The Good Enough Job: A Workaholic's Redemption
Should you re-evaluate your relationship with work
Adam Grant introduced me to Simone Stolzoff’s new book “The Good Enough Job” through his newsletter titled 11 New Idea Books to Spring into Summer.
Simone was a design lead at the global innovation firm IDEO. His work has been featured in The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, and many other publications. He is a graduate of Stanford and The University of Pennsylvania.
I hosted him just before I walked into a formal at Pembroke College, Oxford. It was bright and sunny outside so I decided to conduct the interview sitting in the garden. As often happens in England, it started raining. I got drenched by the time our discussion concluded but it was memorable.
You will learn:
How a workaholic redefined his relationship with work
What does work and life satisfaction really feel like
How being lost is essential to finding oneself
If you enjoy learning with and from people like Simone, you may want to subscribe to Network Capital. You can do so directly via the button below.
To understand the wit and brilliance of Simone’s book title, you might want to refer to our newsletter The Good Enough Parent. Winnicott famously said, “No child needs a perfect parent. All we need is good enough parents.” Building on that Simone says, no one needs a perfect job. All we need is good enough jobs.
The one thing I can say for sure if you are reading this newsletter is that you are an ambitious student/professional. That means you probably work hard and strive for better-than-average outcomes. Striving for that perfect job makes sense. It is your gateway to a better life, one that can give you autonomy, mastery, purpose, significance, and community along the way.
Simone makes this counter-intuitive claim that these goods of work are elusive for most people. We tend to attach our identity to our jobs and end up working to work rather than working to live.
What I found interesting about his book was that he isn’t telling us to work less or maximize productivity or find a work-life balance. These are trite suggestions bandied about by thousands of influencers on Instagram and TikTok. Feel free to figure out what works for you.
Simone nudges us to diversify our identity beyond work. With the help of illustrative examples of relatable young professionals who sacrificed their lives at the altar of work, he drives home the point that work is important but only one component of what makes a good life.
To discover or rediscover ourselves, we need to take some distance and evaluate where we are heading. That’s scary, inefficient, and has no guarantee of success. However, not carving out that distance could have long-term negative effects.
I don’t know whether having a good enough job will be good enough for you but trying to have the perfect job that delivers you all that you wish for in the timeline that you expect is likely to disappoint.
The reward for good work is more work and the reward for bad work is that you get fired. Once you are out of a job, the first thing you do is look for your next job. That may seem obvious - you need to pay your bills. However, the book does a good job of explaining how work colonizes our minds. As you can tell from the choice of words, colonization by definition, is coercive.
It is difficult to step back and re-evaluate your priorities because there is this all-pervasive gaze of envy. There is always someone in your social media universe who has it all figured out, and who goes from success to success with the “winner” smile on his/her face.
Whatever that person may or may not do, you need to look out for yourself. You are likely to be involved in some form of economic activity loosely defined as work for the next 50-60 years. That mythical retirement at 30 or 40 or 50 isn’t coming. Simone nudges you to look at the long-term consequences of an unhealthy relationship with work.
So what’s the point? Is he simply telling us to work less, indulge our hobbies and live life for the sake of it not as means to an end? He is, but in doing so he is pointing towards the possibility of a new world where we immerse ourselves in curiosity and impact, not metrics and performance reviews.
You should of course do what you feel is best for you but consider the case he is making. It will be worth your while.
P.S. We have launched a subgroup where all our community members are connecting with each other on LinkedIn and WhatsApp. You may want to apply to join.
Afterthought: “Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relative to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill-paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid.” Bertrand Russel