4.8 • 641 Ratings
🗓️ 31 May 2023
⏱️ 58 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
In this episode, Simone Stolzoff, independent journalist and author of "The Good Enough Job", shares her insights on how work has come to dominate American culture and how we can reclaim our lives in a world centered around work. Simone's work has been featured in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and numerous other publications.
Simone and I explore the dangers of treating work as a source of identity and meaning, and the importance of diversifying our sources of identity. We discuss how to define what we want our relationship with work to be, the value of active forms of leisure, and the benefits of trading money for time. We also talk about the role of work in our lives, and how it can lead to more creativity and better ideas when we invest in other aspects of ourselves.
Some highlights we explore:
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0:00.0 | The big thing that I think people ought to recognize is that our identities, our sources |
0:06.8 | and meaning, they're sort of like plants. They require time and energy to grow. And one of the |
0:15.4 | risks of living such a work-centric existence is that when you're off work, you often don't have the energy |
0:22.7 | to do anything else. That's why so many people come home and then, you know, flip on Netflix |
0:28.2 | and turn on, turn off their brain for a few hours and then go to sleep and then rinse and |
0:33.1 | repeat. You know, the days become indistinguishable from one another. From the moment we ask our |
0:39.2 | kids what they want to be when they grow up, we exalt the dream job as if it were life's |
0:46.6 | ultimate objective. And that is the topic of today's conversation with Simone Stolzoff. |
0:56.3 | He is the author of an amazing book that is so well-timed called The Good Enough Job, Reclaiming Life from Work. Now, one of the things |
1:04.9 | that I feel that those of us who identify as creators, as entrepreneurs, as people who want to get the most |
1:13.3 | out of life, is that we often over-index on the relationship between the work that we do and |
1:22.4 | our identity. And I've talked in previous shows about how difficult or challenging that can be. |
1:27.3 | Today's episode, it hits different. |
1:30.3 | Simone is an independent journalist and a designer from San Francisco. |
1:34.3 | He's a former design lead at the global innovation firm called IDEO. |
1:40.3 | And he regularly works with folks like the Surgeon General of the U.S., the chief |
1:45.7 | talent officer at Google on how to make the workplace more human. |
1:51.4 | And as an entrepreneur, his work spoke to me because so many times I felt like I was on a |
1:57.0 | very lonely slog, a very difficult, hard uphill journey, and I still do to this day. |
2:02.2 | So I'm always looking for things that can sort of fortify me against those feelings or help me |
2:09.0 | understand those feelings and then get better at not falling into the trap, that identity |
2:16.3 | and job, how it can hold us prisoners. So today's conversation |
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