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Simone, welcome to the podcast.
How are you doing? Thanks for having me.
It's great to be here.
So this is going to be interesting.
So you have written a book called The Good Enough Job.
I have. Which is interesting.
So, in my audience, a lot of people and me struggle with this feeling of like, what do I really want to do for work?
What should my career really be?
I have all these interests, and I want to find something I'm passionate about, but I also want to find something that pays well, and that has some sort of impact, and that ideally gives me enough flexibility to do whatever I want.
And almost everyone I speak to who is in their 20s and even 30s struggles with this sense of, what's the meaning of my work?
And why am I working beyond just to pay the bills?
Which is kind of your specialty, your specialty subject.
How did you first get interested in this sort of topic?
Yeah, well, the good thing about being a journalist is I don't have to necessarily be the expert.
I can just point the camera at different experts around the room.
But for one thing, I am a reporter, and my beat has always been work.
And so the professional angle answer to that question is that I've been tracking work, particularly in the US for the last 10 or so years in my own career.
And I recognize that work has come to fill this outsized rule in American's lives in particular.
You can look at the data comparing the US to other countries, and while all of our peer nations have decreased the number of hours they spend working each year, certain subsets of Americans, particularly college -educated Americans, are working more than ever, which is ahistorical.
He kind of begs the question, why?
Typically the richer a person or the richer a country get, the less they work, because frankly they can afford to work less.
But in the last 30 or so years, we've seen this ahistorical trend where certain Americans are working more than ever.
So that's sort of like the business answer, the professional angle.
There's also the very personal one, which is that after working as a journalist for a number of years, I had an opportunity to interview for another job outside of the industry that I had grown up in.
And the job was at a design agency for this firm called IDEO.
And I sort of passively went through the interview process, always take the phone call, and I got to the end of the road, and I had these two job offers.
One was to continue being a reporter.
I was writing for this trendy magazine in New York City.
And the other was to be a designer.
And on one hand, woe is me, oh, the agony of having to decide between two attractive job offers.
But if you, or anyone in the audience has been at a similar career crossroads before, it can feel existential.
There was sort of Simone, the journalist on one path, and there was Simone, the designer, on another path.
And it didn't feel like I was choosing between two jobs.
It felt like I was choosing between two versions of me.
And I knew I wasn't the only one.
I could feel the same thing that you mentioned among many of my peers who were looking for a vocational soulmate.
They were looking for that perfect job that could help them self -actualize.
And I started asking, maybe our expectations are just a bit too high.
Nice. So how did we get here?
How did we arrive at this place where so much of our identity is so tied to what we do for work?
And has it always been like that?
Well, there's many ways to answer that question.
If your last name is Miller or Taylor, maybe you can say that it's always been like this.
Particularly for Americans and the Protestant work ethic and capitalism were sort of the two strands that entwined to form our country's DNA.
But I also think there's been some changes in the last 30 or 40 years that has made this kind of conflation of work and identity particularly relevant to more and more people.
For one, there's been a decline in other institutions that used to provide meaning and identity in our lives.
Things like organized religion or neighborhood and community groups.
In the 1950s, over nine out of every 10 Americans belonged to some sort of organized religion which provided purpose, something larger than themselves, community, a reason for being.
And today, almost one in three Americans doesn't affiliate with any religion at all.
So without these institutions, the need for belonging for meaning, for purpose, for identity remain.
And many people have turned to where they spend the majority of their time, which is the office.
You can also look at political reasons.
Part of the reason why our relationship to work is so fraught is because the consequences of losing work is so dire, particularly in places like the U .S.
where healthcare is tied to employment or if you're an immigrant, your ability to stay in this country is tied to employment.
So it isn't just about the paycheck, it's also about your livelihood in a broader sense.
But the third, which is the one I really harp on in the book is this sort of subjective value that we particularly in the West have put on to work.
I was just driving through London today and I saw a we work and it said, always do what you love plastered on the side of the building.
And we treat CEOs like celebrities and there is this implicit or often explicit idea that if you haven't found your dream job, if you haven't found what you love, you should keep searching, keep trying because it's some sort of moral failing or shortcoming if you haven't gotten there.
But I think that mentality also comes with a lot of risks.
Cool, okay, that's interesting.
Cause I guess this is sparking a bunch of different thoughts.
So one question I often used to think about is asking people with jobs, the question of, do you look forward to Mondays?
And even when people said that they enjoyed their job, the answer was almost always, well, no.
Cause it's like, surely no one looks forward to Mondays cause it's like weekend and like, you know, yeah, you know, I enjoy being a doctor, but like I still don't really look forward to Mondays.
And I just sort of assumed that that's what a job was, a thing that you wouldn't look forward to.
But then I started doing this sort of YouTube entrepreneurial right to retype stuff.
And now I can say, haddle and hard, that for the most part, I do look forward to Mondays.
And I'm like, huh, that's cool.
I feel like my life has had a step change in happiness, maybe since I started doing a thing where the thing that I do for work is something that I actually look forward to.
And I'm sort of this idea of looking forward to Mondays.
And I'm also then not sure, because people are like, people in their 20s or whatever will ask me and be like, Hey, how do you find a job that you love?
I'm like, I don't know, you just gotta try this old Cal Newport angle of like, get really good at something and develop career capital and autonomy and mastery and purpose and blah, blah, blah.
That gives you intrinsic motivation.
But then there's the whole thing around like, I mean, I could have had all those things in medicine, but I think for me, I would have just been less likely to look forward to Mondays.
But I think that makes sense.
Yeah, I mean, maybe I'll answer your question with a story, which is when I was 22 years old, I was a poetry student.
Actually, that's not completely true.
I studied both poetry and economics, and you can already see a bit of attention between sort of the pursuit of art and the pursuit of commerce.
And I had the opportunity to interview my favorite writer in the entire world, this guy named Anis Mojgani, he's a spoken word poet.
And I asked him, Anis, how do you feel about the mantra, do what you love and never work a day in your life?
And I was expecting him to give me this pep talk.
I was a poetry student, he was a professional poet.
I wanted him to say, follow your passion and the money will follow, get really good and develop that career capital and your life could be a dream.
And he didn't, he said, something I'll never forget.
He said, Simone, I think 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, especially in today's day and age, we love to revere people whose jobs and identities neatly align, the YouTuber or the social entrepreneur or the painter.
But here was my professional idol, a professional poet, no less, telling me that it's okay to have a day job.
And so I think the question of, do you look forward to Mondays is really important.
We work more than we do just about anything else and how we spend those hours matter.
But I also think the question of, do you look forward to whatever you're going home to at the end of the workday on Monday is important.
And sometimes people who are ambitious, people who are really looking for that vocational soulmate get in this loop where they work all the time and so they're not sure what to do when they're not working and then they're not sure what to do when they're not working and so they work some more.
And it creates this imbalance, this way in which we invest so much into just one facet of who we are without rounding out the rest of the person.
Ooh, that's fun. So I had a moment a few like really like last Saturday where it was a really nice day here in London and I didn't have anything on my calendar and I could do whatever I wanted.
And I was like, hmm, what do I want to do today?
And everybody wasn't sure.
I was like, I guess I could sail on the sofa and play PlayStation.
I guess I could read a book, could play the piano, play some guitar.
I was like, I'm seeing some friends for dinner anyway and I've seen a lot of people this week so I kind of want to spend this day by myself.
I was thinking, huh, what the hell do I do?
And my mind just came going to, I'm so like, I'm so used to working and working to me feels so enjoyable and so purposeful and so like, you know, flow statey and stuff when I'm doing it.
That then when it's a weekend, I do often feel like I'm at a bit of a loss.
I'm like, huh, what do normal people do on the weekend?
I don't know. I guess I could watch TV.
I guess I could finish off the Last of Us.
And that question, that was kind of puzzling.
I wrote about it in my newsletter that week because I was like, huh, this is kind of weird.
It's like, I found the thing that I loved for work, which meant that I never had to work a day in my life.
And yeah, this question of like, do you then look forward to the weekend?
Or do you look forward to the thing you do?
And I look forward to the weekend in the sense of like, I don't have any meetings on the calendar, which is nice, but I don't really know what to do with that time.
And something a friend of mine suggested was like, I don't know, I'm making like a menu of options of like, when I have free time, here are some hobbies that I can do and stuff.
And it felt, it felt kind of lame.
I was like, what the hell, how did, yeah.
Just check the ASANA board to see what your hobbies are again.
Yeah. And I think, you know, it points to some of the risks that I was mentioning.
One is the first that we mentioned about expectations.
If you're always expecting your job to be a dream, that creates a lot of room for disappointment.
The second is something that a lot of people found out during the pandemic, which is that your job might not always be there.
You know, maybe it's just because it's a weekend or a company holiday, but maybe it's because you were laid off or furloughed by no fault of your own.
And if your work is your sole source of identity, then you lose your work.
You can be left asking what's left.
But the third, which is, you know, something that I think your weekend predicament really speaks to is the fact that we are all more than just workers, right?
We are someone's child and someone's sibling and someone's friend and a community member and a citizen.
But all of these other identities, guitar player, traveler, artist that exist within us need attention.
They're sort of like plants.
They need water and attention in order to grow.
And if we're just investing in the work identity, those other identities that exist within us can wither.
And so in order to really conceive of yourself as more than just a worker, to see yourself as a guitar player or someone who values their physical health or someone who is a good partner, you have to be able to invest in those identities with your time.
But if we're only working, it is a very narrow platform upon which to balance.
Nice. I like that. Multiple identities.
And you have to invest in those multiple identities with your time.
How do you figure out what these identities are that you want to cultivate?
Yeah, it's a good question.
You know, it's sort of like asking people what are your values.
It can be hard to define really succinctly.
You know, certainly you can journal about it or you can do a values card sort, and I'm sure there's 10 different online quizzes about it.
But I think, you know, these different identities, some of them we are born with and some of them we get to choose.
I often ask people what they like to do when they were a kid.
You know, did you like to play pickup sports?
Did you like to draw?
Did you like to hang out with your friends and do nothing?
There's probably some clue there of what it is that you really would do if you had an idol Sunday with nothing else to do.
But then I think the other aspect to it is that passions, much like your passion for work, are developed through our investment in them.
What makes an identity or a hobby meaningful is the fact that we are squaring our hips towards them.
We are investing time in them.
And the same can be true.
That's sort of the moral argument about the value of investing in these different identities.
I think there's also the business case to be made.
You know, the research shows that people who have what researchers call greater self -complexity tend to be more resilient in the face of adversity.
Imagine, you know, you're really ambitious and you sort of rise and fall based on your professional accomplishments.
And then your boss does something kind of disparaging at work.
If you haven't invested in other facets of who you are, that one comment from your boss on a Friday can spill over into all of the other facets of your life that can completely consume you.
But also through those different identities, that's where we get inspiration to come up with really novel, interesting things.
I mean, you know, this as a creative worker, it's not always when you're banging your head against your keyboard that the brilliant ideas come.
Maybe it is through that active form of rest or leisure, like playing guitar or like going on a walk with someone that you care about.
That is where you might see things that are outside of just the purview of what you're doing on a daily basis.
And it's one of the problems with corporate culture these days is all of our time is sort of compartmentalized into these calendar blocks.
And we have all these meetings, we take in all of these inputs, but we have very little time to synthesize all that we're taking in.
We have very little time to make meaning from everything that we're doing.
And so there's a really strong business case to be made for the value of much as an investor benefits from diversifying the stocks in their portfolio.
We too benefit from diversifying the sources of meaning and identity and purpose in our life.
Yeah, I really noticed this when I first arrived at med school, because I think in high school, a lot of my identity was tied to my academic performance.
And it was like, you know, as a nerdy kid, I wasn't really good at any good at sports.
I didn't really have anything going for me, I felt, except the fact that it was really good academically.
And then towards the end of high school, I was like, you know, this is kind of annoying.
Like, let me also become a close -up magician or something.
And so I tried to dabble with these other things to sort of diversify my identity a bit.
And then I got to med school where everyone there was the highest ranked academic person in their school.
And suddenly I was bang average.
And I was like, holy shit, this pillar of my identity, which was academic prowess, in order for me to maintain that pillar of identity, I'm going to work really, really, really, really freaking hard.
And I don't want to do that.
And I was like, oh, this is kind of bad.
And I read a Mark Manson blog post around that time, which was about this idea of like diversifying your identity and diversifying it into these different sources.
And that was when I was like, okay, that sort of coincided with starting my first business that went well.
And then I sort of had that as my identity.
I continued with the magic stuff.
I started getting more into music.
Later on, like the YouTube channel became a thing.
And so kind of doing well academically then became just one of the, I don't know, arrows in my quiver as it were, rather than the only one.
But I always kind of wondered whether it is better in a vertical miss for our source of identity and esteem to be like internally generated and like an enlightened sort of chap rather than externally derived from hobby A, profession B and I don't know, family member C, that kind of thing.
Does that make sense?
Totally, yeah. And I think there's increasing pressure to make our hobbies more and more legible.
Sometimes it's not okay to be just a baker, but you have to have a side grind where you're selling your baked goods at the farmer's markets.
Or maybe it's not okay just to be a painter.
You have to post your paintings on Instagram and do it for the claps.
I don't think that necessarily has to be the case.
I think you and I both know that intrinsic motivation, things that are derived from mastery and autonomy and purpose, as you mentioned, tend to be a much more sustainable fuel source than just doing it for the applause or for the extrinsic sources of motivation.
And so, it begs the question, how do you find these other identities and how do you water them?
And I think there's a few different ways to do so.
But the primary thing that I tell people is sounds simplistic.
But if you want to derive meaning from things beyond work, you have to do things other than work.
No offense to Netflix.
But I think so many people will go to work and come home and all they'll have the energy to do is try to turn off their brain and turn on The Last of Us or what have you.
And not to say that The Last of Us isn't a great show, but it's not gonna be a source of meaning in the same way that an active hobby, like guitar playing or learning a new language or becoming a member of a book club will give meaning to your life.
They don't both rejuvenate you in a way that will make you a better worker.
But it'll also be another way of conceiving of who you are beyond just what you do for work.
That's nice. One of the things I found myself thinking as you were talking about the work identities thing was I've got this exercise that I always share with the audience, which is what does your ideal Tuesday look like?
Because life is made up of a series of Tuesdays, as Tim said at one point.
And Wednesdays and Thursdays.
All of that stuff. And so instead of trying to optimize for like the big picture like, oh, these big accomplishments.
Like, I've read a book.
It's more like, what does a normal Tuesday in your life look like?
I spent four hours doing writing in the morning.
Great. That's fine.
But I've never once asked myself the question of what does an ideal Sunday look like?
Because I think I've optimized really well for the ideal of Tuesday, which is probably a work day where there's maybe some something social happening in the evening with friends.
But I've never once asked myself, on a day where I'm not doing any work, an ideal Sunday, what would I choose to do with that time?
I'm sure if I asked myself that question, I would come up with like, oh, well, this would be my ideal Sunday menu of options and stuff.
And it would probably lead to some interesting realizations, I suspect.
Yeah. I mean, it makes me wonder, you know, productivity to what end?
Like why do we want to cross things off of our to -do list or get through our work tasks?
Extinctively, it's so that we can go home or have a Sunday to yourself without any obligations.
But I fear that people treat crossing things off the list as the end in and of itself.
There's this great story from the author, Toni Morrison.
And she has had many jobs over the course of her career beyond just being a writer.
She grew up and used to clean rich people's houses in her own words in her hometown of Lorraine, Ohio.
And she was coming home from cleaning people's houses one day.
And she was complaining to her dad about it.
And her dad said, listen, you don't live there.
You live here with your family.
Go to work, get your money and come on home.
But I think we all need something to come home to or else we'll just continually be on that hamster wheel.
But the things that we're coming home to also need to be intentional and conscious decisions.
So you've probably seen this diagram of concentric circles about habit formation where on the inside or on the furthest ring, there's an outcome based habits where you set a goal.
I want to lose 50 pounds, for example.
Then the next ring in is the process -based goals.
So things like I'm gonna go to the gym every Tuesday and Thursday.
And the innermost circle is identity -based goals.
I am going to be a person who goes to the gym.
I conceive of myself as someone who believes in values and physical health.
And therefore, I go to the gym on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
And as a result of that, I might lose 50 pounds.
But the research shows that when our habits are built around these identities, not just the outcomes, not just the processes, they tend to be a lot more sticky.
Which is why I think diversifying our identities are so important.
We have this society -wide conversation about work -life balance, or we have the society -wide conversation about burnout.
But I actually think these phenomenons are all downstream of this question of identity.
This question of, how do I conceive of who I am in this world?
And how do my behaviors reinforce that?
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Pushing back against your thing around like, what's the point?
Productivity to what end?
So yes, one conception of work can be, I take my things off my to -do list to gather my money such that I can then go home and to chill out.
But I'm tempted to argue that like, in my case, I've thought about this a lot to figure out like, if I really didn't care about making money, if I had like a hundred million in the bank or whatever, what would I actually do?
I was like, I would still choose to make YouTube videos and I still choose to write books.
So in that sense, the making of a YouTube video and the writing of a book and the doing of a podcast and the giving of a talk or running a workshop is not a means to an end.
It is the end itself.
It's like doing it for the sake of doing the thing rather than for the sake of the money or for the sake of the time off or whatever.
Yeah, how does that land?
Yeah, I mean, I think it goes back to that original quote from my mentor, which is, 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 I don't think there's anything wrong with the fact that you found a career where you can align your passions and your interests with what you do to make money.
It's awesome. And that model doesn't work for everyone.
And I think the risk is that we try to impose this idea of dream jobs.
Then if you haven't found it, don't settle, keep searching as Steve Jobs said, but we all are running around some of us diabolically like a chicken with their head cut off, trying to find this dream job as if the work thing falls into place, the rest of my life will figure out.
But as the cliche goes, wherever you go, there you are.
We're still people.
And work can be a false idol that can easily be falsified.
So I'm so glad that you found this portfolio career with many different things that brings meaning to your life.
And it reminds me of a story of one of the people that I read about in the book, Liz, who was a teacher and derived an immense amount of her identity from being a teacher.
She loved it. She would happily work 80 hour weeks as a public school teacher in Colorado.
And then she contracted Lyme disease.
She was out hiking in the woods in Vermont.
And she went from being a teacher who derived so much of her identity and self -worth from her job to her mom spoon feeding her chicken soup in bed.
Her productivity was no longer something in her control.
And she said something that has really stuck with me, which is she learned from the chronically ill community about the value of defining ourselves based on our evergreen characteristics, as opposed to things tethered to our productivity or to a market.
So she started to think of herself, not just as a passionate public school teacher or a swimmer, but as a generous friend or someone who shows up for her local community or someone who is naturally intellectually curious.
These evergreen traits that no market or job or boss can ever take away from her.
And so I hope that for the entirety of your career, podcasting and writing and making YouTube videos continue to bring so much value and joy to your life.
But I hope that you're also thinking about what are those other things in your quiver so that if that time were to end, you would still have other pillars of your foundation.
Yeah, oh, that's good stuff.
I'm curious, I've been a follower of your channel for a long time.
And it seems like this year, you've really committed to your physical health.
You really made a commitment towards going to the gym, being consistent.
I'm curious both where that came from and how it's been to really invest in this other identity.
Your question. I turned to 30 last month and I knew that the 30th birthday was coming up.
And often, like most people I interview on the podcast are slightly older than me, if not very much older than me.
And one piece of advice I've often got is take care of your health because you get it for all the obvious reasons.
And I never really made it a conscious commitment to take particularly seriously or sincerely until the start of the year when I was figuring out what are my goals for the year or what would be cool to have done by the end of the year.
And I thought, this is the year that I'm actually gonna kind of double down on this health thing because for the sake of, mostly for the longevity stuff.
I read Peter Attia's Outlive, listened to a bunch of the longevity bros.
Thought about like, oh, you know, I wanna have a family and kids and grandkids and stuff.
And I'd really like when I'm 60, 70 or whatever to have enough energy and physical vitality to be able to play with them and hang out and stuff without getting tired all the time.
And so that was the sort of thing in the back of my mind of like, okay, for the sake of that end goal, let's focus on mostly the process -based habits of, I'm gonna show up to the gym a few times a week, gonna eat broadly, healthily, and try and get X number of steps per day.
But I don't really think it's seeped into my identity just yet.
Because when you mentioned like kind of watering that identity, I sort of felt surprised of like, oh, do I think of myself identity wise as someone who's healthy, someone who takes care of their health?
I'm not sure I do. It's not, or if I were to list out my identities, it wouldn't be anywhere near the top like 50.
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that makes a lot of sense.
I imagine that as you devoted more attention to it, it's become more fulfilling to you, in the same way that after not having gone for a run in a long time, the first run is, can feel like pulling teeth.
It can be incredibly hard.
And then as you settle into the groove of the habit, it not only produces long -term and short -term results, but it is more personally fulfilling to see the progress measured.
I'm thinking about what you said about career capital, this is so good, they can't ignore your framework.
And how Cal frames it is, he says, develop skills that are rare and valuable.
And I think something similar can be said for whatever you wanna call it, maybe identity capital, which is develop identities that are valuable to you, which is to say they reinforce the values of the person you want to be in the world.
And they're rare because they take time in order to develop them.
What makes something valuable or meaningful in our life is the fact that there's an opportunity cost, is the fact that you're at the gym when you could be sitting on the couch or you're out seeing a friend when you could be doing more work.
And so in that way, I would encourage anyone to think about what are the things that they value.
I had this old professor that used to say, show me your calendar and I'll tell you what you value.
And I think that often people throw out values like I value community or I value healthy eating.
But unless those values are reinforced with behaviors, then they're shallow.
Okay, I wanna double click back on this point around that quote from your mentor.
Okay, so the quote, can you remind me what the quote was?
Yeah, 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.
Neither is more noble.
Okay, so you mentioned that the thing that's coming to my mind is like an objection to this is surely it is better to have your cake and eat it too, as it were.
Surely the thing to aspire to is to be someone who loves what they do for work and also loves what they do outside of work rather than framing it as an either or choice, which is what that quote makes it seem like.
Perhaps, yeah, I think it's less of a binary than the quote sets it up to be.
But I think the point that he was trying to make that I believe in is that some people really do treat work as a means to another end.
And that can be an extremely fulfilling way to live your life.
Not to say that some jobs aren't fulfilling intrinsically, but people who have a sense of why they're working, whether it is for the innate pleasure they get from showing up and doing the work each day or from the pleasure that they might get from supporting the people that they love or their real passion of sailing
that they can do. I've seen and talked to so many people who have put all of their identity eggs in the professional basket, only for that basket to reveal its holes.
And I think part of this idea of a good enough job is thinking about how your job can support your vision of a life well lived as opposed to the other way around.
Right now, so many people treat work as the center of their existence and trying to fit everything else in the margins.
And what Anise was saying is that other people put other things in the center and work is a way of propping up that other value that they have.
Yeah, that's good stuff.
You know, one of my team members, Alison, she is like the exact, sort of the person I've met who's the exact embodiment of that mode.
Where, I mean, she's really good at her job and stuff, but her whole thing is like, you know, I'm sorry, Ali, it is just a job by the end of the day.
I'm like, yeah, great.
It's good that she has that perspective on it.
And she said that she's the happiest person that she knows.
She's always like hanging out with friends, going to plays in London and traveling and stuff.
And the fact that the job, you know, she's our head of customer success and she gets to talk to struggling YouTubers and help them with emotional support and stuff.
And there's flexibility and it pays okay.
She's like, great, that takes all the boxes for me so that I can then do the other stuff outside of work.
Which is interesting because from my perspective, I am one of the happiest people that I know.
And I put a lot of my identity eggs into the work basket.
Which is working for now, but I always have in the back of my mind that like, you know, anything could happen.
If I suddenly become unable to speak, for example, that's gonna be a massive blow to my sense of identity.
If I become unable to work, unable to be productive, unable to teach, that's gonna be a massive blow to my sense of identity.
And there was a coach of mine who was a former psychologist who asked, he sort of asked the question of like, hey, Ali, you know, if you had a period of two years where you weren't allowed to make any YouTube videos, or you weren't allowed to post any content, what would you do at that time?
And I was like, oh, well, I mean, I would read loads of philosophy and I'd sort of get my materials prepped and figure out what the next book to write could be and figure out what the next one, I don't know, the next arc of my teaching career could be.
He was like, okay, what if I told you that you are never allowed to create any content and put it on the internet or teach anything at all?
What would you do then?
And I was like, damn, I would get really depressed then.
Because then as he asked me that question, I felt like, oh, then what's the point?
I don't know if I'm being surprised by that because like, if I were to ask my mum, him mum, if you suddenly weren't allowed to be a psychiatrist, how would you spend your time?
She wouldn't say, I'd end up pretty depressed because I wouldn't really have anything to do.
But I found myself giving that response.
And if I were to ask Alison, Alison, if you lost a job or suddenly weren't able to work and had to find a different job, what would you do?
She'd be like, oh, she'd like shrug and be totally okay because actually her identity and maybe sense of self comes from lots of things other than the thing that she's doing for work.
Yeah, I remember this interview that I did also with a psychologist for the book and she sees a lot of patients like you, ambitious, kind of type A, overachievers.
And she talks about, you know, trying to help them invest in facets of themselves beyond work and often her patients will say, okay, I've got it.
I'm going to run an Ironman or I'm going to read 52 books this year.
And in many ways they try and turn their leisure into another quantified form of labor.
And she says, hold on a second.
Why don't you start small?
Why don't you start with a run?
Or why don't you start with reading one book or devoting 15 minutes to reading each night and go from there?
Because I think people can often get in the similar trap to work as they do with their leisure activities.
Like for example, an athlete, you know, do you remember Michael Phelps's Olympic season?
After he won more gold medals than any other Olympian, he fell into this pit of depression.
And I think the cause was that he dreamed the biggest dream he could possibly dream and then he achieved it.
And the question was, what's next?
What's left? I think you and I both know many people who have similar stories of thinking, okay, once I hit one million subscribers or once I make VP or once I, you know, make my first million, then I will be fulfilled.
Then I will be happy.
Then I can focus on, you know, building a deeper relationship with my loved ones.
And it just doesn't work like that.
Once you reach the peak of one hill, you might be just continually searching for the next one.
I am thinking about the story of Kei He, who is a mutual friend of ours.
And his path is so relatable, I think particularly for an immigrant, you know, he is first generation Cambodian American.
And he continually had this sort of defer happiness mentality where in high school, he said, okay, the goal of high school is to get into the best college I possibly can.
And so he got top grades, got into an Ivy League school and he got to the Ivy League school and he said, okay, the goal of college is to get the highest paying job that I can.
And my options are doctor, lawyer, banker, or engineer.
And he chose to become a banker on Wall Street.
And then he said, okay, the goal of Wall Street is to make the most money I can.
And he became the youngest ever managing director at BlackRock.
He owned an apartment in New York city before he turned 30.
He was making a seven figure salary.
And he was about 35 years old.
And he was preparing to go to the wedding of one of his best friends.
And he's looking in the mirror and he's combing his hair and a chunk of his hair falls off into his hand.
And he learns that it's related to stress related alopecia.
And here's a man who has every trapping of success.
He has all of what journalist David Brooks would call the resume virtues, Ivy League graduate, seven figure income, all this on paper success.
And yet he was so stressed out that his hair was literally falling out.
And I think what Kenny did, which I don't think you did necessarily, is he just thought about what the world valued, in the form of what he can get paid for the most or what has the most prestige without considering what he himself valued.
But I think there's risks on the other end of the spectrum too.
We all know a friend who maybe put their job to go all in to pursue becoming a musician or to pursue their art in some way, but is so stressed out by how they're gonna make rent that they can't focus on the actual art they hope to produce.
Or maybe they dropped everything to go to a graduate school to pursue a degree that doesn't lead to any stable job prospects on the other side.
And we see the value of thinking about what the market values in one hand, the value of thinking about what we ourselves value in the other hand, and the key is to pursue something that sits at their intersection.
And I think you've done that in many ways.
You found something that you intrinsically value, making YouTube videos, writing, having conversations like these, that the market also happens to value.
But I think too many people just think about what the market values without consulting what they themselves value as well.
Yeah, because I think about this question a lot, like around every few months, I will find myself on a flight somewhere where I don't get wifi, and I'll find myself thinking.
So my mind will go to the question of what is the point of work?
And it happens like probably every six weeks or so.
Like, what's the point of work?
And I have all the journaling and stuff, or I've asked this question before.
I always land on, okay, well the point of work is like to do something that, to do something you enjoy, to do something that ideally the market will reward, or to make enough money from the thing to feel like you're having an impact, to feel like you're being fulfilled.
And for me right now, at this stage of my life, like this creator, writer, YouTuber thing, seems to take those boxes.
Okay, we're good. And then another six weeks and I'll ask that question again.
And I'll be like, but I swear we asked this question like six weeks ago, like surely my answer should be more stable.
And sometimes we'll get to a filming day where the team's around and I'm just sort of a bit tired in the morning.
And it's like the prospect of filming a handful of YouTube videos that day, where I haven't had enough sleep, I'm like, hmm, I don't need to do this.
I get a chill. And then with the 4 % returns of the S &P or whatever the hell people do.
So why am I doing this again?
And then the team will always kind of like smile and groan to be like, yeah, we've been here before.
And so like, what's up with that?
I mean, I think that's a good question.
And I think the leveled up question is what is the purpose of life?
If you're asking yourself, what is the purpose of work?
I think that is part of that bigger question of what is the purpose of your life?
And my goal with The Good Enough Job, the book, is to make sure that people are defining that bigger question of what is the purpose of their life on their own terms.
What is the purpose of work?
If you don't define it, your boss will gladly define it for you, or your employer will gladly define it for you.
And you can think that the purpose of work is to sell software as a service to meet my quarterly sales goal.
Or the purpose of work is to surpass Mr.
Beast in subscribers.
And the problem with those sort of outcome -based goals is that they're immediately falsifiable.
You can achieve them and realize this is an altar that I shouldn't have been praying on all along.
Do you know David Foster Wallace?
He has this great speech, the This is Water speech.
And in it, he makes the case for praying to some sort of God, or cosmic, or other worldly being.
And he says, if you pray to anything else, it'll eat you alive.
Pray to beauty, and you'll feel like you're never beautiful enough.
Pray to money, and you feel like you'll never have enough money.
But pray to a God, pray to some cosmic force larger than yourself, and maybe that won't become falsifiable.
Work is extremely falsifiable.
Maybe the algorithm changes.
Or maybe there's a global pandemic, and you can no longer give an in -person talk.
Or maybe your company faces economic headwinds.
And the reason why I try and instill this idea of a diversified identity is so that when that day comes, when that one pillar of your identity inevitably crumbles, you can still stand tall.
What does the good enough job then mean?
Well, I'll tell you where it came from first.
We're sitting here in London.
It's an allusion to a theory that was devised by this British pediatrician named Donald Winnicott.
And Winnicott was observing these parents in the mid -20th century in England, and all of these parents wanted to be the perfect parent.
They wanted to shield their kid from experiencing any sort of negative emotion or harm.
And when the kid inevitably felt frustrated or scared or sad, the parents took it extremely personally.
They thought it was a reflection of their own shortcomings.
So Winnicott came up with this alternative.
He called it the good enough parent, or the good enough mother.
And he believed that an approach that valued sufficiency more than perfection would benefit both the child and the parent.
The kid would learn how to self -soothe and take care of some of their own problems.
And the parent would learn how to not lose themselves in their children's emotions.
So obviously I'm making a direct parallel to the working world, and our jobs, much like a crying toddler, are not always in our control.
But to me, I define it pretty broadly.
I think a good enough job is a job that allows you to be the person that you want to be.
And why I like that sort of vague, broad definition is because it's subjective.
For one person, it might be a job that pays a certain salary that allows them to support their family.
For someone else, it might be a job that allows them to talk to interesting people in podcasts or make interesting videos to connect with people around the world.
For someone else, it might be a job that gets off at four o 'clock every day.
So Alison can go to the West End and see a play, or you can pick up your child from daycare, or you can go on that afternoon bike ride.
That really is the thing that brings your life meaning.
But whatever your definition of good enough is, I hope that you recognize when you find it.
Because then you can spend that idle Sunday doing something other than working.
Yeah, so I read your book when it first came out.
But hearing you kind of describe, sort of say the stuff out loud is sort of like hitting me on a different level or I'm like, shit, yeah, got enough jobs, good stuff.
When did it come out?
It came out like this time last year.
Almost a year ago, yeah.
I think I had a bit of a sort of like, in around October last year, just before my book was coming out, I was sort of grappling a lot with issues of identity and how much of my identity I'm holding onto the fucking New York Times Best Seller List, maybe.
And I read your thing about that, which is really interesting.
And I had, you know, I was going to Austin and planning to spend a whole week just like batch filming content.
And then like one of my friends had like a health scare.
And so I ended up not filming the stuff and realizing, appreciating the mortality of life a little bit more and sort of pulling these sorts of threads around.
Yeah, what is the purpose of life?
What's the purpose of work?
Try to ayahuasca ceremony to try and get at that question and what came back from that for whatever that's worth, was that pretty much everything is meaningful if you make it meaningful.
And we kind of create our own meaning in things, just kind of interesting.
But it's like, I haven't reread your book since then.
And so hearing you talk about it now, it's like I'm like, oh, okay, this is connecting on a deeper level than I did when I first read the book.
Yeah, thanks for saying so.
You know, I think the cliche is that you write the book that you need to read.
And I think I wanted to explore this topic because it's one of those intractable questions.
We work more than we do anything, how we spend those hours matter and you are more than what you do.
And how do you square those two things?
And one of the new ways that I've started thinking about it since the book came out, is that it's not just about us.
You know, we often think about work from this extremely individualistic perspective of what will be most fulfilling to me or even what impact would I like to have through the vehicle that is my job.
But if you think about the other concentric circles of which we are a part, you know, being a member of your family, being a member of your neighborhood and being a member of this society at large, those identities all deserve our attention.
And so my sort of macro case for the good enough job is that if we are able to invest in our families, our communities, our countries, then it's not just our own sense of meaning that we'll become more robust, but our neighborhoods will become more robust, more resilient.
Our countries will become more robust and resilient.
We will feel like we have the time and energy to give to things other than producing economic returns for ourselves or for our companies or our employers.
You know, Esther Perel has this line that hit me like a brick.
It was kind of the impetus for writing the book in some way.
She said, too many people bring the best of themselves to work and bring the leftovers home.
And I hope that by reading the book or by coming across some of these ideas, people think about what they're bringing home and see their lives outside of work as worthy of their time and their energy as well.
So a good enough job is a job that helps you be the person you want to be.
What if someone really hates their job, but that job actually does help me the person they want to be, because like, I don't know, they're in that second category of people.
They're in the, oh, I kind of have to do this so that I can do all the fun stuff outside of work.
And at the same time, they also really hate their job.
How does, would your approach be stick it out because actually you've got all these sources of identity and meaning outside of work, so it's all good, bro.
Or would it be like, hey, let's figure out how we can help you have a bit more fun at work later.
How do you approach that?
Yeah, it's a little hard to give prescriptive advice when it comes to something like your career, but I think about a few things.
One is a study that I know both of us are familiar with from these two researchers that went in to interview a bunch of workers who you might not think of as in a particularly fulfilling or meaningful line of work, which is janitors at hospital.
And so Jane Dutton and Amy Ronesky went to this hospital and they interviewed all these janitors and they saw that the janitors roughly broke up into two categories.
One group felt that their job wasn't very high skill.
They didn't really go out of their way to interact with many people.
And ultimately, they weren't very happy at work.
The second group was much more social.
They did a lot more interacting with their colleagues as well as the patients.
They thought their job was higher skill, but the most important difference of that second group was that they saw themselves as an integral part of the healthcare system.
They saw themselves as healers.
And the sort of takeaway from that study is this idea of job crafting, or how can you make the job that you have more like the job that you want.
Part of it is just mindset and mentality.
How can you connect your job to a greater Y that you believe in.
Part of it is being able to craft the actual activities of your job.
Is there a way that you can work with your boss or your manager to be doing more of the things that you like and less of the things that you don't?
And so I'd start there.
I'd say, what are the ways in which you can craft the job you have to be more like the job that you want?
For some people, they might need a new job.
They might need to look around and take a leap.
But before quitting, I would encourage them to start experimenting, start prototyping.
Whether that's putting themselves out there by applying to other opportunities or taking a class on something that they might be interested in.
Or if they don't have time for either of those things, just doing some real thinking about, what is it about this job that I hate so much?
And is this the suffering that I'm willing to put up with in my life?
And if the answer is no, then they might need a change.
But I think it also brings up this third point, which is that the question itself of what do I want to do or what do I want to do most is a question that takes a certain level of privilege to even be able to ask yourself.
And it's not necessarily a question that everyone can afford to ask themselves.
We're sort of having this conversation mostly, I think with the frame of maybe knowledge workers or people that have a level of latitude with what they choose to do for work.
But the majority of people globally don't work because they want to, they work because they have to.
And that's also a reality in sort of where we began the conversation, the original translation of the word work in Latin translates to not enjoyable activity.
And that way thinking about the why you work as a means to support your livelihood or your life is as Anis would say, equally noble.
I think that for people who work as a means to an end, that's the norm.
That's the way that the majority of people work globally.
And as much as it feels good to sit here in our cush positions on the mic saying that everyone should go find their dream jobs, the reality is that that's not how our society is set up.
And so I guess your whole shtick is that if someone is feeling a lot of pressure that they must find their dream job and they haven't yet found it, it is worth asking the question of what would a good enough job look like?
And you mentioned earlier in the conversation that some people can't find their dream job.
And I guess if we think of the sorts of people that listen to this podcast, it's probably not the sort that are in the global majority of having to work.
And a lot of our viewers and listeners will be in that position where they could go, they're broadly knowledge workers.
They could go for job A, B, C, they might have different levels of pay attached to them.
They might have different levels of like activity that they're doing, different levels of prestige.
And in that position, when you do have those options and you know that you don't, for example, have to take a minimum wage job to support your family, but you do have that extra latitude to be able to make the choice.
That's where it feels even more pressurizing.
It's like, yeah, like some friends of mine who are living in Pakistan are not really grappling with this question.
They're like, I've got my job.
It pays a decent amount.
We all have to work for a living.
Let's just do the thing.
And I guess people are from reading some stuff around work.
It's sort of like grandparents generation.
The whole idea of enjoying your job wasn't really a thing.
It was like, oh, you do the work because you do the work to support your family.
And it's like, the question of enjoying your job wasn't even a thing.
But now, because all of us like millennials and gen Zs almost have this option that like, oh, we see people out there who do have the dream job.
It creates this feeling of pressure that unless I also have my dream job, I am like lacking in some way or another.
And it sounds like your approach and what you're trying to get people to do with this book is to say that, hey, that's not the only way to happiness and fulfillment.
The only way to happiness and fulfillment is not merely by having a dream job.
That kind of thing.
Yeah. I think that's very well summarized.
And I'll just double click on one idea, which is that this isn't a case for dropping your standards.
You still get to define what a good enough job means to you.
You look at the cover of the book, The Good Enough Job, Reclaiming Life from Work, and you might think it's this like slacker manifesto or this excuse to sit on your couch or watch more of The Last of Us.
And that's not what I'm saying at all.
It is a little subversive, and that I'm taking this idea of good enough that we normally think of as a way of settling and saying, you know, maybe that's the goal as opposed to the fallback option.
And I think a healthy level of detachment is a really good thing for the work itself.
Final question, I guess, is like, we don't know each other very well.
We haven't, this is the first time we're meeting, but we both follow each other online for some amount of time.
From what you know of my stuff, what are some questions I should be asking myself after this conversation to help diversify my identity away from this like all eggs in the work basket?
Yeah, I mean, I think your therapist was under a good start with those questions of, what would you do if you couldn't do what you do?
I would also return to what do you say that you value and how does how you spend your time reflect or not reflect how you say, what you say that you value?
And then the third is just thinking in a broad sense of regret minimization.
What are the things that you might be thinking on your deathbed that you wish you could have done that you're putting off today or that you're waiting until next quarter or next week to do.
And how can you think about doing them today?
Nice. Sabony, I think that's a great place to end this.
Dayo, thank you so much.
Thanks for having me.
All right, so that's it for this week's episode of Deep Dive.
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