The Importance of Having a Life Outside of Work, with Simone Stolzoff

0:00Okay, you know how sometimes you go to a party and the first question people ask you is, so what do you do? It's this incredibly lazy and boring icebreaker which inevitably leads to a place of a party and a party and a party party and a party and a party and a party and a party. identify with work. Today's guest, Simone Stoltzoff, has extensively studied the role of work in our lives, and we have a conversation around how to refrain from over-identifying with your job. Simone is a Stanford and Penn graduate who works as a consultant for major organizations ranging from Google to the Surgeon General on the topic of more gratifying workplaces.

1:00He's also written for publications ranging from Wired to The Atlantic and is the author of the book, The Good Enough Job. Here he is. Hi, Simone. Hi, Paula. Nice to be here. Thank you so much for spending this time with us. Simone, so you wrote The Good Enough Job, which is all about not over-identifying with your work. Typically, when people write books like that, it's because they themselves have faced that challenge firsthand. Tell us about what happened in your life that led you to needing to explore this topic in book form. Yeah. The old cliche is that you write the book that you need to read.

1:42That was definitely the case for me. Like many of my peers, I think I inherited a lot of scripts about the desire to pursue one's dream job, to self-actualize through the work that we do. And so I really took that to heart. I thought that how we spend our days is how we spend our lives. And therefore, choosing what career to be in was one of the most consequential decisions I'd ever make. And so I spent my 20s playing Goldilocks with careers. I worked in tech for a few years. I I worked in advertising and I worked in journalism and eventually design. It all came to a head at this moment when I was about 28 years old or so.

2:24I was working as a staff writer at a trendy magazine in New York. And I was approached by a recruiter and, you know, always take the phone call. I sort of passively went through this interview process. And then at the end of it, I was at this fork in the road. And there were sort of two paths ahead of me. There was to continue working as a magazine writer or to make a pivot and work for this prestigious design agency that I had heard of. And so on one hand, it's like, you know, woe is me, the agony of having to decide between two attractive job offers. But on the other hand, you know, it didn't feel like I was choosing between two jobs as much as it felt like I was choosing between two versions of me.

3:05You know, there was sort of Simone, the journalist on one path and Simone, the designer on the other path. and it made me realize sort of how I had conflated my sense of identity and self-worth with my career and I thought that maybe I wasn't the only one. And so the book in many ways is an investigation into how work has come to be so central to Americans' identities and eventually a bit of an editorial argument about the value of diversifying our identity beyond just what we do professionally.

4:04or worse. Can you elaborate on that? Yeah. I think this is a lesson that many people have learned firsthand in the last few years with the pandemic. Whether you were laid off or furloughed or just the nature of your job changed in some material way, a lot of people have learned that if you are identifying primarily with your job, if your job is your sole source of meaning and you lose your job, it begs the question, what's left? But I think there are also a few other risks that are maybe less extreme. The first is just about expectations. And I often think about happiness as sort of the difference between our expectations and our reality.

4:48And if we have these sky high expectations about what a job can deliver, if we're always expecting our jobs to be a dream or to be perfect, it can create a lot of room for disappointment. And then the third risk that I get into in a little bit more depth in the book is the ways in which a work-centric existence can neglect other aspects of who we are. The therapist Esther Perel has this great quote where she says, too many people bring the best of themselves to work and bring the leftovers home. And I remember when I first heard that, it sort of hit me like a brick. But, you know, the truth is we are all more than just workers.

5:25We are friends and neighbors and siblings and parents and citizens. And if we are just giving our best time and attention to one aspect of ourselves, we can neglect these other parts of who we are. There's a distinction to be made between identifying with your work, which is psychological, versus bringing a large number of hours to your work, a high volume or quantity of hours to your work. And one of the other points that you make is that if people are bringing a lot of hours to their work, there can often be a multitude of reasons for that. One might be that you over-identify with your work, which is internal, right?

6:04One might be that your bosses have heavy expectations of you, and that's external. And another one, which is also external, might simply be that you need the money. Yeah, I think that's a very important point to distinguish between people who work all the time because they have to and people who work all the time because they choose to. To be fair, the book is really centering around the stories of college-educated, white-collar knowledge workers for the most part. And I made that choice for a few reasons. One, white-collar workers are less likely to have other sources of meaning and identity in their lives.

6:39Things like organized religion or neighborhood and community groups. They're more likely to look to work for transcendence. And second, I think there are sort of two separate issues when we talk about the two sides of the income spectrum. The majority of people do not work to self-actualize. They work to survive. And yet the problems that are perplexing a lot of people who are in the knowledge work economy are questions of self-expression, these sort of higher order concerns. And so I think the problem in many ways is that a lot of our standards of working are holdovers from a more industrial age.

7:21Even if you are working in a knowledge work profession or a job, there isn't always a direct relationship between the number of hours that you put in and the quality of the work, especially when the output is something like a strategy document for an organization or the headline for a marketing campaign. And yet we still use these proxies, like the number of hours that we spend in our office chair, as a proxy for the quality of the work that's being produced. And one of the things I'm hopeful about is that as we shift towards a more hybrid and remote-friendly working world, we'll start to let the quality of work speak for itself and let people find the ways to accomplish their tasks in a way that works around their lives as opposed to the other way around.

8:06But by taking a results-oriented approach rather than a quantitative hours of butt-in-chair approach, the results-oriented approach is theoretically infinite, right? Like for a lot of particularly knowledge work jobs, there is never a point at which you are done. There's always a point at which your output could be improved. So how then do you draw that line? That's a great point, especially with knowledge work where we all carry around little offices in our pockets. Work can be extremely leaky. When you're, say, working on the assembly line, putting together a Model T, you can't necessarily do that from your living room.

8:47The boundaries between when we're working and when we're not working, we're much more clear. And yet today we're all sort of like sharks with one eye open. And the ability to work is almost always available. It can seep like a gas into all of our unoccupied space. And so I think the onus falls both on the shoulders of individuals and on organizations and managers. On one hand, I think often when we talk about work-life balance or some of these issues, we place the burden on the individual to draw those boundaries. We say things like practice self-care or set a boundary this weekend. And yet the institutions themselves, the organizations, the managers, the bosses are the folks who actually have the capabilities to set the expectations and the norms for their teams.

9:34They can put up some of the more structural barriers that protect their employees' lives in and out of the office. And the research increasingly shows that employees who are able to cultivate interests and hobbies outside of work tend to be more creative and innovative in a work context. It shows that people who have what researchers call greater self-complexity, people who have been able to cultivate different sides of themselves, are more resilient in the face of adversity. So there's sort of like the business case for protecting your life outside of work. We all know this firsthand. You're on hour 11 of a 12-hour day.

10:12You're not going to necessarily be firing at all cylinders. But I think there's also sort of the moral case about the way in which cultivating other sides of who we are creates more well-rounded individuals that can be healthy for our communities and for ourselves. To your point about the research showing that cultivating hobbies can actually make you more productive at work, it reminds me of, of course, Adam Grant's book Originals, which is just full of research around precisely that idea that if you have a hobby, people who have hobbies in painting or improv or playing a musical instrument, hobbies that are completely unrelated to their primary occupation, often because they are exercising other areas of their brain, they can engage in lateral thinking, in creative thinking, and that makes them more original, more innovative in whatever field they're in, no matter how seemingly different that field is.

11:16Yeah, that's completely true. I know this firsthand from the world of design. Often we think about the output or the final product, the logo that you might get at the end of the day. But I found that among my co-workers in particular, those who had the most diverse inputs, those who sought inspiration in interesting ways, there's a direct correlation with the type and the quality of the work that they're producing. Particularly in a day where AI or automation might impact different fields, where the ability to produce work becomes cheaper and cheaper, what becomes more important is our tastes, is our ability to be curators, is the ability to write the right prompt for chat GPT.

12:04And I think our ability to do so is a direct reflection of the ways in which we are cultivating a well-rounded perspective going into the work that we're doing. To go back to an earlier point you made, you talked about how many people over-identify with their work because they don't necessarily have other containers through which they can identify. So if a person does not have the hobby of playing a musical instrument or participating in a sport, or if a person does not have a particular religious tradition, then they may not have other communities or other activities that round out that sense of identity.

12:46for a person who's listening to this, who's right now thinking to themselves, well, you know what, I don't even know where I would put space in my life for that. I wake up, I commute, I work, I go to the grocery store, and then I have to do laundry and cook dinner. And maybe they've got two or three kids that they need to take care of after work. What can the average person who's listening, whose schedule is full simply from laundry and lawn mowing when they're not at work, What can they do? Yeah, all of the intense, avid lawnmowers out there, this one's for you. I mean, I think there is an expectation that if you want to diversify your identity, if you want to find other sources of meaning, you have to take extreme measures.

13:31You have to sign up for an Iron Man, or you have to read 52 books a year to be considered a real reader. And in actuality, I think the benefit really comes from starting small. Right now, we're sort of in this chicken and an egg problem where people work all the time, and so they're not exactly sure what to do when they're not working, and so they work all the time. And I definitely have empathy for people who have busy schedules, who have lots of responsibilities on their shoulders. And I want to reiterate the fact that we get meaning through our attention. It requires sort of like a plant, like time and energy in order to grow.

14:12And unless we are actively investing in these things that we hope to find identity and meaning from, you're not going to get the reward. No offense to Netflix, but if all you do is go to work and take care of your responsibilities and then turn off your brain and turn on the TV, you're not necessarily going to find a huge source of meaning in your life in that way. And so I think for people that are strapped for time or that are busy, it can be through small actions for carving out little pockets in your days, in your weeks where you're intentionally not working, you know, protecting that non-work time as if it were sacred, and then choosing how you want to fill it.

14:49Maybe it's a 10-minute catch-up conversation with your best friend that you try and have weekly to invest in your relationships. Maybe it is joining an exercise community or class as opposed to exercising on your own. So you can cultivate a community of people that could care less about what you do for work and value you in other ways. But I think often we think of these grand gestures when in actuality, in order to find meaning in our life, it's really about consistency and it's about attention. It's about squaring our hips towards our values. And I'm glad you brought up Netflix as an example because it reminds me of some research by the author Laura Vanderkam, who is a time management expert, who found that if people devote an hour a day to watching Netflix, which oftentimes people do mindlessly, right?

15:40It's 11 p.m. and that last hour of the day, their brain is zapped and so they just turn on Netflix right before they fall asleep. So it's an hour a day, but because it's mindless, it often gives people the impression that they have not devoted an hour a day to a hobby when in fact they actually kind of have. They just didn't do it consciously. By contrast, what she found in her research is that if people intentionally devote an hour a day to said hobby, then they feel as though they have more time, even though if both sets of people were to fill out a time log detailing their hours, it's actually the same quantitatively, it's the same amount of time.

16:22Yeah, I love that. And one of the things that stuck out to me from her research is just the idea of time boxing. And I think this is particularly true in knowledge work where the work can sort of expand to whatever container we allot for it. We know firsthand that not all hours working are created equal. And I think this is something that I personally learned during the pandemic of, okay, maybe I'm more effective at doing generative work like writing in the morning. And so one hour in the morning is worth three hours in the late afternoon where I'm not necessarily firing on all cylinders. I think the same can be said for our hobbies and our interests.

16:59You know, there's this famous quote from a Stanford GSB professor who said, show me your calendar and I'll show you what you value. I think that's very true. You know, if we do a little personal audit of our weeks, of our days, we can see where we're allocating our time and if they are actually aligning with how we hope to spend our time or what we purport is important to us. Right. Right. Now, you talked about drawing a distinction between when you are working and when you are not, and that kind of speaks to the concept of an integrator versus a separator or a segmentor. Can you elaborate on the distinction between the integrator versus the segmentor?

17:37Because in the construct of preserving a piece of time in which you are not working, that really is something that speaks to the segmentor segment. Yeah, you know, this comes out from the Wharton School, this researcher named Nancy Rothbard. And I think it's particularly relevant towards all of us today or those of us who are working from home. So Professor Rothbard basically breaks down workers into two categories. They are integrators who are folks that don't mind a more porous boundary between their work and their life. You know, the folks that might want to go to the grocery store or go for a run at 3 p.m.

18:16and then maybe sign online one more time after dinner to finish off those emails. And the segmenters who want a more firm boundary between when they're on the clock and when they're off the clock. Just with some personal reflection, you can probably get a pretty good sense of what type of worker that you are. But I think the upshot is that not all workers have the same working styles or preferences. And even for a manager, the same policy, for example, a flexible deadline for when something should be done or turned in can be great for an integrator who can work the work around different aspects of their life and sort of figure out when it makes most sense for them to work on something.

19:00But it could really stress out a segmenter who wants to have a very clear deadline and know that they're done and they can move on to the next thing. And so I think, you know, with any sort of book like this about work culture or work life, it's really easy to give prescriptive sort of one size fits all advice. But in actuality, I think it's much more nuanced. And that's definitely something that I found out through all of my research as well. Right. And what strikes me about that is that there's a large tie in there with career selection as well, because certainly if you are a firefighter or if you are an emergency room nurse, it's shift based work and therefore it's very segmented life.

19:40You're either on the clock or you're off versus if you are a graphic designer or, you know, a full stack WordPress PHP coder, you then can have a much more integrated life. For sure. Yeah, it reminds me of this anecdote that I write about a little bit in the book from a conversation that I had with a mentor of mine when I was in college. So in college, I studied poetry and economics, and you can already see a little tension between the pursuit of art and the pursuit of commerce in my life. And I had the opportunity to interview my favorite writer. His name is Anis Mojgani. He's the current poet laureate of the state of Oregon.

20:21And I asked him, Anis, how do you feel about the mantra, do what you love and never work a day in your life? And, you know, I was a senior in college about to embark on this unknown journey. I was expecting him to say, you know, go follow your passion and the money will follow. And he didn't. He said something that has always stuck with me. He said, some people do what they love for work and others do what they have to so they can do what they love when they're not working. And neither is more noble. And I think that last part is really key. I think we live in a culture and a society that loves to revere people whose jobs and their identities neatly aligned.

21:00But 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 that was sort of my goal with the book is to sort of balance the scales a little bit. I don't think there's anything wrong with identifying with or looking to your job as a source of meaning. But I think it can become problematic when it is the sole source of meaning and identity, as we spoke about earlier. And that reminds me of what Elizabeth Gilbert said in the book Big Magic, where she said not to necessarily burden your art with the responsibility of paying your bills.

21:36Yeah, it's very true. I'm sure we all have friends who have tried to go all in with art and they become so preoccupied with how they're going to make rent that they can't actually focus on art that they hope to create. And so I think the balance is holding what we value in one hand and what the world values or what the market values in the other hand and trying to find a career or a job that sits at their intersection.

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26:38One interesting chart that you show is the frequency of the phrase meaningful work. starting in around the 1940s and particularly picking up post-1960s, the phrase meaningful work has appeared in books and in printed material substantially more. Now, is that because we were simply using a synonymous phrase prior to the 1940s, or is that because there has been growth in the cultural concept itself? I think it's more the latter. If you look at some of the studies from say the 1960s even. There was a study that asked Americans how important is meaningful work to your success at the office. Only about 6 % of people responded that it was very or extremely important.

27:30And then they conducted the same study 20 years later in the early 80s. And they found that 49 % of people thought meaningful work was vital to their success at the office. And now, you know, over nine out of every 10 Americans would take a pay cut in order to pursue more meaningful work. And, you know, I don't think there's anything wrong with meaningful work necessarily, but I think it's important in historical context to understand that this wasn't always a core value to what we look towards our jobs for. Whereas this movement in the 1970s, in particular, the sort of personal growth self-help movement, books like What Color Is Your Parachute by Richard Bowles as being sort of emblematic of this movement.