What does it mean for your job to be "good enough"?
What does it mean for your job or your career to truly be “good enough?”
This is the question that Simone Stolzoff asks in his new book, The Good Enough Job, where he explores case studies of those who are reclaiming their lives back from a constant work grind.
“A fascinating and deeply reported challenge to the idea that our work should—or ever could—be the only center of meaning, self-worth, or community in our lives. The real-life stories fill the reader with the liberating sense that we absolutely could put work back in its place—and that the result would be both richer lives and more effective work,” offers Oliver Burkeman, New York Times bestselling author of Four Thousand Weeks.
“The Good Enough Job is an incredibly propulsive read, filled with characters whose stories will be at once familiar and astonishing—and it will absolutely challenge you to change the way you think about work” says Anne Helen Petersen, author of Can’t Even and coauthor of Out of Office.
Simone Stolzoff is a San Francisco-based author and designer. He is a former design lead at the global innovation firm IDEO and his work has been featured in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, and various other publications. He is passionate about finding and helping others balance between work and life.
Goldie Chan: Why did you want to write “The Good Enough Job” and why that title?
Simone Stolzoff: I’m a victim of the cliché “you write the book you need to read.” I’ve spent my career searching for dream jobs only for each role to fall short of my sky-high expectations. The Good Enough Job is my answer to the endless pursuit of dream jobs. It’s an investigation into why work has become so central to our identities and a call to separate our self-worth from our output. The an allusion to “good enough parenting,” a theory devised by the British pediatrician Donald Winnicott that valuing sufficiency rather than perfection is a better recipe for fulfillment.
Chan: What has your career path been and how has it also changed over time?
Stolzoff: I spent my twenties playing Goldilocks with careers. Before I turned 30, I worked in four different industries—tech, design, journalism, and advertising—all the while searching for a vocational soulmate to help me self-actualize. Now, I’m an author and a freelance journalist, but more importantly, I treat my work as part of—not the entirety of—who I am.
Chan: What is one lesson from the book that you can share with us?
Stolzoff: It may seem obvious, but if you want to derive sources of identity and meaning outside of work, you need to do things other than work. Identities are like plants—they need energy and attention to grow. One of the risks of a work-centric existence is that our jobs don’t just take our best hours, but our best energy too. As psychologist Esther Perel says, too many people bring the best of themselves to work, and bring the leftovers home.
Chan: What is one thing you learned while writing your book that surprised you?
Stolzoff: One great irony is that I wrote the majority of the book—a book about the United States’s culture of overwork—on the side of a full-time job. Even after I left my job to finish the book, I recognized that I was often my own worst manager. I learned that unless we are intentional about the role we want work to have in our lives, it can easily expand like a gas to fill all of our unoccupied space.
Chan: How would you describe your personal brand?
Stolzoff: I’m a journalist, so I try to explain issues that matter in an accessible way. I don’t really think too much in terms of “building a personal brand” as much as finding ways to consistently deliver value to people who read my work.
Chan: What books are currently on your bedside table for reading?
Stolzoff: In nonfiction, I’m reading All The Gold Stars by Rainesford Stauffer. It’s a book about reimagining ambition and is a great companion text to The Good Enough Job. Fiction-wise, I just finished this great, short novel called Tell Me When To Go by Emil Deandreis about male friendship, baseball, and the Bay Area.
Chan: What are you working on now?
Stolzoff: I’m working on figuring out which article to send out next to my newsletter, The Article Book Club, gearing up to teach the next cohort of my class, Designing Your Next Career Step, and thinking about what I might write about for book two.
Chan: Any career advice for this year?
Stolzoff: Rather than think about your job as the central axis around which the rest of your life orbits, start with your vision of a life well-lived, and think about how your work can support that vision.
