Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - The Myth of the Dream Job | Simone Stolzoff

Episode Date: September 4, 2023

Balancing happiness and ambition is a challenge, especially if you often define yourself by your work. Stolzoff covers why it’s good to have a job that’s simply good enough.Simone Stolzoff is the author of The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work. He is a designer and workplace expert from San Francisco, and a former 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.In this episode we talk about:His argument for diversifying our sources for what makes a meaningful life How passion for your job shouldn’t be a stand-in for pay or security And how to balance the pursuit of meaningful work without letting it take over your lifeFull Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/tph/podcast-episode/simone-stolzoffSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is the 10% Happier Podcast, I'm Dan Harris. Hello again. 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 define 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 Stahlsoff 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, IDO, 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 passion 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 Sainly and Bitious. 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, a 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. As you know, we're in the middle

of a big series on work here on the podcast, which feels like good time to point out that even if you love your job, you will experience stress. However, stress does not necessarily have to be a bad thing. It can actually be something you harness to your own advantage. To help you navigate stress to this fall, we've taken one of our most popular courses from the 10% happier app. A course called Stress Better, and we've turned it into a meditation challenge. You will learn from a renowned stress researcher at Columbia University, Professor Madupa Akanova, and from the amazing meditation teacher, Seven A. Celaci, they'll teach you how to use stress to your advantage. It's a seven day stress better challenge

and it kicks off on Monday, September 11th, and you can join over on the 10% happier app right now. Every day you'll get a short video followed by a free guided meditation to help you establish or reestablish your meditation habit. To join the stress-better challenge, just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10%.com. That's all one words spelled out. If you already have the app, just open it up and follow the instructions to join.

If you're not already a 10% happier subscriber, you can join us by starting a free trial that will give you access to the challenge along with everything else on the app. I'm Anna, and I'm Emily, and we're the hosts of Terribly Famous, the show that takes you behind the Velvet Rope and inside the lives of our most iconic stars. This season, we're going to spice up your life, diving into the world of Victoria Beckham. From her disastrous first Spice Girls audition to her fateful meeting with a certain footballer, say you'll be there, listeners. Okay, that's enough.

You're gonna wanna be listening, stop that immediately. Listen to terribly famous early and ad-free on Wondering Plus. T-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t This message comes from Viking, committed to exploring the world in comfort, journey through the heart of Europe on a Viking long ship, with thoughtful service, destination-focused dining, and cultural enrichment, on board and on shore. With a variety of voyages and sailing dates to choose from, now is the time to explore Europe's waterways. Learn more at Viking.com. Simone Stollsoff, welcome to the show.

Thanks Dan, it's a pleasure to be here. It's a 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 illusion to this theory that was devised by this

British pediatrician named Donald Bonacott in the mid-20th century. And so Bonacott 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 never 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 the cat thought that approach that valued sufficiency as opposed to perfection would be better off for both the child

and the parent, the child to learn to self-soothe and take care of some of their own problems, and the parent wouldn't lose themselves in 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 Winnicot, arguing that an approach that values sufficiency, a good enough job, might actually benefit workers. You know, much like 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

access around which the rest of your life orbits might be formula for more fulfillment happiness in the long run. So, honest response to that is I completely agree with Winnicod 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, what homoeconomicus 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 hears like, oh, well, you're just giving up.

Totally. Yeah, even just looking at the title, you might think it's this like slacker manifesto, you know, the good enough job and excuse to sit on our catches. But in actuality, you know, 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, you know, 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. I mean, many of us raised the idea of finding a soulmate, Tom Cruise saying, you complete me with string music swelling beneath, you know, 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, you know, Esther Proud 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, you know, 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. It's so, I mean, I had not heard that argument that 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 sole 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 and ways that can be unhealthy. Yeah, there's this colleague of mine at the Atlantic Derek Thompson who coined this term work

as a which I think is so apt. And I remember the first time hearing about this term, it felt so resonant to me. And other Esther Pearl 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 work as M 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 learn in the pandemic due to furloughs or playoffs. And then the third is just about expectations.

You know, I think often about happiness is 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 providing I've had two careers intertwined, one being a clothe-triding 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 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 Anise Mojgani. He's the current poet laureate of the state of Oregon. And I remember, I asked him, you know, in these, how do you feel about the mantra, do what you love and never work a day in your life? And, you know, it's expecting him to give me this pep talk about, you know, following

my passion and pursuing poetry and the money will follow. And he said something that I'll never forget. He said, you know, Sonone, 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 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 he was my professional idol a professional poet no less telling me that maybe it's okay to have a day job and do Which you love when you're not working?

Yeah, I a 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 a story 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 one 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 are 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 flower or some sort of moral shortcoming when in actuality

that's just not the reality for the majority of workers. To look back to a few things you said earlier that I wanted to loop back to, you invoked Esther Perrell, 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 you don't many of us bring our all or the best parts of ourselves who are working. Everybody else gets the leftovers. But I'm just wondering, is it really zero sum? Is there no way to be awesome all the time? No, I don't think so. And I think the research back says that,

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 to spare a game or you have a bad day at the office. It can very

easily spill over into all the other facets of your life. A research also shows that you know, 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. You know, it's not this zero, some 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 in 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 job 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. when they grow up, which I note to self, I guess I'm gonna try to stop doing. I just wanna acknowledge that I get your point,

and I hope I'm regurgitating it with some semblance of accuracy, and also just wanted to say that, you know, this idea of having more stuff going on outside of work can actually help your work. It appeals to me as a dyed-in-the-wool optimizer, and it's been made to me by previous guests, like Alex Su-jung Kim, 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, hobbies, it could be for woodworking or hiking or exercise or whatever, but that will make you better at your job. Given my conditioning and personality, I find that to be

a very compelling argument. Yeah, 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 research I just mentioned, if we want to derive meaning in 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 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 gonna 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 wanna 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 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? 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 tacit 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 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. You know, 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 like having a kid or like 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? You know, 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 in specifically about this one woman Liz who I interviewed for the book who was your typical sort of type A ambitious striver. She went to an Ivy League college and she bought the swim 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 in a 60, 70 hour weeks that she inflamed her nervous system. She became immunocompromised with a chronic illness. And she went from, you know, swimming six hours a day to her mom spoon feeding her chicken soup in her bed. And she had once,

you know, 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 this 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 D1 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 know 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 for 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. Yeah, I hear that. I mean, I wonder, for you, what was it like to take a step out of the newsroom and 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 careers simultaneously and they were intertwined, you know, being a news anchor and then being what I jokingly refer 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, I had some identity stuff of like, well, I'm not an acrimand anymore. I was actually having dinner at the ether night with somebody who used to be a pretty prominent acrimand and it's 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 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 rejigger their identity beyond something that was sort of tied to their professional achievement or, you know, 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 just one sort of priority system about what matters. And 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 listen, we'll 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 the second thing is we talked about parenting, not everybody listening to this as 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 either 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 like 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. I think that's a choice that we all have to make, you know, 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, you know, 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, hey, why are 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 making 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, the old cliche is 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. 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? It's a question that people with options can afford to entertain.

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, 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 in my hometown. And on one hand, it's like, oh, the agony of deciding between two attractive job offers, you know, whoa, is me. Maybe some of our listeners have been at a similar sort of career classroads. You know, 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 they really sent me for an existential loop. You know, I was pretty inseparable at the time, you know, going through my own little existential crisis about who I was and asking a lot of questions about, you know, 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 kind of first kernel that led to this multi-year research project of questioning, you know, how did work come to be so central to American and particular American's identities and sources of meaning, you know, in fear last name is Baker or Miller, you might think that conflating 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, of 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 income spectrum,

with stagnant wages people have had to work more just by 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 on some of these other institutions that once brought us meaning, an identity have led us to the place we are at today. Coming up, Simone talks about how to expand our identity outside of the office

and the role that passions should play when pursuing career goals. Well done. You've sorted through the embarrassment of riches that is the modern podcast landscape and found me Rob Briden on my podcast. In this series of Briden and I talk to among others Harry Hill, Ben Elton, Charlotte Church, Steve Cougan, and Dame Harriet Walter. And that's just a few. We tend to chat for about 45 minutes to an hour never longer. It's terrific conversation, reminiscent where appropriate, and exchange of anecdotes. So do join me Rob Briden, wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes of Bridenland are available early and ad-free on Amazon Music, or by subscribing

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Five stars. Rico, my friend. Those are some next level problem-solving skills. And that's how to make every day better. Real Amazon customers, real reviews, really. So how do we expand our identities so that we're not stuck in this dilemma that you describe? Yeah, and 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 sort of 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 in the other sources of our life very well either. You know, 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 know, you're there to be present and there are sort of structural protections against working while you're doing some of these activities. And 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 and 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 and 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 the natural inclination sometimes I remember speaking to this this psychologist for the book and she said, you know, I see all of these Taipei ambitious professionals. And I advise them to invest in their non-work selves. And I say, OK, I'm going to sign up for an Ironman.

I'm going to read 52 books this year, you know, thinking that it has to be this grand gesture. And I 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 M or work's interest in 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 and another 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, you know, 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 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 for my viewers 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, 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 cardio ofascular 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, you know, 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 the what journalist David Brooks would call the the resin-aer-cheese, you know, 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, you know, journalism, as you know, on like 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 Nader, which is, did I actually want to invest in my craft and learning these skills that 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 rums 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'm 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 and end up 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 Kay Gly, who has a podcast called, Hari 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 runs the game, there are people that want to be amateur, astronauts, and people that want to 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, you know, 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, you know, 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 modicrum of social support with a less-fraid 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 the SANA 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, you in the end of that passage, just to give that passage it's due after the day in a 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. It's 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. What about, 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. Like this is what I've done. I was an AM super passionate about journalism,

and now I have this amazing job, and I travel all over the world. But am I right in completely rethinking that? And what would be the better advice? Yeah, I think, you know, 2005's 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, you know, don't settle, keep searching. I think that was very much, you know, in the water, especially in the early arts, sort of 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

sort 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 are the two terms that she calls out. When we tell everyone to follow their passion, 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 and 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 their friend or a 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 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 and in the Hollywood

and among the writers or nonprofit sector, healthcare, education, where the industry as a whole has this 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 where out of one side of people's mouth, 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 commenced with the severity of the work that they were doing or the famous line. 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. So as long as passion and life don't become stand-ins for fair pay or workplace productions 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 counterargument

made by people at 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 just sort of innate passions. So telling them to follow their passion is not actionable advice.

So instead, the argument that people at CalMakes, 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 our argument is so sound, you know.

His famous 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 and 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 he's taken some hot button workplace issues such as remote work, unlimited vacation, and other so-called perks. We can't see tomorrow, but we can hear it.

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How can we start to think about what our definition is for good enough? What our definition is for success? That's a great question. You can say 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. there 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 got 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? I then really get to drill down into 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 for 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. You know, we need to hold the world values in one hand

and what new value in the other hand and try and find work at their intersection because I think there's risks at either end of this spectrum. So we want to pick up a representative moment or two from our work lives where we really feel 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 to an end 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 in 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 work cannot be your family. Can you say more about that? Yeah, it's one of those axioms that we throw around a lot of we're like family here. And I don't blame

employers for wanting to promote that type of ethos, you know, people who feel connected to their co-workers 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, informist, I didn't know that to 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 our company's bottom line, well, almost always, Trump, the loyalty to its people. The expectation in families 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, the Swiss literature, Nancy Rothbard and Julia Pellemar. 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. 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 son, there are probably others who don't feel the same way. And so, in the book advocate for a more transactional approach to work, which might sound crass, especially because we're told a job's 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 co-workers, 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 burn out, 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 vases who are equipped with the tools to actually enact the sort of structural protections that keep people from going off the rails. A colleague Anne Helen Peterson has this great distinction between the difference between a boundary and a guardrail. And so you think about the road, the boundaries, or the lines that separate one lane from another,

whereas the guardrails are 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 are 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 employees' ability to get work done as opposed to using some of these proxies, like the number of hours you spend in 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 returned office and hybrid work is a bit of a red hearing.

I think we're already in the age of remote and hybrid work. And it is 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 a younger person, you're missing out in the opportunity for mentorship. Yeah, I'm definitely amenable to that. You know, I worked for four years at this organization,

IDO, that really pited 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 co-workers that you might have only seen

in little boxes on your computer screen. And so, I think there's a lot of pontification about what the future might hold. And I think Malcolm's point is as well taking 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 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 the 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. And I think there are different ways, either synchronously or asynchronously, to build culture beyond having people sort of 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 they're way around. I'll propose an alternative, which is minimum vacation policies. There are two companies out there that require their employees to take time off. And I think that's the type of structural protection working well, you know, when 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 in 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 mean, I think since some of these laws have been passed, 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 70 to $700,000. And I think we've sort of smung the pendulum on one way and then 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 are bash on the bean bag chairs and the ping-pong tables You know, I mean I think the best office best office perk is This is gonna sound like a you know self-help quasi self-help guru I guess but I think the best office perk is is trust is the to sound like a quasi self-help guru, I guess. But I think the best office brick is trust. There's 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. And this is often the hottest of the hot button issues. I don't think it should be a mandate that I think people's full selves should be accepted if they, 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 in-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 head

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, your hobbies, into side hustles or different ways to make money. If you scroll through the TikToks and the Instagram Realies 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 in dry cleaning and 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 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? You know, I'm a boss, but I help 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 I 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 going to 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 the 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 odd work hours and I 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 the 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 that 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 have so that even if you're doing the work on this had her day, you can schedule it to be sent on 9 a.m. on Monday. You know, I think there's this former editor and 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 it being sort of at the top of the mast head 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 4 p.m. 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 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 schedule 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 need Andy to look into that technology. Anything that I should have asked, but didn't? My favorite journalism, last question question. No, I think we covered the basis pretty well.

I appreciate some of your skepticism because I think I covered the basis pretty well. I appreciate some of your skepticism because I think I had a lot of it myself. 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 in 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,

of your argument, the nuance of your argument. And I'm not skeptical, like, 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 they 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 be jigger 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, you know, 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, especially in the US,

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 Justin Davy, Gabrielle Zuckerman, Lauren Smith, and Tara Anderson. DJ Cashmere is our senior producer, Marissa Schneiderman is our senior editor, and Kimmy Regler 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.

Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad-free with 1-3-plus in Apple Podcasts. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com slash Survey. I want you to picture Steve Jobs, tinkering with a computer in his garage. Walt Disney drawing cartoons for his high school newspaper.

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