Escape the Dream Job Trap | Simone Stolzoff

24:51And they said, okay, we can sort of frame work as a source of meaning, as a source of purpose. we live in a very individualistic society in the U.S. And I remember this speech from Steve Jobs. I think it was a commencement speech in 2005. And he basically was like, the only way to do good work is to do what you love. And if you haven't found what you love, keep searching, never settle. And I think I definitely bought into that narrative. I graduated college around that time and I spent my entire 20s playing Goldilocks trying to find that perfect job. And if I was ever bored or if I was ever feeling a little listless, I thought there was something wrong with the job.

25:29And so I hopped industries. I worked in advertising and I worked in tech and I worked in journalism. I worked in design, all the while trying to find that vocational soulmate. And it wasn't until I realized that every job has aspects of monotony. Every job has TDM that you have to go through. And in order to find a job that works for you, perfect is a very hard ideal to live up to. No job is always a dream. Rather than finding a job that is a dream job or the ultimate source of your passion, I think it's much more important to get good at a job, to develop skills that are rare and that are valuable.

26:12There's this great book that I love called So Good They Can't Ignore You by Cal Newport. And his argument is basically like the actual way to improve in your career is to develop career capital, is to develop skills that are rare that people can pay you for. It's not necessarily finding that passion on some personality test and then pursuing that job wholeheartedly. Actually, passion is often the result of hard work rather than a precursor to hard work. And so it's through recording thousands of episodes of a podcast or working as a journalist for a decade or really cultivating your craft that the passion and the love emerges.

26:54And I think often we have the causal relationship the other way around. I think it's also hard to unpack the temporal nature of dream. So when I think of my dream job in my 20s, it was traveling around and running coaching programs and getting to see more of the world. Now that I have a family and a newborn, I don't want to be on the road. I actually want to be more work from home. I want to have more flexibility in my schedule and more virtual. And I think it's hard for us to wrap our heads around like this might be a dream job now, but it might not be a dream job 20, 30 years from now when we climb the ladder and now we have new responsibilities and maybe we're not tapping into our skills that we're so passionate about, but we actually have to manage the passions and skills of team members and people below us.

27:40And I think that concept can be very difficult when you're starting out in your career. And I mean, if we were to look at the number of hashtags for dream job versus good enough job, it's probably astronomically different. But there's so much of us tied to this idea of like, if I just get my dream job, then I'll check all the boxes and I'll move forward and not enough wrestling with what is that dream job now? And is that going to be the dream job in the future? Totally. Yeah, I really believe in sort of the seasonality of work. And maybe, you know, in your 20s, that was your time when you were in a season where you wanted to travel around the world and be a facilitator and lead these coaching programs.

28:18And maybe in your 40s, it's a different expectation for what your job allows you to do. But I think a better frame, as opposed to a dream job, is trying to find jobs where you are intrinsically motivated to do them. You know, I talked to so many people for the book who worked their way up to the top of some corporate ladder only to find out that they were winning at a game that they didn't actually enjoy playing. They were just chasing the next promotion or the next raise or something that looked really good on their resume without consulting what actually mattered to them. And there's this great book by Daniel Pink called Drive, where he really unpacks the science of intrinsic motivation.

28:57And he says it really boils down to three distinct categories. The first is mastery. So are you growing in the ways that you want to be growing? Are you developing the skills that you want to be developing? The second is purpose. Are you connected to the outcome and the results of the work that you're doing, the impact that you're having in the world? And the third is autonomy. Do you feel like you have enough control to feel like you are in the driver's seat of your own life, to fulfill your own version of what freedom means to you. And I think those sort of what the journalist David Brooks calls eulogy virtues, you know, the things that might not show up on your resume, but are part of your spirit, part of your soul are much more important things to pursue than just the things that look shiny to the outside.

29:44And so that's what I would say in terms of like, what is worth pursuing. It's not just the shiniest accolades that can lead to a life where you spend your whole life chasing carrots without actually feeling full. But finding that intrinsic motivation and then also having a good sense of why you work, what are you working for, is a great way to think about how your job can support your life as opposed to the other way around. I know for a lot of our clients who tend to be workaholics, it's also hard for them to find a sense of self and identity outside of work. So when you've been steeped in this culture of perform 80-hour weeks, do everything that work demands, they often come to us because they don't have a social life or at least as much of one as they'd like, or they don't have their partner because they haven't really spent much time cultivating any identity outside of work.

30:36So for those listeners, this idea of a good enough job and having identity outside of work, I know is almost like a record screech. What can they do to start to think about and develop that sense of identity outside of work if they've fully bought into workaholism and aren't happy? There's three things that come to mind for me. The first is carving out space in their days, in their weeks, in their life where work is not an option. You know, that goes back to sort of like the infrastructure point that I was making. If you're always sort of with one eye on work, like a shark sleeping with one eye open, you're never going to be fully present in your life outside of work.

31:11The second is, it may sound simple, but if you want to derive meaning from aspects of your life other than work, you have to do things other than work. that means actually finding meaning as opposed to just turning off your brain. No offense to Netflix, but I converse with a lot of workaholics too. And often they'll say, at the end of the workday, all I can muster doing is turning on the game or turning on Netflix and turning off my brain. But you have to find actual things to do, activities to reinforce those other identities you hope to cultivate. And the third is I'd encourage them to find communities that couldn't care less about what they do for work.

31:50So for example, I love to play pickup basketball. And one of the benefits of my weekly basketball game is I don't care how many books I've sold that week or how many words I've written. They care that I show up on time, that I'm a good teammate and that I box out when I rebound. It's a different expectation, a different value system of what matters. I think work provides one container with one set of metrics that matter. Maybe it's, you know, your salary or how many sales you've made that quarter. But I think it's really important that we find other containers to reinforce that we are more than just workers in our life.

32:27And I think once those workaholics are often really type A driven people are able to find communities that aren't just validating them for their professional accomplishments, it becomes a reinforcing cycle where actually it's really refreshing not to always have to be the boss or not to always have to be on or to feel like you get to show up in a way that's different from showing up as a C-suite executive. I know for a lot of our clients, we talk about small talk and how to break through and not have boring small talk, but they often don't recognize that even when they're trying to find those communities, they're using what do you do for work as their opening line to start the small talk and framing all of the conversation around work because, well, it's a meritocracy.

33:10It's easy to compare resume and certifications and accomplishments in your work life. So that allows them in their type A competitive side to lean in. But if you say, hey, let's shift the conversation to what do you like to do? Well, I don't want to ask that of others because I don't know what I want to do outside of work or what I like to do outside of work. So it's funny how they play it safe by talking about work and And then they struggle to find those communities outside of work because they go to the pickup basketball game and they're just asking you about work, which doesn't lead you get invited to watch the NBA playoffs.

33:42Yeah. You know, I mean, it's like a chicken and egg problem, right? People are working all the time, so they're not sure who they are outside of work. And they're not sure who they are outside of work until they work all the time. You know, I was reading this really interesting study recently about new fathers and how some of the most workaholic tendencies are found right after people have a kid. because when you have a kid, you can contribute a certain amount of input into your child's development, but you don't always get that output back. There isn't always this direct relationship between the energy that you're putting in and the sort of up into the right growth that you might see as like a Wall Street trader, for example.

34:18And so these men are throwing themselves into work in order to be able to feel validation and feel fulfilled. And I think, And especially in the US, like if you look at the data in the 1970s, the average American and the average German worked about the exact same number of hours each year. And now the average American works about 30 percent more than the average German. And, you know, this is like a historical, right? 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 United States, some of the greatest increases in work time are coming from the highest earners.

34:58So the very people that can afford to work less are working more than ever. And I think it's just a testament to the point that you were just making is that a lot of these workaholics don't have other sources of meaning in their life other than work. And so they're spending all of their time at the office, even if they don't necessarily have to be doing so. And of course, everything rolls downhill. So if your managers and your team leaders are working all the time, if you're serious about your career, that's, of course, what you think you're supposed to do. Totally. Yeah, I'm inspired by some leaders that have taken an alternative approach.

35:37You know, I've seen some companies that, for example, have a mandatory minimum vacation requirement or some companies that have, you know, just cultural norms around communication where after 6 p.m., like you're not allowed to send an email or a Slack message. Everything has to wait till the morning. Or, you know, I talked to Jason Fried from Hay and Basecamp and he was saying that in the early days, instead of like offering meals at the office, they would help subsidize like CSA boxes so their family could like healthy food at home. And I think one thing that you see of these cultures that really value people's lives outside of the office is it breeds goodwill.

36:14It breeds loyalty. It breeds retention. It breeds employees who are actually excited to show up for work because they realize that their employers understand that they're more than just an enterprise sales executive or what have you. And I think it's actually ultimately good for the bottom line of a business if they're able to take a long view and say, no, we don't want to be burning out our employees. We want to be able to create cultures that support them to be able to do their best work. And then at the end of the day, to go home and do the things that they love outside of work as well.

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40:06Visit GoodToKnowFacts.org. Yeah, it reminds me of a moment during the pandemic. my wife's company was trying to team build virtually, and they sent out this craft cocktail mixing kit, and then they forced the entire team to sit on a virtual call with the bartender and learn how to mix cocktails. And we were trying to prepare for our wedding, and we weren't drinking, taking a long break from drinking. And I just remember we're in a room sitting next to her. She's staring at all of her team members on Zoom. No one wants to be there. This craft cocktail person who's doing the Zoom is mixing all these crazy drinks.

40:41And of course, it's under the guise of team building. Everyone wants to have a strong team, but when we force our team members to do these activities outside of work in the hopes of creating a great team, it actually burns people out even more. So the idea of creating some guardrails around, hey, no communication after six, and it's okay if you go on a long walk after lunch, as long as the things on the to-do list and the big goals for the team are being accomplished, that's what matters more than forcing us into these interactions with our team members under the guise of building a strong culture.

41:12you cannot force that team building. You have to allow that to happen organically. The more pressure you put to make that happen, the opposite effect will happen. And there will be some unity, but that unity will be in condemning the person that is setting up these forced networking and team building exercises. I was really struck by your research for the book, And I'm really curious, interviewing hundreds of people from all these diverse backgrounds around their work, what was the most surprising insight from those conversations for you or unexpected that you weren't thinking you'd hear? There's this one conversation I had with this Wall Street banker, and his name is Kay He.

42:00And he's sort of the paradigm of someone who is just like a striver and a hustler. Like he is the first generation Cambodian American. And in high school, he set his sights on being the best student so he could get into the best college. And then he went to college and he said, OK, I want to make the most money possible. I could be a lawyer. I could be a banker. I could be an engineer or I could be a doctor. And he chose banking and he went to Wall Street and he went to work on for BlackRock. And he became the youngest ever managing director in BlackRock's history. and you know he by the time he was 30 he had bought an apartment in new york city you know he was making seven figure salary and he had this like realization moment where he was you know preparing to go to a wedding of a friend of his and his hair fell out like the big chunk of his hair fell out from the side of his head and it was related to to stress related alopecia you know so here's someone who has like all of the trappings of success you know it's like graduated from a top college, worked at a prestigious company, has a nice title, has all of the things that you would want from a successful career.

43:13And yet he was so stressed that his hair was literally falling out. He didn't have the time in his weeks to spend all of the money that he was making. And I think he represents one end of the spectrum, which is just valuing what the world values without really considering what you yourself value. But I think I talk to people on the other end of the spectrum where, for example, they took on a massive amount of debt to pursue a graduate degree for a field of study that didn't actually lead to stable job prospects on the other side, or someone who left their job to go all in to pursue their art, but now are so stressed about what they're going to do to make rent that they can actually focus on the art that they hope to be creating.

44:01I think what was most surprising for me is I came in with maybe a little bit more of a hot take and said, you know, like our work centric society is a problem. It's, you know, people are literally dying from overwork. What are we going to do about this? And I left from all the reporting with a more of a lukewarm take, which is to say that, you know, what we do for work matters and we are all more than what we do for work. And so we have to reconcile these two. We have to hold what the world values in one hand, what we value in the other hand, and try and pursue work that sits at their intersection.

44:35And I think it was surprising because we live in an age of hot takes where people either want to lionize work and say, you have to do what you love. And if you don't do what you love, you'll never be happy. Or people that villainize work and are on the Reddit anti-work thread and saying, work is a necessary evil, universal basic income. We should all just be able to have full freedom all day. And I think the actual path to happiness or contentment lives somewhere in the middle. It's not on either extreme. Well, a lot of that has to do, and we've talked about this, I mean, the work that you're doing.

45:10If it's, you know, 100 years ago, people directly saw that what they put into their work affecting their communities, affecting their families and affecting their society. And now that's hard to see. In fact, for AJ and I, I could tell you right now that it's hard for us to understand and how people engage with this podcast. We get download numbers. And then from that, we have people inquiring about our programs and coming out for training. And those training sessions are incredibly important and fun for AJ and I because we're actually getting to hang out and chat and understand how our content has helped those folks.

45:59Which makes, that's the only thing that makes it all worth it. because we get a direct response. The feedback loop is there. For many people, a majority of workers now, there is no feedback loop. It's just information going into the atmosphere. And you hope that people are enjoying your work and things like that. Again, having an idea what the world values, but also being able to create on your own time and produce for yourself, for your own value and for the value of those around you, that would offset some of that black box that we're dealing with of missing out and meaning a purpose that we do for work, for the world's value rather than our own.

46:55I think that goes right back to what you were talking about in terms of pandemic hobbies. I I think one of the reasons why it was so fulfilling for some of these knowledge workers to say, you know, bake sourdough bread is it was an example of an actual physical output that they were able to produce with their two hands, as opposed to this abstraction of what so many of us do in a knowledge economy that isn't actually connected to anything that is physical or anything that is connected to a feedback loop where you see yourself improving other people's lives. for a lot of us, we're just looking for things to measure.

47:27And the easiest thing to measure is the New York apartment and the salary and the bonus and all the accoutrements that come with that versus the value and meaning that we're deriving internally that brings us joy or makes us happy in the moment. That is a lot harder for us to quantify and then even harder for us to compare to others. So there's always this grass is always greener where the banker would love to be the artist and the starving artist would love to not be so starving and would actually like to have the bank account of the banker. And we're always faced with this duality as we're making our way through this journey.

48:00I'd love for our audience to take away one key for them who've just really dedicated all of their life to this job and impressing others, which we find time and time again in our clients. And then we're kind of at that crossroads of they're making enough money now where their needs are met and the difference in happiness is pretty nominal. But then internally, they're still feeling that struggle of like, isn't there more to what I'm doing here? Isn't there more to life than this identity that I've created for myself around work? That's where the title of the book comes in. The reason why I like the term good enough is that if you don't have a definition of what good enough means to you, the default is just more, more, more, more, more.

48:47And, you know, that's part of the sort of DNA of our country. There's sort of Protestant work ethic and capitalism that have entwined to bring us to this point. But my advice for those people is to define what good enough means to them, to really have a keen sense of what is it that they're working for? What about their work is bringing them fulfillment or meaning? Is it the people? Is it the output of what they're doing? Is it their ability to support their loved ones or to put, you know, proverbial bread on the table? And I think once people have actually taken some space and time to consider what it is that they care for, what it is that they're working for, it relieves some of that pressure that is put on all of us to think that you need to have all of your identity and your meaning come from the work basket and freeze up time to be able to invest in some of those other things that might bring them meaning outside.

49:42of work as well. You know, the origin of the term comes from a British pediatrician. His name was Donald Winnicott. And in the mid-20th century, he was observing how there's this growing idolization of parenting, where these parents wanted to be the perfect parents. They wanted to shield their kid from experiencing any sort of negative emotion or harm. And then when their kids inevitably started crying or frustrated or angry, the parents took it extremely personally. And so Winnicott proposed this alternative and as opposed to being sort of perfect parent, what if you strive to be the good enough parent?

50:17And he thought that framework would benefit both the child and the parent. The kid would learn how to self-soothe, how to take care of some of their own issues, and the parents wouldn't lose themselves in their children's emotions. And obviously I'm making it parallel to the working world. Like I and toddler, our jobs are not something that we can always control. But I think actually a healthy level of detachment from the work that you're doing produces better work as well. We all know people that are sort of rising and falling based on their, say, Instagram follower count or their monthly sales quota.

50:53And it's actually by having a little bit of distance from those vanity metrics that allows you to be able to put your work in perspective. And that's what I'm trying to do with the book, what I hope people take away. that's not the idea that you know they have to hate their job or you know there's no meaning or purpose or community to be found at work i've certainly made some of my best friends from work i've had an immense sense of purpose from being a writer and being able to find a craft and a vocation that i care about i just hope it's not the only one and that's the thing that i hope people take away is that just finding those little pockets to invest in other parts of themselves will benefit them as well-rounded people and it will benefit their work life too.

51:38I'd love if you'd be willing to get a bit more vulnerable and share what your personal definition of good enough is, having wrestled with this idea and wrote a book about it. Yeah, totally. I mean, the old cliche among authors is that, you know, you write the book that you need to read. And that was definitely the case for me. You know, like, as I mentioned, I like spent my 20s and early 30s sort of swerving between these different industries, trying to find that perfect job. and then right before this book came out, I was lucky enough to be able to leave working for a corporate overlord and start working for myself and I thought that everything would be fixed.

52:12I'd never have to attend a meeting that should have been an email ever again and I started working for myself and I found that I was actually the worst boss that I'd ever had. It wasn't some culture of a company or manager that was pushing me to work all the time or to open my laptop on the weekends or to feel like shit when I didn't meet my internally imposed goals. It was just my own sort of nature of my self-worth being tethered to my productivity. And it took going through this research process of talking to all of these people, of looking at all of the latest academic studies about what actually leads to fulfillment at work, that I was able to take a step back and be able to erect some of those boundaries myself.

52:59And so some of the things that I do now that I didn't do before, I love having sort of a clear start and stop of the workday, like a little ritual of, you know, this is when I'm going to sign in and this is when I'm going to sign out. And this isn't necessarily one size fits all advice. In the book, I talk about the difference between what I call integrators and segmenters. Integrators are the people that don't mind sort of integrating work in their life and, you know, going to the grocery store at 2 p.m. and then signing back online after their kids go to sleep, whereas segmenters want more of like, this is the chunk that I'm I'm working.

53:29I'm online when I'm online. I'm offline when I'm offline. I found that I'm a segmenter. I like having a distinct workday and being off when I'm off. I have tried to be a beginner in things. I think one of the best antidotes to overwork is play, something that is not future-oriented, but actually focused on the present moment. And I'm finding that with my young son, my wife and I are also taking salsa dancing classes. It's something that's not for any sort of means to another end, but just for the joy of learning and being a beginner once again. And I've done some of my own sort of back of the napkin math about the financials of what do I need to support the life that I want to live, as opposed to just thinking the closer I am to a billionaire, the more happy I am actually understanding, oh, this is a number that makes sense to support what I want from my goals and our family's goals moving forward.

54:24And actually, I don't need to always strive for more and more and more, I can strive to sort of find my definition of good enough and then feel the second benefit of being able to rest.

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55:25Bundling, just another way to save with a personal price plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts and savings, and eligibility vary by state. Yeah, could you unpack the financial component? We've talked so much about the values and obviously the things that go outside of financial, but I know for many of our audience members, like financial is the most pressing. and getting to that number, I think a lot of people have an overestimate of how much they truly need.

55:59So what was the math like for you in going through that process and discovering that number for yourself? It's particularly pertinent right now. We were talking before we started recording. I have a six-week-old at home, so I have a new baby. And especially right before we had the kid, I was so worried about the finance of raising a kid. And I live in San Francisco. You know, it's an expensive city. I was like, oh, the cost of college is skyrocketing. And like, what am I going to do? Do I have to like sell out and go work a PR job for like a bank in order to like live the life that I want to live?

56:30And so I actually sat down and said, okay, like, how much money do I want to save? What is like my burn rate on a monthly basis? You know, how much are my sort of fixed costs? And how much do I want as a cushion on top of that? And I grossly overestimated sort of the amount of money that I thought I needed to make. And once I actually did the numbers, I had this like real peace of mind of understanding, oh, I'm actually, you know, on track. And I think it's like the wisdom of budgeting. Sometimes you think about budgeting as something that is about pinching pennies. But no, the actual benefit of budgeting is to be able to spend freely, to know that, oh, I do have$1 ,000 set aside for dinners out this month.

57:12And so I don't want to have to think twice about ordering an appetizer or what have you. Just last week, I was guest lecturing at Haas, the business school at UC Berkeley. and I had a lot of questions about this, about how expensive the world is and there's no beating around the bush. The costs of living are increasing but I was trying to encourage a student to think holistically about their lives. If you want to live in a city like Los Angeles or New York or Chicago or San Francisco, what have you, you're going to have to earn a certain level of income. The most important thing that jobs provide is an economic contract.

57:52It's an exchange of your time and your effort for money. And I think the more clear-eyed we are about that, the better. But you can also make lifestyle choices that decrease that pressure a little bit. If you want to move to a place with a lower cost of living, you don't necessarily have to have that same pressure to make six figures coming out of college or to work a job that you hate just because it gives you a good salary. And so I encourage people to start with their vision of a life well lived. you know, what do they want? They want to live in a certain place. Do they want to have kids? How many vacations do you want to take a year?

58:28What sort of lifestyle do you want to live? And then think about what job or career might support that lifestyle as opposed to the other way around. I don't fault anyone who wants to work in a big consulting job or work for a big bank because it allows them to pay for the life that they want to leave just as much as I don't fault the barista who works at a coffee shop so that they have enough time to rehearse with their band and find meaning of their life outside of work. Neither path is more noble, as my mentor would have said. But I think the encouragement is to think holistically about the equation as opposed to just thinking about the job in isolation.

59:07Yeah. And I found the more time that my wife and I have spent wrestling with that, the easier it's been to get off the hedonic treadmill of what everyone else is doing. The more clarity you actually have on what it is that you really want and what you and your partner really want on your relationship or as a family, the easier it is to stop worrying so much about the new car your neighbor got or the second house your friend is buying and more focus on, okay, we know exactly what we want this year to look like. We know how many vacations we want to go on. We know where we want to spend our time.

59:37We know the things that are important to us. And wrestling with those questions, it feels really hard and challenging in the beginning, but it actually opens up so much more freedom of all the external pressures and noise that I think lead us to making those wrong decisions for us, where we're now carrying a massive mortgage on a house that we didn't really need in a neighborhood that we don't care that much about anymore. And we don't have time to go on vacation because we have to keep this job that we really don't like, but the boss that we hate. The more you wrestle with these conversations, and even in college, to be talking to college students and business school students about that, the easier it is to make those clear-eyed choices that allow you to have a well-lived life.

1:00:16Yeah, I'm curious about you guys too and thinking about growing your business. Obviously, there's the coaching arm, there's the podcasting arm, other services that you provide. I think I see a lot of people get into entrepreneurship to have more time and autonomy and then basically design themselves into a job where they're working all the time, where they've expanded beyond their breaches. How have you guys thought about sustainability with the art of charm and making sure that you're not scaling faster than you actually want to be scaling just for the sake of going up and to the right. Yeah, I think we're fortunate in our partnership around having check-ins with each other.

1:00:53For a lot of my friends who are entrepreneurs who maybe don't have a business partner or have more control of the business, they're saying yes to everything. And we definitely founded that trap very early on of like, everything sounds exciting and everything sounds valuable and everything is an opportunity. Now being in business almost 18 years, you start to see, well, yeah, there's downsides to all those opportunities that you chase. There's time away from your family. There's time spinning your wheels. There's learning things that you don't necessarily want to learn or care about. So a lot of the back and forth between the two of us is like, is this really what we want to be doing a year from now, three years from now, five years from now?

1:01:28Is this really that important or is it what the customers are demanding, but maybe not what we want to be doing with our time? And I think that's what we've been fortunate in building a business that has allowed us that check-in. I know there are a lot of other friends of mine that are entrepreneurs that don't even have that ability in terms of they're locked into the services they provide. And it's pretty rigid in the line of work that they went into or the industry that they chose of what they have to do to meet the bottom line. So that for me has been a big part of it. And then getting married and starting a family, it's like, okay, well, how do I want to orient work in my life?

1:02:02Whereas before that, entrepreneurship was my life. It was the only thing that really mattered and chasing all those things mattered a lot more. That's been the new way of thinking for me over the last five, seven years. For me, I've learned that for my own sort of value system, time autonomy is like my red Corvette. Certain people work so that they can buy that McMansion or buy that really expensive car. What I am optimizing for in my own career is having as much control over my calendar as possible. And it's different from how I thought about my own career five years ago. I used to think that I wanted to be at the table.

1:02:44I wanted to be in the C-suite. I wanted to be managing a huge team. And that's not what I want anymore. What I want is to be able to have control over my time and be able to have my calendar reflect my values. And so that means I've designed my sort of business of one to be a little bit different from how you might define success if you were just looking at numbers or just looking at external metrics. I have a lot of conversations with my wife around the consequences of those choices. And are you happy with the consequences that that choice will bring? For us, living in a slightly smaller space allows us more time and money for vacation and spending time outside of that space.

1:03:27I know for some of my friends, they want a bigger space with the man cave and all the extra rooms. So they moved to the suburbs and got a bigger house. But all of those choices we make, thankfully, in a position of the economic freedom to do so, they have consequences. Are you willing to make the choices for those consequences? And do you want to make the car payment? Do you want to have to work overtime to pay for the lake house? Or do you want to spend more time with your family? And do you want to spend more time learning Duolingo instead of trying to have to work the extra hours to pay down the car?

1:04:00Well, I love this conversation. And I know we could go on for hours around the good enough job. I'd love in wrapping, you know, what's the one single thing that you took And all of the work that you did in putting this book together, that's changed your perspective moving forward. It comes back to something I said earlier, which is at the end of the day, a job is a transaction. You know, it's an exchange of your time and your effort for a paycheck. And certainly it can be a lot more than that. It can be a source of purpose. It can be a source of community. It can be a source of identity. But being clear-eyed about that economic contract that you're signing, whether you are a podcaster and you work for yourself or you work for a large company is really freeing.

1:04:46It allows you to understand that your job is part of, but not the entirety of who you are. And I'll just echo what I started with, which is that some people do what they love, others do what they have to so they can do what they love when they're not working. And neither is more noble. Thank you so much for joining us. Where can our audience find out more about the book and your writing? You can go to thegoodenoughjob.com. That has all my socials. I run a book club of articles called the Article Book Club that has a few thousand members if you care about long-form journalism. And my second book is about to come out too, which is about uncertainty and how to get better at dealing with what we don't know.

1:05:24So maybe I'll come back in a year and we can talk about that. Would love to. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you very much for being here. Cheers.

1:05:42Thank you for listening to the Art of Charm podcast. And now comes a part of the show where we showcase one of our X-Factor Accelerator members. Take it away, Boris. My name is Boris. I'm a senior software engineer. I was born in Europe and moved to the United States 10 years ago. There was a time when I was lacking sense of community and belonging. I chose the Art of Charm program because I wanted to advance my career and build a personal circle of people with similar values. The program made me view people around me as doors to new opportunities. That person at a conference can refer you to your next job.

1:06:20That stranger at a coffee shop is a gateway to your new hobby. That passenger on a train is your significant other if you make the move. I recommend to take a step and sign up for the Art of Charm program I will see you at the AUC Family Reunion Thank you Boris it was a pleasure and honor working with you two and good luck to you and all of your future endeavors if you've gotten value out of this or any of our podcasts head on over to your favorite podcast player and rate and review this show it would mean the world to us and it helps others find this show and before we head out a huge thank you to our producers Michael Harold and Eric Montgomery Till next week Go out there and make it charming Yeah I remember you You were the bad boy You threw your love away Like it was just a toy And you sold the world You're a song of a tragedy Cause you had your taste I'm black all weeks today Yeah, but I remember you Oh, yeah, I remember you

1:07:43Rinse takes your laundry and hand delivers it to your door, expertly cleaned and folded, so you could take the time once spent folding and sorting and waiting to finally pursue a whole new version of you, like tea time you, or this tea time you or even this tea time you said you hear about Dave or even tea time tea time tea time you so update on Dave it's up to you we'll take the laundry rinse it's time to be great next up is a little song from CarMax about selling a car your way you wanna sell those wheels you wanna get a CarMax instant offer so fast Wanna take a sec to think about it Or like a month?

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