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The Truth About the “Dream Job” is…

That it might not even exist, or at least, the American idea of a Dream Job may not.

From an early age, we’re taught to answer the question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” This seemingly sweet question, answered by wide-eyed elementary schoolers that likely has more to do with their upcoming Halloween costumes than actual career aspirations, doesn’t feel insidious–– but as today’s guest discovers, this obsession with work and work culture is uniquely American.

In researching his book, The Good Enough Job, journalist Simone Stolzoff came across some startling statistics about how Americans view their work. According to studies from the Pew Research Center, when asked what gives their life meaning, American respondents were nearly 2x more likely to name their career than to name their spouse. 

We sat down with Simone to talk about what he learned while researching the idea of dream jobs, including why we’re so obsessed with finding meaning in our work and how that often leads us to compromise our values.

What you’ll learn:

• Where the idea of a “Dream Job” came from in the first place

• What factors make a job a “Good Enough” job, and why that’s so important

• How to detach our sense of self-worth from our careers

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Transcript:

Simone Stolzoff:

Certainly work is a big part of how we spend our time, but we are not just workers, we’re also neighbors and siblings and friends and parents and citizens, and if we’re giving all of our best time and our energy just into one aspect of who we are, it can be a really narrow platform to balance upon.

Tori Dunlap:

Hi financial feminists. Welcome back to the show. I’m so excited to see you. If this is your first episode ever, hello, I am hoping you’ll stick around. My name is Tori. I’m a money expert. I am here to fight the patriarchy by making you rich. I am a New York Times bestselling author. I also of course, host this show and we’re a community of over three million financial feminist, which is very exciting and I hope you’re here for a long time and a good time. I don’t know about you, but every time August hits I get a little sad because somehow summer is already pretty much over. I hope you are soaking up these last few days. Go do something fun. Go pick berries, go rafting. Not rafting. What do you call it? Tubing where you put the inner tube on a lake and you just sit there for a while or you float down the river, floating.

That’s the fucking word I’m looking for, floating. You don’t have to cut that. That was a struggle that it’s important for people to hear. Do something fun, get outside. Read a book. I read Harry Potter every summer. We’re recording this at the end of July. I’m reading number five. I know, I just haven’t read Order of the Phoenix in a really long time. It’s the worst one. I agree. I forgot just how moody Harry is. He’s just so angsty, every three pages, he’s like, “I’m mad.” Kristen just cut in to say he’s such a punk and I agree. I’m just like, you know what? I get it, you have a lot of hormones. Everybody’s fighting … you’re the only one who’s fighting Voldemort, I get it, but don’t take it out on Ron and Hermione. This isn’t their fault. This isn’t their fault. And the best part about my edition of five is that it was the first hardcover I ever got of the Harry Potter books.

I have one, two, three and four paperback and then five, six, seven hardcover, because I got them when they came out. And this hardcover is so beat up, literally the spine lace flat. It’s rough. There’s stains on the back. There’s pages that are about to fall out, but I love it because it’s mine. So just do something fun. Embrace the rest of the summer. Take your vacation days if you haven’t taken them. Enjoy the sun that we have left and I hope you’re having a good one. Today, we have just a really truly fascinating episode. I know I’m biased because I do this show, but this was so interesting to me. This show and our guest. Right now, the job market is just a shit show. It is just so interesting right now. There’s rising costs and there’s more and more layoffs that are still happening. And some industries like the food service industry, I see four hire signs everywhere I go.

And then there’s some industries where they’re laying people off left and right where job searching takes six to 12 months. So I don’t know if we’ve ever been more aware of the role that work plays in our lives, but what happens when, like me, you over-identify with work. When your career, when your job has become part if not, all of your identity, and you are trying to navigate that. I’ve literally had multiple conversations with multiple people in my life. I’m not kidding. Over the last week especially, I’ve actually … very vulnerably, I’ve sat and cried about this. I don’t feel like I have hobbies. I love cooking. I love reading. I love traveling, but I don’t know how much of my actual fulfillment and time is spent doing things that bring me joy that aren’t Her First 100K or aren’t work. And that is something I’d really like to change.

So I know even as someone who literally asked the questions and recorded this episode, I will also be re-listening to it because I need to add myself. Work is this status symbol as much as it’s a paycheck, it’s a badge of honor. We’ve talked with previous guests, including Tara Schuster about this of work being your identity and being the reason that you feel like you’re successful or not successful. Today’s guest argues that that leads to burnout and resentment and that there is a better way forward. Today, we are joined by Simone Stolzoff an independent journalist and consultant from San Francisco, a former design lead at the Global Innovation Firm IDEO. He regularly works with leaders from the Surgeon General of the United States to the chief talent officer at Google on how to make the workplace more human-centered. His work has been featured in the New York Times, the Atlantic, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and numerous other publications.

And he is also a graduate of Stanford and the University of Pennsylvania. No big deal. Simone is also the author of The Good Enough Job, Reclaiming Life from Work and Investigation in a Cultural Critique About Why Work Has Become So Central to Our Identities and A Call to Separate Our Self-worth from Our Output. Before we get into the episode, we, as you probably know, do a bunch of research for all of these interviews and some of the research we uncovered for this is really, really fascinating. Again, more information in Simone’s book and also in this episode, but I wanted to share some kind of fun or maybe not so fun facts with you. In any culture, when people are unemployed for a long time, their conclusion tends to be that something is messed up with the system. The system is rigged, this is bullshit, but Americans by contrast tend to blame themselves.

So for other cultures it’s a very much a conclusion that’s just like this is messed up and the workplace is screwed up. And for us, it’s “We are screwed up,” which I thought was really fascinating. Part of this is because the United States is one of the most individualistic cultures in the world. 91% of the time the median American, the average American in a survey would choose the individualistic answer over the collectivist answer, and I actually did some research about this for my book about the American dream and how that came about. Because this country, when it was colonized was based on this kind of Protestant work ethic. We literally have been taught that the more you work, the better you are, literally the more godly you are. And so that is why so much of our culture and so much of our identity and so much of the way we view value in our society is not based on your inherent value or your inherent worth, it’s based on your output. Yay capitalism.

In the US, 55% of workers, I’m actually shocked, it’s not more, get a sense of identity from their job and seven out of 10 college graduates get a sense of identity from their job as opposed to their job just being something they do. When the Pew Research Center asked Americans what gives their life meaning, respondents were nearly two times more likely to name their career than to name their own spouse. Work is a greater source of meaning for Americans than both faith friends and their actual partner that they spend in theory, most of their time with their bed, with their house with, which is kind of crazy to me. This episode and our interview with Simone is a truly … it’s just like a breath of fair share. If you’ve been brought up in the hustle culture or follow your passion at all costs sort of mindset, we dive into why the shift into over-identifying with our work has been happening.

What the consequences of that shift are on
our mental health and how to reclaim ourselves in a world that is constantly determined our worth by our job titles. So let’s go ahead and get into it. First, a word from the companies that allow us to bring you all of this good free content. I just realized you worked at … how do you pronounce this, IDEO?

Simone Stolzoff:

IDEO. Yeah, exactly.

Tori Dunlap:

I’ve never heard it out loud. I worked … when I was a college student, it was senior year I worked as an intern on a human design book. I think either one of the authors worked there or consulted there, and it was called The Art of Opportunity and it was a human design book. I love that. I was part of your story.

Simone Stolzoff:

There you go. Yeah. A world that I’ve somewhat shared but also embraced in other ways.

Tori Dunlap:

I am so excited to have you. I think we had some back and forth and we also had so many people chat about your work and your book. We actually literally as we’re recording this, have a video going viral about the concept of dream jobs. So this conversation could not be more relevant. What was your first “dream job” and when did you first become aware of this idea of a dream job?

Simone Stolzoff:

Yeah. I’ve had many dream jobs over the course of my life. I think my first was probably to be the shortstop of the San Francisco Giants, my hometown baseball team, but I think my conception of what I wanted for my career has been very responsive to what I was watching on television at the time. So, early on, I remember watching Jerry Maguire and I wanted to be a sports agent after I watched that and I watched Mad Men and then I wanted to be a copywriter after I watched that. So I maybe don’t have a great sense of what I myself want, but I know when I see it

Tori Dunlap:

You call yourself a workist. Can you define this term in the context of your book?

Simone Stolzoff:

Yeah, so workist or workism is the more broad term was originally coined by a colleague of mine, this journalist Derek Thompson. And the idea is pretty straightforward. It’s the idea of treating work akin to a religious identity, so something that you don’t just look to for a paycheck, but also for a community, a purpose, a primary source of meaning in your life. And the argument that both Thompson and I expand upon in the book is that it is a recipe for disappointment. When we have these sky-high expectations for work, when we expect it to deliver transcendence or be our sole means of self-actualization, that’s an expectation that many of our jobs are not necessarily designed to bear.

Tori Dunlap:

Well, and to go off on that, that was the most interesting part I think about the book and some of your research is that a lot of morality around working for Americans specifically even going so far to calling our work akin to a religion, can you break that down for us? What does that shift look like?

Simone Stolzoff:

Yeah, so there’s a few different ways to slice it. You can go back to the foundation of our country with the Protestant work ethic and capitalism is really being the two strands that entwine to form our country’s DNA, but the trend that I really document in the book is over the course of the last 40 or 50 years. Of course, there are political forces, there are economic forces, but the primary one that I focus on is a cultural trend, which is the decline of other sources of meaning and identity in people’s lives. Things like organized religion or community groups or neighborhood groups. These things that once brought a lot of identity and meaning to people and have precipitously declined over the course of the past few decades.

And yet, the need for belonging, for purpose, for meaning, for identity remain. So many Americans have turned to the place where they spend the majority of their time, the office and as a chronicle, this can be something that cuts both ways.

Tori Dunlap:

I think there is this perception that I at least have with Europeans is they’re working to live rather than the other way around. And I think for us as Americans, there is this sense of just, yeah, work is your identity. It’s the thing that you are so focused on. Did you find that there was a difference between Americans and other countries or is this trend all over?

Simone Stolzoff:

Yeah, I think it’s both. I think it’s particularly pronounced here in the US and my family is Italian. There’s definitely a very different sort of value structure and hierarchy of needs when you think about some of these other European cultures. And yeah, I think there’s a few things about the US for example, the way in which we tie our healthcare to our employment, the way in which the consequences of losing work are so dire here, but also just the way in which we idolize work. I wrote the majority of the book from a WeWork and right next to me on the wall, it had plastered, “Always do what you love” and we treat CEOs like celebrities and we really treat work as sort of the central axis around which the rest of our lives orbit.

And there’s this quote from the psychologist, Esther Perel, that has always really resonated with me, which is that too many people bring the best of ourselves to work and then, bring the leftovers home. So I think that really points to one of the main risks of a work centric existence is that we can neglect other parts of who we are. Certainly work is a big part of how we spend our time, but we are not just workers, we’re also neighbors and siblings and friends and parents and citizens. And if we’re giving all of our best time and our energy just into one aspect of who we are, it can be a really narrow platform to balance upon.

Tori Dunlap:

The irony that you wrote, the majority of this book at a WeWork, it’s not lost on me.

Simone Stolzoff:

And that I wrote the majority of this book on the side of a full-time job. I think I’ve been grappling with this for a long time myself, and I think maybe I came into the book process with a little bit more of a hot take. It was like, work is bad, we do it too much, and over the course of reporting for the past three, four years, it’s tempered into something more mild, which is work is important. How we spend those hours matter. We work more than we do just about anything else, but the question then is how do you balance the pursuit of meaningful work without letting work subsume who you are?

Tori Dunlap:

This morality we were talking about before, how does it break down by income level? Because the argument could be made that it seems like there is this morality around working a lot, but if you think of people who work
multiple minimum wage jobs, especially industries like the service industry that’s full of women, that’s full of minorities, it doesn’t seem like their work is regarded at the same level. So how does it break down by income level?

Simone Stolzoff:

Yeah, I think there are two separate issues when you think about the two sides of the income spectrum, when you think about white collar workers who are looking to work like a religion, looking to work to be the most pure expression of who they uniquely are, it’s really a privilege to be able to even ask the question of what do you want to do? Those types of higher level concerns are really most pronounced among people who have the privilege to be able to ask them the optionality in their careers. On the other side of the income spectrum with service work, hourly work, more blue collar work, it’s important to consider that the majority of Americans and the majority of people in the world don’t work to self-actualize.

They work to survive. So, the issues that we’re thinking about when it comes to a lot of these jobs often deemed as essential and yet not given any more compensation or workplace protections is how to make work suck less. How to lift the social safety net so that we can make the consequences of losing work less dire or how can people get paid a wage that’s commensurate with the type of work that they’re doing? I think it really comes to a head when you think about the narrative and the rhetoric that we use sometimes to paint work as a labor of love or to say things like, this isn’t my job, this is my passion. It can actually obscure a lot of the injustice that exists in a lot of these issues.

Especially among people who are working hourly or in creative or in mission-driven lines of work where just the ability to have a job or the ability to work in a creative field is seen as a form of compensation in and of itself and in actuality, can actually obscure a lot of the exploitation that exists in these fields.

Tori Dunlap:

I think that’s so important and we’ve talked about it on their show and I write about it in my book where I’m like … especially with women, there’s this feeling of nonprofit or mission-driven work. We’re literally told as women from childhood that our value is in how we give to society. That’s our identity. We’re given dolls, that’s the toys we’re given, is we’re told to care take. Then, when we become resentful or we believe we should be compensated more, we then feel guilt because we’re like, “Well, we’re doing this really important thing,” and like, “Oh, I can’t ask for more at a nonprofit because they’re struggling,” and it’s this dichotomy of you want to do mission-driven purposeful work, but it can often lead to resentment when you’re asking the work to pay your bills. And when you’re asking for a fair and equitable wage and that isn’t given, there’s so much friction there.

Simone Stolzoff:

Totally. Yeah, a lot of these lines of work, especially care work or when you’re taking care of others or in healthcare and education, these lines of work are feminized and by extension, devalued. People think that you don’t do this work for the money. For example, my partner is an elementary school teacher, and over the course of the pandemic, it was as if people were speaking to her out of two different sides of their mouth. They would say, “Oh my God, you’re doing God’s work. Thank you so much for doing what you do.” And then in the same sentence, “Just make do with what you have.” And so that’s what I see a lot of the time, especially with the service work or care workers that I spoke to for the book, is there’s this idea that I write about called vocational awe.

Which is that in certain lines of work, particularly mission-driven, the types of industries that you were talking about, there’s this sort of halo effect where people are like, “Oh my God, you are doing god’s work. You are doing something that no one does for the money or for something larger than yourself.” And because of that, it becomes aircover to not pay people what they deserve, flat out. And you see this in nursing, you see this in teaching, you see this in any sort of nonprofit or mission-driven space. It’s as if the fact that it’s good for the world is somehow aircover to prevent people getting paid what they deserve.

Tori Dunlap:

And in a way, this work is incredibly rewarding, but it’s also the most emotionally laborious work too. It’s not just literally your physical labor, but yeah, I think of like, I was mentioning social workers, nurses, elementary school teachers. I have so many friends who are coaches or teachers and you are there. One of my good friends, science teacher, middle school science teacher, she’s there to teach kids about science. The majority of her job is navigating parent relationships, bullying. There’s so much emotional labor that goes into a job like that. And of course that is not really compensated in the work that she’s doing. It’s just crazy. So when I think about this sort of relationship to our jobs or to our careers as our identity, I get this all the time.

If I get recognized in public, people very rarely say, are you Tori Dunlap? They’ll say, “Oh, Her First 100K. Oh, Financial Feminist.” Even publicly, my identity is tied to what I do for my career, and I can say personally, I have constantly tried and I’m doing that work right now of uncoupling my identity from my work. So what did you find in your research in terms of, if you can with actionable things, I’m really asking for a friend, AKA asking for me, what sort of conscious decisions can we make to say, “Okay, this is my work versus this is who I am as a person?”

Simone Stolzoff:

Yeah, I definitely can relate to your perspective and also, it’s reinforced by the culture, starting with kids. We ask them who they want to be when they grow up, and then, you go to a cocktail party and the first question is, what do you do? I think it’s hard to tell people to deprioritize work. That feels not very actionable. So the biggest things that I found through my research that have really helped is the people who have had the healthiest relationships with work of the people that I spoke to, all had a really keen sense of who they were when they weren’t working. So the question is then how do you invest and develop these other sides of who you are? And I think there’s sort of two steps.

One is to create opportunities where work is not an option. Part of the problem with modern day knowledge work is it’s so leaky. You’re always one phone tap away from answering another work email or being back into that sort of work mindset. So, one of the benefits of say, going to a yoga class or going on a walk with your best friend or doing something that has a structural barrier that prevents you from multitasking is it allows you to carve out space in your days, in your weeks, in your life, where you are acting as someone more than just a worker. And the second question is how do you fill that space? It might sound a little simplistic, but if you want to derive identity outside of your job or if you want to find meaning outside of your work, you have to do things other than work.

So often, especially in our current economy, you might come home from a laborious job and all you have is the energy to turn off your brain and turn on N
etflix and no offense to Netflix, but that’s not necessarily a vehicle for making meaning in your life. So whatever it is, it’s your hobby, it’s the instrument that you’re learning, it’s the recreational softball team that you play on. It’s the sense of who you are when you’re not just thinking through the lens of what can produce economic value and then, trying to find people that can reinforce those identities. So for example, I love playing pickup basketball and the basketball court, no one cares that I’m a journalist or that I’m an author or how many books I sold that week.

They care that I’m showing up as a teammate that I box out when I rebound or pass. And thinking about ways in which our identities are reinforced by the people around you and how you can find an identity and a community in your life where they couldn’t care less about what you do to make money.

Tori Dunlap:

The audience knows this, but one of the things that I love doing is bar classes for literally the reason that you said, like I love them for the working out, but literally, my phone stays in the locker for that hour and I don’t know if there’s any other time that my phone other than me being asleep that my phone is not accessible and it’s so freeing in that way. We were talking about identity separating that. Your book is called The Good Enough Jump. So talk to me about the transition or the journey to finding the good enough job for yourself, and can you also define what you mean by the good enough job?

Simone Stolzoff:

Yeah, so I can get a little bit into the origin of the title. There’s two sources of inspiration. The first is pretty straightforward, it’s the good enough job as a foil to the dream job. The second is an allusion to this theory that was devised by this British pediatrician in the mid 20th century named Donald Winnicott. And Winnicott was observing how there was this growing idolization of parenting, where he’s a British man, specifically in England, there was these parents that wanted to be the perfect parent. They wanted to shield their kid from experiencing any sort of negative emotion or harm. And then, when the kid inevitably felt frustrated or sad or angry, the parent took it extremely personally.

They thought it was a reflection of their own shortcomings. So Winnicott proposed an alternative, and he said, “Instead of valuing perfection as our ideal, what if we valued sufficiency?” And he thought it would benefit both the child and the parent. The child would learn how to self-soothe and take care of some of their own problems and the parent wouldn’t lose themselves in their children’s emotions. So obviously, I’m making a direct parallel to the working world and with this growing sort of idolization of work and the pursuit of dream jobs and perfect jobs, one sets a bar that is very, very high that leaves a lot of room for disappointment underneath. Secondly, it really loses sight of work as part of, but not the entirety of who we are. So the idea with a good enough job in my mind is it’s a job that allows you to be the person who you want to be. My favorite thing about it is it’s subjective.

You get to choose what a good enough job is for you. Maybe for you, it’s a job that pays a certain amount of money or is in a certain industry or allows you to do certain things during the day or maybe gets off at a certain hour so that you can go to that bar class or pick up your kids from school every day. The important part is that you recognize what your definition of good enough is, so then you can convert some of that energy that you might be spending, wondering whether there’s something better out there or whether you’re actually spending your time pursuing the truest version of your calling into your life outside of the office as well.

Tori Dunlap:

Do you feel like passion led careers can sit in that good enough job or is that something that needs to be separate from the thing that makes us money?

Simone Stolzoff:

The way I think about it is that a job can be a reflection of your passion. It can be a great source of meaning and identity. I’ve certainly made lifelong friends through different jobs that I’ve had, but it becomes risky when it is the sole source of identity or meaning and passion in your life. We found this out the hard way during the pandemic as many people’s jobs changed or they were laid off or furloughed. If your job is your sole source of identity and you lose it, what’s left? There’s also the argument about expectations, that we’ve talked about and also, just neglecting other parts of who we are. If we want to be not just good workers but good people, it’s important that we save some of our time and energy for things other than our pursuits of economic value.

Tori Dunlap:

Capitalism is the through line for all of this, and it’s like I think that it has ingrained in us this feeling that if you’re not making money, it’s not worth doing. I had a partner literally tell me a couple of years ago, he’s like, what are your hobbies? And I’m like, I don’t have any hobbies. It was the first time I realized I had tried the business that I was running on the side of my nine to five. I monetized it almost immediately, and then it became my hobby, and then it became my full-time thing. It was very difficult for me to both find things that I didn’t feel the urge to monetize and also find a balance between those and the things that were making me money

Simone Stolzoff:

Yeah, and the research backs this up. Obviously, there’s sort of the moral argument about the value of finding other pursuits outside of work, but there’s also the business case. It shows that people who have what researchers call greater self complexity, who have invested in different sides of who they are, tend to be more resilient in the face of adversity. This makes sense. If you’re sort of rising and falling based on your professional accomplishments and you have a bad day at work or you’re boss is something disparaging, it can very easily spill into all the other facets of your life unless you’ve taken the time to invest in other parts of who you are. Also, people with greater interests and hobbies outside of work tend to be more creative problem solvers.

They tend to be more innovative, and I think this is particularly true now in the age of AI and thinking about what really sets us apart is it’s about the inputs. It’s about our way of being able to think at problems differently. It’s not necessarily being able to do the monotonous rote work. Frankly, the robots are going to be able to do that soon enough. It’s the ability to find ways to be inspired, to cultivate your taste, to understand what your version of good looks like. And that’s all fueled by having a robust life outside of the office.

Tori Dunlap:

Yeah, and we’ve talked a lot about identity in the past couple episodes, and I think we’ve kind of settled on like identity is literally I am versus something else is just … it happened or I did this thing. A lot of people, again, especially women, it’s like, “Oh, I missed this deadline or something happened, not like I failed or I missed this deadline, but I am a failure or I am incompetent.” And there’s something so powerful even about shifting the w
ay we think about ourselves and others to just be like, “No, it’s a statement of fact.” This happened versus the duration or the derivative of that, which is I am this person, I did this thing and therefore I am this.

Simone Stolzoff:

Yeah, we see this with companies all the time, people that refer to themselves as I am a Googler, for example, as opposed to I am someone who works at Google.

Tori Dunlap:

I work at Google.

Simone Stolzoff:

Yeah, it shows who is driving the cart, and I think you’ve talked about this on the show in the past. I think sometimes it takes some sort of inciting incident or some sort of way of shaking you out of the spell under which you’re living to recognize the fragility of having that identification be solely just one part of who you are. So for example, in the book, one of the stories I tell is of someone who, this woman, Liz, she was a very sort of typical type A, an ambitious overachiever. She went to an Ivy League school, she both swam and was on the water polo team. She graduated and did TFA, Teach for America and really identified with her identity as a teacher. Then she contracted a chronic illness that prevented her from being productive.

Obviously, this was hard in more ways than one, but I think one of the silver linings that she found was that she was able to reconceive of who she was based on her evergreen characteristics. She could no longer define her self-worth based on her ability and her output in the office. So she started to think of herself as, I am loyal, I am generous with my time. I am a supporter of the arts. These things that no market or job or boss can take away from you. I think this is true for a lot of people. Maybe it’s exposure to a different culture, like you talked about your experience starting abroad or maybe it is a layoff or a furlough, but once you are awakened to the fact that your job might not always be something that you can rely on, it makes it very easy to think about the benefits of diversifying your identity.

Tori Dunlap:

You mentioned a couple of times, and we had a question about this, of layoffs and especially post-COVID, it happened during COVID. It’s happening a lot now. Have the recent layoffs affected our relationship with work as a whole, and do you think we’re entering into this new era of boundaries and beliefs since we’re really learning the concept that your job won’t love you back?

Simone Stolzoff:

Yeah, definitely. I think it’s a broader fallout of the pandemic, but especially layoffs at some of these companies that our society has idolized. When it’s the Facebooks and the Googles and the Microsofts of the world laying people off, these are the same companies that we’re pushing the belief that you can come here and do the best work of your life. We’ll take care of you, our workplace is like a family, the sort of Silicon Valley ethos of what work could be.

Tori Dunlap:

We’ll give you haircuts on campus. You don’t even have to leave.

Simone Stolzoff:

Exactly, and we’re seeing that breakdown. So one thing that I advocate for in the book is a more transactional approach to work, which might sound crass, especially because we’re told jobs are meant to be callings and vocations and passions, but I think fundamentally jobs are economic contracts. They’re in exchange of your time and your energy and your labor for a paycheck, and certainly, they can be much more than that, but I think one thing that the layoffs are showing us is that employers already treat work transactionally. They hire employees who add value and fire employees who do not, and I think employees or workers would benefit from being able to see what is their end of the contract as well, what are the terms of this employment contract? It will help them, for example, talk about money as opposed to thinking that somehow talking about compensation undermines the best interest of the company.

And more importantly, it helps them understand that their job is not the entirety of who they are. It’s just one part of how they make a living.

Tori Dunlap:

As a guest on Financial Feminist, I really appreciate you saying that because yet we got to talk about money, we have to talk about compensation and I think there’s this narrative that’s fed, again, I can speak as a woman of loyalty, like you’ll be compensated for your loyalty, but companies are not loyal to you, as a business owner, sometimes I have to make hard decisions, and it’s one of those things where if you find a better opportunity or if you find something different, it’s okay to move on. In that same vein though, we’ve gotten questions from our community about this feeling of golden handcuffs of either I don’t feel like I can get compensated and truly, I don’t think I can get compensated somewhere else at the same level, or I have a vesting schedule where in order to get my full 401K, I need to stay for four years.

There’s this feeling sometimes I think of you’re unhappy in this role or it’s toxic, but it’s fully remote and that’s better or what is the reframe here or what is the process of deciding if it’s worthwhile to move on?

Simone Stolzoff:

Yeah, I think it’s super nuanced and some people don’t have as much choice about whether or not they can just get up and quit their job, especially if they have responsibilities or dependents or other ones who are really relying on that income. What I always encourage people to think about is start with your vision of a life well-lived and then think about how your career or your job can support that vision, because too often it’s the other way around. Too often we start with the job and we think, “Okay, how can my life support this job that I want?” And the truth is, you can make lifestyle choices if your corporate job is not serving you.

There are ways in which you might be able to move to a place with lower cost of living or make choices where you’re negotiating how you and your partner or just you individually are spending or budgeting your money or it might just be a mindset shift of making the job you have the job you want, whether it is scaling back or understanding the type of work that really energizes you and the type of work that really burns you out. There’s this one study that I write about in the book that I think is really illustrative, and it was a study of janitors in a hospital who you might not think of as the most meaningful line of work. What the researchers found was that even though all of these janitors had the exact same job at the exact same institution, there was a huge variance in the amount of meaning and fulfillment that they got from their job.

And the workers roughly broke down into two categories. There was the first group, and they didn’t see their job as particularly high skill. They didn’t really go out of their way to interact with patients or their coworkers, and ultimately they weren’t very fulfilled by their work. And then, there was a second group who thought their job was a little bit higher s
kill, thought their job was part of this larger healthcare system where they played an integral part in healing the sick. They had an understanding of what was the larger purpose that they could attach their job to. So that might be within your line of work, the mission of the company, but you might also just reframe and think about the ways in which your job affords you the life that you lead, and not trying to put all of your identity eggs in the job basket, not trying to rely on your work to also be your primary social community and your go-to dinner spot.

And your way of changing the world, some people do what they love and some people do what they have to so they can do what they love when they’re not working and I don’t think either is more noble.

Tori Dunlap:

I have kind of a half fledged thought and I’m trying to get to what I am thinking about, but Simone, what you just said is really interesting because what I’m hearing is it’s like, okay, when your work is your identity, that’s potentially problematic. That’s an issue, but at the same time, if you’re a janitor at a hospital and you are getting community and this sense of fulfillment and this sense of purpose and belonging that actually makes your job better, that feels like a very slippery slope for me between my job is my identity, versus I’m also getting community and joy from this. I don’t know. I think they probably can live, and I imagine the research says that you can still have that sense of fulfillment and purpose without making it your identity. It’s interesting to hear that because it sounds very close.

Simone Stolzoff:

Totally. Yeah, and I think that’s where the nuance comes in. I think on one hand there are people that completely lose themselves in their jobs, and then on the other end of the spectrum, there’s people that have a more nihilist point of view where they don’t care about their jobs or they’re quiet quitting what have you. And I don’t think either is necessarily a healthy relationship to work. I think you and I both know sometimes the worst work days are the days where you don’t feel engaged and you don’t feel connected to the type of work that you’re doing, and if you’re just framing work as sort of a necessary evil, that’s a recipe for unhappiness and very, very long work days. So I think the balance is we have to hold two things in each hand. On one hand it’s what do I value?

What do I care about? What are the things in my work life that I need to be true? And on the other hand, you have to think about, “Okay, what is the market value? What is the market care about? What are those incentives and motivators? And try and find work at their intersection,” because if you’re just caring about what the market values, then you can find yourself playing a game that you don’t actually want to win or trying to climb a career ladder that you don’t actually want to be on, but if you’re just thinking about what you care about and what you value, then you can find yourself in a position where, for example, you’re taking on a lot of debt to go to graduate school to pursue a degree that might not actually lead to stable job prospects on the other end or you quit your job to go all in on your art.

Then you become so preoccupied with how you’re going to pay your rent that you can’t actually focus on the art that you hope to create. So I think that’s the balance we’re hoping to strike. It’s not that work is a necessary evil or work is a perfect reflection of who you are in the world, but it’s somewhere in between.

Tori Dunlap:

It reminds me, there’s this quote in the personal finance community, your net worth is not your self-worth. And I think it’s also the same thing with your job, and I just remembered my editor when I was writing my book, I talked about the two keys to negotiating, and I talked about knowing your data, knowing your numbers, knowing what your market rate is, and then your value. For me, that was like, how have you saved the company money? How have you shown up and exceeded expectations? And I remember her writing a note to me and she’s like, “Hey, can we change this to value add?” Because it’s not your value, right? Your value and your intrinsic value as a person is not what you’re bringing and why you deserve to be compensated. And it was such an interesting shift that I didn’t even pick up on, and it reminded me of that when we were talking about identity.

Simone Stolzoff:

Totally, and I think people that have things that are important to them outside of work often can have a level of healthy detachment from the job itself that can benefit you. In the case of a negotiation, for example, you have a real clear idea of what your BATNA is or have a clear idea of why you’re working, or if you’re in a job where everyone is sort of gripping the output so tightly, it’s going to prevent you from being able to have the perspective to see, “Wait, is this actually serving our goals?” Some of my favorite coworkers I’ve ever had are people who care about skateboarding, way more than they care about work or there’s a political cause that they care about.

And I think it’s more interesting for both the workplace and for the world when we’re able to have other interests and passions that we’re investing in as well.

Tori Dunlap:

You were mentioning the story of Liz, and I know the book is a collection of stories as well. Are there any that you can share for us that really stuck out to you as you were writing?

Simone Stolzoff:

Yeah, I mean there are a lot. I think maybe one I’ll talk about today is of this guy Josh. And Josh has a very interesting background. He grew up in project housing in Virginia, went to a community college before transferring to a four-year school and really didn’t prioritize work for the majority of his early life. Then, he, through a series of events, ended up getting hired by this advertising and marketing agency, which is called Profit, which I thought was a little bit on the nose, but perfect. He became enraptured by the culture of this agency and he would work late and really set his eyes on becoming a creative director, which was sort of his ultimate goal of once I become a creative director, then I’ll be happy.

So for years, he works his way up the chain and he’s guaranteed a promotion in the next evaluation cycle, and he ends up not getting the promotion and walking away from it and ends up quitting his job. Yeah, in many ways, this is sort of like the most cliche story in the book. He works his way up, he doesn’t go what he wants and then he leaves it all behind. What I found most interesting about Josh’s life is now he’s running this thing, which he calls the experiment, and the experiment has three precepts. The first is that he only works on things that he finds personally meaningful. The second is that he only works for projects that pay him well. His hourly rate is 130 or $140 an hour, and the third is that he never works more than 20 hours a week. And obviously, this represents sort of an extreme.

Tori Dunlap:

Sounds like Tim Ferriss.

Simone Stolzoff:

Yeah, in some w
ays. He’s like a single man in his late 30s, and this allows for certain affordances in his life, but I think what it represents is a break from what is traditional in our society, which is as you gain more expertise, you trade that expertise for more money, for more work, frankly, that’s one of the rewards of professional success is the ability to work more. Josh I think represents turning that on its head and saying, actually, I’ve built up all these skills and instead of trading my expertise for more work, I’m going to trade my expertise for more time. And he lives this very rich, balanced life that is such an antidote to what is customary, particularly in the US of this kind of idea that in order to be successful, you have to kind of go up into the right.

When we talk about what it means to be successful, we rarely talk about whether someone was happy or healthy. We just mean that they’ve made a lot of money, and I think from a financial feminism point of view, it’s a really great perspective to know what your level of enough is. If you just worship more and more and more, it will eat you alive. And I like Josh’s story just because it shows that, okay, he had his understanding of what he needed in order to live and was able to draw a line.

Tori Dunlap:

Without turning this into a therapy session, it is something that I have thought a lot about recently because the more successful and the bigger HFK gets, the more time the more energy. Yeah, I was telling somebody last night, I’m like, as much as I love entrepreneurship, a nine to five job, you know what, looking pretty good sometimes. It looks pretty good sometimes of just going in and doing my work and hopefully, clocking out at a reasonable time. And yeah, that’s so interesting. I was asked I think two years ago on a podcast, what is enough for you? And I realized for me, it’s not even about money, my ambition, it’s just such a drug and my relationship to my ambition, I’m constantly working on.

I think it’s the reason why I’ve been successful, and it’s also the reason that sometimes I feel utterly miserable.

Simone Stolzoff:

Yeah, I mean, I can relate to it. Obviously, we’re both ambitious people, self-driven. We’ve written books, but one way that I like to think about it is hopefully there’s a seasonality to work. Even if in this current moment you’re really grinding to finish the next episode or get the project in on time or to hit your quarterly goal, hopefully that can be balanced by a season where you have other priorities in your life as well. I think particularly with knowledge work, there isn’t always a direct relationship between the number of hours that we put in and the quality of the output. I think that’s a holdover from a more industrial perspective on work. And in fact, when the deliverable is a big idea or a book or a headline for a marketing campaign or a strategy document for an organization, we need space in our days.

We need to have the room for the ideas to bounce off of each other and to synthesize all of the inputs that we’re taking in. So I’d encourage you and all of the other overachievers that we have listening in to think about how rest and work are not necessarily oppositional. Rest, and our ability to recharge is an integral part of our ability to be sustainably productive over a long time horizon.

Tori Dunlap:

Well, and the thing I keep asking myself is it’s like, what’s the point of all of this work, if you don’t have something, not just like headlines or New York Times Best Seller, like if you don’t have anything to show for it, meaning rest and travel and ease. And if I am out here talking about how money gives you happiness and yet I’m also not happy, well then something has got to shift. Were there any other gender differences that you noticed in the research for the book?

Simone Stolzoff:

Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of our perspectives in terms of the narratives that we’re told early on are gendered in the stories that we tell. So, for men, it’s often your self-worth is your net worth, or once you have this certain title, then you’ll be manly or then you’ll be able to be a provider. For women, I think it’s often the expectation that they do it all, that they are able to have this sort of lean in perspective of, okay, you have to kill it at the office and then, you have to kill it at the home life, and you have to not ask for too much and also, be agreeable with a smile on your face. And I think thankfully, some of those expectations are starting to break down. And I’m really inspired by families in particular that have traditional gender roles.

I’m inspired by women who have been able to advocate for being able to prioritize things outside of the office. There was someone that I interviewed for the book who was a lawyer that works halftime, not part-time, but there’s this one role that her and another lawyer split, and I think that’s such a nice way to think about drawing boundaries and actually making sure that you are protected in your priorities and you know your worth and your value, and you don’t have to let someone that is just grinding all the time supersede your own skill. So, I think on the other end of the income spectrum, there’s a lot of the gender talk when it comes to wage disparities, and that’s particularly amplified for women of color.

And I think a lot of the collective organizing that we’re seeing now are really encouraging signs of being able to just first of all, just talk about some of the issues that you’re facing and the understanding that there is strength in numbers. Yeah, first and foremost, I hope that even if you are grinding in your job or trying to kill it, you understand that there’s a lot of value in finding a community of others who are wrestling with some of the issues that you’re wrestling with as well.

Tori Dunlap:

I’m going to ask you the most tech bro question, what is the future of work? What do you think the future of work looks like? Is it four-day work week? Is it remote jobs? What is the future of work?

Simone Stolzoff:

I mean, I think it’s a great question and I think it’s something that everyone is trying to kind of peek around the corner and see. I think one of the big things that has been a positive outcome of the shift to remote and hybrid work is a lot more autonomy and trust placed in the hands of employees and individuals. I think that employers who understand that employees can get work done in a manner and in a way that best fits their own needs that will be successful. I think a lot of the expectations of treating the amount of hours that you spend in your office chair as a good proxy for the quality of work that you’re producing are going out the window. So I think in the future there’s going to be a lot of different arrangements in how work gets done by who and when.

And I think that’s one of the best things that has come out of this big reorientation that we’ve been going through in the past few years, is the understanding that the best employee benefit is not a ping pong table or a free lunch on campus. It is autonomy and trust, to be able to do the work as you see fit. And ultimately, we have the technology and the mechanisms for that to be true. And moving forward, I think the companies tha
t are able to instill trust in their employees who are able to respect employees’ lives in and outside of the office will have a competitive advantage. I think in the future, companies will try and compete with each other to try and be perceived as the most work-life balanced in the way that they might compete with each other today to be the most mission-driven. And I think that’s a positive outcome of the past few years of the pandemic.

Tori Dunlap:

If somebody is listening and they’re either feeling stuck or unhappy or they’re listening similar to me and they’re going, “Wow, my identity is very tied up in my career and I would like to work to separate that,” what do you have to say to them or what advice do you have?

Simone Stolzoff:

My big advice is just to start small. Find little pockets of your day and your week and your life where you can invest in other identities just as you might water a plant. Five minutes here, five minutes there. Can you learn a new word in a foreign language? Can you set up a weekly coffee date with your best friend? Can you try and find a new thing to learn, not to master it or to monetize it, but because it makes you light up, because it makes you feel alive. And I think slowly but surely you’ll find that our identities are like plants. They need our time and attention. One of the problems of a work centric existence is that our jobs don’t just take our best hours, but often our best energy too.

So, I would just think about ways in which you might be able to channel some of your energy into reinforcing these other identities that exist within you because they will grow in proportion with how much attention you give them.

Tori Dunlap:

Have you read, Eat, Pray, Love? Have you ever read the book?

Simone Stolzoff:

I have, yeah.

Tori Dunlap:

She talks about … and it has become this phrase for me and some friends. She talks about in the first section of learning Italian, and she’s like, “No one in my family speaks Italian. I don’t need this for work. It’s not even practical because it’s kind of a dying language,” but she’s like, “I just love the way it sounds. I love how it feels in my body. It’s the melody and the joy, and I love the people from Italy.” She goes, “I’m just learning it because it brings me joy.” And so I have this group of friends where we’ll often ask each other, how are you learning Italian?

Simone Stolzoff:

I love that.

Tori Dunlap:

What are you doing? And it doesn’t obviously have to mean literally learning Italian, but what are you doing just because you like it? What are you … and this is a whole other conversation that I don’t mean to dive into, because we’re wrapping up, but we also just have this really … and I know I feel it, this deep uncomfortability with being bad at something. Brene Brown talks about this too. She talks about this … we have this fear of, “Oh, I try something for the first time, and of course I’m bad at it, so I’m never going to do it again.” And it’s like, if it brings you joy, if you like it, great. You don’t have to be an Olympian to swim. You don’t have to be Usain Bolt to go on a run. You can do things that you love that bring you joy purely because they bring you joy and you don’t have to be good at them.

Simone Stolzoff:

Totally. And I think … I spoke to the psychologist for the book, and she said, often when she gives people advice to try and invest in some other parts of themselves, they’ll say things like, okay, I’m going to sign up for an Iron Man, or I’m going to try and read 52 books this year.

Tori Dunlap:

A six-month thing, a year long thing. We bite off more than we could chew.

Simone Stolzoff:

And in many ways, it’s like converting their leisure into another form of work. Yeah, I mean, I think from Eat, Pray, Love, the word she always repeats is [foreign language 00:54:45] which means let’s cross the street or let’s-

Tori Dunlap:

Let’s crossover.

Simone Stolzoff:

Crossover. Yeah. And maybe that’s a nice way to think about what are the ways in which you can crossover from your work hat or your work lens on the world and to other parts of who you are.

Tori Dunlap:

That’s going to make me teary. Yep. Lovely poetic ending. Thank you for being here. Thank you for your work. Plug away. Tell people where they can find you. Find everything that you create.

Simone Stolzoff:

Yeah, these are places, just thegoodenoughjob.com, and you can find all my socials there. And Tori, really appreciate you having me on the show.

Tori Dunlap:

Thank you so much to Simone for joining us. Please make sure to check out his book, The Good Enough Job, Reclaiming Life From Work. I know I will. This is wherever you get your books, but especially your local independent bookstore. If you love the show, please feel free to subscribe, share with your friends, the easiest way to support us is just hitting that plus or that subscribe button wherever you’re listening right now or leaving us a five star review. We super appreciate it and it allows us to keep doing this show and keep bringing incredible guests on. Thank you for being here, as always, Financial Feminist, I hope you’re soaking up your last bit of summer and we’ll talk to you soon.

Thank you for listening to Financial Feminist a Her First 100K podcast. Financial Feminist is hosted by me, Tori Dunlap, produced by Kristen Fields, marketing and administration by Karina Patel, Sophia Cohen, Kahlil Dumas, Elizabeth McCumber, Beth Bowen, Amanda Lafew, Masha Bachmakiava, Kailyn Sprinkle, Sumaya Mulla-Carillo and Harvey Carlson. Researched by Ariel Johnson. Audio Engineering by Austin Fields. Promotional graphics by Mary Stratton. Photography by Sarah Wolfe, and theme music by Jonah Cohen-Sound. A huge thanks to the entire Her First 100K team and community for supporting the show. For more information about Financial Feminist, Her First 100K, our guests and episode show notes, visit financialfeministpodcast.com.