Wondery plus subscribers can listen to 10% happier early and add free right now. Join Wondery plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. This is the 10% Happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris.
Hello, gang. One of the central themes in my life and in my work has been the balance between happiness and ambition. Can you boost your calm quotient without losing your professional edge? Today, we've got a guest who challenges a lot of my deep conditioning around this subject. I have for better or worse often defined myself by my work. One of the first questions I ask people when I meet them is what do you do? I even ask kids sometimes, what do you want to do when you grow up?
My guest today argues that it is psychologically dangerous to define yourself by your work. Now, he is not anti-ambition. It's just that he thinks that for many of us, things are out of whack. In particular, he's worried that we often get too focused on the dream job. Simone Stalzoff is the author of a new book called The Good Enough Job. He's a writer, designer, and workplace expert from San Francisco.
He is a former design lead at the Global Innovation Firm IDEO and a graduate of Stanford and the University of Pennsylvania. We talk about his argument for diversifying our sources of what makes a meaningful life, how passionate for your job should not be a stand-in for pay or security, and how to balance the pursuit of meaningful work without letting it take over your whole life.
I should say this is episode one of a big four part series we're launching today called sanely ambitious. We thought Labor Day would be a good time to kick this thing off over the next two weeks. We've got episodes about how to integrate mindfulness into work and how to handle big emotions at the office and how to redefine success and more. I think you're going to like it. Hit me up on Twitter or via the 10% happier website or the app with your feedback. I want to hear it.
unrelated little plug here. I want to put in a mention for a live event. I'm doing outside of Denver at the Mile High Church on November 3rd. If you can't be there in person, you can watch the live stream. There's a link for tickets in the show notes.
Before we get started, I want to remind you of all the good stuff we're doing over at DanHarris.com these days. You probably heard me announce that we've started a new community through sub-stack, which includes all kinds of perks for subscribers, such as the ability to chat with me and sometimes our guests.
about each of the new podcast episodes. Video, ask me anything sessions, even live meditation sessions with me. Plus you'll get a cheat sheet, which includes full transcript and key takeaways from every episode. Recently we had my friend, Sebene Selassie and Jeff Warren in the chat. And we've got plenty of other podcast guests who are gonna be hopping into the chat in the coming weeks. So stay tuned for that. We're having a lot of fun. We'd love you to join us. It's eight bucks a month or 80 bucks a year.
or free for anybody who can't afford it. No questions asked. Just head over to DanHarris.com. We'll see you there. Meanwhile, I want to give you an update on what's happening over on the Happier app. As you know, I used to be involved with that app. I'm not anymore, but I'm going to continue to update you on their doings. They are very excited to announce something very cool. They have teamed up with two of the world's most renowned meditation centers, the Insight Meditation Society and Spirit Rock for an exclusive retreat giveaway.
Two winners will receive a $1,500 credit to go on a retreat, a $600 travel credit, and a complimentary four-year membership to the Happier app. The giveaway is from October 1st to October 14th. Enter now at HappierApp.com slash retreat giveaway. That's HappierApp.com forward slash retreat giveaway.
Wondering new podcasts, even the royals pulls back the curtain on the darker side of royal families past and present from all over the world, where status comes at the expense of your freedom, your privacy, and sometimes even your head. New episodes come out every week. Listen to even the royals early and ad-free on Wondery Plus. Simone Stalzoff, welcome to the show. Thanks, Dan. It's a pleasure to be here.
Pleasure to have you here. So let me ask you a very basic question. Can you just lay out the basic thesis of your book?
Yeah, I'd be happy to. Let's start with the title. The title is The Good Enough Job. And it's an allusion to this theory that was devised by this British pediatrician named Donald Bonacat in the mid 20th century. And so Bonacat was observing how there was this growing idolization of parenting. These British parents wanted to be the perfect parent and shield their kid from experiencing any sort of negative emotion or harm
And then when the kid and I really thought frustrated or sad or angry, the parent took it extremely personally. They thought it was a reflection of their own shortcomings. And so when it got thought that approached that valued sufficiency as opposed to perfection would be better off for both the child and the parent. The child would learn to self-soothe and take care of some of their own problems and the parent wouldn't lose themselves and their children's emotion.
So obviously I'm making a direct parallel to the working world and the ways in which work and jobs have become idolized particularly in the past four decades or so. And borrowing from Winnicott arguing that an approach that values sufficiency, a good enough job might actually benefit workers much like a
a crying toddler a job is not something that's always in our control and so thinking about a job as good enough a way to support the life that you want to live as opposed to the central axis around which the rest of your life orbits might be a formula for more fulfillment and happiness in the long run.
So honest response to that is I completely agree with Winnicott on the good enough parent thing, having tried it for a couple of years and I love it, but constantly screwing up on the good enough job, given my conditioning as, you know, homo economicus or whatever the hard charging ambitious raised by hard charging ambitious people surrounded by them. Part of me hears that and thinks, oh, it's perfectly reasonable.
And part of me here is like, oh, well, you're just giving up. Totally. Yeah. Even just looking at the title, you might think it's this slacker manifesto, the good enough job and excuse to sit on our couches. But in actuality, the thing that I like about the framework is that it's subjective. So you get to choose what good enough means to you.
perhaps it's a job that pays a certain wage, perhaps it's a job that's in a certain industry or a job that allows you to have a certain type of impact or maybe it's a job that gets off at a certain hour so that you could pick up your kids from school at three o'clock. But the other side of the good enough job is it's a foil to the dream job. This idea that there's this one perfect job out there that if you haven't found it, you can continue to search your whole life.
And I think the argument that I'm making is about the value of diversifying our sources of identity and meaning. So much as an investor benefits from diversifying the sources of stocks in their portfolio, we too benefit from diversifying the sources of meaning and identity in our life. And thinking about a job as just one part of, but not the entirety of who we are builds a much more stable foundation, even if you are ambitious or you want to do world changing work.
I believe you draw the analogy to romance. Many of us raised the idea of finding a soulmate, Tom Cruise, saying, you complete me with string music swelling beneath the dream partner or the dream spouse. But there are probably many people we could do the work of making a great life with. And you want to have
more people in life than just your spouse to rely on. So you're not putting all the pressure on your identity as being part of that couple. And that diversification applies to work. Yeah, I think Esther Pearl has done some really awesome work on this topic. And she basically says that we're often looking to a single person to do the quote unquote job of an entire village.
I think this is particularly true in the United States these days, with the decline of other sources of identity and meaning in people's lives. Things like organized religion or neighborhood and community groups. So many Americans are turning to the place where they spend the majority of their time, the workplace, to fulfill all of these needs of belonging and community and identity and purpose.
And I argue that this isn't necessarily a burden. Our jobs are designed to bear. I had not heard that argument, the organized religion argument vis-a-vis work until I started preparing for this discussion with you. It's really interesting because
We've seen so many fascinating consequences of the decline of organized religion, people turning to everything from soul cycle to their local meditation parlor as a replacement. But yes, of course, work has to fall into that and it becomes even more central to our lives in ways that can be unhealthy.
Yeah, there's this colleague of mine at the Atlantic Derek Thompson who coined this term workism, which I think is so apt. And I remember the first time hearing about this term, it felt so resonant to me. Another Esther Prell quote is that too many of us bring the best of ourselves to work and bring the leftovers home. And I think this is one of the main costs of workism is
If we are giving all of our best time and energy to our jobs, we can neglect these other identities that exist within us, the neighbor and the parent and the friend and the traveler and the artist. But I think there are another couple of risks that have really shown in the past few years in the pandemic. One of which is that your job might not always be there. If you treat your job as your primary source of identity and meaning, and you lose your job,
What's left? This is a lesson that so many have had to have to learn in the pandemic due to furloughs or layoffs. And then the third is just about expectations. I think often about happiness as being sort of the difference between our expectations and our reality. And when we have these sky-high expectations of looking to our jobs to deliver transcendence or self-actualization, it creates a lot of room underneath that for disappointment.
Yes, and I would say that provided, and I've had two careers, intertwined one, you know, being a club-trading journalist and the other being a quasi self-help guru. Both of them have provided a lot of really profound meaning and transcendence. And of course, a lot of bad shit too.
Yeah, I agree. I definitely have gotten a lot from the different jobs I've had in my life. I don't think there's anything wrong with a job being a source of meaning or a source of identity. I think it just becomes risky or problematic when it is the sole source of identity.
You know, I think our society loves to revere people whose identities and their jobs neatly align the social entrepreneur or the astronaut or the anchor man, for example. And, you know, there's this anecdote that I talk about in the book from a moment, my senior year of college, I was studying poetry and economics. And you can already see the sort of tension between art and commerce in my life. And
I had the opportunity to interview my favorite writer in the entire world. His name is Anis Mojgani. He's the current poet laureate of the state of Oregon. And I remember I asked him, Anis, how do you feel about the mantra, do what you love and never work a day in your life?
And I was expecting him to give me this pep talk about following my passion and pursuing poetry and the money will follow. And he said something that I'll never forget. He said, you know, Simone, some people do what they love for work and others do what they have to for work so they can do what they love when they're not working. And neither is more noble.
And I think that last part is key. Dan, you and I have been lucky enough to align a lot of our interests with our livelihoods. And the majority of Americans, the majority of people do not actually work to self-actualize. They work to survive. And so here was my professional idol, a professional poet, no less, telling me that maybe it's okay to have a day job and do what you love when you're not working. Yeah, I thousand percent agree with that. There are the issues of
for lack of a less annoying word privilege or luck. I want to talk about your background, but I can speak with authority about my own and it's massively lucky. So, of course, I had more opportunities to use work to get a job that would self-actualize. I haven't had to work.
just to survive. So just wanna plus one on that. And then I know people who may also have been raised with a lot of privilege and just haven't found a passion. And I can see among some of them that they feel guilty about that. That's not a moral failing.
Yeah, I mean, particularly in the United States, you might think it is in the way that we idolize work and the way that we treat CEOs like celebrities and plaster always do what you love on the walls of our co-working spaces. You know, here our self-worth and our productivity are so tightly bound that not
Finding a job where you can do what you love is often perceived either implicitly or explicitly as some sort of character flaw or some sort of moral shortcoming when in actuality that's just not the reality for the majority of workers.
To go back to a few things you said earlier that I wanted to loop back to, you invoked Esther Perel, who's a friend and has been on the show many times. I love her. And she says something that definitely resonates with me, which is, and you repeated it, which is that many of us bring our all or the best parts of ourselves to our work and everybody else gets the leftovers. But I'm just wondering, is it really zero some? Is there no way to be awesome all the time?
No, I don't think so. And I think the research backs us up. It shows that people with greater what researchers call self-complexity tend to be, for example, more resilient in the face of adversity. This makes sense. If you are rising and falling,
solely based on your professional accomplishments and your boss has something disparaging, or you have a bad day at the office. It can very easily spill over into all the other facets of your life. But the research also shows that people with more varied hobbies and interests outside of work
tend to be more creative, more innovative, better problem solvers. And so I think they actually feed each other. It's not this zero sum game, either you're prioritizing work or you're prioritizing life. Often when we have a more
diversified portfolio of meaning. There's sort of the business case to be made about the way in which it fuels our work life in the same way that having jobs that are good enough allow us to be better parents and neighbors and siblings and citizens.
And I think the natural inclination, especially right now in our world, is to either lionize or villainize work, to say that work sucks. And we do it too much, and our entire world is centered around it, or to say that work is the only way that you can make a difference in the world. And if you haven't found your dream job, keep searching. And I think what I'm trying to advocate for is a middle path.
for a way to treat our jobs as a way to support our vision of a life well lived, as opposed to the other way around. So what you concluded with was the idea that your thesis is nuanced, and it's really up to us to make the decision, but we shouldn't be burdened by the notion inculcated into all of us, as you often point out, through this cultural tick we have of asking little kids what they want to be when they grow up.
which I'd note to self, I guess I'm going to try to stop doing. I just want to acknowledge that I get your point, and I hope I'm regurgitating it with some semblance of accuracy. And I also just wanted to say that this idea of having more stuff going on outside of work can actually help your work. It appeals to me as a
died in the wool optimizer. And it's been made to me by previous guests like Alex Sujung Kim Kang, who wrote a book called Rest. And he talked about how rest and work are two sides of the same coin. And by rest, he doesn't mean just napping. He means also active rest and hobbies. It could be for woodworking or hiking or exercise or whatever that will make you better at your job. Given my conditioning and personality, I find that to be a very compelling argument.
Yeah, I totally agree. I think one of the things that we don't think about enough is the ways in which our jobs don't just take our best hours, but often our best energy too. And like the researcher you just mentioned, if we want to derive meaning and other aspects of our life, it might sound simplistic, but we have to do things other than work.
and doing things requires time and energy, no offense to Netflix. But if we just work and then come home and try to turn off our brains and turn on the TV, we're not going to necessarily cultivate a more diverse identity portfolio. You're not going to find meaning from things in your life, like your relationships or your hobbies or your local community. These things are sort of like plants. They require time and attention in order to grow.
And when we are intentional about investing in them in the same way that we might invest in our careers, we're much more likely to be fulfilled. Note to the listener, we are going to talk about what practical steps you can take to broaden your identity in this way. But let's just stay at a higher level for a few more minutes. Just out of curiosity, should we and have you stopped asking kids what they want to be when they grow up?
Yeah, I mean, I'm a phase in my life where I'm not surrounded by too many youngsters right now, but I think the sort of adult equivalent is the cocktail party line of, so what do you do? And I think in many ways it's so indicative of our work-centric culture that we ask people to define themselves based on their job titles. And so I have a little hack that I've
they've been using recently, which is instead of asking people, what do you do trying to insert two little words into that canonical piece of small talk and ask people what do you like to do? And I think just that subtle shift can help people define themselves on their own terms.
allow them to define themselves based on how they spend their time or where they find meaning in their life and not just the sort of classist question of, okay, I'm going to size you up based on your industry and your job title. And maybe the task of assumption is that I'm looking around to see if there's anyone else that might be more worthy of my time to speak with. I'm guilty of all of that. And I do often find it's interesting in telling what people have chosen to do for work.
Yeah, you know, me too. And it's a large part of our days. And I don't think there's anything wrong with talking about our careers or I don't think we need sort of no work zones. But I do think that for certain circles, it can be a question that puts an undue burden on the respondent to have to have a sexy or cool or mission driven job for that exact reason, just to be perceived as worthy in the eyes of the people around them.
So a tweak would be just, what are you up to? What are you into these days? What are you interested in? How do you spend your time? Yeah, exactly. I think I spoke with a lot of people for the book who had some sort of inciting incident in their life, like a layoff or having a kid or having a health scare that really put things in perspective for them.
but made answering the question, what do you do cause for a nervous breakdown? It can really send you for an existential loop. But I think the sort of silver lining of some of these big life events where you're forced to prioritize something other than work is that they allow you to define yourself on your own terms. Something specifically about this one woman Liz, who I interviewed for the book, who was your typical sort of type A ambitious
She went to an Ivy League college and she built a swam and was on the water polo team. And then graduated and did Teach for America. Another sort of career path where identity and jobs are often conflated. And it was through her working life when she was working 60, 70 hour weeks that she inflamed her nervous system. She became immunocompromised with a
chronic illness, and she went from swimming six hours a day to her mom spoon feeding her chicken soup in her bed, and she had once derived so much identity and self-worth from her productivity, and her productivity was no longer in her control.
And she told me something that has really stuck with me, which is that she learned a lot from the sort of chronically ill community about the value of defining ourselves based on our evergreen characteristics. So rather than think of herself as a teacher or as a D one athlete.
or as an overachiever, she started to define herself based on being generous with her time or being a loyal friend. These traits that no market or boss or company could take away from her. And I don't know, it feels like the type of wisdom that can be relevant to all of us, not just people who are struggling with health scares in their life, but
from the ways that we just conceive of our own identity of what are the traits that are inherent to us that aren't necessarily contingent on achievement or some sort of external validation? Again, I'm finding myself agreeing with it intellectually, but feeling like there's no way I could do that. It just cuts against the grain of, you know, 52 years of breathing on planet Earth. Hmm.
Yeah, I hear that. I mean, I wonder, for you, what was it like to take a step out of the newsroom after having worked for 20 years and having defined yourself largely by what you did? How did it feel to no longer be able to do that for a short period of time?
I had two career simultaneously and they were intertwined, you know, being a news anchor and then being what I jokingly referred to as a quasi self-help guru or meditation evangelist, whatever. So walking away from ABC, well, first of all, it was, it had some upsides because I was sleeping more and less harried and busy. So that was nice. But yeah, it had some identity stuff of like, um, so I'm not an anchor man anymore.
I was actually having dinner at the anthem night with somebody who used to be a pretty prominent acrobat and interesting to talk to him about it, too. It's a strange feeling to lose that part of my identity. But for me, I had this whole other piece, so it wasn't that big of a leap.
I think a lot of people that I interviewed for the book had something like having a kid as being a big event that helped them sort of re-jigger their identity beyond something that was sort of tied to their professional achievement or just some sort of event where we can try on different identities for size. For example, I love to play pick up basketball.
I think one of the benefits of playing basketball each week is that it's a community that could frankly care less about what I do for work. They don't care about how many words I've written that week or how many books I've sold. They care about whether I am a good passer or I box out when I rebound or show up on time.
I think it can be really refreshing to inhabit these other containers of our life where people have different value systems. I think certainly the office or the workplace can provide one great one. And our success is often easily quantifiable or measured. But it's just one sort of priority system about what matters. And then there's a lot of benefit both to our health and to our community when we're able to also find other arenas to
spend time in and other identities that we can exhibit in those different spaces.
Yeah, I hear two things in there that resonate with me despite my conditioning. One is, yes, for sure, getting involved in different types of communities. I've done volunteer work or my friend group or playing in a band with people. These are all just examples from my own life, but obviously people listening will have their own. That is good. It does kind of de-center work in ways that feel good, whether I was or am aware of it or not directly.
And then the second thing is we talked about parenting, not everybody listening to this is a parent, but it was something about this anecdote you were relating about the woman saying this really powerful thing, but just didn't resonate with me personally about how her new identity was somebody who was generous with her time or a good friend. Maybe I'm neither of those things and that's why I didn't land. But being a dad, that definitely, that definitely lands for me.
Yeah, and I think one of the things in writing a book like this is it's hard to be prescriptive with one size fits all solutions. Obviously, I can't tell you from my desk here in San Francisco what other identities are important to you or what parts of your non-work self are worth investing in.
And I think that's a choice that we all have to make, to think about what are the other values that we have and what are ways in which we are dedicating our time and our energy and our attention to those values. And I think becoming a dad is a great forcing function to have to introspect and ask some of those questions.
Yes, again, your point is not to be prescriptive, but to say we should do the thinking because it will make us happier right now, probably. And if things go haywire at work, which can happen to anybody, it'll be nice to have done that. So let me ask you the long delayed question that I keep meaning to get to, which is why is this so important to you? What's happened in your life that you've come? You have to have a lot of passion around a subject to write a whole book about it. What happened with you?
Yeah, you know, the old cliches that you write the book that you need to read. And yeah, in many ways, my entire adult life has been trying to answer this question of what role work should have in my life. And, you know, I think it's worth underlining that even the question, what do you want to do has a certain level of privilege associated with it? You know, it's a question that people with options can afford to entertain.
And thankfully I grew up with some options, you know, coming out of college. I was looking primarily for a job that could be the greatest reflection of myself and my personality and my interests. And so I played Goldilocks with careers. I worked in tech for a few years and then I worked in advertising.
And I worked in journalism and as a magazine reporter, and that's when it really came to a head. There was this moment in my career where I was about 28 or 29, and I was writing for a magazine in New York. And a recruiter reached out to me about a job offer, a design agency based in San Francisco and my hometown.
And on one hand, it's like, oh, the agony of deciding between two attractive job offers. Low is me. Maybe some of our listeners have been at a similar sort of career crossroads. I didn't feel like I was choosing between two jobs as much as it felt like I was choosing between two versions of me.
And it really sent me for an existential loop. I was pretty insufferable at the time, going through my own little existential crisis about who I was and asking a lot of questions about how did my job and my identity become so entwined.
And I knew I wasn't the only one. So that was sort of the first kernel that led to this multi-year research project of questioning how did work come to be so central to American and particular Americans' identities and sources of meaning. And if your last name is Baker or Miller, you might
think that completing who you are and what you do is nothing new, but I do think over the past 40 or 50 years, there have been a few trends that have really exacerbated this movement towards work centricity. There are political factors, for example, the way in which we tie healthcare to employment in this country, or
We tie, if you're an immigrant, your ability to stay in this country to your employment status. There are economic factors for people at the lower end of the income spectrum. With stagnant wages, people have had to work more just to buy the same loaf of bread, whereas people on the other side of the spectrum have been able to consolidate more wealth with the more hours they work.
But you know, the one that I really focus on is this kind of cultural factor, this subjective value that we place on work in this country and how they decline of some of these other institutions that once brought us meaning and identity have led us to the place we're at today. Coming up, Simone talks about how to expand our identity outside of the office and the role that passion should play when pursuing career goals.
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What's up, guys? It's your girl Kiki, and my podcast is back with a new season, and let me tell you, it's so good. And I'm diving into the brains of entertainment's best and brightest, okay? Every episode, I bring on a friend and have a real conversation. And I don't mean just friends. I mean the likes of Amy Poehler, Kel Mitchell, Vivica Fox. The list goes on. So follow, watch, and listen to baby. This is Kiki Palmer on The Wondery App, or wherever you get your podcast.
So how do we expand our identities so that we're not stuck in this dilemma that you describe? Yeah, I think the simplest way to do so is sort of two steps. The first is carving out space in your days, in your weeks where working is not an option. I think particularly for knowledge workers,
where we have offices in our pockets. We're always one swipe away from being back on the clock, work has become extremely leaky. We're all sort of like sharks sleeping with one eye open on our emails or on our work tasks. And to the topic of rest, I don't think that serves our work lives very well when we're always on and not
carving out space to recharge and it doesn't serve our ability to be present and the other sources of our life very well either. One of the benefits of, say, going on a run or going to a yoga class is that you can't multitask while you're doing it. You're there to be present and there are structural protections against working while you're doing some of these activities. Then the second step is just choosing how to fill your time.
I was speaking about earlier, our identities and sources of meaning in our lives grow in proportion with how much attention we give to them. So, you know, you can say that you care about being a good friend, but your identity as a friend will grow in proportion with how much time you're actually spending investing in your relationships.
same with the causes that you care about or your local community or your ability to learn a few songs on the guitar or learn a foreign language. You know, these things that all make us into well-rounded people are deserving of our time and our attention in addition to our work lives. I think the natural inclination
Sometimes I remember speaking to this psychologist for the book and she said, you know, I see all of these type A ambitious professionals and I advise them to invest in their non-work selves and I say, okay, I'm going to sign up for an Ironman or I'm going to read 52 books this year, you know, thinking that it has to be this grand gesture and actually think it's better to start small, to try and pick up a hobby not to
master it or to monetize it, but because it helps you connect with the inherent joy of doing so. I think one of the best antidotes to work as them or work centricity is play, like the different activities in their lives that we do just for the sake of doing them, whether it's
dancing, or jamming, or crafting, or just inhabiting the present moment. There's a sort of mindfulness to it when we're able to entrench in an activity not because it's a means to another end, but as an end in and of itself.
So I hear two interlocking pieces of advice. One is to create as much space as you can in your life where you cannot work because you're in a yoga class, in a soul cycle class running
I don't know, there are a million activities where you can't be multitasking, do those. And the other is, and this is related, it seems, and please correct me if I'm wrong, to engage in activities where there's nothing to be gained from them. And you can expand your identity because you are playing a different role at that time. You are a volunteer, you are a friend, you are a dad, you are the drummer in a band. So am I summing that up correctly?
Yeah, I mean, I'd push back a little bit against the idea that there's nothing to be gained from them, maybe just not anything monetarily. But yeah, just reminders that we exist on this earth to do other things beyond produce economic value. Yes. Well, that's actually, I feel like that's kind of a relief because I exercise and I meditate. And I think certainly for the former and more than I would like to admit for the latter, there is the expectation of some sort of outcome, you know, like with exercise.
I've gradually released the goal of looking a certain way or working on releasing that, but I definitely have the goal of improving my cardiovascular fitness and being healthy for as long as possible for my young son and my wife, and also just being less depressed or anxious because I've discharged some energy, similar goals with meditation. So they're not economic goals, but it seems like it would comport with your idea that there's something to be gained. It's just not monetary.
100%. I think what they do is they help connect us with what intrinsically motivates us, what we find inherent pleasure or joy or fulfillment in doing as opposed to what journalist David Brooks would call the resume virtues, those external markers of validation. I'll tell one more quick anecdote because I think it's illustrative of this exact point, which is
When I was 27, I was working in tech and deciding whether to go back to graduate school to pursue a degree in journalism. And journalism, as you know, on law or medicine, is not a field where you necessarily need a graduate degree in order to do the work. And so I was going back and forth, had this long pro-con list in my head, and I went for a walk with a mentor of mine.
And after hearing me sort of blab on about whether or not I should go, he asked me this question that sort of cut through all the noise. And he said, if you could go back to school, but you couldn't tell anyone that you did it, would you still do it?
And I love that question, you know, it cut straight to the heart of the matter, which is, did I actually want to invest in my craft and learning these skills? Did I want to be a graduate student or do I want to just be someone who had a graduate degree? And I think you can sort of
extrapolate that to all these different realms of our life. You know, like, did you want to meditate or do you want to be someone that had meditated or thinking about different ways in which we can find the activities that we want to do for the inherent joy or pleasure in doing them as opposed to the perception or the amount of likes that you might get when you post a hike on Instagram later. What did you end up doing?
I ended up going to school and I'm glad that I did. But I think if not for that question, I might have never taken the time to consider my own values and my own motivation for doing so. I might have just done it as a bomb for a restless leg or as something to do, as opposed to really connecting with, okay, do I want to do this? Because I value this in and of itself.
a related and I think even more provocative question and one that you include in your book, I'll read a little passage from your book. The activist Dana White recently posed a simple question on Twitter. If capitalism wasn't a thing and you had all your needs met, what would you do with your life?
That reminds me of a similar question that is often posed by the podcaster, Jocelyn K. Gly, who has a podcast called Hurry Slowly, and it's all about these kinds of issues. And she's been on the show, which is, who are you without the doing? And I find that to be a challenging question. What say you?
Yeah, I mean, I think what I loved about that provocation on Twitter is that if you read through the responses that, you know, it runs the gamut there are people that want to be amateur astronauts and people that want to, you know, be regular attendees at their community garden.
But I think what stood out for me was that work is not absent of people's responses. I think there is an inherent drive to want to contribute to something larger than yourself, to want to invest your time and your energy.
in creation or producing something. But it shows that without some of those pressures to always be doing, it can help us connect with the why of the doing beyond just a way to make a buck.
And so I think for me, I feel incredibly lucky to have found a line of work in writing that is something that I would probably do if I weren't paid to do it as well, and to have aligned my way of making money with my personal interests. But I think the beauty of that question is that
It shows and what we find out during the pandemic with, which is that just with a modicum of social support with a less frayed social safety net, people were able to make decisions to leave jobs that weren't good enough for them and find more alignment in the work that they were doing.
we saw this on a large scale and so I think that was sort of my takeaway is that when we are able to decouple our basic human needs from our survival, we are able to think more expansively about the possibilities ahead of us.
Yeah, in the end of that passage, just to give that passage it's due after the Dana White question, you wrote perhaps my favorite response was, I keep doing exactly what I'm doing with less worry, frustration and trauma about money. And then you go on to say it's notable that people's visions didn't exclude labor and you touched on that in your response, but removing it as a prerequisite for survival expanded how they conceived of what's possible. Yes, so I think that's probably true for me. I'd probably keep doing what I do, but I'd probably do a little less of it.
and maybe add in a bunch of other things. This came up earlier, this idea of having a passion or being passionate about work and how some people find that to be kind of threatening because maybe they don't have a passion or maybe they can't afford to pursue a passion. It makes me recall a commencement speech. I was asked to go to my alma mater Colby College back in 2005, way before I was ready to give a commencement speech because I didn't know anything about giving people advice.
And I gave what I think in hindsight might be pretty shitty advice, which was follow your passion. This is what I've done. I wasn't, I am super passionate about journalism and now I have this amazing job and I travel all over the world. But am I right in like completely rethinking that? And what would be the better advice?
Yeah, I think 2005 is an interesting year. That's the same year that Steve Jobs gave that famous commencement address at Stanford where he said, the only way to do great work is to love what you do. And so if you haven't found what you love, don't settle, keep searching.
I think that was very much in the water, especially in the early aughts. The iPhone was coming out and entrepreneurship was very sexy and there was a lot of excitement, understandably so, about the ability to change the world through our work.
I think following your passion works well for people who can weather the inherent risk in doing so. And the book I cite the research from this University of Michigan professor named Aaron Chek.
And she writes about the sort of double edged sword of following your passion and how for people with fewer opportunities, the advice to follow your passion can actually exacerbate inequality for people who don't have the same springboards and safety nets or the two terms that she calls out. When we tell everyone to follow
They're passionate, but we don't make those passionate jobs accessible to everyone. It can lead people down damaging paths. I think this is true in our industry in journalism, where, for example, a lot of the entry level internships and roles don't pay a living wage. And so the people who can afford to
Maybe get their rent subsidized or live with a friend or family member for a little while can benefit from following their passion, whereas some people can be hung out to dry. There's another term that I think is really important to think about in this discussion, which is
It's called vocational awe. I recently wrote an op-ed about this term for the times about how there are certain industries, particularly creative, mission-driven, prestigious industries, that have this perceived righteousness to them. Journalism is a good example. We're seeing this in the Hollywood strike.
in Hollywood and among the writers or nonprofit sector, healthcare, education, where the industry as a whole has a sort of halo effect because it is this privilege of being able to work in a way that reflects your passion. But that can also cover up a lot of the exploitation or injustice that exists within these fields.
My partner is an elementary school teacher and I think she saw this very clearly during the pandemic or out of one side of people's mouths. They would say, you know, you are doing God's work. Thank you for doing the work that you do. And then the other side saying, you know, just make do with what you have or the, you know, quote unquote essential workers who were told how important their work is, but also not given
compensation or workplace protections that were commensurate with the severity of the work that they were doing or the famous line, you know, there's a line of people out the door that would happily take your job. And so I think there's nothing wrong with passion or love for your work as so as long as passion and love don't become stand-ins for fair pay or workplace protections or job security.
I think another argument I've heard against the advice that I gave to those poor graduates from Colby in 2005, and I may not be recapitulating this accurately, and perhaps you can steer me here, but I've heard this counter-argument made by people like Cal Newport, who also has been on this show and writes a lot about the culture of work and its relationship to technology, is that for many people, they may not have
to sort of innate passions. So telling them to follow their passion is not actionable advice. So instead, the argument that people like Cal makes, and again, I hope I'm saying this correctly, is that the passion can come from the doing of the work, pick something reasonably interesting, and the effort will create the energy.
Yeah, exactly. He says, you know, passion is often the result of expertise and hard work, not the precursor to doing so. And I think that argument is so sound, you know, the same as book on the topic is so good, they can't ignore you, which is a reference to a famous Steve Martin line. But I think that's great advice for young people is to build skills, to take a bet and throw yourself an invest in building some expertise and investing in your craft and hopefully the passion will follow.
Coming up, Simone talks about how to define your good enough job, why work cannot be your family, and his take on some hot button workplace issues such as remote work, unlimited vacation, and other so-called perks.
How can we start to think about what our definition is for good enough? What our definition is for success.
That's a good question because I think everyone has their own definition. I think there are circumstantial factors. For example, if you want to live in New York City, you are going to have to earn a certain wage. You can't say that your good enough job pays $10 an hour and that you want to live on
the 39th floor of a Manhattan apartment building. So I think there's like some factors that take into account the sort of ideal life that you want to lead. I think there are things that are based on just your material needs. No delusions here. We live in the material world in order to pay for your material existence or are things that your job must provide. And then there are other things that are based on your values.
I think values can kind of be a squishy word, but for me there are many different ways to uncover what you uniquely care about. There are card sorts and journaling, but I think my favorite is just a narrative approach of thinking about what is a time in your work life where you felt like you really ought to show up in the way that you wanted.
Maybe it's not the shiniest or sparkulous moment. It's not necessarily when you got the promotion or landed the job. But what is sort of a very specific time where you were able to be the type of person that you wanted to be in a work environment?
And then break it down. Think about what are the component parts that led to it? Were you collaborating with others? What was the type of environment you were in? Was it protected from distractions? Were you doing creative work? Were you doing more operational work? What were the factors in your life outside of it? And then really get to drill down and to
what matters to you because I think right now the inclination is just to use what the market values as a proxy for what to care about. The job that pays the most or has the most prestigious job title and I'll tell you firsthand from many of the people that were quote unquote successful that I interviewed for the book.
Many of them spent their lives climbing up career ladders that they later found out that they didn't actually want to be on or playing a game that they didn't actually hope to win. So I think that's the balance. We need to hold what the world values in one hand and what you value in the other hand and try and find work at their intersection because I think there's risks at either end of the spectrum.
So we want to pick up a representative moment or two from our work lives where we really felt like this is awesome and see if we can have a work life going forward. That includes as much of that as possible while also thinking about the realities of the market.
Yeah, I think it goes back to that idea we spoke about earlier that some people do what they love for work and other people do what they have to for work and do what they love when they're not working. And so I advise people to start with their vision of a life well lived. Think about what does success look like? Where are you living? What are you doing? And then think about how your job might be able to support that vision.
I think there's a lot of kind of prescriptive one size fits all advice, especially in the career realm. There's distinctions between different types of workers, different types of priorities, different types of treating work as more of a means to an end or an end in and of itself, and trying to get clear on what your priorities are at this moment. And knowing that work has a natural
Season to it, you know, maybe there will be seasons where you're doing more prioritizing your career and other seasons where you're doing more prioritizing your life outside of work and hopefully they can both balance each other out. One of the things that people look for in a job is co-workers they like and you make a case in the book that, you know, work cannot be your family. Can you say more about that?
Yeah, you know, it's one of those axioms that we throw around a lot of, you know, we're like family here. And, you know, I don't blame employers for wanting to promote that type of ethos. You know, people who feel connected to their coworkers tend to stay at jobs longer. They tend to be more engaged in their actual work.
But I think it's really important to make a distinction between what a family is and what a workplace is. First and foremost, I know that you, but most of the families I know are pretty dysfunctional. I don't know if you'd want to aspire to.
create workplaces in their image but I think there are some fundamental differences and especially recently we found this out where the loyalty to a company's bottom line will almost always trump the loyalty to its people. The expectation in family is that the love is unconditional where
in a workplace setting employment by definition is conditional. There's this research that I cite in the book from Warren, this researcher named Nancy Rothbard and Julie Pelomar and
They have this paper that's called Friends Without Benefits, which I think is a great title and showing some of the dark sides of very collegial family-like workplaces. And what they found is that in workplaces with these really tight familial bonds, information tends to travel through social ties, as opposed to be transparently available for everyone to see. They found that
Decisions tend to be made based on trust of employees as opposed to rigorous business analysis. And I think it's worth pointing out that even if the workplace might feel like family to some, there are probably others who don't feel the same way.
And so in the book, I advocate for a more transactional approach to work, which might sound crass, especially because we're told jobs are meant to be callings and passions and vocations. But I think that employers already treat work transactionally.
you know, they hire employees who add value and fire employees who do not. And I think the more clear-headed we can be about that, the better. And so if you're an employee thinking about what is your end of the bargain, you know, what is the economic contract that you're entering into? And although you might form close bonds and relationships with your coworkers, ensuring that that's not your only source of community in your life.
In terms of what has become a massive problem for many people overwork and burnout, what do you recommend that we haven't already discussed? I think when it comes to burnout, a lot of times we put the onus on the individual. We say things like practice self-care this weekend or set a boundary. But in actuality, I think,
The onus ought to fall on employers, on the managers and bosses who are equipped with the tools to actually enact the sort of structural protections that keep people from going off the rails. A colleague Ann Helen Peterson has this great distinction between the difference between a boundary and a guardrail. And so you think about the road, the boundaries are sort of the lines that separate one lane from another.
whereas the guardrails are the the metal barriers, the things that prevent you from driving off the cliff. And I think companies are really best positioned to enact some of those structural protections. So I'm really inspired by companies that have, say, norms about when they are on an offline
or have really clear cultures that prioritize people being able to take time off and protect their physical and mental health outside of the office. I think, you know, burnout is a result of
passion. I think it's a result of caring and trying to do great work, not of disengagement as it often gets positioned. And I think particularly for workers who care about what they do or are passionate about the work that they are doing, it's important to take breaks and to reset before it's too late to sort of take time to refill your gas tank before you're running on empty.
And I actually think there's a good business case to be made for this as well. We're seeing this with four-day work week experiments that are going on around the world. I think a lot of our standards around working our holdovers from a more industrial age where perhaps there was a more direct relationship between the number of hours that you put in and the quality of work that you get out.
But particularly in a knowledge economy when the deliverable is something like a strategy document for an organization or a headline for a marketing campaign or a big idea for an article or a book.
There isn't always a direct relationship between the number of hours we put in and the quality of work that we get out. Our brains need space for ideas to bounce around, to synthesize all of the different inputs that we're getting in. And so I think the enlightened organizations who are thinking more long-term are seeing how rest and time off the clock are an integral part of being sustainably productive in the long haul.
In our remaining time, I want to do a bit of a lightning round to get your take on hot button workplace issues. You already hit on one of them the four day work week. What's your view on remote work?
I think it's a positive trend. I think the underlying idea of remote work in my mind will allow companies to hire the best employees no matter where they live. It will imbue hopefully a sense of autonomy and trust in employee's ability to get work done as opposed to using some of these proxies like the number of hours you spend and
an office chair as a proxy for the quality of work that you're producing. And so I think in the future, we're going to see a lot of different arrangements of how organizations are organized. Some will be remote, some of them will be hybrid, some of them when necessary will still require employees to come into the office. But I feel like the debate between return to office and hybrid work is a bit
of a red herring. I think we're already in the age of remote and hybrid work, and it is just a matter of how companies are going to be adaptable to it moving forward. What about the argument that we sometimes hear from people like, in fact, Malcolm Gladwell made it on the show that you're missing out on the opportunity for in-person collaboration and especially if you're younger person, you're missing out on the opportunity for mentorship?
Yeah, I'm definitely amenable to that. I worked for years at this organization, IDEO, that really pied it itself on in-person collaboration and that sort of water cooler magic of being able to rub shoulders with people. But I think there are different models of doing so, even in a remote and hybrid first world. So for example, one thing that I'm encouraged by is companies that are bringing their employees for very intentional reasons.
So rather than coming to the office and sitting on Zoom meetings all day, maybe designing a quarterly retreat where people are coming together to build those in-person relationships, to build culture, to connect with coworkers that you might have only seen in little boxes on your computer screen. And so I think there's a lot of
pontification and about what the future might hold. And I think Malcolm's point is as well taken that we need to create systems for mentorship. We need to find ways for employees to connect with each other and get to know each other beyond just in this transactional nature of a Zoom meeting where you sign on and sign off. But I don't think that in person is the only path to doing so. I think it's just a matter of companies being intentional about the ways in which they design these programs to work well for everyone.
Just to say, my little podcast team is on the eve of our in-person summit, which begins tomorrow morning. Well, it won't be tomorrow morning for people listening to this, but it's tomorrow morning for me and you. Okay, speaking of Zoom, what do you think about Zoom happy hours?
I'm not the biggest fan of Zoom happy hours. I'll sort of bring together two hot trends, which is the art of gathering Priya Parker's work and this digital toolification of so much of work. And I think unless the gathering has a purpose and a host and some intention behind it, it's going to waste a lot of different people's times.
I think there are different ways, either synchronously or asynchronously, to build culture beyond having people cosplaying what it's like to be in person with their cocktails in their living room. What about unlimited vacation policies?
Yeah, I think this is one that definitely cuts both ways, and there's been a lot of research that shows that many companies with unlimited PTO actually leads to employees taking less time off than the other way around. I'll propose an alternative, which is minimum vacation policies. There are a few companies out there that require their employees to take time off.
And I think that's the type of structural protection working well. And employers are really encouraging employees to get out and invest in something other than their work lives. What about policies that make salary transparent within the company? So everybody knows what everybody else is making. I think that's a positive direction. Just transparency in general, I think, is often a good thing in the workplace.
especially when it comes to mitigating some of the racial and gender bias that we see with workers who are doing similar types of work, we're getting paid vastly different salaries. We'll see. I think since some of these laws have been passed, it's been New York and elsewhere around job descriptions with transparent salaries. Companies are sort of finding the way around and saying, okay, the range for this role is
you know, 70 to $700,000. And I think we've sort of swung the pendulum on one way and it'll continue to be refined moving forward. But in general, I think paid transparency is a good thing.
best and worst office perks. This is where we bash on the beanbag chairs and the ping pong tables. You know what I mean? The best office, best office perk is, this is going to sound like a self help, quasi self help guru, I guess. But I think the best office perk is trust, is the ability to instill a level of autonomy in your employees to get their work done when and how they see fit.
And I think that the companies who are doing this well of creating systems where they have standards of excellence, they have expectations around when work should be turned in, but they really trust their employees to get that work done in the way they see fit are going to succeed and have a competitive advantage moving forward.
I think the worst office perk, I think there are a lot of the ones in my backyard in Silicon Valley, like the on-campus dinners or the ability to go to the gym or do your dry cleaning at work that are sort of purportedly perks, but the companies are really the true beneficiaries. I think particularly with young people who might not have many things going on in their life outside of work,
They can be dangerous. They can learn employees to center their whole lives around the office and keep them at the office late when they don't necessarily have to be, and that can come at the expense of our ability to invest in our communities, to find communities and friends outside of work, and to live more well-rounded lives. Bringing your full self to work, yay or nay?
This is Daphne, the hottest of the hot button issues. I don't think it should be a mandate that I think people's full shallows should be accepted if the individual chooses to present them. I've been to too many Zoom happy hours with very personal icebreaker questions that feel like they're crossing a line between
what people should be expected to share in a professional setting. And at the same time, I think bringing your full self quote unquote to work works best for people who feel like they're already part of the end group or the majority. And maybe people want to have a different persona and the workplace that they do outside of the workplace. And there should be nothing wrong with that. Having a side hustle.
I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with having a side hustle. One thing that I've noticed in my research is a lot of people think about it as a hedge against economic precarity if they're able to make some money on the side. But what I'm wary of is the inclination to turn all of your passions, your interests, and your hobbies into
Side hustles are different ways to make money. If you scroll through the TikToks and the Instagram realist these days, it feels like every third one is about some way to monetize your interests or try to make passive income.
And I think that can be dangerous, especially for young people who are trying to build their careers. If you are always thinking about your side hustles and your monetization schemes, it can make it very hard to be off the clock. Just a few more. We talked about dry cleaning in a gym at work. What about meditation at work?
Yeah, you know, this is maybe more in your realm of expertise than mine. I think similar to bringing your whole self, I think it's nice when it's an option and I think it's paternalistic when it's a mandate. So I think that offices that have meditation rooms or yoga studios or
you know, support employees who want to do some mindfulness before work can be a great option as long as it's not shoved down employees threats. I think it can certainly help work. I have a regular meditation practice that I attribute a lot of my ability to focus and to be compassionate in the workplace to that personal practice. But it works for me and I don't think that it needs to necessarily be something that we are
bringing too much spirituality into the workplace in a way that makes people do things that they don't feel comfortable doing themselves. Final question, and you've touched on this a little bit, but what would your advice be to people like me who are in a leadership position? I'm a boss, but I helped set the culture for at least one team. And by the way, I've been the recipient of a couple of 360 reviews and seen where I go wrong. What are some of the best practices for bosses?
Yeah, maybe find the two meditation teachers that you worked with between your first and your second 360 review.
Sorry, that was an inside baseball reference to Dan's TED Talk, but I think the biggest thing for bosses or managers is to model the type of culture that you hope to create. I think companies can have the most progressive or enlightened policies in the world, but if the boss is sending emails at 10 p.m. or going on vacation, but never fully signing offline, of course, that's gonna trickle down to the rest of the organization.
And so I think for bosses and managers in addition to being intentional about trying to enact some of these structural protections that protect your employees' lives outside of the office, make sure that you are practicing what you preach and trying to live in accordance to the type of organization that you want to be part of and lead. Oh man, that's a challenging one because
for me that very specific thing because i keep on work hours and i'd like to integrate lots of relaxation into my day and so sometimes i very often get a bunch of work done on saturday that's because i don't work a full often don't work what many would consider a full work day on monday through friday
Sometimes I do, but not always. And so I've tried to be clear with a team. If I'm sending you an email or a slack, it's just because I'm getting all the shit done and answering all the questions I came in during the week that I didn't get a chance to deal with. And I think I've communicated that well, but maybe not. So I don't know what say you in the face of all of this embarrassing stuff I'm admitting.
No, I don't think it's embarrassing. I think it's very natural. I wonder if you might be able to use some of these send later tools that Slack and Gmail, for example, have so that even if you're doing the work on a Saturday, you can schedule it to be sent on 9am on Monday. I think there's
this former editor-in-chief of Wired, Megan Greenwell, who I have a whole chapter of the book dedicated to. And she told me about in the early days of being sort of at the top of a masthead how she wanted to be always available. And so her little green dot next to her name on Slack was almost always available for people to reach out to. And she thought this was like a method of being accessible to her employees. And she made it very clear.
like you did, that even if I'm always available or if I'm answering things on the weekends, it doesn't mean that you have to. But I think taking the perspective of, say, a junior employee on your team or someone who's just starting out, if they get an email or a Slack message from the big box on
Saturday at 4pm, even if the message explicitly is, you know, you don't have to respond to this later, I think it's hard to couple that from the reality of, well, if my boss is working, then I probably should be too. So I'd think about ways to balance it. It's not so black and white, but maybe there are ways that you can get work done on your schedule, but you can send it in a way that might work best for your team's schedules as well.
That the point is very well taken and I completely agree that if I was a junior employee and I got an email from a boss on a Saturday, I would want to react to it. Yeah, so I needed to look into that technology. Anything that I should have asked but didn't.
My favorite journalism. Last question question. No, I think, you know, we covered the basis pretty well. I appreciate some of your skepticism because I think I had a lot of it myself. You know, I think I came into the book writing process with a little bit more of a hot take saying, you know,
Work is bad, our whole world centers around it. We've got to work less. And I think on the other side of the years of reporting, it's tempered into something a little bit more mild, which is to say that we work more than we do just about anything else and how we spend those hours matter. So the question is, how do you balance the pursuit of meaningful work without letting work take over your life?
And I don't think that's a question that I can answer for you or there will be a fixed answer. I think it's something we'll continue to wrestle with for the entirety of our careers and our lives. But I think a good step one is asking yourself and trying to be intentional about your answer.
Yeah, I appreciate the complexity of your argument, the nuance of your argument. And I'm not skeptical. It's not like in any way that I think it's bullshit. It's more that I'm sort of skeptical about whether I can do some of these things given
the culturally and familial biases that have been ingrained into me. Totally. Yeah. Maybe one last piece of advice is to try and find a way to spend some time in a place that has a different hierarchy of value. You know, one of the reasons that I think inspired me to write this book is that my family is Italian and they have some different priorities there. And so spending time in a place that cares about different things is a good way to reach your own expectations and your values as well.
Yeah, I was thinking about that because one of the questions that I had written down to ask and then didn't ask although I'm asking it now was, I have people close to me who are actually in the process of rethinking the role of work in their life right now. And they and I are still embedded in a larger social structure. And I'm not just talking about the larger culture. I mean, just like our little social
world, our little community, where pretty much everybody else has the old values. And it's hard. I think one is naturally deeply influenced by the people in your world. I mean, one root is to just change the people in your world, but it's not always easy to do.
No, yeah, and I can relate firsthand of the difficulty and the tumult that can come from trying to dislodge some of these very deeply held beliefs, you know, especially in the U.S., which is a country that treats productivity and self-worth as so closely bound. Not easy, but worth doing, worth thinking about. You've given us a lot to think about, so Simone, thank you. Thanks for having me on.
Thanks again to Simone. Thanks to you for listening. 10% Happier is produced by Justine Davey, Gabrielle Zuckerman, Lauren Smith, and Tara Anderson. DJ Cashmere is our senior producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior editor. And Kimmy Reggler is our executive producer. We get our scoring and mixing from Peter Bonaventure over at Ultraviolet Audio. And our theme, music was written by Nick Thorburn of The Band Islands.
Coming up on Wednesday, part two of our series, it's a gem from the archives, one of the most popular episodes we've ever had on the show with Matthew Hepburn, a Dharma teacher who has a lot of experience at the office. He's going to talk about how to integrate mindfulness into your day and lots of other stuff.
If you like 10% happier, I hope you do. You can listen early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at Wondery.com slash survey.
