Afford Anything - The Importance of Having a Life Outside of Work, with Simone Stolzoff

Episode Date: July 27, 2023

#453: Today I chat with Simone Stolzoff, a consultant for organizations ranging from Google to the Surgeon General’s Office, and the author of "The Good Enough Job." He’s a graduate of Stanford and U. Penn. Simone has spent a lot of time thinking about the role of work in our lives, and he's got some really interesting ideas about how we can see work as just one part of a happy and fulfilling life. We'll be talking about what happens when work becomes more than just a job, how to challenge the idea that work has to be our calling or our dream, and how to build a more well-rounded life. If you’ve ever “over-identified” with your job, then you’ll find today’s conversation thought-provoking. Enjoy! For more information, visit the show notes at https://affordanything.com/episode453 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Okay, you know how sometimes you go to a party and the first question people ask you is, so what do you do? It's this incredibly lazy and boring icebreaker, which inevitably leads to standing around a plate of hors d'oeuvres talking about work, which is the most boring thing you could possibly do at a party and very unmemorable. Please don't do that. But the fact that that is such a de facto icebreaker is emblematic of the fact that we often can over-identify with work. Today's guest, Simone Stoltzoff, has extensively studied the role of work in our lives, and we have a conversation around how to refrain from over-identifying with your job. Simone is a Stanford and Penn graduate who works as a consultant for major organizations

ranging from Google to the Surgeon General on the topic of more gratifying, workplaces. He's also written for publications ranging from Wired to the Atlantic and is the author of the book, The Good Enough Job. Here he is. Hi, Simone. Hi, Paula. Nice to be here. Thank you so much for spending this time with us. Simone, so you wrote The Good Enough Job, which is all about not over-identifying with your work. Typically, when people write books like that, it's because they themselves have faced that challenge firsthand. Tell us about what happened in your life that led you to needing to explore this topic in book form. Yeah, you know, the old cliche is that you write the book that you need to read. And that was definitely the case for me. Like many of my peers, I think I inherited a lot of scripts

about the desire to pursue one's dream job, to self-actualize through the work that we do. And so I really took that to heart. I thought that, you know, how we spend our days is how we spend our lives and therefore choosing what career to be in was one of the most consequential decisions I'd ever make. And so I spent my 20s playing Goldilocks with careers. I worked in tech for a few years. I worked in advertising and I worked in journalism and eventually design. And all came to a head at this moment when I was about 28 years old or so. I was working as a staff writer at a trendy magazine in New York and I was approached by a recruiter and, you know, always take the phone call. I sort of passively went through this interview process. And then at the end of it, I was at this fork in

the road. And there was sort of two paths ahead of me. There was to continue working as a magazine writer or to make a pivot and work for this prestigious design agency that I had heard of. And so on one hand, it's like, you know, woe is me, the agony of having to decide between two attractive jobs. offers. But on the other hand, you know, it didn't feel like I was choosing between two jobs as much as it felt like I was choosing between two versions of me. You know, there was sort of Simone the journalist on one path and Simone, the designer on the other path. And it made me realize sort of how I had conflated my sense of identity and self-worth with my career. And I thought that maybe I wasn't the only one. And so the book in many ways is an investigation into how work

has come to be so central to Americans' identities and eventually a bit of an editorial argument about the value of diversifying our identity beyond just what we do professionally. And so within this exploration of how we over-identify with our work, one of the points that you make that really stood out to me is that over-identifying with your work can actually be dangerous because if that identity is broken, either through, if you're an athlete, it might be through injury. It might be, if you're a knowledge worker, it might be through a layoff. However, that identity is broken, it can lead to depression or worse. Can you elaborate on that? Yeah, I think this is a lesson that many people have learned firsthand in the last few years

with the pandemic, whether you were laid off or furloughed or just the nature of your job changed in some material way. A lot of people have learned that if you are identifying primarily with your job. If your job is your sole source of meaning and you lose your job, it begs the question, what's left? But I think there are also a few other risks that are maybe less extreme. The first is just about expectations. And I often think about happiness as sort of the difference between our expectations and our reality. And if we have these sky high expectations about what a job can deliver if we're always expecting our jobs to be a dream or to be perfect, it can create a lot of room for disappointment. Then the third risk, what I get into in a little bit more depth in the

book, is the ways in which a work-centric existence can neglect other aspects of who we are. The therapist Esther Perel has this great quote where she says, too many people bring the best of themselves to work and bring the leftovers home. I remember when I first heard that, it sort of hit me like a brick. But, you know, the truth is we are all more than just workers. We are friends and neighbors and siblings and parents and citizens. And if we are just giving our best time and attention to one aspect of ourselves, we can neglect these other parts of who we are. There's a distinction to be made between identifying with your work, which is psychological, versus bringing a large number of hours to your work, a high volume or quantity of hours to your work.

And one of the other points that you make is that if people are bringing a lot of hours to their work, there can often be a multitude of reasons for that. One might be that you over-identify with your work, which is internal, right? One might be that your bosses have a heavy expectations of you, and that's external. And another one, which is also external, might simply be that you need the money. Yeah, I think that's very important point to distinguish between people who work all the time because they have to and people who work all the time because they choose to. To be fair, the book is really centering around the stories of college-educated white-collar knowledge workers for the most part. And I made that choice for a few reasons.

One, you know, white-collar workers are less likely to have other sources of meaning and identity in their lives. things like organized religion or neighborhood and community groups, they're more likely to look to work for transcendence. And second, I think there are sort of two separate issues when we talk about the two sides of the income spectrum. You know, the majority of people do not work to self-actualize. They work to survive. And yet the problems that are perplexing a lot of people who are in the knowledge work economy are questions of self-expression, these sort of higher order concerns. And so, you know, I think the problem in many ways is that a lot of our standards of working are holdovers from a more industrial age, even if you are working in a knowledge,

work, profession, or a job. There isn't always a direct relationship between the number of hours that you put in and the quality of the work, especially when the output is something like, you know, a strategy document for an organization or the headline for a marketing campaign. And pain. And yet we still use these proxies, like the number of hours that we spend in our office chair as, you know, a proxy for the quality of the work that's being produced. And one of the things I'm hopeful about is that as we shift towards a more hybrid and remote from the working world, we'll start to let the quality of work speak for itself and let people, you know, find the ways to accomplish their tasks in a way that works around their lives as opposed to the other

way around. But by taking a results-orienting, approach rather than a quantitative hours of butt-in-chair approach. The results-oriented approach is theoretically infinite, right? Like for a lot of particularly knowledge work jobs, there is never a point at which you are done. There's always a point at which your output could be improved. So how then do you draw that line? That's a great point, you know, especially with knowledge work where we all carry around little offices in our pockets. Work can be extremely leaky, you know, when you're, say, working on the assembly line, putting together a model T, you can't necessarily do that from your living room. The boundaries between when we're working

and when we're not working, we're much more clear. And yet today, we're all sort of like sharks with like one eye open and the ability to work is almost always available. It can seep like a gas into all of our unoccupied space. And so I think the onus falls both on the shoulders of individuals and on organizations and managers. On one hand, I think, you know, often when we talk about work-life balance or some of these issues, we place the burden on the individual to draw those boundaries. We say things like practice self-care or, you know, set a boundary this weekend. And yet, the institutions themselves, the organizations, the managers, the bosses are the folks who actually have the capabilities to set the expectations and the norms for their teams. They can put up

some of the more structural barriers that protect their employees' lives in and out of the office. And the research increasingly shows that employees who are able to cultivate interests and hobbies outside of work tend to be more creative and innovative in a work context. It shows that people who have what researchers call greater self-complexity, people who have been able to cultivate different sides of themselves, are more resilient in the face of adversity. So there's sort of like the business case for protecting your life outside of work. You know, we all know this firsthand.

You're on hour 11 of a 12 hour day. You're not going to necessarily be firing at all cylinders. But I think there's also sort of the moral case about the way in which cultivating other sides of who we are creates more well-rounded individuals. It can be healthy for our communities and for ourselves. To your point about the research showing that cultivating hobbies can actually make you more productive. at work. It reminds me of, of course, Adam Grant's book Originals, which is just full of research around precisely that idea that if you have a hobby, you know, people who have hobbies in painting or improv or playing a musical instrument, hobbies that are completely unrelated to their

primary occupation, often because they are exercising other areas of their brain, they can engage in lateral thinking, in creative thinking, and that makes them more original, more innovative in whatever field they're in, no matter how seemingly different that field is. Yeah, that's completely true. I think I know this firsthand from the world of design. You know, often we think about the output or sort of the final product, the logo that you might get at the end of the day. But I found that among my coworkers in particular, those who have had the most diverse inputs, those who sought inspiration in interesting ways. There's a direct correlation with the type of and the quality of the work that they're producing, particularly

in a day where AI or automation might impact different fields where the ability to produce work becomes cheaper and cheaper. What becomes more important is our tastes, is our ability to be curators, is the ability to write the right prompt from. chat GPT. And I think our ability to do so is a direct reflection of the ways in which we are cultivating a well-rounded perspective going into the work that we're doing. To go back to an earlier point you made, you talked about how many people over-identify with their work because they don't necessarily have other containers through which they can identify. So if a person does not have the hobby of playing a musical instrument or participating in a sport, or if a person does not have a particular religious tradition, then they may not have other communities or other activities that round out that sense of identity.

For a person who's listening to this, who's right now thinking to themselves, well, you know what, I don't even know where I would put space in my life for that. I wake up, I commute, I work, I go to the grocery store, and then I have to do laundry and cook dinner, and maybe they've got two or three kids that they need to take care of after work. What can the average person who's listening, whose schedule is full simply from laundry and lawnmowing when they're not at work, what can they do? Yeah, all of the intense, avid lawnmowers out there, this one's for you. I mean, I think like there is an expectation that if you want to diversify your identity, if you want to find other sources and meaning, you have to take extreme measures. You have to sign up for an Iron Man or you have to read 52 books a year to be considered a real reader.

And in actuality, I think the benefit really comes from starting small. Right now, we're sort of in this chicken and egg problem where people work all the time and so they're not exactly sure what to do and they're not working. and so they work all the time. And, you know, I definitely have empathy for people who have busy schedules, who have lots of responsibilities on their shoulders. And I want to reiterate the fact that we get meaning through our attention. It requires sort of like a plant, like time and energy in order to grow. And unless we are actively investing in these things that we hope to find identity and

meaning from, you're not going to get the reward. No offense to Netflix, but if all you do is go to work and take care of your responsibilities and then turn off your brain and turn on the TV, you're not necessarily going to find a huge source of meaning in your life in that way. And so I think for people that are strapped for time or that are busy, it can be through small actions for carving out little pockets in your days, in your weeks where you're intentionally not working, you know, protecting that non-work time as if it were sacred, and then choosing how you want to fill it. Maybe it's a, 10-minute catch-up conversation with your best friend that you try and have weekly to invest

in your relationships. Maybe it is joining a exercise community or class as opposed to exercising on your own. So you can cultivate a community of people that could care less about what you do for work and value you in other ways. But I think often we think of these grand gestures when in actuality, in order to find meaning in our life, it's really about consistency and it's about attention. It's about squaring our hips towards our values. Right.

And I'm glad you brought up Netflix as an example because it reminds me of some research by the author Laura Vandercam, who is a time management expert, who found that if people devote an hour a day to watching Netflix, which oftentimes people do mindlessly, right? It's 11 p.m. And that last hour of the day, their brain is zapped. And so they just turn on Netflix right before they follow it. sleep. So it's an hour a day, but because it's mindless, it often gives people the impression that they have not devoted an hour a day to a hobby, when in fact they actually kind of have. They just didn't do it consciously. By contrast, what she found in her research is that if people intentionally devote an hour a day to said hobby, then they feel as though they have more time,

even though if both sets of people were to fill out a time log detailing their hours, it's actually the same, quantitatively, it's the same amount of time. Yeah, I love that. And, you know, one of the things that stuck out to me from her research is just the idea of time boxing. And I think this is particularly true in knowledge work where the work can sort of expand to whatever container we all lot for it. We know firsthand that not all hours working are created equal. And I think this is something that I personally learned during the pandemic.

of, okay, maybe I'm more effective at doing generative work like writing in the morning. And so one hour in the morning is worth, you know, three hours in the late afternoon where I'm not necessarily firing on all cylinders. I think the same can be said for our hobbies and our interests. You know, there's this famous quote from a Stanford GSB professor who said, show me your calendar and I'll show you what you value. I think that's very true. You know, if we do a little personal audit of our weeks, of our days, we can see where

we're allocating our time and if they are actually aligning with how we hope to spend our time or what we purport is important to us. Right. Now, you talked about drawing a distinction between when you are working and when you are not, and that kind of speaks to the concept of an integrator versus a separator or a segmentor. Can you elaborate on the distinction between the integrator versus the segmenter, because in the construct of preserving a piece of time in which you are not working, that really is something that speaks to the segmenter segment. Yeah, you know, this comes out from the Wharton School, this mistress of her name Nancy Rothbard, and I think it's particularly relevant towards all of us today or those of us who are working from home.

So Professor Rothbard basically breaks down workers into two categories. They are integrators who are folks that don't mind a more porous boundary between their work and their life. You know, the folks that might want to go to the grocery store or go for a run at 3 p.m. And then maybe sign online one more time after dinner to finish off those emails. And the segmenters who want a more firm boundary between when they're on the clock and when they're off the clock. Just with some personal reflection, you can probably get a pretty good sense of what type of, worker that you are, but I think the upshot is that not all workers have the same working styles or preferences. And even for a manager, you know, the same policy, for example, a flexible

deadline for when something should be done or turned in can be great for an integrator who can work the work around different aspects of their life and sort of figure out when it makes most sense for them to work on something. But it could really stress out a segmenter who wants to have a very clear deadline and know that they're done and they can move on to the next thing. And so I think, you know, with any sort of book like this about work culture or work life, it's really easy to give prescriptive sort of one-size-fits-all advice. But in actuality, I think it's much more nuanced. And that's definitely something that I found out through all of my research as well.

Right. And what strikes me about that is that there's a large tie in there with career selection as well. because certainly if you are a firefighter or if you are an emergency room nurse, it's shift-based work and therefore it's very segmented life. You're either on the clock or you're off. Versus if you are a graphic designer or a full-stack WordPress PHP coder, you then can have a much more integrated life. For sure. Yeah, it reminds me of this anecdote that I write about a little bit in the book from a conversation that I had with a mentor of mine. when I was in college. So in college, I studied poetry and economics. And you can already see like a little tension between the pursuit of art and the pursuit of commerce in my life. And I had the

opportunity to interview my favorite writer. His name is Anise Mojgani. He's the current poet laureate of the state of Oregon. And I asked him, Anise, how do you feel about the mantra, do what you love, and never work a day in your life? And, you know, I was a senior in college about to embark on this unknown journey. I was expecting him to say, you know, go follow your passion and the money will follow. And he didn't. He said something that has always stuck with me. He said, some people do what they love for work and others do what they have to so they can do what they love when they're not working. And neither is more noble. And I think that last part is really key. I think we live in a culture and a society that loves to revere people whose jobs and their

identities neatly aligned. But here was my professional idol, a professional poet, no less, telling me that it's okay to have a day job. And so I think that was sort of my goal with the book is to sort of balance the scales a little bit. I don't think there's anything wrong with identifying with or looking to your job as a source of meaning. But I think it can become problematic when it is the sole source of meaning and identity, as we spoke about earlier. Right. And that reminds me of what Elizabeth Gilbert said in the book Big Magic, where she said not to necessarily burden your art with the responsibility of paying your bills. Yeah, it's very true. I'm sure we all have friends who have

tried to go all in with art and they become so preoccupied with how they're going to make rent that they can't actually focus on art that they hope to create. And so I think the balance is holding what we value in one hand and what the world values or with the market values in the other hand and trying to find a career. or a job that sits at their intersection. We'll come back to this episode after this word from our sponsors. Fifth Third Bank's commercial payments are fast and efficient, but they're not just fast and efficient.

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You know, if you look at some of the studies from, say, the 1960s even, there was a study that asked Americans, how important is meaningful work to your success at the office? Only about 6% of people responded that it was very or extremely important. And then they conducted the same study 20 years later in the early 80s, and they found that 49% of people thought meaningful work was vital to their success at the office. And now, you know, over nine out of every 10 Americans would take a pay cut in order to pursue more meaningful work. And, you know, I don't think there's anything wrong with meaningful work necessarily, but I think it's important in historical context to understand that this wasn't always a core value to what we look towards our jobs for. Whereas this movement in the 1970s, in particular, the sort of personal growth, self-help movement, books like What Color Is Your Parachute by Richard Bowles as being sort of,

of emblematic of this movement. And in the past, you know, people very much look to work as a way to be a productive member of society or to take care of some of their material needs. But starting in the 70s and 80s, we saw this shift where people started looking to work as a form of self-expression, as opposed to asking what they could give to their job. People started asking what their job could give to them. And, you know, I think the culture of startups and girl bossing and the ways that we treat CEOs like celebrities and plaster always do what you love on the walls of our co-working spaces really feeds into this narrative. But I think we're starting to see a bit of a pushback to that where similar to what Mojgani said, you know, people are recognizing that, okay, maybe some people

do what they love and treat their job as their primary means of self-expression or self-house. actualization, but other people treat work as more of a means to an end. And can there be satisfaction when you spend eight or more hours a day doing something that is nothing more than a means to an end? Yeah, I think there's risk on that side of the spectrum as well. And we're particularly seeing this right now with younger generations and quite quitting and sort of this more nihilist approach to being anti-work or anti-capitalist. and I actually don't think that's a formula for fulfillment either.

You know, I know this on a personal level. The longest work days, the days that have been hardest to get through tend to be the days where I feel least engaged with the work that I'm doing. And so, you know, I think in the book I advocate for more of a middle path, not treating work as a necessary evil, not treating work as the sole source of meaning in our life, but finding a way that our jobs can support us to be, the people that we want to be. You know, starting with our vision of a life well-lived and thinking

about how our careers can support that vision as opposed to the other way around. So it's sort of a vision in which your work provides meaning, but the soccer team that you play with on Saturdays also provides meaning. And the mom's group or dad's group that you're in every Tuesday night and then the poker game that you play every Thursday night, those also provide meaning. And so all of that together forms the complete mosaic. Yeah, that's beautifully said. You know, it's much as an investor benefits from diversifying the investments in their portfolio, I think we too benefit from diversifying the sources of meaning and identity in our lives. Now, one thing that strikes me is much of our conversation so far has been about meaning and

identity, which is internal. There's also the way that work impacts a sense of status, which is external. And one thing that stood out to me when I read it was a conversation that you had with a different mentor of yours. An author, I think their first name was Robin. I'm forgetting their full name. It was a conversation in which they asked you, well, I'll let you tell it, but it was a very interesting question as you were at a decision crossroads. Yeah. So, you know, I think this anecdote gets at the difference between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. And so I was about 26. or 27 or so. And as I mentioned, I was working in tech and advertising, and I wanted to become a real writer. And so I was contemplating going back to grad school to get a journalism degree. You know, unlike law or medicine, a degree is not necessary to be a journalist, but can certainly help put you on that path. And I went for a walk with Robin Sloan, who is another author, a mentor of

And I blabbed on for way too long about this pro and con list that I'd made in my mind and all the reasons why I should or shouldn't go to journalism school. And then he asked me a question that really cut through all the noise. And he said, if you could go, but you couldn't tell anyone that you went, would you still do it? And I love that question because it really cuts to the core of what my own motivation was, not to be someone who had gone to journalism school or had a degree, but did I actually want to do the process of refining my craft, of learning these skills?

I think this is something that we can all ask ourselves that whatever phrase of our careers were at. I think the problem with just chasing external rewards, just chasing the next job title, the promotion, or the bonus, is that we can spend our entire lives chasing these carrots without truly feeling full. I think intrinsic motivation, finding what activities you like doing

for the act of doing them, the behavior themselves, tends to be a much more sustainable fuel source as opposed to just working for the reward at the end. Right. And what I like about that question, if you could do it but you wouldn't tell anybody that you did it, would you still do it?

I mean, that question is, I think, a guiding, question for so many possible paths in life, whether it's, in your case, going to school, selecting a particular career, hitting a certain level of income or certain level of net worth, you know, some of the financial goals that people have, you know, if you could do it, but you couldn't ever tell anyone and you could show to the world no outward signs of it, you know, would you still want that? And sometimes the answer is yes. Or I, I, find a lot of people have travel goals that sometimes can feel a little bit like Instagram

copy paste, right? If you could take that trip, but you couldn't tell anyone that you've taken that trip and you couldn't post any photos of it, would you take it? Yeah, it's a great point. You know, I think so many of us live our lives based on some sort of achievement rubric that either we've created for ourselves or that we've internalized from the scripts that we've inherited from our families or the people around us. And I think questions like that really get to the heart of helping people determine what they value, not what your parents value or what you perceive your friends might value, but what you care about yourself.

Now, one of the things that you mentioned is that the cliches that we often hear in the modern world are like, practice self-care, right? They're broad, they're generic. They lack specificity. and they also lack, I think, a certain awareness of human behavior, you know, the actual science of behavioral change. You've talked previously about structural interventions that can happen at the organizational level. But as an individual, what can each of us do, you know, the average person who's listening to this, what can we do to actually make changes that are implementable? Yeah, totally.

I think, you know, even saying care less about your job, is not very actionable advice. And so what I found is the best way to diversify your meaning-making portfolio is to spend your time doing what you purportedly care about. You know, it might sound simplistic, but if you want to find meaning and things other than work, you have to do things other than work. You know, I can't be here telling you exactly what that is for you. You know, maybe you want to learn.

a foreign language or learn a musical instrument. Maybe you want to get involved in your local community garden or do something that connects you to the political causes that you care about. But I think our identities are very much reinforced by the people around us. So a few pieces of advice. One would be to try and find a community that could care less about what you do for work, a community that values you in other ways. So for example, I like to play pickup basketball. And besides the exercise. I think one of the great things about it is that my value as a teammate on the basketball court has not have anything to do with how many pages I've written that day or how many books I've sold. It's about how I box out when I rebound or show up as a generous passer. And I think having

those other communities can really round out our personalities. And the second is I think about kind of the culture of work that we have in the United States. You know, from an early age, we ask kids what they want to be when they grow up at the dinner party. We ask each other, so what do you do? And I think we all have a role to play in changing some of that culture. You know, one thing that I found is just by inserting two little words, instead of asking people, what do you do, asking people what do they like to do, is a way to allow people to define themselves on their own terms. And I think we can all play a role in trying to maybe de-center works prevalence in our conversations in our society. When I moved to New York during the pandemic, I found a group of friends. There was a group of maybe 14 or 15 of us. And we have a rule amongst ourselves that we don't talk about work. We don't even ask each other what one another does. With my friend Carolyn, who's one of my best friends, I have outright told her, I never want to learn what your job is. And so over time just through like accidental slipups, somebody will slip like the name of the company they work for. You know, we try not to be.

be iron-fisted about it. So we've all kind of figured it out through like contextual clues over time, but we intentionally steer clear of any direct conversations about it. I love that. Yeah, it's made for a very fulfilling friendships. Yeah, fulfilling friendship and a real way to have contrast to how most people spend the majority of their days. I think one of the problems with modern knowledge work is it's hard to turn off your work brain. And I think having communities like that are really important, not just to recharge so you can go back to work, but to remind ourselves that work is part of, but not the entirety of who we are. Right. Right. That integrated sense of self. Well, thank you for spending this time with

us. Are there any final points that you would like to emphasize for our audience? No. I appreciate you having me on. I hope the listeners can maybe think about what's one way that they can invest in their non-work self as a way to, you know, make some of these conversations actionable moving forward. Thank you, Simone. What are three key takeaways that we got from this conversation? Number one, there is a risk that comes with over-identifying with your job. I often think about happiness as sort of the difference between our expectations and our reality. And if we have these sky-high expectations about what a job can deliver, if we're always

expecting our jobs to be a dream or to be perfect, it can create a lot of room for disappointment. Over-identifying with your job can impact your level of happiness or impact your internal state when your expectations don't meet reality. And it can also leave you with less energy to bring to other parts of your life. In fact, you may neglect those other areas. So that is the first key takeaway. Key takeaway number two. When it's hard to draw boundaries between life and work, one method to help with the separation can be developing a greater sense of self-complexity. People who have what researchers call greater self-complexity, people who have been able to

cultivate different sides of themselves, are more resilient in the face of adversity. So there's sort of like the business case for protecting your life. outside of work. We all know this firsthand. You're on hour 11 of a 12-hour day. You're not going to necessarily be firing at all cylinders. But I think there's also sort of the moral case about the way in which cultivating other sides of who we are creates more well-rounded individuals. It can be healthy for our communities and for ourselves. If you are a knowledge worker or if you work remotely, it can be particularly difficult to draw the line between your home life and your work life.

And so becoming aware of the options and tools available and becoming aware of the concept of self-complexity, simply having a term for it, which then gives you the framework for it, that can be a great first step into achieving that sense of self-complexity, which is another way of saying a healthier balance. So that is the second key takeaway.

Finally, key takeaway number three, advice and narratives around work culture or work-life balance can be very prescriptive and can be hard for people to navigate when they feel like, oh, maybe I should work less, or maybe I should be all in on one thing and quote-unquote follow my passion, right? There are so many cliches and aphorisms that are reductive because the reality is these situations are nuanced and people have different seasons in their life. I was expecting him to say, you know, go follow your passion and the money will follow. And he didn't. He said something that has always stuck with me. He said, some people do what they love for work and others do what they have to so they can do what they love when they're not working. And neither is more noble. And I think that last part is really key. I think we live in a culture and a society that loves to revere people whose jobs and their identities neatly aligned. But here was the last part is really key. I think that we live in a culture and a society that loves to revere people whose jobs and their identities neatly aligned. But here was, my professional idol, a professional poet, no less, telling me that it's okay to have a day job. And so I think that was sort of my goal with the book is to sort of balance the scales a little bit. I don't think there's anything wrong with identifying with or looking to your job as a source of meaning. But I think it can become problematic when it is the sole source of meaning and identity, as we spoke about earlier.

So remember, different seasons for different things. sometimes you will be in a season of life where you're all in. That was me for the past year when I was at Columbia. I was all in and other areas of my life. I knew that I was intentionally neglecting because I knew that this was only going to be a 10-month thing, right? And I knew it was going to be an incredibly intense 10 months. And everything else in my life would be on pause for those 10 months. But then I knew that it was limited and that once those 10 months were over, I could return back to tending to other areas, going back to the gym, coming back to afford anything full time, looking after my investments again, right?

All of the things that I put on pause during that very specific and limited period. So it's okay to have seasons, right? It's okay to adopt an approach that is like interval training where you sprint and then rest and then sprint and then rest, right? You go all out in a sprint burst and then you completely rest. That is a perfectly fine. In fact, it's a great framework. In fact, I love the sprint rest interval training framework. Some people prefer that.

Other people prefer the marathon approach, one where you pace yourself and you take that marathon sustainable pace, you know? So are you an ultramarathoner or are you a sprinter? You need to know which style works better for you and approach your life, your business, your work, your career, your investments, approach these projects accordingly. Those are three key takeaways from this conversation with Simone Stoltzoff. Thank you so much for tuning in. My My name is Paula Pantt. This is the Afford Anything podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please do two things.

I'm only listening to you this time. One is subscribe to our show notes, afford anything.com slash show notes, so that you can get a synopsis of every episode, including the timestamps, delivered hot and fresh to your inbox. And the other thing is to make sure that you are following us in your favorite podcast player. And if you use Stitcher, be aware that the Stitcher app is going to disappear at the end of August 2023. So if you are using the Stitcher app, please find your new favorite podcast playing app and follow us there. Thanks again for tuning in.

This is Paula Pan, and I will catch you in the next episode.