saying here is that
we are putting all of our eggs into this basket
of career or job title or whatever it is that
we find most attractive about our jobs. What are some
(14:37):
of the benefits that you found when we take a
step back and when we look to some other outlets,
some other ways that we are able to find our
identity totally.
Speaker 3 (14:47):
Yeah, you know, much as an investor of benefits from
diversifying the stocks in their portfolio, I think we two
really benefit from diversifying the sources of identity and meaning
in our lives. And there's some research to back them up.
You know, there's studies about what researchers call developing greater
self complexity, or having different self aspects, which essentially means
(15:10):
just investing in different parts of ourselves. You know, we're
not just workers. We're also siblings and neighbors and citizens
and friends and parents, and you know, these identities they
need investment, you know. They One of the main reasons
or arguments for doing so is that in the case
of it doesn't even have to be a layoff, but
(15:32):
any sort of bad news in the work realm, when
we have a more diversified identity portfolio, it's less likely
to spill over into other aspects of our lives. We're
more resilient if we have greater self complexity. There's also
a semblance not just in the sort of the bare
case of something tragic or bad happening but in just
(15:55):
the value of being able to give our time and
attention into other parts of who we are. It's important
to keep in mind that identities are sort of like plants,
you know, like they need time and intention in order
to grow. And I think part of the risk of
living in a life that's so centered around work is
(16:18):
that work doesn't just take our best time and often
also takes our best energy as well. And so one
of the arguments that I ca in the book is
that in order to diversify your identity beyond what you
do for work, you have to do things other than work,
which may seem a little obvious, but you know, for
(16:39):
me at least, I can definitely relate to the experience
of you know, you go to work, you come home,
you're exhausted. All you have the energy to do is
sort of turn off your brain and turn on Netflix.
And while that can, you know, temporarily be a nice
way to recharge or you know, to get lost in
another world, if you really want to have other sources
of meaning in your life, you need to be actively
(17:01):
doing things and in the community, doing things with others,
investing in your relationships. And so that's what I advocate.
Speaker 2 (17:09):
For Yes, it's about just being a well rounded individual.
And as you were talking about religion a second ago,
it maybe think through how getting laid off from a
job that's not a I mean, it's not something that
anybody wants to go through, but it's not like it's
the equivalent of having your faith taken from you. And
so I see that as being another problem with viewing
(17:31):
your job. And you know, almost to the same extent
that you view religion is that faith is it's such
a personal and internal thing and the ability for somebody
outside of you to take that away kind of goes
counter to I think how a lot of individuals view
their faith, how they view their spirituality. And so yeah,
for you to show up one day and all of
(17:51):
a sudden, it's just like, hey, this thing that you've
depended on as much as someone would typically depend on
their faith, as oh, it's no longer there. That could
be incredibly dev state.
Speaker 1 (18:00):
Even more tenuous connection to our work than we think.
And some people who if you put your hope and
dreams and faith and future expectations all inside of this
one vehicle which is your career, at some point somatic
there's a really good chance that someone can take that
away from you. It's like a jangu tower and it's
like you're down to just like a singular.
Speaker 4 (18:17):
Block at the bottom.
Speaker 2 (18:19):
If you were to pull that one thing, it's like
everything else just completely falls up ut.
Speaker 3 (18:23):
Yeah. I mean, you guys know the writer David Foster Wallace,
he has this very iconic speech, this is Water, and
one of the points that he makes is that there's
no such thing as not worshiping. We all worship something,
either consciously or unconsciously, and whatever you end up worshiping
will probably each you alive. You know, worship beauty and
(18:45):
you'll feel like you're never beautiful enough. Or worship money
and you feel like you never have enough of it.
And I think the same is true with work.
Speaker 4 (18:55):
You know.
Speaker 3 (18:56):
It's what gets us into these systems where people are,
you know, chasing carrots their entire lives and never fully
feeling full. You know. It's like you can chase all
the next rung on the career ladder, the next title
or status or salary band. But unlike these sort of
material things of the working world, religion is less easily falsifiable,
(19:22):
you know, And I don't think we necessarily have to
all find whatever you know, God out there exists for us.
That's definitely one means of doing so. But by having
other sources of meaning, we're able to just bounce back
if say, your manager says something disparaging over the course
(19:43):
of the work day. If you can show up as
a as a good father that night, or show up
as a good third basement for your recreational softball team,
or show up as you know, a very present friend
to a buddy who is going through something. All of
those ide identities can help soften the inevitable bumps we
(20:04):
face them along the reative work.
Speaker 4 (20:06):
Yeah, and the places where work falls short.
Speaker 1 (20:07):
I'm still gunning for that senior podcast host title that
Matt has not bestowed any yet, but I don't know,
maybe soon.
Speaker 2 (20:13):
Two more years.
Speaker 1 (20:14):
It's two more years ago. I know you've always even
hold that like a care in front of me that
I could never attain. But we've got more questions we
want to get to with you, Cimo. We specially want
to talk about the role that passion or fulfillment plays
and work like do we need to divorce it completely?
And so we'll get to questions on that and maybe
some practical suggestions for how to find to start to
remove our identity from mostly being centered around our work.
(20:36):
We'll get to some of those those questions dot combo
right after this.
Speaker 4 (20:49):
All right, we are back from the.
Speaker 2 (20:50):
Break talking to Simo stoles Off about the good enough
job and Seema talk to us about meaning, talk to
us about purpose and work, because it certainly seems.
Speaker 4 (21:00):
Like that there's this.
Speaker 2 (21:02):
This push to find like ultimate fulfillment in your career.
But how do you think we should think about that role,
specifically the role that passion plays in our in our
nine to five, Like is the dream job? Is it
just a pipe dream at this point?
Speaker 3 (21:15):
Yeah, it's a good question, you know. And I think
when you like look at the cover of the book
or even read the title, you know, the subtitle is
Reclaiming Life from Work, you might assume that my argument
is some it's like anti work, you know. And this
idea of like anti work has become a bit of
a meme or trend recently. There's a huge subreddit about
(21:36):
anti work, and it's there's a lot of cultural cachet
and being able to be like anti capitalist or against
the man. And yet I don't think that going full
on to that end of the spectrum is necessarily helpful
or will be a recipe for fulfillment when it comes
to passion, you know, I think I have certainly derived
(21:58):
a lot of meaning and purpose and passion from my
work myself. But I think, you know, I rely a
lot on this chapter of the research of this woman
at Michigan State named Aaron Check who wrote this book
called The Trouble with Passion, and basically her argument is
that not all of us have the same on ramps
(22:19):
to be able to translate our passions into our means
of making money, and for people who have fewer opportunities,
it can actually exacerbate inner quality when we tell everyone
to follow their passion, but some people don't have as
much access to passion jobs as others. And I think
(22:39):
a lot of times, you know, passion can be a
stand in for fair compensation or fair pay. There's this
concept in the book I talk about that's called vocational AWE,
which is the idea that certain industries have a sort
of perceived righteousness, like a halo effect. I'm thinking about
things like healthcare workers, or like teachers, or people that
(23:03):
work in the nonprofit sector, and it was a concept
that was originally coined by this librarian, this woman named
Fobasi Utar, and she observed how this sort of rhetoric
around follow your passion or you know, vocational awe, like
the idea that you should be in it for something
more than the money, can actually cover up a lot
(23:24):
of the malpractice and exploitation that exists within all of
these different fields. You know, I've this mentor this woman
and Helen Peterson, and she says, most of the time
all passion can get you is the excuse to be
paid very little. And so you know, it's a fine balance. Obviously,
you know, we work more than we do just about
anything else in our life, and you know how we
(23:45):
spend those hours matter. But I think being clear headed
about the fact that work is first and foremost an
economic contract. It's an exchange of your time and your
labor for money, the better it can certainly be more
than those things. But I think the more sort of
clear headed we can be about its fundamental purpose, the
better off will be.
Speaker 4 (24:06):
Yeah. I like that.
Speaker 1 (24:08):
Okay, you talked too about how like stagnating wages, and
we've seen a little bit of that change recently. We've
seen kind of especially at the lower end of the
income spectrum, we've seen higher paces in wage growth, still
not making up for lots of decades where that wasn't happening.
But I guess so there is that element where for
(24:29):
a lot of folks pay hasn't kept up and so
having to work more hours just to make ends meet
is a thing for sure. But I guess I want
to ask you too, there's a lot of people Matt
and I talk about this all the time. We see
stats where people make two hundred k a year and
they're still living paycheck to paycheck. So often for a
lot of people it's not just that they're not getting
paid enough. So do you think, not being a personal
(24:49):
finance nerd to the extead of Matt and I like
our poor savings habits in that intense reliance on that
income from our day job, does that make matters worse
that we are basically we tied the hip to our
employer that we don't have enough margin where if we
did lose our job or if we wanted to pursue
something else, that we don't really have that ability totally.
Speaker 3 (25:08):
Yeah, I mean, I think there's sort of like two
parts to the question. There's one is like the what
we've observed in the pandemic, where the just a monochrome
of kind of social support from the government allowed a
lot of people to leave jobs that weren't good enough
for them. And so, you know, I think one of
the misconceptions about the Great Resignation was that it was
(25:32):
just people kind of dropping out of the labor force
and sitting on their couch all day, Whereas an actuality,
the majority of people that left jobs during the heart
of the pandemic actually just left to find better jobs.
So I think that's really important to consider. It's like,
when we feel like there is a little bit of
(25:53):
government support or just a less fraid social safety net,
people feel more empowered or define work that works better
for them. And then there's kind of the second half
of your question, which is, you know, thinking about people
that we're making a lot of money that might not
have very much slack and their budget or their spending habits.
(26:18):
And I think a lot of that comes back to
sort of the consumerism that is so prevalent in America
and the pressure to always be spending and keeping up
with the joneses and having the nice new thing and
sort of foregoing some of the long term benefits that
we can get from saving or having just you know,
(26:38):
more resiliency built into your budget versus the sort of
short term rash of getting something that's shiny and new consumerism.
Speaker 4 (26:45):
I'm not sure what you're talking about. I haven't seen
that a playoffs country.
Speaker 2 (26:48):
We talk about that all the time here on the
show Cimo. You're discussing how it's like, is it a
it's like a chicken or egg situation where we are
spending therefore we have to earn more, or is it, oh,
we don't have the time to dedicate towards developing our
identity outside of work because we are working so much.
It's this sort of doom loop that we find ourselves
(27:10):
stuck in. And I think that's definitely true when it
comes to our personal finances and how that's intertwined.
Speaker 4 (27:16):
With our careers as well.
Speaker 2 (27:18):
One of the other myths that you tackle that you
address is that our coworkers, how we should not necessarily
view them as family. Oftentimes folks just they believe that line.
And I'll talk into a buddy of mind, and he's
after getting laid off. He he highlighted the fact that, man,
you know, this is a line that I believed. It's
I'm a manager myself. We live by this line. But
(27:39):
when the time comes and you get laid off, you
quickly realize that your family left. Coworkers are not your family.
Why is that such a problem.
Speaker 3 (27:48):
Yeah, I think you know, the desire to form close
bonds at work isn't misguided, and there have been lots
of studies to back this up. People that have close
friends at work tend to be more fulfilled by the job,
they tend to stay at jobs longer, and so it
should come as no surprise that companies and especially leaders
(28:09):
sometimes use the rhetoric of family and the sort of
bonds that bind us together to try and inspire employees
to work for the cause or to stay at their
companies for longer. And I think, similar to your friend,
so many people have seen over the past two years,
(28:31):
how that rhetoric can be very shallow. You know, you
can't fire someone from your company. But even if it
was true that your workplace could be like your family,
I'm not sure that's something that we should aspire to.
You know, most of the families that I know are
pretty dysfunctional in one way or another, you know, And
(28:51):
so in some ways the question about like workplace as
family is sort of just a semantic distinction and just
about this idea of like how much of our relationship
should be center in the workplace. And you know, I
think the argument that I make is like, it's not
necessarily a problem to have friends at work, But I
(29:13):
think if your workplace is your sole source of community,
that is a narrow platform to balance on. You're prone
to be blown over by a strong gust of wind,
whether that is getting laid off, or your quote unquote
family member having to give you some tough love in
the sake of further in the business goals, or even
(29:37):
just the sort of negative consequences of the sort of
in groups and the clicks that can form at work.
There's been research that has found that in more familial workplaces,
workers are less likely to speak up about wrongdoing, They're
less likely to be transparent, they're less likely to make
(29:58):
decisions based on sound business analysis and rigor as opposed
to just sort of like trusting what your buddy says.
And so, you know, there are actual material consequences of
relying too much on social ties as opposed to fundamentally
what a professional relationship should be, which is based on
your material goals for the company.
Speaker 1 (30:20):
So it makes me think of the last real job
I had. Fortunately, I don't have a real job now,
I just podcast, but the last real job I had,
there was this thing where once a month they would
give one hundred dollars awards to like ten different people
in the company for going above and beyond and for
doing something just of incredible dedication to the company and
to the company's efforts. And the people who got rewarded
(30:42):
is like literally just I mean a hundred bucks. I'm
not saying a hundred bucks is nothing, but it was
one hundred bucks. And it was oftentimes somebody who came
in on the weekend, who like left their family in
the lurch to come take care of something at work.
And I was like, I'm making it my personal goal
to never win this award because it felt like that
was asking too much, creating a tie that it didn't
(31:03):
deserve that sort of stranglehold over my life. And I
could tell so many people prided themselves I'm being able
to win this one hundred dollars recognition in front of
their coworker sort of thing, and I had just the
opposite stance, and I was like, this is absurd, and
there's no way I ever want to be found up
on that podium accepting the award, because it will have
(31:23):
meant that I dropped obligations and duties that matter a
whole lot to me. So I guess that's where I
want to ask, too, how do we find create a
proper attachment to work or we are working hard, where
we're producing good work, where we are a part of
the organization in a meaningful way without going above and beyond.
We don't want to be lackadaisa whole, but we also
(31:43):
don't want to over exert ourselves and basically inhibit the
ability for those other identity forming necessities to take place.
Speaker 3 (31:56):
Yeah, I mean, I love the question. It reminds me
of office space. Where to for anistans wearing the vest
with like flare at the.
Speaker 2 (32:02):
Restaurant, pieces of flair exactly.
Speaker 3 (32:05):
It's like, you know, she's wearing what the expectation was set,
but like the idea is that you shouldn't wear the minimum.
You should be going about and beyond and wearing the
most flair, you know. And I think like, it's amazing
how easy sometimes it is to incentivize workers to stay
late or to work on the weekends. There's sort of
like the equivalent of like the free T shirt that
(32:26):
you can get, you know, like, what about one hundred
dollars actually costing the company or what is it costing you?
So in the book, I advocate for a more transactional
approach to work. And it might sound crass to treat
a job as a transaction, you know, especially because we've
been told that jobs are meant to be meanings and
identities and vocations and callings, not mere paychecks. But I
(32:48):
think a more transactional approach to work can actually benefit
both employers and employees. I think it freese employers to
be able to be straightforward about what the expectations for
good work looks like, to be clear and setting up
you know, this is what success would mean, and these
(33:10):
are the numbers that we're hoping you hit. This is
the sort of standards that we have here as a company.
And it frees employees to you know, talk about compensation
in a fair way and not think that somehow talking
about money is undermining the best interest of the company.
It Freese employees to understand what is expected of them,
(33:32):
and more than anything, it frees employees to treat work
as part of, but not the entirety, of their lives.
And you know, we're talking a lot about quiet quitting
and workers that are sort of phoning it in. I
don't actually think that is a recipe for fulfillment or
happiness either. You know, Like, I'm sure we can all
(33:54):
relate to the work days where you don't have enough
work to do and you're sort of just twiddling your
thumbs and the clock is moving slower than you thought
was humanly possible. I think treating work as like a
necessary evil is not necessarily a recipe for fulfillment either.
Speaker 4 (34:11):
But I think why social media was invented.
Speaker 3 (34:14):
Exactly just to fill all the it's like a fills
all the unoccupied space in our days. But you know,
I think it's it's finding that balance of like, what
do you want works role to be in your life?
How does that intersect with the necessities to do a
good enough job for your company, and how you can
invest the time and energy that you have in other
(34:36):
aspects of who you are. What I like about the
sort of title of the book, The good enough job
is that it's intentionally subjective. You know, you get to
decide what good enough means to you. Maybe it's a
job that pays a certain amount of money, or maybe
it's a job that has a certain title or isn't
a certain industry, or maybe it's a job that gets
off at a certain hour so that you can pick
(34:58):
up your kids from childcare. But whatever sort of your
definition of good enough is, I employ you to recognize
when you have it, because that's what will allow you
to set better boundaries around when you can say the
workday is done and not necessarily feel like you're always,
(35:18):
you know, somehow fallen behind if you're not getting ahead.
Speaker 4 (35:22):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (35:22):
Yeah, Well, like you said, it's not necessarily a bad thing.
It's not, and it also shouldn't be your sole focus.
It's so hard to find that balance. But you've talked
about setting some of these boundaries here in your book,
and we're actually going to get to some of the
practical ways that we can try to help decide for
ourselves what the good enough job is. We'll get to
(35:43):
all of that right after this.
Speaker 1 (35:54):
All right, we're back from the break still talking with
Cimo stoles off about doing work that's good enough, and
I really love that framework, but specifically, how do we
get there with the day job that we've got going on,
whether we're self employed or we have, you know, a
W two job. Let's talk Sima for a second about
(36:15):
drawing better work boundaries, because I love the concept, but
in practice it seems like it could be a little
more difficult. How do we make sure that we're working
the way we want, not being wrung dry by our employer,
and that we still get to keep our job right
because we still got to pay the mortgage or the
rents or whatever it is.
Speaker 3 (36:32):
Yeah, totally. I think you know, the question with boundaries
is it's tricky. It can be a fine line, literally,
and I think sometimes those boundaries are incumbent on the
worker to draw, and sometimes the responsibility should actually lie
on the employer. My mentor that I mentioned earlier, and
Helen Peterson, she has this great distinction between the difference
(36:53):
between boundaries and guardrails. You can think about boundaries as
sort of like the line and then the of the
highway that keeps you from going to from one lane
to another, whereas guardrails are structural they're put in place
by the state. They're the metal things on the side
of the road that keep you from going over. And
I think, you know, one of the problems with individually
(37:16):
imposed boundaries is that they inevitably break. You know, you
can have an intention to work less, but if there
is a deadline, or it's near the end of the
quarter and you have a quarterly sales goal, or your
boss tells you to work more hours, it can be
hard to raise your hand and be like, actually, I
(37:36):
have a boundary, you know. I mean, I definitely found
this in writing the book, you know, the great Irony said,
I was like working on this book about the culture
of overwork in America, and in many ways I was
my own worst manager then. So I would, you know,
feel crappy on weeks where I didn't hit my writing
(37:58):
goal and I wouldn't have to open up the laptop
on the weekend, even though I had a quote unquote
boundary that I didn't want to do that. And so
I think, you know, the first point is that a
lot of the onus to set these boundaries actually should
rest on the company and on managers and creating cultures
where it's okay for people to take time off, creating
(38:19):
plans in place for distributing the workloads so that there
isn't an undue burden placed on any individual, Hiring enough
employees so that there's enough work, enough workers to spread
out the work, and also creating norms around like when
you should be on or off the clock. But I
also think that individuals also deserve a certain level of
(38:41):
responsibility that the one step that I always come back
to is in Japan they have the most progressive parental
leave and specifically for fathers parntal Leaf policy and the world,
fathers are entitled to up to a year of paid
time after they have a kid. The last data that
I looked at, only five percent of Japanese fathers took
(39:06):
the entirety of the time that they were allotted, and
so it sort of points to these two necessities. There
needs to be the sort of policies in place that
allow people to do things other than work or prioritize
things outside of their work life, but there also needs
to be the cultural will to do so, and I
think that is what some of this kind of deprogramming
(39:30):
or having a sufficiency mindset when it comes to work
can allow us to do.
Speaker 2 (39:35):
Yeah, that's and this is why we love your approach, Cimo.
I mean, you're finding yourself in the radical middle, because
I feel like it's easy just to point to one
end of the spectrum or the other and be like,
that's the devil if we need to do the or exactly.
But yeah, you're saying, you know, there is a certain
degree of responsibility that falls with the actual company, but
(39:55):
that doesn't mean that we're not off the hook. And
I think in particular, we need a channel our efforts
in the areas that I think where we can move
the needle the most for us as individuals. And when
it came to for you to talk about some of
the different boundaries that we can draw in our lives,
like you talk about too, how there are some folks
who like to have their work to be more integrated
(40:15):
within their life, right, And so it's not even saying
that what you should do is have hard boundaries and
that's going to be how you're going to be able
to achieve happiness and a successful life. But it seems
like you're just asking a lot of questions and you
want individuals to kind of do the hard work, and
it seems like that that is at the core of
the problem here is that a lot of individuals they
are not doing that difficult work. They're not setting goals
(40:38):
for themselves. You know, they're chasing status. They're chasing after
rankings or job titles or salaries as opposed to taking
the time and thinking through what it is that they
want for themselves. I mean, do you feel like that
that's accurate?
Speaker 3 (40:50):
Yeah, totally. And you know, I mean the actual form
out of the book is chronicle people's stories in different industries,
and the one that stands out here is the story
of a Wall Street banker that I tell it's perhaps
like the most cliche story in the book. This guy
was a valedictorian and he went to an Ivy League
college and got a job on Wall Street that paid
(41:12):
the most, and quickly rose up the ranks of the
firm and was one of the youngest vps in the
firm's history. And from his perch at the top of
the org chart, he realized that he was playing a
game that he didn't actually want to win, so, you know,
and he hadn't taken the time to look up and ask,
(41:33):
what is it that I actually want? You know, he
was always just chasing what the market valued. But I
think you know, the wisdom in his story is that
the other end of the spectrum, where you just think
about what you want without considering what the market wants,
is dangerous as well. It's the kind of thing that
might get you in a situation where you assume a
(41:54):
lot of student debt to pursue a graduate degree that
might not actually lead to job back on the other end,
or a situation where you're an artist but you're so
preoccupied by how you're going to pay rent that you
can't actually focus on the art that you hope to create.
And so, you know, it might be a little simplistic,
but I think it's really important to hold both of
(42:17):
those incentives in your hand at the same time and
thinking about, Okay, what is it that I value, what
is it that the market values, and how can I
find work that marries the two.
Speaker 1 (42:28):
Yeah, and so one of the things I loved about
your book was that it wasn't some sort of self
help ten steps to a better relationship with your job,
and it was more storytelling. But I guess I am
also curious at the end, like when we talk about
having that conversation with your boss, with your direct manager.
Let's say you've been somewhere for years and you feel like,
(42:49):
over time there's just been this encroachment and so I
feel like of your employer on your own personal time,
and you found it harder to set boundaries, which I
think probably a lot of people could relate to that.
What does it look like then, too, I mean you
might start looking down the road to work somewhere else, right,
that's potentially one solution. But what if you're like, I
(43:09):
really like my job, I would just like to have
a more normal relationship with it. How would you suggest
starting to have that conversation with your direct supervisor to
kind of set up boundaries that are going to make
sense for both of you.
Speaker 3 (43:22):
Yeah, I think you know, there are things that you
can do within the confines of the workplace, and there
are things that you can do outside of the workplace.
When it comes to talking with your manager, I always
go back to just clarity of expectations. I think one
thing that drives people to over work is this desire
to sort of perform that they're doing a good job.
(43:44):
You know, this in the office world might mean just
like putting in FaceTime at the office and staying at
your desk. In the home world, that might be you know,
just sitting around on Slack or Microsoft teams waiting for
someone to send you a message. But what we should
be valuing is the quality of the work itself. And
so that's where I often start when I advise people
(44:05):
about talking to their bosses or their managers having a
very clear conversation about, Okay, where are we what is
the sort of like status of the quality of the
work that I am producing? Where am I meeting expectations?
Where am I exceeding expectations? If you want to try
and get promoted or move to the next level, what
(44:25):
is the type of work that you are expected to do?
And just making some of those things clear and so
you're not just sort of putting in pennies to the
proverbial work piggybank, hoping to cash out one day, but
you're actually, you know, working clearly towards what good work
looks like at your company. When it comes to your
life outside of.
Speaker 1 (44:46):
Work, focusing on the work, I like that, yeah, yeah,
not on the other stuff. Hey, am I here enough?
I'm I here enough hours? I feel like that. That's presenteeism.
You start to feel like that's part of the work
that's required, but that's not the work totally.
Speaker 3 (45:00):
You know, certain industries are just really set up in
a way that then make this very hard. Like I
think I'm thinking of like lawyers, for example, who are
asked to track their billable hours in like six minute
or fifteen minute increments. And I was talking to a
few lawyers for the book, and they're saying, you know,
it is disincentive for me to do efficient work. You
(45:20):
know that I get no material award for working efficiently
or doing high quality of work. It's all just about
the number of hours I spend on the work. And
that incentive structure is just so backwards, you know, Like
I understand that lawyers bill hourly, and so there should
be an expectation that they're you know, doing a certain
(45:40):
number of hours in order to do work for the firm.
But you know, what we should be rewarding is the
quality of the work itself. And I think that can
be extended to so many other fields. The thing I
always advise people for outside of the office is you know,
I talked a little bit about doing things other than
work and practice this means sort of like having active
(46:03):
forms of leisure. You know, like, if you want to
conceive of yourself as more than just someone who exists
on this earth to produce economic value or economic returns
for a corporation, try and find realms of your life
where people maybe don't even know what you do for
work or don't care about your job title. You know.
(46:25):
And this doesn't necessarily have to be taking up knitting
or a personal hobby. While I do think there is
value in being able to do something just for the
joy of it or just for the fun of it.
It can mean getting involved in your neighborhood or your
local community. It can mean finding a community of people
like a sports team or a book club, that your
(46:48):
value to that community is not tied to your value
in the office. It's something where you can show up
in a different realm and start to kind of cultivate
those different identities. You know, just a recent example, I'm Jewish,
and there are there's like a dormant Jewish identity somewhere
deep inside of me. I'm not very not a very
(47:11):
active Jew. But you know, recently it was Passover and
you know, I sat around the table with my family
and we participated in some of the traditions of the religion.
And it was through that behavior. It was through that
activity of actively doing something related to Judaism that I
felt my identity as a Jewish person began to grow.
(47:32):
And so you can think about that in any realm
of your life, whether you're a craft beer aficionado, that
identity will grow if you are actively taking time to
learn more about the craft beers, are going out drinking
with friends.
Speaker 4 (47:46):
Just don't let it grow too much. Tay sober out there, folks.
Speaker 2 (47:48):
But absolutely, well, Simo, this has been an awesome conversation.
We really appreciate you taking a time to just talk
to us about finding that balance. Where is it that
folks can learn more about you and specific where they
can find your book.
Speaker 3 (48:02):
Yeah, the best place to go is the good Enough
job dot com. And this is my first book and
so every order or pre order really makes a big difference,
and there you can find all of my socials and
other information that you might need.
Speaker 2 (48:17):
Awesome. Well, thank you again for joining us here on
the podcast, Semo.
Speaker 3 (48:21):
Thanks for having me all.
Speaker 1 (48:22):
Right, Matt, gotta love that conversation with Simone. I feel
like there is like so much of what he has
written about, and what he talks about we've talked about
in different ways over the years, exactly, not with the
eloquence or the precision.
Speaker 2 (48:35):
We certainly have not written a book on it. I mean,
it's just one of the reasons I mean that we
wanted to have him on because the message that he
has it's so important, and honestly, the more ways that
you can talk about it, like the different angles that
you can take to the same end goal, well, if
that helps others to find that balance and to find
that fulfillment and happiness in life, we are all for
(48:55):
it for sure.
Speaker 4 (48:56):
All right. So what was your big takeaway from this combo?
Speaker 1 (48:58):
Was it that we should all be more chocolate cookies,
preferably with a little bit of sea salt, That a
little bit of sea salt really makes them stand down?
Speaker 4 (49:04):
I think I thought you made Yeah.
Speaker 2 (49:05):
Personally, I like a touch of oatmeal in there as well,
just say it adds a little bit of chew.
Speaker 4 (49:10):
Just not raisins.
Speaker 2 (49:11):
Yeah, it's not raisins. You hate on raisins there, Okay.
So I think my big takeaway is that so many
of the things, so many of the problems and the
different myths that he addresses in the book. It's not
that they are something we should completely avoid, but it's
just that we are relying on our job to meet
those ends more than we should. Uh So, for instance,
when it comes to the job you do, should you
(49:33):
be passionate about it? Well, maybe we should be less
focused on the passion side of things and instead, first
and foremost, like he said, we should be thinking about
it like an economic contract. Yes, I'm going to exchange
my time and my talents for a paycheck.
Speaker 4 (49:47):
And if you like the job, that's great, be on
top exactly.
Speaker 2 (49:49):
Yeah, And how maybe we shouldn't be looking to our
jobs to find that interpersonal relationship and to the extent
that we even think of our coworkers as family, but
instead we should maybe maintain a degre of professionalism. And
if we think about it from maybe more of that
transactional framework, Like within that framework, I think it could
be healthier because honestly, I feel like it kind of
(50:10):
goes counter to what a lot of folks are saying,
where they're just like, oh, no, no, no, you know, like
the whole if you're an employee here, we treat you
like family and like that whole approach but.
Speaker 4 (50:18):
It benefits from that relationship typically the employer.
Speaker 2 (50:20):
Yeah, not you, And it leaves the employee in an
unhealthy position once you get fired or once you leave
that job and you're trying to and you're rudderless and
you're trying to figure out what you're gonna do next.
Speaker 4 (50:29):
But I thought we were family, Yeah exactly.
Speaker 2 (50:31):
Yeah, So I just I don't know. It's interesting to
hear someone take an approach towards your work, towards your
career that d emphasizes the like the interpersonal side of things.
It's it's sort of like it's a way that he
is finding himself in the middle because he's not going
to the far extreme and saying that like, oh, yeah,
we should all be completely disenchanted with our job. We
should only be thinking about it as a contract, but
(50:54):
that you should only do the bare minimum either, right exactly.
Speaker 4 (50:57):
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (50:57):
So there's a way to find fulfilling work, and there's
also a way to find work that's going to pay
you well, but you don't necessarily have to sell your
soul in order to achieve that on either end of
the spectrum.
Speaker 1 (51:08):
Yep, No, I think it's a good way to put it.
My big take about you though. Yeah, when he said
all of our identities need investments, I thought that was great.
And he basically talked about how they're similar to houseplants,
and my thought was, Man, a lot of our houseplants,
at least in my house, are parched, like we're not
doing a good enough job with them. And I think
the same is true for a lot of our identities
(51:28):
areas in our life. Yeah, like when it comes to spouse,
when it comes to parent, when it comes to community involvement.
We talked about that Wall Stream journal I can't get
that out of my head, just that poll about how
people value money more than they value community, more than
they value patriotism, or in they value family these days.
It speaks so much about where we're at as a culture.
I think we value our careers way more than we
(51:49):
value a lot of those things too, because our careers
are so tied to money, and that is a shame.
And so we need to start to think about how
we can start watering, start pruning, start taking care of
those other identity forming factors in our lives, like hobbies,
like interpersonal relationships. And I think that will in all
likelihood mean putting a little bit less into work and career,
(52:10):
and I think we'll be happier for it. So I
guess is this where I put in my two weeks? Notice, Matt, sure,
just kidding, but now.
Speaker 2 (52:18):
We are more how to money for folks.
Speaker 4 (52:20):
We try not to overdo it and and that is.
Speaker 2 (52:22):
All about finding that balance.
Speaker 1 (52:24):
Part of the reason we love it because we're not
working sixty hours a week doing it. But Matt, let's
go back to the beer that we had on this episode.
This is a beer I picked up when I was
out on the West Coast. It's Ye scrap Alicious by
Los Angeles Aleworks. What are your thoughts on this ipa?
Speaker 2 (52:36):
Is the whole scrap alicious thing? Is that the name
of this cat?
Speaker 4 (52:39):
I think so? Is it like a brewery cat? I
think so.
Speaker 2 (52:41):
It makes me think about when we were in Kentucky
and we went to Peerless Distillery. They had a distillery
cat that's right, that hung around there in the gift shop.
But yeah, man, this was a fantastic juicy ipa, as
it's written here on the label. Just like our conversation
with Simone, it strikes the balance between being incredibly juicy
(53:03):
and having the right amount of sweetness, but at the
same time, it's got like that sharpness, the bitterness that
you get from the Hops that it's been a minute
since I've said blue cheese as I've described an IPA,
but this one kind of had some of those sharp
blue cheese elements. And when you're able to strike that
perfect balance between the two, you end up with an
amazing beer.
Speaker 1 (53:21):
I feel like when you describe an IPA, you don't
typically want to describe it as funky, but occasionally there
is an IPA.
Speaker 2 (53:28):
And blue cheese is funky.
Speaker 1 (53:29):
Yeah, and you can call it funky and it's a
good thing. Sometimes if it's funky, it means that it's
as a bad thing. Yeah, it's like, oh no, this
is a shelfterd. This was on the shelf from a
year or two, and so it kind of tastes a
little funky, but this is like, no, no, no. The Hops
bring a level of yeah that that just some kind
of unique notes from from the hop set that they
put into this IPA, And so I like it. It
(53:50):
was juicy, a little funky, and overall good vibes from
this one.
Speaker 2 (53:54):
Yeah, Specifically, if you're really into the Hops, that's got
I've never even heard of these first two hops brew
one Loral and then Sabro.
Speaker 1 (54:02):
Yeah, I've seen those hops on labels before, but not
this first two. So so many hot varieties now, it's ridiculous.
You know, you just gotta go down there one of
these days. You want to go to a hot farm
down in New Zealand.
Speaker 2 (54:12):
Uh yeah, that sounds pretty cool field trip. Maybe in
like five ten years, who knows, But yeah, enough about
the beer. Be sure to look out for Simone's book.
It's set to be published here in a couple of weeks.
I found it to be incredibly thought provoking and hopefully
I wonder if this is one of his goals. But
just for you to be able to ask yourself a
bunch of different questions as you process and do the
(54:34):
hard work of figuring out what it is that you're
looking for, like that, not just in your statement, yeah exactly,
not just in your job, but honestly just in life overall.
But we'll make sure to have links up on the
website at how toomoney dot com. And Buddy, that's going
to be it for this episode. Until next time, Best
Friends Out, Best Friends Out.
Speaker 3 (55:00):
You don't fool
Welcome to Hod of Money. I'm Joel and I am
Matt and today we're discussing The Good Enough Job with
Simone stoles Off.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
So I'm going to start today's episode a little differently.
Let's start out with a quote. Work will always be work.
Some people work doing what they love. Other people work
so that they can do what they love when they
are not working. Neither is more noble. This is a
quote from Simone stoles Off's new book, The Good Enough Job,
(00:48):
that is set to publish here in a couple of weeks,
and it's actually made by Simone's favorite writer who happens
to be a poet. And after going through this book,
I don't think anything else we could say could actually
encapsulate Simo's book any better. But we are going to
discuss a number of themes from the book, how to
basically diversify your identity. We're gonna talk about the similarities
(01:09):
between work and religion, or maybe the dissimilarities, uh, the
false promise of chasing after status. All of this we're
going to discuss today and more. Simone stoles Off, thank
you so much for joining us on the podcast.
Speaker 3 (01:20):
It's a pleasure to be here.
Speaker 1 (01:21):
Guys, we're glad to have you and some of your
closest friends call you Simo, So we assume just based
on our five minute chat beforehand, we can we're allowed
to call you.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
That is that we switching to sea.
Speaker 3 (01:31):
Yeah, Oh, it's kind of like my cocktail party line.
You know, it's like Simo, It's like Nemo with an S.
Speaker 4 (01:36):
You know, awesome.
Speaker 1 (01:38):
So we'll probably refer to you that way through a
lot of this episode. But Simo, we're excited to chat
with you. And the first question we ask every guest
who comes on the show is what is their craft
beer equivalent? And what we mean by that is, while
you're saving, investing diligently for the future, what is it
that you proactively spend money on that some people might
think is a little weird or you're just thrilled to
spend money in a certain way while you're still handling money.
Speaker 3 (02:00):
Well, yeah, so my craft beer equivalent isn't the most
expensive purchase. It might pile up if you do it
as frequently as I do. But I am a chocolate
chip cookie fiend. I actually need a chocolate chip cookie
every single day for four years of college. It's like
(02:21):
become a little bit of like it's like my brand now,
you know, like my friends like it's like the cookie guy.
But I still love them, you know, And I like
I'm not much of like a chocolate chip cookie snob,
you know, I'm a kind of equal opportunist, from the
famous amos to the artisanal like eight dollars cookie that
I bought the other day.
Speaker 4 (02:39):
Are you baking your own ever?
Speaker 3 (02:41):
Sometimes? Yeah, I don't know. I feel like cookies are
kind of like Beatles songs, Like even the not great
ones are still like pretty good.
Speaker 4 (02:51):
Feel that way.
Speaker 2 (02:52):
If you're mentioning famous amos in the same as like
an eight dollars let me come on, who can who's
actually putting those things down? But I guess you do
not discriminate one.
Speaker 4 (03:01):
Do you ever go off brand like the fake chips
a hole or something like that?
Speaker 3 (03:05):
Yeah, I'll do it.
Speaker 4 (03:06):
I don't know.
Speaker 3 (03:06):
I'm just like easily pleased. It's maybe not best for
like my cultural high brownness, but I like enjoy cookies
in all of their forms.
Speaker 4 (03:17):
No, I love it. Okay.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
One last question about the cookies. Do you have a
favorite for lack of better words, adjunct, Like, what's something
that you like in chocolate chip cookies that may not
necessarily be traditional.
Speaker 4 (03:27):
And if you say, raisins this interviews over.
Speaker 3 (03:29):
Now, yeah, I'm a purist. I think I my like
hotter take literally is that. I like under baked cookies.
I like cookies that still feel like a little gooey
in the middle, and like the closer that you can
get to the cookie dough spectrum without giving yourself sammonilla.
Speaker 2 (03:47):
No, I like that respect. Yeah, the ability to fold
a cookie in half is better than.
Speaker 3 (03:52):
You're getting to like my Italian roots.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
Way, yes, yeah, yeah, I love it all right. That's
something I loves to have into your book on it.
Like you, So you say that you're recovering workest in
the intro it kind of it almost feels like an
AA introduction introduction honestly, But talk to us about maybe
when it dawned on you that you were overvaluing the
(04:14):
role of work in your own life, Like, what is
it that caused you to reevaluate that?
Speaker 3 (04:18):
Yeah, so, you know, I think we're all about the
same age, kind of smack in the middle of the
millennial generation. And I think I was raised on certain scripts.
You know, I grew up with lots of opportunity, which
I'm grateful for, and also this mentality of you know,
I could sort of do whatever I wanted, and it
was just a matter of figuring out what particular career
(04:40):
path or what particular job was the best reflection of
my unique passion and personality. And I spent my twenties
really playing goldilocks with different jobs. I worked in tech
for a few years, and I worked in food for
a few years, and I worked in journalism for a
few years. And it really came to ahead at a
(05:01):
moment when I was choosing between these two particular jobs.
One was to be a staff writer at a digital
magazine and the other was to be a designer at
this global design agency. And on one hand, it's like, oh,
agony is me, you know, like the plight of deciding
between two attractive job offers. But you know, maybe you
(05:23):
guys or some of your listeners have been in a
similar crossroads before, you know. For me, I really didn't
feel like I was choosing between two jobs as much
as I was choosing between two versions of me. And
this sort of like career and decision moment. I was
probably twenty eight or twenty nine really threw me for
an existential loop, and I was wondering, sort of, how
(05:45):
did my identity become so entwined with what I did
for work, what I did to make money? And that
was sort of the first kernel that led to what
became the research project that eventually became the book.
Speaker 1 (05:59):
Nice Well, and yeah, I think probably, Well, I don't know,
maybe some people have not had that, and they're just
nose to the grindstone and they haven't had that moment
of reflection. Hopefully this discussion like that we're going to
have today pushes people to have a little bit of
that at least start to initiate the thought process. Am
I putting too much effort or identity into my work?
(06:19):
But can you give us a brief history lesson about
how we got to the point where careers became so
central to our identity, to our existence. It seems like
it didn't used to be that way, and now careers
are kind of all defining in a lot of ways.
Speaker 3 (06:33):
Yeah, I mean, there's many different possible ways to answer
this question. And maybe if your last name is Miller,
you probably condect to differ that. You know, identity and
careers have been tied together for a long time. But
I think there is something that is uniquely American about this,
and also something that is unique to the last sort
(06:54):
of fifty years or so, and so I think there
are kind of economic arguments. There's political arguments, there are
social arguments, cultural arguments. The historical one is just the
fact that the Protestant work ethic and capitalism we're really
the two strands that entwine to form our country's DNA.
From the beginning, being American was synonymous with your ability
(07:17):
to be a productive member of society or to be
able to work hard. There's also kind of economic arguments.
I think this really differs depending on what side of
the income spectrum you're looking at. On the sort of
lower earning side, wages have been stagnant for the last
forty or fifty years, which means that people have had
(07:38):
to work more just to earn the same money to
buy the same loaf of bread. Has driven a lot
of people to work long hours. On the other side,
there's the tax structure of our country and the way
that employment and healthcare are often tied together that make
the consequences of losing work so dire, and also the
(08:00):
ability to consolidate wealth with the more hours that you
work greater abilities to do so. The argument I really
focus on in the book is the sort of subjective
or the cultural value that Americans place on their jobs.
You know, we live in a country that treats CEOs
like celebrities, and we plaster always do what you love
(08:24):
on the walls of our co working in space. We
parade around our job titles and small talk conversation and
on our social media profiles, and there is really this
sense that.
Speaker 4 (08:35):
You are what you do.
Speaker 3 (08:37):
And I think that is unique to a certain extent
to this age that we're in right now. We're work
is very much in vogue, or maybe in the last
three or so years, with the pandemic hotly contested about
its role in our lives.
Speaker 2 (08:54):
Sure, yeah, and you say it's becoming something that is
churning out to be more global, Like it's essentially become
an American export that other countries are now starting to
follow in our footsteps, sort of like Levi's it's like,
not only do you get the genes, but you also
get our ridiculous work ethic.
Speaker 3 (09:09):
But yeah, I mean, I think the way that I
frame it is like I think workism, which is a
term that was originally coined by the journalist Derek Thompson
in the Atlantic. It's the idea of like treating work
akin to a religious identity. Yeah, the thing that you
look to is just a paycheck, but also for totally
a community, a sense of self worth, a sense of
purpose in your life. I think it's primarily a phenomenon
(09:32):
that is most prevalent among people that have a certain
level of privilege, you know, college educated Americans, But that
doesn't mean that it exists. It doesn't exist in other countries,
it doesn't exist in other sort of class strata. It
just is particularly pronounced for people that have truthfully the
privilege to be able to choose what they want to do.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
Totally. Yeah, absolutely, And you kind of just touched on
something I was going to follow up there with, which
was religion, because you see that one of the problems
is that more folks are trying to get the meaning
out of their job that they used to find in religion.
And so is a solution Should we just go to synagogue?
Should we just go to church more? Does that solve
all of our problems? What is the I guess the
(10:14):
problem or the difficulty in finding or putting our faith
within our jobs, within our careers.
Speaker 3 (10:19):
Yeah, I mean, the data on the religiosity of Americans
is pretty interesting. You know, if you look back to
the height of religiosity in the US and sort of
the nineteen fifties, it's something like six or seven percent
of Americans weren't religious, and everyone else had a pretty
strong association with an organized religion. And there's been this
(10:43):
precipitous decline in the past forty years where today nearly
one in three, almost in the latest data, Americans don't
have a particular religious affiliation, whether they're agnostic or atheist,
or just don't believe in anything in particular. And so,
you know, when you think about the role that religion
(11:03):
plays in people's lives, it is obviously something to believe in,
a potential path to transcendence, but it's also a primary community.
It's a primary source of your identity. And so with
the decline of these organized religions, the need for belonging
and for purpose still remains. And the argument that they
make in the book is that work for many people
(11:26):
has taken on that role. But the problem is that
that's not necessarily a burden our jobs are designed to bear.
You know, this is particularly visible in the past few
years with the pandemic. You know, some people, whether it
was due to layoffs or furloughs, lost their jobs, you know,
and if your work is your primary source of identity
(11:48):
and meaning and you lose it, what's left well.
Speaker 1 (11:51):
And even for folks who didn't lose their job, maybe
they started working from home and that connection to the
culture and to the community of work was sever and
so that kind of changed their relationship how they interacted
with their work as well. So it was seen more
as like a I do this for a paycheck when
I can, and it lost if it's all encompassing nature.
(12:12):
You think that's true too.
Speaker 3 (12:13):
Yeah, definitely. I mean I think regardless of what type
of work, you had changed in some way in the
past three years. And you know, I started reporting this
book before the pandemic. I definitely did not anticipate a
global pandemic helping everyone sort of reconsider their relationship to
their jobs. But it was this huge wake up call
I think for everyone. You know, their job wasn't exactly
(12:35):
what it used to be. And I think people who
were maybe over indexed and looking to work as a
source of identity and meaning in their life. We're left
for a rude awakening, you know. And the main sort
of argument that I make in the book, when it
gets into a little bit more of an editorial section,
is about what you said about the value of diversifying
your identity and sources of meaning beyond just what you
(12:58):
do for work. You know, this isn't just to protect
in the case that you get laid off. But I
think one of the risks of a work centric existence
is that we can neglect other parts of who we are.
Speaker 1 (13:10):
And one other thing I want to follow by I
mentioned how there is a work from home class. I
feel like the pandemic kind of it created a dichotomy, right,
and we saw other people incredibly overworked and theirship their
job changed in a different way if you worked at
a grocery store. My dad, who was stocking shelves in
a grocery store at the ripe old age of sixty eight, like,
that was a different thing, right than what a lot
(13:32):
of other people experienced. A laptop class to work from
any work class. And so it really was kind of
a tale of two Americans and how they relate to
work and everyone was questioning their relationship to work, but
for different reasons.
Speaker 3 (13:42):
I think, yeah, I mean, I love harping on that
term essential worker that was thrown around so often during
the pandemic. It's like we saw that many of these
workers were essential. My partner is an elementary school teacher,
you know, and maybe similar to your father. Her workload
and the risk that she had to expose herself to
increased astronomically over the course of the pandemic. And yet
(14:04):
we still haven't necessarily given these workers that we deem
essential the protections and the pay and the benefit to
ensure that they can keep doing their jobs safely for
us all.
Speaker 2 (14:16):
So you mentioned diversifying your identity. Can you share some
of the benefits of diversifying your identity? Right, So, when
it comes to investing your money, you want to make
sure that you don't have all of your eggs in
one basket. And essentially, what you're saying here is that
we are putting all of our eggs into this basket
of career or job title or whatever it is that
we find most attractive about our jobs. What are some
(14:37):
of the benefits that you found when we take a
step back and when we look to some other outlets,
some other ways that we are able to find our
identity totally.
Speaker 3 (14:47):
Yeah, you know, much as an investor of benefits from
diversifying the stocks in their portfolio, I think we two
really benefit from diversifying the sources of identity and meaning
in our lives. And there's some research to back them up.
You know, there's studies about what researchers call developing greater
self complexity, or having different self aspects, which essentially means
(15:10):
just investing in different parts of ourselves. You know, we're
not just workers. We're also siblings and neighbors and citizens
and friends and parents, and you know, these identities they
need investment, you know. They One of the main reasons
or arguments for doing so is that in the case
of it doesn't even have to be a layoff, but
(15:32):
any sort of bad news in the work realm, when
we have a more diversified identity portfolio, it's less likely
to spill over into other aspects of our lives. We're
more resilient if we have greater self complexity. There's also
a semblance not just in the sort of the bare
case of something tragic or bad happening but in just
(15:55):
the value of being able to give our time and
attention into other parts of who we are. It's important
to keep in mind that identities are sort of like plants,
you know, like they need time and intention in order
to grow. And I think part of the risk of
living in a life that's so centered around work is
(16:18):
that work doesn't just take our best time and often
also takes our best energy as well. And so one
of the arguments that I ca in the book is
that in order to diversify your identity beyond what you
do for work, you have to do things other than work,
which may seem a little obvious, but you know, for
(16:39):
me at least, I can definitely relate to the experience
of you know, you go to work, you come home,
you're exhausted. All you have the energy to do is
sort of turn off your brain and turn on Netflix.
And while that can, you know, temporarily be a nice
way to recharge or you know, to get lost in
another world, if you really want to have other sources
of meaning in your life, you need to be actively
(17:01):
doing things and in the community, doing things with others,
investing in your relationships. And so that's what I advocate.
Speaker 2 (17:09):
For Yes, it's about just being a well rounded individual.
And as you were talking about religion a second ago,
it maybe think through how getting laid off from a
job that's not a I mean, it's not something that
anybody wants to go through, but it's not like it's
the equivalent of having your faith taken from you. And
so I see that as being another problem with viewing
(17:31):
your job. And you know, almost to the same extent
that you view religion is that faith is it's such
a personal and internal thing and the ability for somebody
outside of you to take that away kind of goes
counter to I think how a lot of individuals view
their faith, how they view their spirituality. And so yeah,
for you to show up one day and all of
(17:51):
a sudden, it's just like, hey, this thing that you've
depended on as much as someone would typically depend on
their faith, as oh, it's no longer there. That could
be incredibly dev state.
Speaker 1 (18:00):
Even more tenuous connection to our work than we think.
And some people who if you put your hope and
dreams and faith and future expectations all inside of this
one vehicle which is your career, at some point somatic
there's a really good chance that someone can take that
away from you. It's like a jangu tower and it's
like you're down to just like a singular.
Speaker 4 (18:17):
Block at the bottom.
Speaker 2 (18:19):
If you were to pull that one thing, it's like
everything else just completely falls up ut.
Speaker 3 (18:23):
Yeah. I mean, you guys know the writer David Foster Wallace,
he has this very iconic speech, this is Water, and
one of the points that he makes is that there's
no such thing as not worshiping. We all worship something,
either consciously or unconsciously, and whatever you end up worshiping
will probably each you alive. You know, worship beauty and
(18:45):
you'll feel like you're never beautiful enough. Or worship money
and you feel like you never have enough of it.
And I think the same is true with work.
Speaker 4 (18:55):
You know.
Speaker 3 (18:56):
It's what gets us into these systems where people are,
you know, chasing carrots their entire lives and never fully
feeling full. You know. It's like you can chase all
the next rung on the career ladder, the next title
or status or salary band. But unlike these sort of
material things of the working world, religion is less easily falsifiable,
(19:22):
you know, And I don't think we necessarily have to
all find whatever you know, God out there exists for us.
That's definitely one means of doing so. But by having
other sources of meaning, we're able to just bounce back
if say, your manager says something disparaging over the course
(19:43):
of the work day. If you can show up as
a as a good father that night, or show up
as a good third basement for your recreational softball team,
or show up as you know, a very present friend
to a buddy who is going through something. All of
those ide identities can help soften the inevitable bumps we
(20:04):
face them along the reative work.
Speaker 4 (20:06):
Yeah, and the places where work falls short.
Speaker 1 (20:07):
I'm still gunning for that senior podcast host title that
Matt has not bestowed any yet, but I don't know,
maybe soon.
Speaker 2 (20:13):
Two more years.
Speaker 1 (20:14):
It's two more years ago. I know you've always even
hold that like a care in front of me that
I could never attain. But we've got more questions we
want to get to with you, Cimo. We specially want
to talk about the role that passion or fulfillment plays
and work like do we need to divorce it completely?
And so we'll get to questions on that and maybe
some practical suggestions for how to find to start to
remove our identity from mostly being centered around our work.
(20:36):
We'll get to some of those those questions dot combo
right after this.
Speaker 4 (20:49):
All right, we are back from the.
Speaker 2 (20:50):
Break talking to Simo stoles Off about the good enough
job and Seema talk to us about meaning, talk to
us about purpose and work, because it certainly seems.
Speaker 4 (21:00):
Like that there's this.
Speaker 2 (21:02):
This push to find like ultimate fulfillment in your career.
But how do you think we should think about that role,
specifically the role that passion plays in our in our
nine to five, Like is the dream job? Is it
just a pipe dream at this point?
Speaker 3 (21:15):
Yeah, it's a good question, you know. And I think
when you like look at the cover of the book
or even read the title, you know, the subtitle is
Reclaiming Life from Work, you might assume that my argument
is some it's like anti work, you know. And this
idea of like anti work has become a bit of
a meme or trend recently. There's a huge subreddit about
(21:36):
anti work, and it's there's a lot of cultural cachet
and being able to be like anti capitalist or against
the man. And yet I don't think that going full
on to that end of the spectrum is necessarily helpful
or will be a recipe for fulfillment when it comes
to passion, you know, I think I have certainly derived
(21:58):
a lot of meaning and purpose and passion from my
work myself. But I think, you know, I rely a
lot on this chapter of the research of this woman
at Michigan State named Aaron Check who wrote this book
called The Trouble with Passion, and basically her argument is
that not all of us have the same on ramps
(22:19):
to be able to translate our passions into our means
of making money, and for people who have fewer opportunities,
it can actually exacerbate inner quality when we tell everyone
to follow their passion, but some people don't have as
much access to passion jobs as others. And I think
(22:39):
a lot of times, you know, passion can be a
stand in for fair compensation or fair pay. There's this
concept in the book I talk about that's called vocational AWE,
which is the idea that certain industries have a sort
of perceived righteousness, like a halo effect. I'm thinking about
things like healthcare workers, or like teachers, or people that
(23:03):
work in the nonprofit sector, and it was a concept
that was originally coined by this librarian, this woman named
Fobasi Utar, and she observed how this sort of rhetoric
around follow your passion or you know, vocational awe, like
the idea that you should be in it for something
more than the money, can actually cover up a lot
(23:24):
of the malpractice and exploitation that exists within all of
these different fields. You know, I've this mentor this woman
and Helen Peterson, and she says, most of the time
all passion can get you is the excuse to be
paid very little. And so you know, it's a fine balance. Obviously,
you know, we work more than we do just about
anything else in our life, and you know how we
(23:45):
spend those hours matter. But I think being clear headed
about the fact that work is first and foremost an
economic contract. It's an exchange of your time and your
labor for money, the better it can certainly be more
than those things. But I think the more sort of
clear headed we can be about its fundamental purpose, the
better off will be.
Speaker 4 (24:06):
Yeah. I like that.
Speaker 1 (24:08):
Okay, you talked too about how like stagnating wages, and
we've seen a little bit of that change recently. We've
seen kind of especially at the lower end of the
income spectrum, we've seen higher paces in wage growth, still
not making up for lots of decades where that wasn't happening.
But I guess so there is that element where for
(24:29):
a lot of folks pay hasn't kept up and so
having to work more hours just to make ends meet
is a thing for sure. But I guess I want
to ask you too, there's a lot of people Matt
and I talk about this all the time. We see
stats where people make two hundred k a year and
they're still living paycheck to paycheck. So often for a
lot of people it's not just that they're not getting
paid enough. So do you think, not being a personal
(24:49):
finance nerd to the extead of Matt and I like
our poor savings habits in that intense reliance on that
income from our day job, does that make matters worse
that we are basically we tied the hip to our
employer that we don't have enough margin where if we
did lose our job or if we wanted to pursue
something else, that we don't really have that ability totally.
Speaker 3 (25:08):
Yeah, I mean, I think there's sort of like two
parts to the question. There's one is like the what
we've observed in the pandemic, where the just a monochrome
of kind of social support from the government allowed a
lot of people to leave jobs that weren't good enough
for them. And so, you know, I think one of
the misconceptions about the Great Resignation was that it was
(25:32):
just people kind of dropping out of the labor force
and sitting on their couch all day, Whereas an actuality,
the majority of people that left jobs during the heart
of the pandemic actually just left to find better jobs.
So I think that's really important to consider. It's like,
when we feel like there is a little bit of
(25:53):
government support or just a less fraid social safety net,
people feel more empowered or define work that works better
for them. And then there's kind of the second half
of your question, which is, you know, thinking about people
that we're making a lot of money that might not
have very much slack and their budget or their spending habits.
(26:18):
And I think a lot of that comes back to
sort of the consumerism that is so prevalent in America
and the pressure to always be spending and keeping up
with the joneses and having the nice new thing and
sort of foregoing some of the long term benefits that
we can get from saving or having just you know,
(26:38):
more resiliency built into your budget versus the sort of
short term rash of getting something that's shiny and new consumerism.
Speaker 4 (26:45):
I'm not sure what you're talking about. I haven't seen
that a playoffs country.
Speaker 2 (26:48):
We talk about that all the time here on the
show Cimo. You're discussing how it's like, is it a
it's like a chicken or egg situation where we are
spending therefore we have to earn more, or is it, oh,
we don't have the time to dedicate towards developing our
identity outside of work because we are working so much.
It's this sort of doom loop that we find ourselves
(27:10):
stuck in. And I think that's definitely true when it
comes to our personal finances and how that's intertwined.
Speaker 4 (27:16):
With our careers as well.
Speaker 2 (27:18):
One of the other myths that you tackle that you
address is that our coworkers, how we should not necessarily
view them as family. Oftentimes folks just they believe that line.
And I'll talk into a buddy of mind, and he's
after getting laid off. He he highlighted the fact that, man,
you know, this is a line that I believed. It's
I'm a manager myself. We live by this line. But
(27:39):
when the time comes and you get laid off, you
quickly realize that your family left. Coworkers are not your family.
Why is that such a problem.
Speaker 3 (27:48):
Yeah, I think you know, the desire to form close
bonds at work isn't misguided, and there have been lots
of studies to back this up. People that have close
friends at work tend to be more fulfilled by the job,
they tend to stay at jobs longer, and so it
should come as no surprise that companies and especially leaders
(28:09):
sometimes use the rhetoric of family and the sort of
bonds that bind us together to try and inspire employees
to work for the cause or to stay at their
companies for longer. And I think, similar to your friend,
so many people have seen over the past two years,
(28:31):
how that rhetoric can be very shallow. You know, you
can't fire someone from your company. But even if it
was true that your workplace could be like your family,
I'm not sure that's something that we should aspire to.
You know, most of the families that I know are
pretty dysfunctional in one way or another, you know, And
(28:51):
so in some ways the question about like workplace as
family is sort of just a semantic distinction and just
about this idea of like how much of our relationship
should be center in the workplace. And you know, I
think the argument that I make is like, it's not
necessarily a problem to have friends at work, But I
(29:13):
think if your workplace is your sole source of community,
that is a narrow platform to balance on. You're prone
to be blown over by a strong gust of wind,
whether that is getting laid off, or your quote unquote
family member having to give you some tough love in
the sake of further in the business goals, or even
(29:37):
just the sort of negative consequences of the sort of
in groups and the clicks that can form at work.
There's been research that has found that in more familial workplaces,
workers are less likely to speak up about wrongdoing, They're
less likely to be transparent, they're less likely to make
(29:58):
decisions based on sound business analysis and rigor as opposed
to just sort of like trusting what your buddy says.
And so, you know, there are actual material consequences of
relying too much on social ties as opposed to fundamentally
what a professional relationship should be, which is based on
your material goals for the company.
Speaker 1 (30:20):
So it makes me think of the last real job
I had. Fortunately, I don't have a real job now,
I just podcast, but the last real job I had,
there was this thing where once a month they would
give one hundred dollars awards to like ten different people
in the company for going above and beyond and for
doing something just of incredible dedication to the company and
to the company's efforts. And the people who got rewarded
(30:42):
is like literally just I mean a hundred bucks. I'm
not saying a hundred bucks is nothing, but it was
one hundred bucks. And it was oftentimes somebody who came
in on the weekend, who like left their family in
the lurch to come take care of something at work.
And I was like, I'm making it my personal goal
to never win this award because it felt like that
was asking too much, creating a tie that it didn't
(31:03):
deserve that sort of stranglehold over my life. And I
could tell so many people prided themselves I'm being able
to win this one hundred dollars recognition in front of
their coworker sort of thing, and I had just the
opposite stance, and I was like, this is absurd, and
there's no way I ever want to be found up
on that podium accepting the award, because it will have
(31:23):
meant that I dropped obligations and duties that matter a
whole lot to me. So I guess that's where I
want to ask, too, how do we find create a
proper attachment to work or we are working hard, where
we're producing good work, where we are a part of
the organization in a meaningful way without going above and beyond.
We don't want to be lackadaisa whole, but we also
(31:43):
don't want to over exert ourselves and basically inhibit the
ability for those other identity forming necessities to take place.
Speaker 3 (31:56):
Yeah, I mean, I love the question. It reminds me
of office space. Where to for anistans wearing the vest
with like flare at the.
Speaker 2 (32:02):
Restaurant, pieces of flair exactly.
Speaker 3 (32:05):
It's like, you know, she's wearing what the expectation was set,
but like the idea is that you shouldn't wear the minimum.
You should be going about and beyond and wearing the
most flair, you know. And I think like, it's amazing
how easy sometimes it is to incentivize workers to stay
late or to work on the weekends. There's sort of
like the equivalent of like the free T shirt that
(32:26):
you can get, you know, like, what about one hundred
dollars actually costing the company or what is it costing you?
So in the book, I advocate for a more transactional
approach to work. And it might sound crass to treat
a job as a transaction, you know, especially because we've
been told that jobs are meant to be meanings and
identities and vocations and callings, not mere paychecks. But I
(32:48):
think a more transactional approach to work can actually benefit
both employers and employees. I think it freese employers to
be able to be straightforward about what the expectations for
good work looks like, to be clear and setting up
you know, this is what success would mean, and these
(33:10):
are the numbers that we're hoping you hit. This is
the sort of standards that we have here as a company.
And it frees employees to you know, talk about compensation
in a fair way and not think that somehow talking
about money is undermining the best interest of the company.
It Freese employees to understand what is expected of them,
(33:32):
and more than anything, it frees employees to treat work
as part of, but not the entirety, of their lives.
And you know, we're talking a lot about quiet quitting
and workers that are sort of phoning it in. I
don't actually think that is a recipe for fulfillment or
happiness either. You know, Like, I'm sure we can all
(33:54):
relate to the work days where you don't have enough
work to do and you're sort of just twiddling your
thumbs and the clock is moving slower than you thought
was humanly possible. I think treating work as like a
necessary evil is not necessarily a recipe for fulfillment either.
Speaker 4 (34:11):
But I think why social media was invented.
Speaker 3 (34:14):
Exactly just to fill all the it's like a fills
all the unoccupied space in our days. But you know,
I think it's it's finding that balance of like, what
do you want works role to be in your life?
How does that intersect with the necessities to do a
good enough job for your company, and how you can
invest the time and energy that you have in other
(34:36):
aspects of who you are. What I like about the
sort of title of the book, The good enough job
is that it's intentionally subjective. You know, you get to
decide what good enough means to you. Maybe it's a
job that pays a certain amount of money, or maybe
it's a job that has a certain title or isn't
a certain industry, or maybe it's a job that gets
off at a certain hour so that you can pick
(34:58):
up your kids from childcare. But whatever sort of your
definition of good enough is, I employ you to recognize
when you have it, because that's what will allow you
to set better boundaries around when you can say the
workday is done and not necessarily feel like you're always,
(35:18):
you know, somehow fallen behind if you're not getting ahead.
Speaker 4 (35:22):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (35:22):
Yeah, Well, like you said, it's not necessarily a bad thing.
It's not, and it also shouldn't be your sole focus.
It's so hard to find that balance. But you've talked
about setting some of these boundaries here in your book,
and we're actually going to get to some of the
practical ways that we can try to help decide for
ourselves what the good enough job is. We'll get to
(35:43):
all of that right after this.
Speaker 1 (35:54):
All right, we're back from the break still talking with
Cimo stoles off about doing work that's good enough, and
I really love that framework, but specifically, how do we
get there with the day job that we've got going on,
whether we're self employed or we have, you know, a
W two job. Let's talk Sima for a second about
(36:15):
drawing better work boundaries, because I love the concept, but
in practice it seems like it could be a little
more difficult. How do we make sure that we're working
the way we want, not being wrung dry by our employer,
and that we still get to keep our job right
because we still got to pay the mortgage or the
rents or whatever it is.
Speaker 3 (36:32):
Yeah, totally. I think you know, the question with boundaries
is it's tricky. It can be a fine line, literally,
and I think sometimes those boundaries are incumbent on the
worker to draw, and sometimes the responsibility should actually lie
on the employer. My mentor that I mentioned earlier, and
Helen Peterson, she has this great distinction between the difference
(36:53):
between boundaries and guardrails. You can think about boundaries as
sort of like the line and then the of the
highway that keeps you from going to from one lane
to another, whereas guardrails are structural they're put in place
by the state. They're the metal things on the side
of the road that keep you from going over. And
I think, you know, one of the problems with individually
(37:16):
imposed boundaries is that they inevitably break. You know, you
can have an intention to work less, but if there
is a deadline, or it's near the end of the
quarter and you have a quarterly sales goal, or your
boss tells you to work more hours, it can be
hard to raise your hand and be like, actually, I
(37:36):
have a boundary, you know. I mean, I definitely found
this in writing the book, you know, the great Irony said,
I was like working on this book about the culture
of overwork in America, and in many ways I was
my own worst manager then. So I would, you know,
feel crappy on weeks where I didn't hit my writing
(37:58):
goal and I wouldn't have to open up the laptop
on the weekend, even though I had a quote unquote
boundary that I didn't want to do that. And so
I think, you know, the first point is that a
lot of the onus to set these boundaries actually should
rest on the company and on managers and creating cultures
where it's okay for people to take time off, creating
(38:19):
plans in place for distributing the workloads so that there
isn't an undue burden placed on any individual, Hiring enough
employees so that there's enough work, enough workers to spread
out the work, and also creating norms around like when
you should be on or off the clock. But I
also think that individuals also deserve a certain level of
(38:41):
responsibility that the one step that I always come back
to is in Japan they have the most progressive parental
leave and specifically for fathers parntal Leaf policy and the world,
fathers are entitled to up to a year of paid
time after they have a kid. The last data that
I looked at, only five percent of Japanese fathers took
(39:06):
the entirety of the time that they were allotted, and
so it sort of points to these two necessities. There
needs to be the sort of policies in place that
allow people to do things other than work or prioritize
things outside of their work life, but there also needs
to be the cultural will to do so, and I
think that is what some of this kind of deprogramming
(39:30):
or having a sufficiency mindset when it comes to work
can allow us to do.
Speaker 2 (39:35):
Yeah, that's and this is why we love your approach, Cimo.
I mean, you're finding yourself in the radical middle, because
I feel like it's easy just to point to one
end of the spectrum or the other and be like,
that's the devil if we need to do the or exactly.
But yeah, you're saying, you know, there is a certain
degree of responsibility that falls with the actual company, but
(39:55):
that doesn't mean that we're not off the hook. And
I think in particular, we need a channel our efforts
in the areas that I think where we can move
the needle the most for us as individuals. And when
it came to for you to talk about some of
the different boundaries that we can draw in our lives,
like you talk about too, how there are some folks
who like to have their work to be more integrated
(40:15):
within their life, right, And so it's not even saying
that what you should do is have hard boundaries and
that's going to be how you're going to be able
to achieve happiness and a successful life. But it seems
like you're just asking a lot of questions and you
want individuals to kind of do the hard work, and
it seems like that that is at the core of
the problem here is that a lot of individuals they
are not doing that difficult work. They're not setting goals
(40:38):
for themselves. You know, they're chasing status. They're chasing after
rankings or job titles or salaries as opposed to taking
the time and thinking through what it is that they
want for themselves. I mean, do you feel like that
that's accurate?
Speaker 3 (40:50):
Yeah, totally. And you know, I mean the actual form
out of the book is chronicle people's stories in different industries,
and the one that stands out here is the story
of a Wall Street banker that I tell it's perhaps
like the most cliche story in the book. This guy
was a valedictorian and he went to an Ivy League
college and got a job on Wall Street that paid
(41:12):
the most, and quickly rose up the ranks of the
firm and was one of the youngest vps in the
firm's history. And from his perch at the top of
the org chart, he realized that he was playing a
game that he didn't actually want to win, so, you know,
and he hadn't taken the time to look up and ask,
(41:33):
what is it that I actually want? You know, he
was always just chasing what the market valued. But I
think you know, the wisdom in his story is that
the other end of the spectrum, where you just think
about what you want without considering what the market wants,
is dangerous as well. It's the kind of thing that
might get you in a situation where you assume a
(41:54):
lot of student debt to pursue a graduate degree that
might not actually lead to job back on the other end,
or a situation where you're an artist but you're so
preoccupied by how you're going to pay rent that you
can't actually focus on the art that you hope to create.
And so, you know, it might be a little simplistic,
but I think it's really important to hold both of
(42:17):
those incentives in your hand at the same time and
thinking about, Okay, what is it that I value, what
is it that the market values, and how can I
find work that marries the two.
Speaker 1 (42:28):
Yeah, and so one of the things I loved about
your book was that it wasn't some sort of self
help ten steps to a better relationship with your job,
and it was more storytelling. But I guess I am
also curious at the end, like when we talk about
having that conversation with your boss, with your direct manager.
Let's say you've been somewhere for years and you feel like,
(42:49):
over time there's just been this encroachment and so I
feel like of your employer on your own personal time,
and you found it harder to set boundaries, which I
think probably a lot of people could relate to that.
What does it look like then, too, I mean you
might start looking down the road to work somewhere else, right,
that's potentially one solution. But what if you're like, I
(43:09):
really like my job, I would just like to have
a more normal relationship with it. How would you suggest
starting to have that conversation with your direct supervisor to
kind of set up boundaries that are going to make
sense for both of you.
Speaker 3 (43:22):
Yeah, I think you know, there are things that you
can do within the confines of the workplace, and there
are things that you can do outside of the workplace.
When it comes to talking with your manager, I always
go back to just clarity of expectations. I think one
thing that drives people to over work is this desire
to sort of perform that they're doing a good job.
(43:44):
You know, this in the office world might mean just
like putting in FaceTime at the office and staying at
your desk. In the home world, that might be you know,
just sitting around on Slack or Microsoft teams waiting for
someone to send you a message. But what we should
be valuing is the quality of the work itself. And
so that's where I often start when I advise people
(44:05):
about talking to their bosses or their managers having a
very clear conversation about, Okay, where are we what is
the sort of like status of the quality of the
work that I am producing? Where am I meeting expectations?
Where am I exceeding expectations? If you want to try
and get promoted or move to the next level, what
(44:25):
is the type of work that you are expected to do?
And just making some of those things clear and so
you're not just sort of putting in pennies to the
proverbial work piggybank, hoping to cash out one day, but
you're actually, you know, working clearly towards what good work
looks like at your company. When it comes to your
life outside of.
Speaker 1 (44:46):
Work, focusing on the work, I like that, yeah, yeah,
not on the other stuff. Hey, am I here enough?
I'm I here enough hours? I feel like that. That's presenteeism.
You start to feel like that's part of the work
that's required, but that's not the work totally.
Speaker 3 (45:00):
You know, certain industries are just really set up in
a way that then make this very hard. Like I
think I'm thinking of like lawyers, for example, who are
asked to track their billable hours in like six minute
or fifteen minute increments. And I was talking to a
few lawyers for the book, and they're saying, you know,
it is disincentive for me to do efficient work. You
(45:20):
know that I get no material award for working efficiently
or doing high quality of work. It's all just about
the number of hours I spend on the work. And
that incentive structure is just so backwards, you know, Like
I understand that lawyers bill hourly, and so there should
be an expectation that they're you know, doing a certain
(45:40):
number of hours in order to do work for the firm.
But you know, what we should be rewarding is the
quality of the work itself. And I think that can
be extended to so many other fields. The thing I
always advise people for outside of the office is you know,
I talked a little bit about doing things other than
work and practice this means sort of like having active
(46:03):
forms of leisure. You know, like, if you want to
conceive of yourself as more than just someone who exists
on this earth to produce economic value or economic returns
for a corporation, try and find realms of your life
where people maybe don't even know what you do for
work or don't care about your job title. You know.
(46:25):
And this doesn't necessarily have to be taking up knitting
or a personal hobby. While I do think there is
value in being able to do something just for the
joy of it or just for the fun of it.
It can mean getting involved in your neighborhood or your
local community. It can mean finding a community of people
like a sports team or a book club, that your
(46:48):
value to that community is not tied to your value
in the office. It's something where you can show up
in a different realm and start to kind of cultivate
those different identities. You know, just a recent example, I'm Jewish,
and there are there's like a dormant Jewish identity somewhere
deep inside of me. I'm not very not a very
(47:11):
active Jew. But you know, recently it was Passover and
you know, I sat around the table with my family
and we participated in some of the traditions of the religion.
And it was through that behavior. It was through that
activity of actively doing something related to Judaism that I
felt my identity as a Jewish person began to grow.
(47:32):
And so you can think about that in any realm
of your life, whether you're a craft beer aficionado, that
identity will grow if you are actively taking time to
learn more about the craft beers, are going out drinking
with friends.
Speaker 4 (47:46):
Just don't let it grow too much. Tay sober out there, folks.
Speaker 2 (47:48):
But absolutely, well, Simo, this has been an awesome conversation.
We really appreciate you taking a time to just talk
to us about finding that balance. Where is it that
folks can learn more about you and specific where they
can find your book.
Speaker 3 (48:02):
Yeah, the best place to go is the good Enough
job dot com. And this is my first book and
so every order or pre order really makes a big difference,
and there you can find all of my socials and
other information that you might need.
Speaker 2 (48:17):
Awesome. Well, thank you again for joining us here on
the podcast, Semo.
Speaker 3 (48:21):
Thanks for having me all.
Speaker 1 (48:22):
Right, Matt, gotta love that conversation with Simone. I feel
like there is like so much of what he has
written about, and what he talks about we've talked about
in different ways over the years, exactly, not with the
eloquence or the precision.
Speaker 2 (48:35):
We certainly have not written a book on it. I mean,
it's just one of the reasons I mean that we
wanted to have him on because the message that he
has it's so important, and honestly, the more ways that
you can talk about it, like the different angles that
you can take to the same end goal, well, if
that helps others to find that balance and to find
that fulfillment and happiness in life, we are all for
(48:55):
it for sure.
Speaker 4 (48:56):
All right. So what was your big takeaway from this combo?
Speaker 1 (48:58):
Was it that we should all be more chocolate cookies,
preferably with a little bit of sea salt, That a
little bit of sea salt really makes them stand down?
Speaker 4 (49:04):
I think I thought you made Yeah.
Speaker 2 (49:05):
Personally, I like a touch of oatmeal in there as well,
just say it adds a little bit of chew.
Speaker 4 (49:10):
Just not raisins.
Speaker 2 (49:11):
Yeah, it's not raisins. You hate on raisins there, Okay.
So I think my big takeaway is that so many
of the things, so many of the problems and the
different myths that he addresses in the book. It's not
that they are something we should completely avoid, but it's
just that we are relying on our job to meet
those ends more than we should. Uh So, for instance,
when it comes to the job you do, should you
(49:33):
be passionate about it? Well, maybe we should be less
focused on the passion side of things and instead, first
and foremost, like he said, we should be thinking about
it like an economic contract. Yes, I'm going to exchange
my time and my talents for a paycheck.
Speaker 4 (49:47):
And if you like the job, that's great, be on
top exactly.
Speaker 2 (49:49):
Yeah, And how maybe we shouldn't be looking to our
jobs to find that interpersonal relationship and to the extent
that we even think of our coworkers as family, but
instead we should maybe maintain a degre of professionalism. And
if we think about it from maybe more of that
transactional framework, Like within that framework, I think it could
be healthier because honestly, I feel like it kind of
(50:10):
goes counter to what a lot of folks are saying,
where they're just like, oh, no, no, no, you know, like
the whole if you're an employee here, we treat you
like family and like that whole approach but.
Speaker 4 (50:18):
It benefits from that relationship typically the employer.
Speaker 2 (50:20):
Yeah, not you, And it leaves the employee in an
unhealthy position once you get fired or once you leave
that job and you're trying to and you're rudderless and
you're trying to figure out what you're gonna do next.
Speaker 4 (50:29):
But I thought we were family, Yeah exactly.
Speaker 2 (50:31):
Yeah, So I just I don't know. It's interesting to
hear someone take an approach towards your work, towards your
career that d emphasizes the like the interpersonal side of things.
It's it's sort of like it's a way that he
is finding himself in the middle because he's not going
to the far extreme and saying that like, oh, yeah,
we should all be completely disenchanted with our job. We
should only be thinking about it as a contract, but
(50:54):
that you should only do the bare minimum either, right exactly.
Speaker 4 (50:57):
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (50:57):
So there's a way to find fulfilling work, and there's
also a way to find work that's going to pay
you well, but you don't necessarily have to sell your
soul in order to achieve that on either end of
the spectrum.
Speaker 1 (51:08):
Yep, No, I think it's a good way to put it.
My big take about you though. Yeah, when he said
all of our identities need investments, I thought that was great.
And he basically talked about how they're similar to houseplants,
and my thought was, Man, a lot of our houseplants,
at least in my house, are parched, like we're not
doing a good enough job with them. And I think
the same is true for a lot of our identities
(51:28):
areas in our life. Yeah, like when it comes to spouse,
when it comes to parent, when it comes to community involvement.
We talked about that Wall Stream journal I can't get
that out of my head, just that poll about how
people value money more than they value community, more than
they value patriotism, or in they value family these days.
It speaks so much about where we're at as a culture.
I think we value our careers way more than we
(51:49):
value a lot of those things too, because our careers
are so tied to money, and that is a shame.
And so we need to start to think about how
we can start watering, start pruning, start taking care of
those other identity forming factors in our lives, like hobbies,
like interpersonal relationships. And I think that will in all
likelihood mean putting a little bit less into work and career,
(52:10):
and I think we'll be happier for it. So I
guess is this where I put in my two weeks? Notice, Matt, sure,
just kidding, but now.
Speaker 2 (52:18):
We are more how to money for folks.
Speaker 4 (52:20):
We try not to overdo it and and that is.
Speaker 2 (52:22):
All about finding that balance.
Speaker 1 (52:24):
Part of the reason we love it because we're not
working sixty hours a week doing it. But Matt, let's
go back to the beer that we had on this episode.
This is a beer I picked up when I was
out on the West Coast. It's Ye scrap Alicious by
Los Angeles Aleworks. What are your thoughts on this ipa?
Speaker 2 (52:36):
Is the whole scrap alicious thing? Is that the name
of this cat?
Speaker 4 (52:39):
I think so? Is it like a brewery cat? I
think so.
Speaker 2 (52:41):
It makes me think about when we were in Kentucky
and we went to Peerless Distillery. They had a distillery
cat that's right, that hung around there in the gift shop.
But yeah, man, this was a fantastic juicy ipa, as
it's written here on the label. Just like our conversation
with Simone, it strikes the balance between being incredibly juicy
(53:03):
and having the right amount of sweetness, but at the
same time, it's got like that sharpness, the bitterness that
you get from the Hops that it's been a minute
since I've said blue cheese as I've described an IPA,
but this one kind of had some of those sharp
blue cheese elements. And when you're able to strike that
perfect balance between the two, you end up with an
amazing beer.
Speaker 1 (53:21):
I feel like when you describe an IPA, you don't
typically want to describe it as funky, but occasionally there
is an IPA.
Speaker 2 (53:28):
And blue cheese is funky.
Speaker 1 (53:29):
Yeah, and you can call it funky and it's a
good thing. Sometimes if it's funky, it means that it's
as a bad thing. Yeah, it's like, oh no, this
is a shelfterd. This was on the shelf from a
year or two, and so it kind of tastes a
little funky, but this is like, no, no, no. The Hops
bring a level of yeah that that just some kind
of unique notes from from the hop set that they
put into this IPA, And so I like it. It
(53:50):
was juicy, a little funky, and overall good vibes from
this one.
Speaker 2 (53:54):
Yeah, Specifically, if you're really into the Hops, that's got
I've never even heard of these first two hops brew
one Loral and then Sabro.
Speaker 1 (54:02):
Yeah, I've seen those hops on labels before, but not
this first two. So so many hot varieties now, it's ridiculous.
You know, you just gotta go down there one of
these days. You want to go to a hot farm
down in New Zealand.
Speaker 2 (54:12):
Uh yeah, that sounds pretty cool field trip. Maybe in
like five ten years, who knows, But yeah, enough about
the beer. Be sure to look out for Simone's book.
It's set to be published here in a couple of weeks.
I found it to be incredibly thought provoking and hopefully
I wonder if this is one of his goals. But
just for you to be able to ask yourself a
bunch of different questions as you process and do the
(54:34):
hard work of figuring out what it is that you're
looking for, like that, not just in your statement, yeah exactly,
not just in your job, but honestly just in life overall.
But we'll make sure to have links up on the
website at how toomoney dot com. And Buddy, that's going
to be it for this episode. Until next time, Best
Friends Out, Best Friends Out.
Speaker 3 (55:00):
You don't fool
Hosts And Creators
Joel Larsgaard
Matthew Altmix
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