The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work
Simone Stolzoff, 2023
Work promises meaning, friends, and an answer to who you are, taking your best hours in return. Journalist Simone Stolzoff spoke with more than a hundred people, from bankers to librarians, to discover what happens when life is built around work alone. You will learn to put work back in its proper place and decide which job is good enough for you.
Who it is for
For anyone who answers “Who are you?” with a job title. For anyone searching endlessly for a dream job. And for anyone with no energy left for anything after work.
Work will always be work. Some people work at what they love. Others work so they can do what they love outside work. Neither is nobler.
The fisherman who did not need advice
Simone Stolzoff recalls an old parable in his book. An American businessman with an MBA meets a fisherman on the Mexican coast who has returned with his catch before lunch. The businessman advises fishing longer, buying a bigger boat, then an entire fleet, and selling the company for millions in twenty years. The fisherman asks what happens afterward. Then, says the businessman, you can settle in a quiet village, fish in the mornings, and spend evenings with family. In other words, exactly what the fisherman does already.
Stolzoff, a journalist and designer from San Francisco and former IDEO employee, spent a long time seeking his one perfect dream job. To understand why work became the center of so many lives, he spoke with more than a hundred people: chefs, bankers, teachers, engineers. What he saw has a name. Journalist Derek Thompson coined workism: expecting work to provide what religion once offered, meaning, community, and an answer to who you are.
Stolzoff is not urging you to quit work or stop caring about it. He suggests changing expectations and seeing work as part of life rather than all of it. His central idea is simple: you are not what you do.
In this book you will meet a chef whose life’s work was taken away, a banker whose hair began falling out from stress, startup employees who thought their company was a family, and a consultant working fewer than twenty hours a week without regrets. We begin with a seemingly simple question: who are you when you are not at work?
When work becomes your only self
Divya worked as a chef, developing new dishes for a restaurant. Assigned recipes for guests with dietary restrictions, she spent months seeking dairy-free versions of its signature tapioca pudding and leek soufflé. One day, a woman who had not eaten dairy for seven years cried on tasting her dairy-free brie.
An idea grew from this: dairy-free products a home cook could use in almost any recipe. Divya called them Prameer, playing on paneer, the Hindi word for cheese. She built the company with a mentor and gave it her whole self. Then the mentor pushed her out. The blow was heavier than an ordinary dismissal: losing the business meant losing her answer to who she was.
Stolzoff explains why this happens. Psychologist Patricia Linville introduced self-complexity: the number of separate, independent aspects of someone’s life. People with many such aspects became depressed and ill less often after a difficult event. For those with few, the stress of one failure more often spilled into everything else.
Imagine an investor keeping all their money in one stock. While it rises, they feel like a genius, but one fall ruins them completely. Identity works the same way. Stolzoff compares a person’s different sides to plants: they need time and attention or they wither. Psychotherapist Esther Perel says too many people bring their best selves to work and take the leftovers home.
Over time, Divya herself began investing energy in different sides of her life, and Stolzoff presents her as an example of Linville’s point. The first practical step follows: name who you are besides your job title. A friend, neighbor, brother or sister, someone who loves soccer or baking. Then give at least one side time this week. The mistake is doing this only as insurance against losing a job. Different sides of life make people more complete, and according to research the author cites, people with interests outside work even work more productively.
About the author
Simone Stolzoff is an American journalist and designer from San Francisco, and a former design lead at the consultancy IDEO. He writes about work for The Atlantic, The New York Times, and other publications.
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