Ep. 249: The Good Enough Job (w/ Simone Stolzoff)

00:00:00.000 | And this will be our, our look at the issue of life after

00:00:04.680 | school to give to all of our recent graduates or graduates

00:00:07.760 | to be who are out there in the audience.

00:00:10.160 | I'm Kyle Newport, and this is Deep Questions.

00:00:19.520 | The show about living and working deeply in a distracted world.

00:00:28.320 | Here in my Deep Work HQ, joined as always by my producer, Jesse.

00:00:32.600 | Jesse, hear me stumble a little bit on the line because I was getting in my

00:00:37.080 | head about getting rid of in an increasingly distracted world, and I

00:00:41.800 | was getting ahead of that.

00:00:42.640 | Don't forget to do that.

00:00:43.480 | I stumbled over the earlier words.

00:00:45.160 | I noticed.

00:00:46.080 | Yeah.

00:00:46.720 | It's kind of a sectarian battle right now amidst our listeners about the pro

00:00:52.160 | in increasing people and the anti in increasing people, the audience is about

00:00:57.240 | split. I listen to a lot of talk radio, so I'm always listening to the way

00:01:01.760 | they enunciate and stuff.

00:01:02.920 | Yeah.

00:01:03.280 | Yeah.

00:01:03.960 | Well, that was not a masterclass.

00:01:05.440 | The way I just pronounced that, that subhead, but I'll tell you what, you

00:01:08.960 | know what, I just picked up, speaking of unrelated topics, I just picked up my

00:01:15.840 | faculty academic regalia.

00:01:19.080 | Is that a robe?

00:01:21.360 | It's the robe and the weird puffy hat, the medieval dress of the faculty

00:01:28.920 | member with a doctorate in the.

00:01:30.880 | So for graduation?

00:01:32.360 | For graduation.

00:01:33.000 | Cause you have to go to every graduation.

00:01:34.200 | I actually have never been to graduations.

00:01:37.000 | I don't, I don't normally go to graduations, but I have a doctoral student.

00:01:40.080 | Oh, he's got a doctoral student's graduate, just got his PhD or he got it

00:01:43.720 | earlier in the year, but this is the commencement and there's a, there's a

00:01:46.200 | tradition when you get your PhD or your advisor is called hooding and your, your

00:01:49.960 | advisor, it's like, it's passing on the mantle and everyone dresses up in these,

00:01:53.720 | these fancy regalia.

00:01:54.880 | My last student didn't go to that.

00:01:57.000 | Cause of COVID?

00:01:57.680 | No, that was before.

00:01:59.160 | Um, for whatever reason, I guess he had already, he had, you know, I think often

00:02:02.680 | what happens is you, you graduate when you're done, but the ceremonies

00:02:06.320 | happen during graduation week.

00:02:08.560 | So a lot of times the students are, he had already moved on and got a job

00:02:12.040 | and, uh, he moved back to China.

00:02:14.040 | Um, but this, my current student graduated closer to this.

00:02:17.600 | He lives nearby.

00:02:18.200 | So, so we're going to do it.

00:02:19.680 | So I have regalia.

00:02:20.320 | It was, I bring it up because it has always been a tradition in my writing.

00:02:24.720 | And I guess now in my podcasting that when we get to graduation season, I want

00:02:30.760 | to give some sort of commencement address type advice to the new graduates and a

00:02:36.800 | particular advice about entering the job force and thinking about your career.

00:02:42.880 | It was actually, and this is a little insider Cal Newport detail.

00:02:48.520 | It was attending a graduation, one of my sister's graduations, where I wrote a

00:02:53.320 | blog post, it's a long time ago.

00:02:56.560 | And that's where I first introduced the idea of Lifestyle-Centered Career Planning.

00:02:59.760 | That's what first got me thinking about careers and led to my first general

00:03:04.320 | audience book in 2012, which was So Good They Can't Ignore You.

00:03:07.520 | And so it's been this tradition that when graduation season comes, I like to give

00:03:11.320 | advice about what, how to think about work, how to think about life outside of school.

00:03:17.560 | And I'll say, Jesse, sometimes I forget that not everyone has spent their entire

00:03:21.640 | adult life on a college campus like I have.

00:03:24.640 | So to me, these seasons, like a course is graduation season.

00:03:27.280 | It's all that's happening, but for most people, it's not, it's just May or whatever.

00:03:30.880 | So I have to remember that, okay, not everyone has lived their entire

00:03:34.280 | adult life on a college campus, but for us, it's, it's, it's in our bones.

00:03:37.720 | So here's what I was going to do today.

00:03:39.920 | Coincidentally, fortunately, and coincidentally, an author I know, a fellow

00:03:45.800 | author at the same imprint that I published my books at at Penguin, Simone

00:03:50.920 | Stolzoff has a book that just came out.

00:03:52.560 | It came out, I believe it comes out the day this podcast airs or day before the

00:03:57.800 | day after, but right around you're hearing this podcast, this new book is coming out.

00:04:00.720 | The book is called The Good Enough Job Reclaiming Life From Work, which I think

00:04:07.800 | is, is provocative and interesting.

00:04:09.840 | And I read it and I blurbed it and I liked it.

00:04:12.560 | And I said, you know what, Simone, why don't you come on the show?

00:04:16.240 | We'll do our deep dive together.

00:04:19.000 | I can talk to you about your book and your ideas, and this will be our, our look

00:04:24.200 | at the issue of life after school to give to all of our recent graduates or graduates

00:04:28.960 | to be who are out there in the audience.

00:04:31.360 | So I asked him, if he'd come on the show, if he would call in and he said he would.

00:04:34.960 | So I'm looking forward to talking with Simone Stolzoff, author of The Good Enough Job.

00:04:38.960 | All right.

00:04:39.400 | So Jesse, let's see if we can get Simone on the line.

00:04:42.280 | Sounds good.

00:04:43.000 | All right.

00:04:43.560 | Simone, thank you for calling into the show to talk about your new book.

00:04:49.360 | I have to say, when I heard from your editor about this book and, Hey, do

00:04:53.240 | you want to see an early copy?

00:04:54.240 | This is one of those ones where the title is all I needed to say a hundred percent.

00:04:59.280 | Yes.

00:04:59.680 | The Good Enough Job.

00:05:01.720 | I was on board at that point already.

00:05:04.960 | I said, of course, I know, I know we're speaking the same language here.

00:05:09.040 | I'm going to like it.

00:05:10.280 | And I wasn't disappointed.

00:05:11.920 | But thanks for coming on.

00:05:13.680 | You are going to help us help mold young minds.

00:05:16.960 | This is our commencement era, the commencement period episode where we dive

00:05:22.560 | into the element of how does work fit into a fulfilling life?

00:05:27.520 | And I think your book's got a lot of great ideas.

00:05:29.360 | So I wanted to start before we got into the ideas of the book is just briefly your

00:05:34.960 | story.

00:05:35.600 | I'm going to give you the rough bullet points I know.

00:05:38.680 | And then you tell me the reality or you fill in the gaps there, because I think

00:05:43.400 | there's probably a lot captured here.

00:05:45.080 | So from what I understand, you were a design lead at IDEO, the sort of fantastic

00:05:52.040 | design shop.

00:05:53.000 | Then you moved on, I guess, on your own.

00:05:55.880 | So doing design and business consulting and then decided to write this book.

00:06:01.240 | Those are the big level bullet points.

00:06:03.120 | What are the interesting details I'm missing here?

00:06:06.360 | Yeah.

00:06:07.000 | I mean, thankfully for maybe some of our listeners, I graduated college a little

00:06:11.040 | bit more recently than you did.

00:06:12.400 | But I spent my 20s really playing Goldilocks with careers.

00:06:15.960 | So I graduated.

00:06:17.560 | I was studying poetry and economics.

00:06:19.760 | So you could already see this sort of tension between art and commerce in my

00:06:23.240 | life and moved back to my hometown of San Francisco.

00:06:26.160 | And I worked in advertising for a few years and then I worked in tech for a few

00:06:30.520 | years.

00:06:31.160 | And then I started working in journalism.

00:06:33.760 | And really the impetus for the book was this moment where I was reached out to by

00:06:39.560 | a recruiter at this design consultancy called IDEO.

00:06:42.760 | And it really sent me for an existential loop.

00:06:45.960 | It felt like I was choosing not just between two jobs, but between two versions

00:06:50.440 | of me.

00:06:50.800 | You know, one path being the journalist and the other path being the designer.

00:06:54.960 | And maybe for some of our recent grads that are listening to this episode, they've

00:06:59.360 | been at a similar kind of career crossroads.

00:07:01.960 | And so I couldn't make up my mind for the life of me.

00:07:04.640 | On one hand, it's like, oh, the agony of deciding between two attractive job paths.

00:07:09.200 | But on the other hand, you know, how we spend those hours matters as a polymath

00:07:14.440 | like you very much knows.

00:07:15.960 | And so the question of the book was sort of how did work become so central to our

00:07:21.000 | identities, to our sense of self-worth and what to make of it?

00:07:24.680 | And that's what I'm excited to chat with you about today.

00:07:28.320 | Right. So even the fact that that was a fraught crossroads is itself telling, you're

00:07:33.760 | saying. The fact that it felt so important in the moment as if you were making

00:07:38.160 | decision about the definition of yourself as a person or the core of your lifestyle

00:07:44.520 | was about to be determined by do you follow more of the journalistic path or go to

00:07:49.360 | go to IDEO. So then how did you end up freeing from that mindset or getting that

00:07:55.480 | distance to say, wait a second, I think there's something that's malformed in the way

00:07:58.600 | our culture deals with this?

00:07:59.960 | Yeah, I mean, I think it was out of necessity.

00:08:03.240 | You know, I was I was suffering, thinking that I had made the wrong choice.

00:08:07.280 | And, you know, short story is that I ended up leaving journalism and the trendy magazine

00:08:11.720 | that I was writing for to join IDEO.

00:08:13.560 | And it felt like I had turned off part of who I was and I had made this

00:08:18.800 | irreconcilable mistake and that the journalism industry would never have me back.

00:08:23.920 | And, you know, spoiler alert, leaving the newsroom was actually the best thing that

00:08:28.600 | happened to my writing career.

00:08:29.840 | But obviously I couldn't have foreseen that.

00:08:32.440 | But I think, you know, what ultimately helped was just having a healthy level of

00:08:36.520 | detachment, a level of of distance from rising and falling with my professional

00:08:41.640 | accomplishments. And I think it's particularly true here in the U.S.

00:08:46.200 | where what you do is often the first question we ask each other when we meet, where

00:08:51.360 | our productivity and our self-worth are so tightly bound.

00:08:54.720 | I think what I was missing was perspective to understand that work is part of who I

00:09:00.320 | am. That's one source of meaning in my life, but it is not the entirety of who I was.

00:09:05.040 | And that realization was ultimately what helped me develop a healthier relationship to

00:09:09.400 | work moving forward.

00:09:10.160 | Now, that happened after you left IDEO or at some point while you were there.

00:09:14.160 | When did that come?

00:09:15.240 | I think while I was there, you know, in the first few months I was insufferable.

00:09:20.680 | You know, I was thinking, oh, I've made this awful mistake.

00:09:23.760 | Is the journalism industry ever going to let me back in?

00:09:26.680 | Will all of my former colleagues think I sold out?

00:09:29.320 | You know, and I think one insight from a career's perspective is that the decisions we

00:09:33.560 | make in our careers are much more reversible than we might think.

00:09:37.720 | You know, you think you go on one path and there's never going to be an opportunity for

00:09:42.000 | you to do what you once did again.

00:09:44.600 | And that's simply not true.

00:09:45.960 | You know, some of the most interesting people and professionals that I know have had

00:09:50.720 | more of meandering paths, you know, look at you like you have always maintained a few

00:09:55.640 | different professional identities.

00:09:57.200 | And for me, I've learned that switching between these different modes of working has

00:10:01.520 | actually helped me, you know, scratch all these different itches of my interests and also

00:10:06.240 | conceive of a job as what it is, you know, a job and not the entirety of who I am.

00:10:11.080 | Right. This is an interesting opportunity right now.

00:10:14.720 | Here is why X, Y and Z.

00:10:16.440 | Let's do this for a while.

00:10:18.240 | Like this will fit in well with this other image of the city it's in.

00:10:21.400 | I want to live there. There's some interesting people.

00:10:23.360 | The income maybe is going to open up some other options.

00:10:25.600 | And and then a few years from now, if you need to reconsider that, you can reconsider

00:10:29.440 | it. I mean, yeah, I would say it sounds like a European perspective, which I mean,

00:10:33.800 | mainly as a diss against America, because we have we do have I have very international,

00:10:39.840 | a very international audience and it is very regional specific how people think about

00:10:46.960 | how people think about careers.

00:10:50.280 | I joke the German version of my career book, So Good They Can't Ignore You.

00:10:53.760 | I love the German version because it's it's a newspaper with a fake headline and it's the

00:10:58.320 | the dream job lie.

00:11:00.000 | But in like really stark German, it's great.

00:11:03.040 | It's all one word.

00:11:03.880 | Yeah, it's all one word. They have a word.

00:11:05.680 | Funnily enough, yeah, it's a job for how I am.

00:11:10.040 | That definitely has played a part.

00:11:12.400 | You know, I am multicultural.

00:11:14.600 | My mom's side of the family is Italian.

00:11:16.640 | You know, my name is Simone Luca.

00:11:18.360 | And I think there's just a different conception of workplace in our life.

00:11:22.560 | I've loved one thing that you've talked about in the past, which is the difference between

00:11:26.680 | treating work as sort of the central axis around which the rest of your life orbits and

00:11:31.760 | starting with your vision of a life well lived and thinking about how your work or your

00:11:36.960 | career can support that vision.

00:11:39.440 | You know, I think in the United States we often miss the forest for the trees.

00:11:43.280 | We often think that, you know, what you do for work is the most consequential decision

00:11:48.040 | you make. And then the rule is that you have to shove your life into the margins.

00:11:52.680 | But I think, you know, in the town that my mom grew up in, for example, in Puglia in

00:11:57.440 | southern Italy, you know, it's a very different conception.

00:12:00.440 | All my cousins, you know, they don't leave town for college.

00:12:05.680 | They tend to work in the industry that their parents worked in.

00:12:09.160 | And work is more of a means to an end than an end in and of itself.

00:12:13.240 | And not to say that any particular path is better or worse than the other.

00:12:16.880 | But I do think that Americans could learn a thing or two about less work centric

00:12:22.280 | cultures. Right.

00:12:23.720 | And that's why you're in a good position to think about that, not just your personal

00:12:27.320 | experience, but you have your family experience.

00:12:30.240 | So in pulling out this thread a little bit more about what led to the book.

00:12:34.360 | So what was the I guess you went back and started writing more.

00:12:38.800 | Do I have this right? So you returned to journalism to some degree, writing for a lot of

00:12:43.960 | interesting, a lot of interesting pieces for a lot of top publications.

00:12:46.720 | Talk about that transition back towards introducing more writing and then how that

00:12:51.320 | eventually led to the idea maybe I should actually write a book.

00:12:55.560 | Yeah. So it started as a desire to keep my writing muscles from atrophying.

00:13:01.880 | You know, maybe this is relatable in periods of your life when you're doing more

00:13:05.240 | research or more teaching.

00:13:06.920 | You know, writing is a skill and you need to practice it in order to keep it up.

00:13:11.520 | And so I was working this design job and was looking for a way to have some

00:13:17.040 | commitment to continue to have to write.

00:13:19.720 | And so I was a freelancer for places like the Atlantic and Wired.

00:13:23.960 | And I was really writing about work culture from a broad sense.

00:13:28.640 | And a colleague of mine, Derek Thompson, coined this term "workism," which I loved so

00:13:33.800 | much. It's the idea that a lot of Americans and particularly college educated

00:13:38.080 | Americans are treating work akin to a religious identity.

00:13:42.680 | So instead of looking to work just for a paycheck, they're also looking to work for

00:13:46.520 | community and purpose and transcendence.

00:13:49.960 | And, you know, Derek argues that this is a burden that our jobs are just not designed

00:13:54.640 | to bear. And that resonated with me so deeply from both the personal standpoint, but

00:13:59.480 | also from what I was observing in the labor market.

00:14:02.800 | You know, in our country, we treat CEOs like celebrities and we plaster "always do

00:14:08.120 | what you love" on the walls of our co-working spaces.

00:14:11.200 | And, you know, I think there's a few risks to this.

00:14:13.800 | For one, as many people have found out in the past few years, your job might not

00:14:17.960 | always be there. You know, if your job is your identity and you lose your job, what's

00:14:22.800 | left? And then the second is, you know, just the expectations that places on our job.

00:14:28.000 | I like thinking about happiness as sort of the difference between our expectations and

00:14:32.600 | our reality. And if we have these sky high expectations of what a job can deliver, it

00:14:37.280 | just leaves a lot of room for disappointment.

00:14:40.600 | And the third is, you know, what I get into towards the end of the book is that by

00:14:45.560 | centering work, we can neglect other aspects of who we are.

00:14:50.360 | You know, we are not just workers.

00:14:52.120 | Our purpose on this planet is not just to produce economic returns for corporations.

00:14:57.360 | We are also neighbors and parents and siblings and friends and citizens.

00:15:03.040 | And on the other side of sort of prioritizing work is the ability to prioritize other

00:15:09.400 | aspects of life, other aspects of who we are, other things that can bring meaning to our

00:15:13.880 | lives.

00:15:14.640 | Yeah. Well, where do you think and when thinking about it, we can use the workism term

00:15:19.560 | when you're thinking about that pervasive influence.

00:15:23.600 | There's no doubt that it is beneficial to employers.

00:15:27.840 | So if your employees really subscribe to work as their sense of transcendent meaning,

00:15:33.160 | then, well, I mean, of course I'm going to stay late because this is what my life is

00:15:38.480 | about. But what's your thought?

00:15:40.560 | What's your take on where this originates from?

00:15:43.600 | Because it often seems to me that it's advantageous to employers, but there's a more

00:15:48.320 | complicated cultural story here, maybe even a more haphazard cultural story than there

00:15:53.560 | was, you know, a conference room where a bunch of mustache twirlers got together and

00:15:57.680 | said, let us invent this culture and then we'll get longer hours.

00:15:59.840 | It seems there's probably it's a complicated story.

00:16:02.520 | So what you did all this deep reporting.

00:16:04.600 | We're going to get more into the guts of the book here in a second, but I just want to

00:16:07.400 | preview that it really goes its deep profile style.

00:16:11.120 | So it actually spends time with different characters and their interactions with their

00:16:16.720 | job and their disappointments.

00:16:18.040 | And so you've really been been sort of deep into the cultural matrix here.

00:16:21.520 | So what's your what's your take when you're trying to detangle where American workism

00:16:27.040 | what its actual roots are?

00:16:28.960 | What are the different forces that contribute to it?

00:16:30.840 | Yeah, I mean, there's a few ways in, you know, there are historical factors, cultural,

00:16:35.640 | economic, political. You know, one is just the foundation of our country.

00:16:40.280 | If you think back to the early days, the Protestant work ethic and capitalism were really

00:16:46.160 | the two strands that entwined to form our country's DNA.

00:16:50.960 | But, you know, this trend of workism and or you might want to call it the culture of

00:16:56.800 | overwork in America is really pronounced in the past 40 or 50 years.

00:17:03.000 | So that begs the question, you know, what happened?

00:17:05.080 | What has changed in the past 40 or 50 years?

00:17:07.000 | In the 1970s, the average American and the average German worked almost the exact same

00:17:12.400 | number of hours each year.

00:17:13.680 | And now the average American works about 30 percent more.

00:17:17.040 | So how do we get here?

00:17:18.680 | You know, I think the argument that I focus on in the book is the sort of subjective value

00:17:24.520 | that Americans give to work.

00:17:26.400 | So with the decline of other sources of meaning and community, like organized religion,

00:17:32.880 | like different sorts of neighborhood groups, the desire for purpose and belonging and

00:17:39.920 | meaning remains.

00:17:41.160 | And many Americans have just transposed that to the workplace where they spend the

00:17:46.560 | majority of our time.

00:17:47.840 | I mean, you can look at other factors like the fact that we tie health care to employment

00:17:53.480 | in this country. You know, like one of the reasons why our relationship to work is so

00:17:58.360 | fraught here is because the consequences of losing work are so dire.

00:18:03.520 | You know, I'm thinking about, you know, former colleagues of mine who were on visas

00:18:08.200 | where their ability to even live in this country was contingent on them maintaining a

00:18:12.920 | W-2 job.

00:18:14.200 | But, you know, there's lots of different factors that play into it.

00:18:18.720 | And I think as you've so eloquently documented in the past, we're sort of seeing the

00:18:24.280 | pushback to the work centricity movement of the early aughts and, you know, girl bossing

00:18:30.800 | and hustle culture.

00:18:31.880 | And now everyone, for better or for worse, is renegotiating their relationship to work

00:18:37.280 | coming out of the pandemic, which is why I'm so excited to be chatting with you, who has

00:18:42.080 | also thought so deeply about these things.

00:18:44.040 | Do you think the pandemic, as part of what's going on here, is that remote work done from

00:18:49.800 | your apartment, for example, transforms the activity into an abstraction and almost

00:18:56.880 | something like an absurdity?

00:18:57.640 | Like, once it's actually reduced, you're sitting at home and maybe like your partner's

00:19:02.240 | there and you can hear what they're doing and it's just on email.

00:19:05.320 | And it's something about removing yourself from the physical location of work, emphasize

00:19:11.000 | the sort of absurdist or somewhat abstract nature of a lot of white collar work in

00:19:15.320 | particular, and that there's some sort of then theological, like a crisis of faith of

00:19:20.920 | wait a second.

00:19:21.520 | This is what I'm pinning my self-worth on.

00:19:25.840 | I mean, I know the pandemic was an accelerant.

00:19:28.200 | This is where we got the great resignation.

00:19:30.600 | I think Derek has written well about really trying to pick apart what's really happening

00:19:34.480 | there. But there's trends in there that are useful.

00:19:36.280 | Quiet quitting then came along.

00:19:37.960 | All this is pandemic induced cultural change.

00:19:40.280 | So we know the pandemic had an issue.

00:19:42.200 | I'm interested in that idea that the inherent absurdities of digital knowledge work became

00:19:48.240 | hard to miss. And that was, you know, that was the Wizard of Oz curtain got separated a

00:19:53.360 | little bit. Wait a second.

00:19:54.280 | It's the mayor moving, moving, you know, whatever.

00:19:57.520 | Like there was a bit of a broken, the illusion was broken.

00:20:00.320 | I don't know. What do you think about the pandemic?

00:20:02.440 | What about the pandemic helped magnify this long festering, sort of 20 year long festering

00:20:07.760 | unease that was growing?

00:20:09.440 | Yeah, I think, you know, what you just said reminds me of Marx and sort of the alienation

00:20:14.960 | or the atomization of work, you know, back when work moved from a craft based economy

00:20:20.320 | where people were either farming or making things with their hands into an industrial

00:20:25.440 | economy where people were making things in factories.

00:20:28.360 | One of Marx's biggest fears was that we would become divorced from what we're actually

00:20:33.920 | creating. You know, if you're just on an assembly line, adding one part to a widget, it's

00:20:39.120 | very different from, you know, getting in touch with the natural ebb and flow of the

00:20:44.160 | seasons and making something for someone who you know will be using it.

00:20:48.280 | I think that's to a certain extent what's happened in the pandemic, too.

00:20:51.760 | It's revealed some of the, you know, quote unquote bullshit jobs that a lot of us do.

00:20:58.280 | You know, I'm reminded of this one woman, Aubrey, who I talked to in the middle of the

00:21:02.160 | pandemic, who had just quit her job.

00:21:03.640 | And she said, you know, the pandemic for me was an existential slap in the face.

00:21:08.720 | It made me question, you know, is my worth in this world really my ability to, you know,

00:21:15.960 | contribute to my sales goal number for some tech company that I don't care about?

00:21:20.360 | And so I think that's one side of it is just the kind of the absurdity that a lot of

00:21:25.280 | people felt when you remove all the other elements of work, like the social side of it

00:21:31.800 | or the ability to interact with people on a day to day basis.

00:21:35.720 | A lot of people found themselves for better, for worse, pushing numbers around

00:21:39.520 | spreadsheets. I think the second is just the ability to face our own mortality.

00:21:45.400 | And, you know, people were looking in the news and death was all around us and people

00:21:52.240 | were questioning, wow, is this is this how I'm going to spend my time?

00:21:57.000 | And the third is people were able to see a different way.

00:22:00.240 | You know, people who hadn't been able to spend quality time with their children during

00:22:05.280 | the middle of the day were able to see what a more sort of balanced life between work

00:22:10.840 | and home is that to the extent that, you know, commuting two hours each day bordered on

00:22:15.480 | the absurd. And now we're, you know, we're picking up the pieces and people are trying

00:22:19.640 | to make sense of where we are now with, you know, remote work or hybrid work.

00:22:23.680 | I think the one thing that we can say is true across the board is everyone's work

00:22:29.120 | changed a certain degree.

00:22:30.400 | You know, at the extremes, people were laid off or furloughed and forced to figure out

00:22:34.680 | who they were without their job.

00:22:36.640 | But even people who are able to maintain their work, I'm sure lots of the listeners to

00:22:42.160 | your podcast and sort of these knowledge economy jobs, work isn't the same today as it

00:22:48.400 | was in twenty nineteen.

00:22:50.480 | And people are rightfully so questioning what role they want work to have in their lives

00:22:55.840 | moving forward. You know, one of the things I like you did with your book, because it

00:23:00.000 | gets a nice complimentary point to what we just discussed.

00:23:03.000 | So right now we're talking about how the pandemic, among other things, maybe point out

00:23:06.200 | some of the absurdities of some of these spreadsheet and email jobs.

00:23:10.280 | I like how in your book you also talked and spent time with people who represented the,

00:23:15.600 | I guess, traditional response to that, which is what I need is if the if the content of

00:23:20.840 | my work is radically different or engaging enough, then the work can be meaning.

00:23:25.480 | I'm thinking in particular about the chef you spent time with because that's that's the

00:23:28.760 | classic counterpoint.

00:23:30.040 | OK, yes, I'm on email that you write.

00:23:31.600 | This job is terrible.

00:23:32.840 | I'm going to throw away my tie and become a chef or, you know, whatever the the visions

00:23:38.440 | or professional full time novelist or something like this.

00:23:41.200 | And that's often a storyline.

00:23:42.520 | So if we radically change our work, it will radically change these issues.

00:23:47.720 | We have these holes we have in our life.

00:23:49.800 | And this is what I think was I enjoyed about you cataloging the again, the existential

00:23:54.960 | issues with a quote unquote dream style job.

00:23:58.280 | A Michelin starred chef is like it's also a it's a hard job and has and you end up with

00:24:03.600 | the same sort of questions and its content of your work cannot save you from trying to

00:24:09.440 | figure out a full life that includes work and is not dominated by it.

00:24:12.400 | Yeah. You know, wherever you go, there you are.

00:24:15.120 | And I think that's particularly true in the work world.

00:24:18.560 | And and I think some of these jobs that are, quote unquote, greater or dream jobs have

00:24:25.160 | some of the greatest problems in them because there is this sort of perceived halo effect

00:24:30.840 | of the privilege of being able to do the work itself that keeps people from advocating for

00:24:37.720 | what they need or or knowing their own worth.

00:24:40.640 | There's this concept in the book that I talk about called vocational awe, and it was

00:24:45.000 | coined by this librarian.

00:24:47.160 | But I think it's very applicable to teachers and health care workers and people in the

00:24:51.960 | nonprofit sector, anyone whose job has a sort of social mission.

00:24:55.960 | And this woman, Fobazi Itar, coined it.

00:24:59.240 | She was a school librarian.

00:25:01.120 | And basically the term refers to the perceived righteousness that some of these different

00:25:06.520 | fields have, you know, even fields like ours, like being able to write or being in

00:25:10.600 | academia. There's this sort of idea that, OK, these these fields are doing God's work

00:25:17.400 | and therefore they are beyond critique.

00:25:19.800 | But, you know, as a colleague of ours and Helen Peterson says, often all that passion

00:25:24.640 | for your work will get you is the ability to get paid very little.

00:25:28.680 | You know, people can use the sort of good brand of some of these jobs to obscure a lot

00:25:35.200 | of the exploitation and malpractice that exists within these factories.

00:25:39.240 | You know, we saw in the education world in the same breath, people were told you're

00:25:45.000 | doing God's work and make do with what you have.

00:25:48.120 | You know, there's sort of like speaking out of two sides of our mouth when we talk

00:25:51.840 | specifically about dream jobs or jobs that others might seem might think are cool or

00:25:58.240 | might think are prestigious.

00:25:59.640 | They can they cannot always be as shiny as their veneer.

00:26:04.760 | Yeah, I love that term, by the way.

00:26:06.800 | Vocational awe, because I think you're right, especially among highly educated

00:26:11.080 | knowledge workers. That is a that's a common trap.

00:26:15.440 | And then you have the flip side, which is, for example, you know, Mike Mike Rose, semi

00:26:20.480 | famous Ted talk about he's pushing back against the notion of passion and vocational

00:26:26.000 | awe. And he's talking about his time on the Discovery Discovery Channel that did the

00:26:30.400 | show Dirty Jobs that was called.

00:26:32.240 | And he went on and talked about a lot of people in these maybe it was a septic tank

00:26:37.760 | cleaner, for example.

00:26:38.920 | And you would say, well, the content of that job is, you know, well, in this case,

00:26:43.000 | literally crap. Right.

00:26:44.200 | So you're like, how could that possibly be a job that you're going to be happy in?

00:26:47.720 | And but he would say, but this person was way happier than someone that maybe had a

00:26:51.640 | job that had traditional awe, but they had well, it was well paid.

00:26:55.000 | But also it was there was autonomy.

00:26:57.760 | It was their own business.

00:26:58.800 | They you know, they they could grow it as they wanted.

00:27:01.160 | They could control their own hours.

00:27:02.680 | They had a nice house at the lake because it's you know, it's actually highly skilled

00:27:05.840 | work and and in demand.

00:27:07.480 | And and because there is no there's no vocational awe in septic tank cleaning.

00:27:13.000 | So it's like completely expected.

00:27:14.320 | Right. You say, I'm going to sort of craft how I want this business to run.

00:27:17.120 | And no, I'm not going to do things on Sundays and whatever.

00:27:19.400 | So I think it's a cool I think it's a good way of getting at a trap that certainly

00:27:24.720 | professors have this.

00:27:25.680 | So, yeah, totally.

00:27:27.280 | I mean, there's a study there's a study that I write about in the book that is pretty

00:27:31.480 | famous. And it's about this idea of job crafting.

00:27:34.280 | And, you know, these two researchers study how people make meaning in different lines

00:27:39.200 | of work. And so they went to a place that you wouldn't think of as particularly

00:27:42.960 | meaningful. They were interviewing custodial workers at a hospital.

00:27:47.400 | And what they found is that among these workers, people who had the exact same job

00:27:52.360 | description and daily duties, there was a huge variation in how meaningful or

00:27:57.480 | fulfilled people felt from their jobs.

00:27:59.440 | And what they found was, you know, the workers roughly broke into two groups.

00:28:03.720 | There was the first group who did not feel like their job was particularly high

00:28:08.400 | skill. They sort of went through the motions, didn't really interact with many

00:28:12.920 | people that they worked with, and ultimately didn't really like their jobs very

00:28:16.840 | much. And then there's a second group who, you know, thought their job was pretty

00:28:21.680 | high skill. They interacted with the patients and their colleagues.

00:28:25.080 | But the most important part was workers in the second group attached their job to a

00:28:30.920 | greater mission.

00:28:32.840 | They saw themselves as part of this system, that job was to heal the sick.

00:28:38.520 | And by associating their work with this like larger social mission, they were able

00:28:44.960 | to, you know, get by in the more menial and routine things that exist in any line

00:28:50.640 | of work. And in some ways, this is sort of a counterpoint to the argument that we

00:28:54.520 | were just making, because we do individually have the ability to craft our

00:28:59.600 | jobs to create the meaning that we want to get to a certain extent.

00:29:04.200 | But the risk is that when work becomes your sole source of meaning or your sole

00:29:10.880 | identity, it becomes a very narrow platform to balance on.

00:29:15.080 | And as we saw in the pandemic, people were very susceptible to be being blown away

00:29:20.480 | by, you know, say, a strong gust of wind.

00:29:22.960 | Yep. Well, what is, let's get prescriptive.

00:29:27.960 | All right. So if we sort of accept this notion of what we should avoid, the

00:29:33.280 | centering of work as the main source of meaning in life, practically speaking, then

00:29:37.840 | how should we think about approaching the choice of job and then what we do once we

00:29:42.960 | have a particular job?

00:29:44.040 | Yeah, you know, the main thing that I advocate for in the book is to diversify your

00:29:49.520 | identity. So much as an investor benefits from diversifying the sources of stocks in

00:29:55.000 | their portfolio, we too benefit from diversifying the sources of meaning and

00:30:01.280 | identity in our lives.

00:30:02.800 | And this is borne out in the research.

00:30:04.360 | You know, research shows that people with greater what they call self-complexity,

00:30:08.560 | which just means sort of cultivated other sides of who they are, are more resilient

00:30:13.480 | in the face of change, which makes a lot of sense.

00:30:15.840 | You know, if your boss says something disparaging and your work is your only source

00:30:20.280 | of self-worth, it can spill over to all the other facets of your life.

00:30:23.840 | And people with more interests and hobbies and passions tend to be more creative

00:30:29.400 | problem solvers. And especially in the knowledge economy, where there isn't always a

00:30:33.880 | direct relationship between how many hours you put in and the quality of the output,

00:30:38.400 | that's really important to be able to have space in your day so that ideas can bounce

00:30:45.160 | off of each other so that you can synthesize all of the inputs that you're taking in.

00:30:48.520 | And I know you talk about this a lot with timeboxing and thinking about ways that you

00:30:52.720 | can have some unstructured time in your day for your body to marinate all the things

00:30:59.080 | that are coming in. And so then the question is, how do you diversify your identity?

00:31:03.880 | And I think there's really just two steps and it's pretty straightforward, might seem

00:31:09.280 | simplistic, but I've been surprised by how few people actually put this into practice.

00:31:14.520 | The first is just to carve out space where you're not working.

00:31:19.280 | Right now, I think so many knowledge workers in particular exist in the sort of

00:31:23.040 | perpetual state of half work where they're swiping down at email to see, swiping down at

00:31:28.920 | dinner to see if new emails have come in.

00:31:31.440 | And they're kind of like sharks sleeping with one eye open.

00:31:34.480 | But one of the problems with this work centric point of view is that at the end of the

00:31:41.720 | workday, you don't have time or energy to do much else.

00:31:46.400 | Esther Perel, the psychologist, has this great phrase where she says, too many people

00:31:50.360 | bring the best of themselves to work and then bring the leftovers home.

00:31:54.560 | And that's always resonated with me.

00:31:56.600 | And the second part is, you know, it might sound straightforward, but if you want to

00:32:02.360 | have other sources of meaning in your life beyond work, you have to do things other than

00:32:08.040 | work, not turn on Netflix or turn off your brain at the end of the day, but try and find

00:32:13.320 | ways that you can actively invest in your relationships, invest in your community,

00:32:17.520 | invest in your interests and hobbies.

00:32:19.680 | You know, there's a direct relationship between the time and energy that we give to

00:32:23.600 | things and the meaning that we're able to get from them.

00:32:26.120 | And, you know, identities are sort of like plants.

00:32:29.240 | You know, they need time and energy to grow.

00:32:31.440 | And right now, too many people are giving not only their best hours, but their best

00:32:35.840 | energy just to one thing in their life, which is their jobs.

00:32:40.040 | So then how do we grapple with productivity in this context?

00:32:45.320 | By which I mean, there's this tension that is coming through in a lot of the writing

00:32:50.120 | about these issues right now, that to to make the space to do other things, to have the

00:32:55.840 | confidence to shut down your work and not feel that you need to check the email, that

00:33:00.240 | you're still delivering, that you're not scrambling late at night because, oh, God,

00:33:05.240 | this thing is due and I forgot about it.

00:33:07.280 | You need to really have your life, professionally speaking, organized.

00:33:11.800 | Right. And this is where we would traditionally use the term like productivity

00:33:14.520 | systems. You know, you're you have capture and control and you're time blocking or

00:33:18.720 | something like this. And then there's the other valence of productivity, which is more

00:33:22.320 | of the economic metric that the maximizing of production, they're trying to produce

00:33:26.520 | more. So let's talk about that.

00:33:28.880 | How do we do?

00:33:30.400 | Am I right in saying we do really need to care about the mechanics of work in order to

00:33:34.760 | attain work? And if that's true, how do we care about the mechanics of work without

00:33:40.160 | falling into the trap of, well, now that I can control these mechanics, why don't I

00:33:44.240 | produce more Model T's?

00:33:45.720 | How do we deal with productivity in this?

00:33:48.040 | And when we think about this framework?

00:33:49.360 | Yeah. So there's sort of like the individual or the micro scale.

00:33:53.480 | And then there's the macro scale.

00:33:54.920 | You know, I think a lot of the data coming out of some of these four day workweek trials

00:33:59.800 | is showing that productivity and hours put in are not always directly related.

00:34:05.120 | You know, in some lines of work, yes.

00:34:07.000 | And in many ways, this is a holdover from the industrial age where the more hours you

00:34:12.080 | spend on the assembly line, the more Model T's get produced.

00:34:15.560 | But in a knowledge economy, when the output is more often an idea or a piece of

00:34:23.240 | writing or a headline for a marketing campaign, not all hours are created equal.

00:34:30.320 | And we still live in a world that tries to impose a lot of these industrial era

00:34:36.680 | schedules onto our knowledge economy lives.

00:34:39.880 | So this is something that you and others have written about a lot.

00:34:44.280 | One of the benefits on the individual and the personal scale of being organized and

00:34:50.080 | planning out when you're going to do what is that it can create firmer boundaries

00:34:55.320 | around when you're not going to do the thing that is hanging over your head.

00:34:59.160 | You know, I've always found that the best productivity hack is presence.

00:35:04.240 | It's just your ability to unitask and do one thing at a time.

00:35:08.960 | And, you know, yes, there are apps and ways to design your environment that might

00:35:14.120 | optimize for presence.

00:35:15.680 | But when you boil it down at the end of the day, the best way to be productive is

00:35:21.320 | to, as you would say, do deep work is to rid yourself of some of those distractions

00:35:26.200 | and be more attuned to when you have the energy to do certain types of work

00:35:31.400 | throughout the day.

00:35:32.120 | And I think that's one of the great pieces of potential of our current, you know,

00:35:36.120 | remote world or hybrid world is people have a lot more autonomy and agency to work on

00:35:43.000 | tasks at times that best suit their energy levels.

00:35:46.200 | And so whereas, you know, work might on one moment on one task when you're feeling

00:35:51.960 | super low energy, expand like a gas and just take up however much space you a lot

00:35:57.080 | for it in a more intentional or, you know, autonomous world.

00:36:01.520 | Maybe if you're not being very productive on what you're doing, you can put it to

00:36:07.000 | the side and, you know, go for a walk or do something more routine and mundane that

00:36:13.040 | doesn't require you to think hard or think critically about what you're doing.

00:36:16.720 | Right.

00:36:17.080 | And then schedule or slot that work in that requires you to really think deeply into a

00:36:23.000 | time in your day when you are feeling like you're firing on all cylinders.

00:36:27.000 | Well, now I'm theorizing on the fly.

00:36:28.920 | So here's my new theory based on exactly what I just heard you say that helps

00:36:33.960 | explain, you know, I have an uneasy relationship with the the anti productivity

00:36:39.960 | world out there.

00:36:41.880 | And, you know, I put and whose work I really respect is definitely, you know, in that

00:36:45.800 | world. And sometimes we don't feel like we're talking about different things.

00:36:50.760 | We're talking about productivity organization.

00:36:52.480 | But here's my theory that reconciles all of that.

00:36:54.400 | If you take and you're going to tell me if I'm crazy or not, if you take productivity

00:36:59.560 | techniques and I'm talking organizational techniques and you throw it into a life that

00:37:05.080 | has the work as my sense of transcendent meaning in that context, it's almost impossible

00:37:10.400 | to prevent those tools from doing anything but actually just increasing effort.

00:37:14.240 | Because if work is my defining meaning and what I do, if I'm given the tools that

00:37:20.720 | actually allows me to produce more with more time, I am going to produce more.

00:37:24.720 | And because that's the context most people are in, there is a fair critique from the

00:37:28.600 | anti productivity movement of I don't even want to talk about to do list or organizational

00:37:34.200 | tools or I want to castigate that as it's all it's all productivity bros talking about

00:37:38.240 | it because they're rightly pointing out in the professional context I see around me

00:37:42.160 | that the tools is throwing dynamite onto the shaky train car.

00:37:46.400 | Whereas if someone has adopted your framework already, though, and is saying, OK, I

00:37:50.840 | have a diverse identity work as part of it.

00:37:53.640 | But are these other things that are important to me?

00:37:56.400 | You throw productivity tools in that context.

00:37:58.640 | They say, oh, great.

00:37:59.600 | This is what's going to allow me to get this done by three so I can get my bike rides in

00:38:04.440 | before the sun goes down.

00:38:05.520 | It's so it's maybe it's the context dependent.

00:38:09.320 | Valence of productivity is the key, this is I'm making up terms on the flags, it's what I

00:38:14.640 | do is the key to explaining how sort of the anti productivity crowd is touching on

00:38:19.280 | something absolutely right, but at the same time, also these types of thinking could be

00:38:23.960 | absolutely critical to a better way of work and all of it's true at the same time.

00:38:26.960 | It's not actually a contradiction.

00:38:28.120 | It's all contextual.

00:38:28.920 | I totally agree.

00:38:30.880 | You know, it depends on what your North Star is.

00:38:33.560 | You know, if work is the lens through which you're viewing your life, then everything can

00:38:39.800 | become grist for the mill.

00:38:41.200 | You know, all your inputs are in service of your ability to create commercial output.

00:38:47.080 | But if you take a more zoomed out picture and think about work as part of what you do,

00:38:54.040 | it's similar to budgeting with money.

00:38:56.560 | You know, the goal of budgeting isn't to be pinching pennies and contemplating every

00:39:01.760 | single purchase you make.

00:39:02.720 | It's actually to free yourself from having to negotiate every single decision anew.

00:39:08.240 | And I think the good side of productivity is just that is understanding what is the ways

00:39:14.240 | in which you're going to schedule and budget your time so that you can feel free when

00:39:18.960 | you're off the clock to actually be off the clock and then know when you're on the clock

00:39:23.440 | what you're going to be doing with that time as well.

00:39:25.360 | And then when thinking about this framework, the other thing that comes up is this idea

00:39:29.360 | of I've written about before, like in So Good They Can't Ignore You, that often in a job,

00:39:34.720 | instrumentally speaking, skill is your best leverage.

00:39:38.120 | So the better you are at something that's valuable, the more potential control you have

00:39:42.680 | over what your job is like.

00:39:44.000 | If you're recognized that and willing to actually deploy it.

00:39:48.040 | So now there's kind of a balancing act here, right?

00:39:52.000 | We want to find a we want to find a path between quiet quitting on one side and all in

00:39:57.880 | overload on the other side, a path in which you are deliberately building up skill because

00:40:02.760 | it's going to give you more and more options to craft work to fit with other identities.

00:40:07.200 | But that that's a kind of an ambitious pursuit.

00:40:11.160 | And you don't want that to fall into into overwork.

00:40:14.240 | So how do we how do we navigate?

00:40:16.080 | You know, I don't want to just give up because that's not going to end up well.

00:40:20.240 | But I don't want the ambition of I'm going to get better at this new thing because it's

00:40:25.040 | going to give me two years from now the ability to now I'm going to be fully remote and

00:40:28.000 | can dictate my terms. How to not allow that to push you into back to overload.

00:40:33.920 | I'm back to like, let's just this is let's keep going.

00:40:36.000 | Yeah. I mean, that's the million dollar question, right?

00:40:38.760 | How do you pursue meaningful work without letting your work subsume who you are?

00:40:43.480 | And if I might, I'll offer a term, which is the good enough job.

00:40:48.040 | You know, I think what I like about the framework is that it's intentionally subjective.

00:40:52.520 | You get to choose what good enough means to you.

00:40:55.440 | Maybe your version of good enough is making a certain salary or making a certain amount

00:41:00.000 | of money, or maybe it's having a certain title or working in a certain industry or

00:41:05.960 | getting off at three o'clock so you can go pick up your kids from school or go on your

00:41:09.720 | bike ride. But what I encourage people is to recognize when they have it, because the

00:41:15.960 | default is just more, more, more, more, more.

00:41:19.840 | And that's what leads to a lot of the restlessness or the lack of fulfillment is when

00:41:25.760 | people don't know to what end they're working for.

00:41:30.040 | I think getting very clear on your values and understanding how work can support your

00:41:36.880 | vision of a well-lived life can help you understand what your version of enough is.

00:41:42.400 | And I think that's the key in threading that needle.

00:41:45.320 | I do agree with you where on the side of, you know, quite quitting or, you know,

00:41:51.280 | nihilism, it's not necessarily a recipe for fulfillment either.

00:41:56.720 | I remember you talking on a past episode about how you think a lot of this sort of

00:42:00.600 | like anti-capitalism rhetoric and anti-work rhetoric is a red herring.

00:42:05.200 | And it's true. We live in a material world as much as we might want to deny it.

00:42:10.720 | You know, right now there's a lot of cultural cachet in being against work.

00:42:15.600 | But at the end of the day, everyone still has to pay rent.

00:42:19.200 | And so just kind of chalking work up to a necessary evil, I don't think is ultimately a

00:42:25.440 | recipe for happiness either.

00:42:26.760 | Do you have any faith or optimism about there also being systemic changes in

00:42:32.720 | organizations themselves that makes these type of jobs more generally sustainable?

00:42:40.200 | And I'm coming at this from, you know, my my thread of critique, the thread I'm always

00:42:44.360 | trying to throw into this conversation and sort of the thread I hold on to, and I'm

00:42:48.120 | kind of alone in this sometimes, is I, of course, as a computer scientist, take this

00:42:52.800 | technological thread looking into this, that there is this unintentional side effects of

00:42:58.360 | introducing low friction communication tools.

00:43:00.440 | The collision of digital with knowledge work spun work habits and directions that were

00:43:05.640 | particularly unsustainable.

00:43:07.280 | I mean, I like to think of it as it takes this mindset you're talking about.

00:43:10.360 | Work is my meaning. More is better.

00:43:12.080 | And then it was upping the marijuana to heroin, right?

00:43:17.280 | These tools then made it possible to, oh, I can now easily work all the time.

00:43:21.200 | Right. So it it it enabled this existing mindset to really spiral out of control.

00:43:26.000 | So I have this sort of technological thread is that just this haphazard approach to

00:43:30.480 | collaborating where we say, here's Slack, here's email, figure it out, has made things

00:43:35.880 | 10 times worse or whatever.

00:43:37.040 | But that also opens up the idea of, oh, so if in part things are incredibly unsustainable

00:43:42.480 | because of this techno social loop, that's not really helping anyone is making workers

00:43:45.720 | more miserable. People stay up till midnight checking emails is not really making, you

00:43:50.640 | know, sale forces revenue better because those people are distracted from whatever

00:43:56.480 | writing better code or something like that.

00:43:57.920 | So do you have any optimism that even market forces and this is the late capitalism

00:44:02.880 | club, late stage capitalism really hates this idea.

00:44:05.320 | And I'm not saying this is going to happen.

00:44:06.400 | I'm just going to throw it out there that even market forces could potentially play a

00:44:09.600 | role in making work more sustainable as at some point there might be some recognition

00:44:15.040 | of we need some more structure here.

00:44:17.480 | Like, this is crazy.

00:44:18.400 | We can't just send emails all day long and just out of control throwing work back and

00:44:22.720 | forth like this isn't helping anyone.

00:44:24.200 | So is there systemic changes that might happen that might complement the sort of

00:44:28.160 | individualized strategies you're talking about here?

00:44:30.400 | Yeah, I think there have to be, because right now the default is the hyperactive hive

00:44:36.880 | mind. It's everyone running around like a chicken with their head cut off trying to

00:44:40.600 | respond to a million different Slack notifications.

00:44:43.320 | And, you know, obviously, like my disposition, I tend to lean toward the moral case as

00:44:49.360 | opposed to the business case for the value of working less or investing in other sides

00:44:54.320 | of work. But I do think there are things that companies can do.

00:44:57.720 | And I think it's incumbent on companies to do them, because right now, too often the

00:45:02.240 | onus is placed on the individuals to find better work life balance or to practice self

00:45:07.680 | care. And I really think that companies in their own best interest have the

00:45:12.760 | responsibility to design systems that make work more, as you would say, sustainably

00:45:17.080 | productive. So some things that I've seen that I think work really well, first and

00:45:21.440 | foremost, hiring enough people so that there's enough people to do the work.

00:45:25.800 | I think part of what I've noticed through my reporting is that some of these companies,

00:45:30.520 | there's no Slack built into their system so that when one employee takes time off, they

00:45:36.080 | have to be available because there aren't the right systems in place to be able to

00:45:42.040 | delegate that work to other people that work there.

00:45:44.360 | The second is, you know, managers and bosses need to model the type of culture and

00:45:50.680 | behavior that they want their companies to have.

00:45:53.560 | You know, I've talked to so many different leaders or CEOs that say, yeah, you know,

00:45:58.440 | we want to try and cultivate more of a healthy relationship to work here.

00:46:02.640 | And, you know, of course, I'm on Slack at 11 p.m.

00:46:06.120 | answering emails and my green dot is always available.

00:46:08.760 | You know, culture trickles down from the top.

00:46:11.920 | And if your boss is answering emails on their honeymoon in the Sahara Desert, like

00:46:17.600 | what, of course, you should be doing so, too, is the kind of implied message.

00:46:21.560 | And then I think it's just about being more clear about expectations.

00:46:26.520 | So there's a section in the book where I talk about a more transactional approach to

00:46:31.560 | work, which might seem crass, especially in our current culture that loves to think of

00:46:36.240 | jobs as callings and vocations and passions.

00:46:39.000 | But what I mean when I think about a more transactional approach to work is just being

00:46:43.600 | clear on both sides of the equation.

00:46:46.160 | What is this contract that we're entering into?

00:46:48.920 | I think it can free both employers and employees.

00:46:52.200 | Employers can focus on defining what good work looks like and employees can know what

00:46:59.360 | the expectations are for success and more importantly, treat their job as part but not

00:47:05.400 | the entirety of who they are.

00:47:06.680 | You know, I think like questions around the ability to advocate for fair compensation

00:47:12.840 | all come back to this idea that work is more than an economic contract.

00:47:19.240 | But at the end of the day, fundamentally, definitionally, what a job is, is an

00:47:25.160 | exchange of a worker's time and energy for a paycheck.

00:47:28.600 | I think the more clear sighted we can be about that, the better.

00:47:32.440 | I'm 100 percent on board with you.

00:47:34.400 | I mean, I think that idea is straight on.

00:47:36.240 | The more you can actually surface the implicit transaction, everything gets better.

00:47:40.440 | And then it's about I'm doing this for you in exchange for this income.

00:47:45.040 | And maybe as the skill gets higher, the amount of income for the same amount of

00:47:51.480 | effort, maybe that goes up or whatever.

00:47:52.720 | But this is what I'm doing and I did it well and I'm doing it well.

00:47:56.440 | And so the fact that I'm not here at three because I'm with my kids or doing

00:47:59.840 | something else doesn't matter.

00:48:01.440 | What matters is I'm delivering next month this package that I said I was going to

00:48:05.080 | deliver. I am a big believer in that, whether that is an explicit thing or it's

00:48:09.600 | more implicit. I've written about it.

00:48:10.880 | I mean, people have tried this internally.

00:48:12.640 | This is like results only work environments, tried to make that tangible inside big

00:48:17.920 | environment. And where that did work, it worked really well.

00:48:20.280 | My friend Ben Kastnoka years ago wrote a book called The Alliance.

00:48:25.080 | He might have co-authored that with Reid Hoffman, but it was about...

00:48:27.800 | I actually went to high school together.

00:48:29.000 | Oh, you know? OK.

00:48:30.160 | You know Ben?

00:48:30.680 | Yeah, we're both San Francisco natives.

00:48:32.680 | Yes. Oh, excellent.

00:48:34.040 | Good. Well, we have a lot we could talk about.

00:48:35.400 | But so you know Ben and you remember his company in high school.

00:48:39.320 | But that book is proposing a future of work that hasn't quite come, but it was kind

00:48:43.920 | of a good idea that it was you might imagine a future, especially highly skilled

00:48:47.800 | workers say, I'm going to have a contract with you to do this for the next two years.

00:48:51.160 | And this is what our relationship is going to be.

00:48:53.280 | Is this I'm doing this work for you and I'm good at it and you're paying me well for

00:48:56.600 | it. And and you know, when we're done, we'll shake hands and I'm going to sign a

00:48:59.800 | contract somewhere else. You know what?

00:49:01.160 | And there could be more of that within all of it seems to me a pushback against the

00:49:05.200 | no, no, you're just a cognitive cog in this giant machine.

00:49:08.800 | And we just want to just keep pumping as much.

00:49:11.480 | You just pump out as much out of your brain as possible.

00:49:13.640 | Just always be doing stuff.

00:49:14.680 | The more stuff, the better.

00:49:15.800 | And yeah, you have work life balance.

00:49:18.000 | But remember, every time you choose life over work, you're kind of letting us down.

00:49:21.640 | So you always have to deal like every moment you have to be negotiating that and that

00:49:25.160 | that sort of there's no upper limit.

00:49:26.600 | We're giving it to you. We're saying, figure it out.

00:49:28.320 | Just doesn't work. Yeah, it's just just misery making.

00:49:31.080 | And then the pandemic, especially those of us who had kids at home to like trying to

00:49:35.720 | go to school. I think that was another another breaking point where it's like, you

00:49:40.840 | know, yeah, we acknowledge that, but also just still do all your work.

00:49:43.680 | And I think some of the systems within companies are directly in opposition to the

00:49:51.160 | ability to move to this more enlightened future.

00:49:53.600 | Like I'm thinking of lawyers, for example, like lawyers are forced to track their job,

00:50:01.760 | their work in like six or 15 minute increments.

00:50:04.960 | And it's just this perverse incentive that rewards time spent working over the quality

00:50:11.280 | of the work. And I remember talking to this litigation associate in New York, and he

00:50:15.680 | basically told me that like I have no incentive to do work efficiently or produce high

00:50:22.440 | quality in a shorter amount of time.

00:50:24.600 | My only incentive is to, you know, build my billable hours that are expected of me.

00:50:31.000 | And for as long as we have systems like that in place, we're never going to be able to

00:50:36.640 | achieve the life of work life integration that so many people desperately want.

00:50:43.360 | Yeah, like estate lawyers have figured this out, this idea of, OK, we have packages, we

00:50:49.720 | will plan your estate and here's how much it costs.

00:50:52.120 | And that's the negotiation, not ours.

00:50:54.480 | And I'll tell you one, I want to be respectful of your time, but I'll tell you one

00:50:57.640 | positive alternative model I came across recently here in D.C.

00:51:00.760 | is there's an increasing number of law firms.

00:51:02.880 | These are typically women run law firms because it's reacting in particular to the

00:51:08.480 | impossibilities of advancement in that model.

00:51:11.600 | If, let's say, for example, you have kids and the model of these new law firms is we

00:51:16.360 | have a much lower cap of hours.

00:51:17.720 | And they say, because you know why it we bill at a high rate and this generates a good

00:51:23.160 | amount of money and everyone makes a good income and we have that cap low.

00:51:28.320 | We don't have the the unbounded upper end model of the standard big law firm of like

00:51:32.840 | the more the better. And how do you differentiate yourself?

00:51:35.320 | You outbill someone else.

00:51:36.280 | And so these new firms are coming out and saying, our goal is not to try to, you know,

00:51:40.000 | it's OK. We don't need the one point seven million dollar salary as the top equity

00:51:44.280 | partner. Actually, what if we do this social contract?

00:51:46.880 | We work 40 hour weeks.

00:51:48.680 | We bill 30 out of those 40 and everyone's making, you know, whatever it is.

00:51:54.600 | I don't give numbers, but, you know, whatever it is, like a very healthy, like in the

00:51:57.600 | middle of the six figure salary or something like that.

00:51:59.800 | And that's considered radical.

00:52:01.200 | But I love that type of thinking of like, well, what are we actually trying to

00:52:04.080 | accomplish here? What if it's not just maximizing the income scorecard, you know,

00:52:08.680 | for our equity partners or something like this?

00:52:11.120 | So I like that.

00:52:12.440 | I love to see that type of that type of innovation.

00:52:16.000 | You know what it sounds like those lawyers know?

00:52:18.880 | They know their definition of good enough.

00:52:21.720 | They have a sense of what they need and not just this endless desire for more.

00:52:27.480 | Yeah. And if only there was a book that could teach this mindset.

00:52:31.200 | Oh, there is. So we got the good enough.

00:52:34.040 | Job. Let's see if I get the subtitle right from memory.

00:52:36.440 | Reclaiming life from work.

00:52:38.960 | Exactly. Just right.

00:52:40.840 | All right. Well, Simone, thank you for calling in and helping giving us some some

00:52:45.880 | deep ideas here. I really recommend the book.

00:52:47.520 | And again, it's very humanist.

00:52:50.480 | It's it's stories into the lives of real people.

00:52:54.080 | It's not, shall we say, Cal Newport esque of here's 17 definition terms and

00:52:59.840 | framework. So I appreciate that.

00:53:01.560 | I think my readers will as well.

00:53:03.160 | They get enough frameworks and new terms for me.

00:53:06.120 | Absolutely. Money. Thank you for calling in.

00:53:09.000 | Good enough job. Thank you.

00:53:10.640 | Yeah. It's out tomorrow and you can learn more at the good enough job dot com.

00:53:14.160 | Oh, yeah. I'm see.

00:53:15.800 | You know what? I'm terrible at this because I'm terrible at marketing.

00:53:18.200 | I have social media. Tell us.

00:53:19.720 | OK, the good enough job dot com.

00:53:21.640 | Is that the book website?

00:53:22.640 | That's the book website.

00:53:23.880 | And socials. What should we know?

00:53:25.400 | My social media.

00:53:26.400 | OK, first name, last name.

00:53:27.760 | Simone Stolzoff.

00:53:28.760 | Yeah. So much for having me on.

00:53:30.120 | All right. Thank you.

00:53:31.600 | All right. Well, that was great.

00:53:32.600 | I think we really got into some interesting wisdom there.

00:53:36.760 | There we go. That's my my sort of virtual commencement address for the year.

00:53:42.640 | So what I want to do next is tackle a collection of questions from you, my

00:53:46.800 | listeners, that will all be more or less roughly themed about this idea of finding

00:53:51.640 | meaning in your job, figuring out what role your job should play in your life.

00:53:55.720 | We get a lot of questions like that.

00:53:56.720 | So I called I called three or four for us to tackle before we get there.

00:54:00.280 | However, let me talk about one of the sponsors that makes this show possible, a

00:54:03.960 | sponsor that is very appropriate given the theme of today's episode, and that is

00:54:10.320 | our friends at 80,000 Hours.

00:54:13.360 | 80,000 Hours is a nonprofit that aims to help people have a positive impact with

00:54:18.880 | their career.

00:54:20.240 | Now, think about this.

00:54:21.160 | As we were just discussing with Simone, if you adopt a mindset that says my entire

00:54:28.600 | identity worth and happiness doesn't have to come from my job, job is just one part

00:54:33.240 | of my life, then that opens up a lot more options for what you want to do with your

00:54:37.240 | job. And if it's just going to be something that helps support me, it's not the end

00:54:40.800 | all and be all. Might as well consider making it a job that is useful to the world.

00:54:45.920 | This is where 80,000 Hours comes in.

00:54:48.680 | Now, let's talk about this name.

00:54:49.840 | Where does that come from?

00:54:50.760 | Where does that number come from?

00:54:51.840 | It is the length of the average career.

00:54:54.680 | This is 40 hours a week, times 50 weeks a year, times 40 years, gets you to 80,000

00:55:00.200 | hours. As the folks at 80,000 Hours like to say, that's a lot of time.

00:55:04.640 | So if your job is something that is useful to the world, you'll end up putting in a lot

00:55:09.440 | of effort towards improving the world because of how much time you actually spend

00:55:12.680 | working on your job.

00:55:14.440 | Most career advice doesn't really address social impact or how to make a positive

00:55:19.640 | difference. So 80,000 Hours is a nonprofit that is focused on exactly that goal.

00:55:23.760 | They've spent the last decade conducting research along academics at Oxford

00:55:28.840 | University to figure out how to optimize the impact of your career on the world.

00:55:34.640 | I have known the 80,000 Hour people since my book, So Good They Can't Ignore You,

00:55:39.720 | came out. I remember that they were just getting this nonprofit up and going and we

00:55:43.960 | shared a simpatico view that there is more of an instrumental way of understanding

00:55:48.400 | jobs as opposed to instead being our identity or the thing that's going to make us

00:55:52.280 | most happy. So I've known the individuals involved at 80,000 Hours for over a

00:55:56.880 | decade now. So what you can do is go to their website, 80,000Hours.org/deep.

00:56:03.080 | That's where you'll find all of their research and guides about having a high impact

00:56:07.960 | career. They also have a excellent podcast where they have unusually in-depth

00:56:14.920 | conversations with experts in the world's most pressing problems.

00:56:17.600 | What you can do to solve them so you get expert views on different careers that are

00:56:20.720 | useful to the world.

00:56:23.440 | If you've been enjoying my discussions of AI, I would suggest checking out their

00:56:28.120 | somewhat recent interview with David Chalmers on the nature and ethics of

00:56:31.680 | consciousness. He's an expert on machine consciousness.

00:56:34.520 | Very interesting. 80,000 Hours also has a great job board where you can find

00:56:39.280 | listings for jobs that make a difference.

00:56:41.960 | They even offer free one on one career calls with their impartial advising team.

00:56:46.200 | Everything they provide is free.

00:56:47.400 | They're a nonprofit and their only aim is to help you find a high impact career.

00:56:53.440 | So if you go to 80,000Hours.org/deep, and don't forget that slash deep, because if

00:56:59.360 | you go to the include the slash deep, you'll get sent a free copy of their in-depth

00:57:04.160 | career guide, which will help you learn about what makes for a high impact career,

00:57:07.840 | help you get ideas for choosing an impactful path and then create a plan to put

00:57:12.480 | what you found into action.

00:57:14.080 | So head to 80,000Hours.org/deep.

00:57:17.440 | That's the number 80,000 followed by the word hours.org/deep.

00:57:21.600 | Start planning a career that is meaningful, fulfilling and help solve one of the

00:57:24.760 | world's most pressing problems.

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00:57:34.760 | internet privacy.

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00:57:50.720 | your packets off the public radio waves and see what websites or services is this

00:57:55.080 | person talking to.

00:57:56.400 | Even if you're within the privacy of your own home, talking to your private internet

00:58:01.360 | subscription with a cable company, for example, that internet service provider can

00:58:05.600 | watch who is he talking to, who is she talking to and sell that data.

00:58:10.120 | To a data brokers, a VPN helps you get around that.

00:58:13.480 | Here's the way it works. Instead of directly connecting to a site or service, you

00:58:17.280 | instead make a secure encrypted connection to a VPN server.

00:58:20.760 | You then tell that server with encrypted messages, here's who I really want to talk

00:58:25.120 | to. That server talks to that site or service on your behalf, encrypts the response and

00:58:29.760 | sends it back to you.

00:58:30.840 | People sniffing your wireless packets, your internet service provider, all they find

00:58:34.320 | out is that you're talking to a VPN server.

00:58:36.160 | They learn nothing about your actual internet habits.

00:58:40.120 | You need to use a VPN.

00:58:41.440 | If you do use a VPN, I suggest ExpressVPN.

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00:59:16.800 | That's ExpressVPN.com/deep to learn more.

00:59:24.360 | All right, let's hear some of your questions about fitting your career into a deep life.

00:59:32.520 | Jesse, who's our first question today?

00:59:34.120 | All right, first question is from Confused.

00:59:36.120 | How do I figure out what kind of job I want to do?

00:59:38.640 | I'm 42, totally confused.

00:59:40.840 | I can't even I can't even go back to school as I don't know what I'm interested in.

00:59:44.320 | Well, Confused, it's a good question.

00:59:46.480 | It's not too late.

00:59:47.120 | We are going to help you out here.

00:59:48.600 | I'm glad you're not just defaulting to go back to school.

00:59:52.440 | But the very fact that you brought that up to say, I don't think I can do that.

00:59:57.080 | I think that is very telling.

01:00:00.040 | And I want to I just want to focus on that for just a second, because I think that

01:00:03.680 | underscores the degree to which is just expected.

01:00:06.680 | If you don't know what to do.

01:00:07.960 | Burn 30 or 60 thousand dollars on a degree and that'll kill time and maybe that'll

01:00:12.640 | open something up new that has become so expected that you felt the need to have a

01:00:17.080 | disclaimer because you expected that might be the advice you get.

01:00:19.840 | You had to disclaim it right up front so that I want to you want to hear that advice

01:00:22.840 | because it wasn't going to work for you.

01:00:23.840 | That shows how ubiquitous that idea has become.

01:00:26.320 | As longtime listeners know, I do not think randomly going to school is a great idea

01:00:30.920 | for graduate degrees.

01:00:31.920 | I do not think you should use it as a time killer or use it speculatively.

01:00:37.760 | Hey, I have to imagine if I get this degree, interesting jobs will arise.

01:00:42.440 | My theory about grad degrees, which I talk about every couple of months here on the

01:00:47.480 | show, is you should get a graduate degree when the specific path you're on, you get

01:00:55.120 | to a block in that career path that says this degree from this school allows me to

01:00:59.320 | move forward to this next step on the career path.

01:01:01.800 | And I really want to go there when you have a specific reason to get the degree and

01:01:06.680 | trusted evidence that the degree you're getting from the place you're getting it

01:01:09.600 | will take you to that next location.

01:01:13.080 | So degrees should be deployed for very specific reasons, not as a speculative

01:01:18.560 | investment in opportunities that are yet undiscovered.

01:01:22.840 | It's like me going to get a Ph.D.

01:01:25.440 | That was very clearly on the step to becoming a professor.

01:01:29.000 | But I really want to become a professor.

01:01:30.200 | So there's a really clear reason why I did that.

01:01:34.680 | All right.

01:01:34.920 | So we put school out of the way.

01:01:35.960 | What should you do?

01:01:37.920 | You're not going to be surprised you're confused.

01:01:40.760 | My listeners aren't gonna be surprised here either.

01:01:42.680 | When I say lifestyle centric career planning, when I hear how do I figure out

01:01:47.920 | what type of job I want to do, I'm totally confused.

01:01:50.640 | I would say that question is the wrong one.

01:01:53.040 | What job do I want to do?

01:01:55.880 | What does that mean that you want to do the job because it's going to

01:01:58.920 | mat some innate passion, because it is going to make you happy every day,

01:02:03.680 | because you're going to feel an unshakable drive and motivation and happiness to

01:02:09.640 | work. That doesn't mean anything to me.

01:02:11.800 | What does it mean to want to do a job?

01:02:13.280 | I think that is too vague.

01:02:14.840 | I think you're probably putting, as we talked about with Simone earlier, you are

01:02:18.760 | probably putting way too much emphasis on the job must be fulfilling some

01:02:24.880 | fundamental need I have.

01:02:26.360 | Lifestyle centric career planning is a great way to flip that around.

01:02:30.280 | What you're aiming towards is a fully featured vision of your lifestyle, not

01:02:35.600 | just your what type of work you're doing, but where you're living, what your day

01:02:39.600 | is like, what your time is like.

01:02:41.640 | Is it heavily scheduled or open?

01:02:43.080 | Are you in the woods or in the city?

01:02:44.560 | Are you reading first edition Faulkner by a creek somewhere in the woods or

01:02:51.080 | checking out the latest post-punk band in an underground club in the Lower East

01:02:56.320 | Side? You just have these clear visions of what resonates, what lifestyle resonates,

01:03:01.080 | what are the different elements of that lifestyle?

01:03:03.440 | And then you say, great, how do I work backwards from that to achieve those

01:03:07.960 | elements? And what you then start looking for is decisions in your life that move

01:03:11.400 | you as far forward as possible towards that vision.

01:03:14.920 | Your job will be a huge part of that vision, but now you're deploying your job

01:03:18.520 | towards something specific, not answering the question, what do I want to do?

01:03:23.360 | But instead answering the question, what is the right package of decisions that

01:03:29.040 | will move me closest to this vision that I have articulated?

01:03:31.840 | It's a pragmatic problem.

01:03:33.160 | It is a practical problem.

01:03:34.560 | The job becomes, in the same way that Simone talked about, quite instrumental.

01:03:39.600 | So you're 42, right?

01:03:41.800 | So we're not 22, where you might be more prone to thinking my job is going to be

01:03:47.560 | everything. And at 22, by the way, you probably have no idea really what you want

01:03:52.280 | in your lifestyle anyways.

01:03:53.360 | You have self-reflection, now you have self-awareness, you have quite a bit of

01:03:56.520 | experience as an adult.

01:03:58.560 | So you can form, I think, a realistic, pragmatic lifestyle that really does

01:04:02.720 | resonate. And then you just get tactical.

01:04:06.160 | All right, well, this lifestyle is really built around, I don't know, autonomy and

01:04:11.040 | being outside in the country.

01:04:12.760 | So, OK, it's got to be remote work.

01:04:15.000 | Maybe if I live cheaper, that will then open up the salary range that would work for

01:04:21.600 | me. I know I don't like this type of effort.

01:04:25.160 | So let me look at this category of jobs.

01:04:27.960 | And what I think about, I'm confused, I have a very specific example in mind.

01:04:32.760 | I remember meeting someone up in Vermont when we were there last summer who had some

01:04:36.720 | job for the state government in Burlington and skied every day on the way to or from

01:04:43.680 | work. They lived in between him and his work was a ski hill.

01:04:47.560 | A lot of what he did, he could go out, he had to go and do surveying in the woods.

01:04:52.000 | And so there's lots of sort of being outside.

01:04:53.600 | And the job was like fine.

01:04:54.720 | But it was like what he was building was this great Vermont lifestyle.

01:04:57.560 | The job was so weird and specific and government specific.

01:05:01.160 | There's no way that he sat down and said, what do I want to do?

01:05:03.160 | Well, I want to have this particular position in this bureaucracy in the Vermont

01:05:06.880 | state government. No, no. He had a lifestyle vision.

01:05:10.240 | And it involved living in a place like Vermont and having this flexibility and these

01:05:14.680 | engagement with the outside.

01:05:15.920 | And then he went and as part of putting together that picture, found this job that made

01:05:19.520 | that work. It was a good enough job to use Simone's term.

01:05:22.840 | All right. So lifestyle, career planning confused and don't go get a random graduate

01:05:27.440 | degree. All right, Jesse, what do we got next?

01:05:30.520 | All right, next question is from M.

01:05:32.240 | What advice would you give somebody who is currently in a role that meets every job

01:05:36.480 | satisfaction criteria but is struggling with motivation?

01:05:39.800 | I consistently lack motivation to do deep work and have to force myself to focus.

01:05:44.160 | This at times feels almost physically impossible, especially when working from home

01:05:48.880 | and leads me to cycling between burnout, stress, boredom and guilt.

01:05:52.680 | Well, and this is common, especially right now, especially post pandemic.

01:05:58.040 | There's two potential forces that might be at play here

01:06:03.760 | that is causing this a motivation issue.

01:06:06.240 | I don't know which of these that play.

01:06:08.240 | It's likely that both are maybe at play and they're mixed together.

01:06:10.800 | But let's talk about both separately.

01:06:12.240 | The first is what I call deep procrastination, which is an issue I wrote

01:06:17.560 | about originally back when I focused my blog just on students because it was in the

01:06:22.440 | student population that I first observed this issue.

01:06:25.480 | Deep procrastination is where you find yourself unable to work up the motivation to do

01:06:30.680 | work that needs to be done.

01:06:31.880 | And for students, it'll be a paper that has to be submitted or a take home exam that has

01:06:36.640 | to go back and they just can't do it.

01:06:38.520 | They cannot muster the internal motivation to even get started.

01:06:43.320 | Deadlines will be passed.

01:06:45.400 | Professors will give them extensions.

01:06:46.960 | Oftentimes they maybe end up even having to withdraw from that semester.

01:06:50.480 | They just can't push themselves to work.

01:06:52.440 | So I observed this when I was especially at MIT, where I was at the time among high

01:06:56.760 | achieving students. It was different than depression because in other aspects of their

01:07:03.000 | life, they were not a hedonic.

01:07:04.800 | So it wasn't an overall flattening of their ability to have sort of excitement or hope

01:07:10.560 | or positive feelings.

01:07:11.680 | There's other things are still very exciting to them, but they couldn't do schoolwork.

01:07:14.600 | So deep procrastination could be at play here.

01:07:18.400 | I'll talk in a second about how to service that, but let me let me mention the other

01:07:22.480 | possible force at play here, which would be the idea that your mind might be dopamine

01:07:28.120 | sick. So dopamine sick is where you have.

01:07:32.840 | So frazzled your brain.

01:07:36.440 | With constant targeted distraction at the slightest hint of boredom delivered through

01:07:42.480 | your phone, delivered to your computer screen, that is now unable to work up the proper

01:07:48.680 | motivation to do something that's longer form, deeper and more complicated, that is so

01:07:52.920 | frazzled from just being stimuli bombarded with all of these algorithmically expertly

01:07:58.560 | aimed sources of stimuli, these digital darts right to the base of your brainstem that

01:08:05.720 | give you that metaphorical electrical charge that when it comes time to do something

01:08:10.120 | that is comparably more stayed, that's comparably more boring, like let's start

01:08:14.280 | gathering sources and writing this memo.

01:08:16.200 | Your brain just can't do it.

01:08:18.640 | And there's been a uptick anecdotally, an uptick in dopamine sickness, especially

01:08:24.360 | post-pandemic because of how much and how many people fell into a pattern of much more

01:08:31.520 | hyperactive exposure to distraction that they would have before.

01:08:35.200 | Because maybe they're now at home and they're working remotely so they can have the

01:08:39.320 | phone out and things feel more haphazard.

01:08:42.160 | Maybe also there is an escape was happening.

01:08:45.280 | You're anxious about things that are happening in the world and you can't confront

01:08:49.680 | them. And so let me just look at the phone.

01:08:51.200 | Let me just look at these these distractions and get that numbing in the moment.

01:08:55.520 | So I think we have a lot more dopamine sickness than we had before.

01:08:57.960 | Students are getting this very strongly because they got so embedded with their devices

01:09:02.760 | that now their brains are struggling.

01:09:05.920 | When you say here's a senior thesis you have to write as a high school student and their

01:09:09.840 | brain is tick, tock, tick, tock, tick, tock.

01:09:13.040 | How can I go from seven seconds before I swipe to spending hours trying to research

01:09:20.160 | Charles DeGreat or something like this?

01:09:22.480 | So both of these things might be a play.

01:09:23.880 | Deep procrastination, dopamine sickness.

01:09:26.560 | Let's talk about solutions to both.

01:09:29.640 | And you can mix and match these solutions as they seem to fit.

01:09:32.480 | So what I learned about deep procrastination is that its source tends to be a

01:09:38.080 | combination of the locus of control and motivation being away from the internal and more

01:09:44.600 | towards the external.

01:09:45.720 | So extrinsic motivation.

01:09:47.280 | You're like, I don't really this feels arbitrary to me or it's not something I really want

01:09:51.360 | to do. But it's being for a student, it might be, I don't know, my parents wanted me to be

01:09:56.120 | a pre-med major and this chemistry class is really hard.

01:09:59.120 | I never even wanted to be a doctor.

01:10:00.360 | And this class is not something I went after because I was excited about it.

01:10:04.240 | And in work, it could be I don't even understand why I'm writing this self-assessment

01:10:08.560 | report. So I just put it on my plate.

01:10:10.000 | No one's even going to read this thing.

01:10:11.240 | So you have this lack of intrinsic motivation for the work, coupled with the work being

01:10:15.680 | hard. So the chem class is really hard and I never want to be a doctor in the first

01:10:20.280 | place. This report is going to be a real pain.

01:10:22.640 | I don't even really know.

01:10:23.920 | There's a lot of ambiguities around how do I even do this?

01:10:26.360 | And I wasn't my idea to do this in the first place.

01:10:28.640 | No one's really going to read it.

01:10:29.560 | That combination can trigger.

01:10:32.920 | Deep procrastination. So a couple of things you can do here.

01:10:36.200 | One, you have to reduce the hardness that does help lock it in your organizational

01:10:41.480 | system. Here is how I keep track of what's on my plate.

01:10:44.800 | Here's how I plan my time during the day.

01:10:46.680 | Maybe I'm doing capture, configure, control style system of professional workplace

01:10:51.600 | management. I have processes in place for common collaborations.

01:10:56.240 | There's a sense your brain gets of I am in control of how I approach my work that

01:11:02.040 | gives it more confidence and reduces the sense of this is some ambiguous, hard,

01:11:06.560 | impossible task. So when the hard thing gets reduced to time blocks that show up in

01:11:11.160 | time block plans for the days and you sort of execute your time blocks for the days,

01:11:14.760 | it's not as hard to execute.

01:11:16.640 | So that can help.

01:11:18.680 | Simplifying obligations also helps.

01:11:21.640 | So there's a sense of hardness that sometimes come here from just you're overwhelmed,

01:11:25.000 | you're overloaded and your brain says this is enough.

01:11:28.320 | Like, I don't even know what all this stuff is.

01:11:29.640 | This is impossible, uncle.

01:11:31.840 | I'm going to do deep procrastination.

01:11:33.320 | So it's a good time because it's a serious problem.

01:11:35.360 | And we're not able to to just get normal work done.

01:11:39.160 | It's causing you real subjective distress.

01:11:41.160 | You have to be ready to make some actual big changes here and a real simplification on

01:11:44.800 | what's on your plate, even if it ruffles some feathers, may be what you need here.

01:11:48.840 | Makes your workload seem manageable or possible to your mind.

01:11:54.560 | And then finally, I think you need some sort of target that your professional life is

01:12:00.520 | serving. This goes back to something like lifestyle centric career planning.

01:12:04.040 | So here's the chain of influence I want here.

01:12:07.120 | I want you to have this vision you're excited about for your life that you're not

01:12:11.480 | there yet, but a lifestyle that's different, that resonates.

01:12:14.280 | There's some things I need to change.

01:12:15.680 | You need to figure out how your work fits into there.

01:12:18.080 | And this may require some changes, I need to shift over from this work to that work

01:12:22.480 | or change my change, my focus within the organization, because that's going to open up

01:12:25.800 | these options, which lets me get closer to my lifestyle.

01:12:27.960 | But what you're trying to get here is a chain of influence from a motivating image of a

01:12:31.480 | desired lifestyle and have that chain of influence come all the way back to the work

01:12:35.320 | you're doing right now. And it seems like that's arbitrary, but for the motivational

01:12:39.160 | sensors in our brain, that makes a big difference.

01:12:41.040 | Now you get intrinsic motivation.

01:12:42.760 | This self-assessment report is going to be a pain to write, but it's part of my plan

01:12:49.000 | to get this next promotion, which I'll then negotiate to shift over to this type of work,

01:12:53.600 | which I'll negotiate to do remotely.

01:12:55.160 | And then I'm going to move to the upper peninsula of Michigan as my plan all

01:13:01.440 | specifies I should do.

01:13:02.520 | Now the hard, hard effort deployed towards a goal you believe in is not, not hard.

01:13:07.040 | It's not going to cause deep procrastination.

01:13:09.160 | We appreciate hard things if we know why we're doing them.

01:13:12.200 | So you have to, you have to fit a why in there.

01:13:14.000 | If you're just going through your job, this should be a good job.

01:13:16.280 | I'm paid well, it's satisfying.

01:13:17.560 | I like the people, but it's just a job.

01:13:21.440 | Then doing the effort could fall into this deep procrastination trap.

01:13:24.040 | So you have to connect it to a bigger positive vision.

01:13:26.480 | All right.

01:13:27.360 | So what about dopamine sickness?

01:13:28.560 | If that is the issue here?

01:13:29.680 | Well, you need boredom therapy.

01:13:31.280 | I talk about this in my book, deep work.

01:13:33.960 | This means a regular periods throughout your day where your mind craves distractions and

01:13:37.560 | you do not give those distractions to your mind.

01:13:39.680 | This includes, for example, going on at least one walk or errand a day without your

01:13:45.160 | phone.

01:13:45.600 | So you have no option of looking at your phone or listening to something.

01:13:50.520 | I would also suggest the phone for your method.

01:13:52.400 | My phone gets plugged in by the front door in the kitchen.

01:13:55.840 | When I get home, if I need to look something up or check text messages, I have to walk

01:13:59.680 | over there and read it there.

01:14:00.760 | It is not with me on the couch.

01:14:02.640 | It is not with me at the dinner table.

01:14:05.280 | God forbid.

01:14:05.880 | It's not with me in the bathroom.

01:14:07.160 | So you still have the phone in your apartment, in your house.

01:14:11.320 | You still have the conveniences of, Oh, I need to look up what time this thing is

01:14:14.480 | tomorrow or text someone on meeting later, but it's not on your person.

01:14:18.200 | And that makes all the difference.

01:14:20.080 | So now your brain is getting used to this idea.

01:14:22.000 | Sometimes we get distraction when we're bored.

01:14:24.440 | Sometimes we don't.

01:14:25.920 | And this is a withdrawal period.

01:14:28.480 | Give that a couple of weeks and your brain will get much more comfortable with it.

01:14:31.720 | You can also do interval training with your ability to concentrate on hard things.

01:14:35.800 | Let me just do 20 minutes.

01:14:37.440 | 20 minutes with a timer.

01:14:39.800 | And if I break and check email or my phone, I have to reset the timer.

01:14:43.360 | Your brain says that I can do.

01:14:44.640 | I might freeze when you say, right, this thing is going to take five hours, but 20

01:14:49.400 | minutes I can do, and you start with that 20 minutes with a timer, intensely

01:14:53.800 | working on things until you can do that pretty regularly without it being too

01:14:57.760 | horrified.

01:14:58.280 | 20 minutes doesn't seem too bad.

01:14:59.480 | And then you add 10 more minutes.

01:15:00.520 | And then once 30 minutes becomes comfortable, you add 10 more minutes.

01:15:03.480 | So you might literally need to retrain your brain for longer and longer intervals

01:15:08.640 | of focus as you escape dopamine sickness.

01:15:11.760 | Finally, I think you need to care about location.

01:15:14.560 | You need to care about rituals for your work.

01:15:17.400 | So you mentioned that working from home is a big part of work seeming very hard for

01:15:23.680 | you to get started with.

01:15:24.800 | This is a tricky thing.

01:15:27.160 | When your home environment, your work environment is the same.

01:15:30.440 | You're trying to wrench your mind from a domestic context into a professional

01:15:33.960 | context.

01:15:34.400 | It's hard to do.

01:15:35.520 | Your mind is still largely ensnared in the domestic context.

01:15:38.920 | It's hard.

01:15:39.360 | Therefore, you don't have as much resources to actually focus on the thing ahead.

01:15:44.120 | It messes with your motivational sensor senses.

01:15:47.120 | So, Em, I would say go radical here.

01:15:48.800 | You need a really different location.

01:15:50.680 | You do your work, renovate the garden shed, rent some office space in a small town,

01:15:57.080 | spend money on this.

01:15:57.960 | You have a big problem.

01:15:59.040 | And you're unable to get work started.

01:16:01.120 | So you have to see this as an issue that might require big solutions and build much

01:16:04.920 | more elaborate rituals around your work.

01:16:06.600 | This is my work day.

01:16:07.520 | I have a big walk I do to get coffee where I think I plan my day at the coffee shop.

01:16:11.640 | And when I get back to my desk and my exotic location near my house, I immediately

01:16:15.320 | start working at the end of the day.

01:16:17.200 | I go to that same coffee shop and do a shutdown routine and then do another walk

01:16:22.320 | to switch my mindset.

01:16:23.200 | You need radical rituals.

01:16:24.360 | You need radical locations to help your mind separate work from non-work to help

01:16:29.720 | your mind more automatically generate the motivation it needs to get going.

01:16:32.920 | You're not just forcing it, white knuckling it.

01:16:35.040 | Hey, let me just put this laundry basket down, walk past my kid over here who's

01:16:39.840 | homesick and just say, concentrate now.

01:16:42.480 | And you're staring at the computer amidst all of that chaos.

01:16:45.600 | So I don't know if you have deep procrastination.

01:16:47.480 | I don't know if you have dopamine sickness.

01:16:48.760 | I don't know if it's some mix of those two things, but think about those solutions

01:16:54.360 | and the types of solutions that seem to resonate with you.

01:16:56.480 | Go with those.

01:16:57.600 | That'll probably point you towards what the real problem actually is.

01:17:00.480 | Did you go over the term dopamine sickness?

01:17:03.400 | Uh, I think so.

01:17:05.400 | Yeah, I think you did.

01:17:06.280 | Yeah.

01:17:06.480 | Yeah.

01:17:07.000 | I mean, it might be around.

01:17:08.080 | I just made it up, but I like it.

01:17:10.200 | It's, um, you come up with a lot of terms.

01:17:12.280 | I like terms.

01:17:12.960 | Well, there's a show about the opioid crisis called dope sick.

01:17:17.280 | Either is.

01:17:18.160 | Yes.

01:17:18.480 | That's probably what that's probably what I'm implicitly playing off of.

01:17:21.920 | Uh, I do, I do come up with a lot of terms.

01:17:24.720 | All right, let's do another question.

01:17:26.080 | All right.

01:17:26.880 | Next question is from Will.

01:17:28.120 | I'm having a hard time finding an academic position in a location.

01:17:31.600 | That's good for my family.

01:17:32.800 | I received a suggestion that I should be more flexible and exploring

01:17:36.000 | other jobs outside academia, but I'm hesitant because I'm afraid of landing

01:17:40.000 | in a job that's not my cup of tea.

01:17:42.320 | It also feels like a waste of career capital.

01:17:44.480 | I'd like to ask your suggestion on how to apply lifestyle, career

01:17:48.440 | centered planning, career capital, and other principles you teach in this context.

01:17:52.520 | Well, yeah, well, I mean, academia is rough.

01:17:55.360 | Let's, let's start with that.

01:17:56.680 | Academia can mean different things.

01:17:59.840 | So we should be clear about what it is.

01:18:02.920 | What is the target lifestyle you're looking for in academia?

01:18:07.280 | What do you have in mind?

01:18:08.000 | You have in mind a sort of one, one R1 tenure track research type professorship.

01:18:14.240 | This would be that the classical in the U S system, the

01:18:16.280 | classical notion of professorship.

01:18:17.720 | So one, one means you teach one course in the fall and one course in the

01:18:21.560 | spring that most of your focus is on research and tenure track, meaning

01:18:25.440 | that you're, you're in a position where your goal is to get tenure in the

01:18:29.120 | position based off your research contributions, when you think about

01:18:32.200 | famous professors, this is what they are.

01:18:33.920 | One, one, usually at R1 research universities on the tenure track.

01:18:38.600 | There's another thing.

01:18:39.320 | Academia could mean academia could mean a tenure track position, but at a two,

01:18:44.400 | two or three, three at a more of a teaching focused institution where you.

01:18:48.280 | Will produce research like a book every now and then, but not at the same expected

01:18:54.160 | rate or quality as someone at a research institution where you have a lot more

01:18:57.360 | time and that's a different type of feel.

01:18:59.280 | And there it's often more about the, the academic community, the school, the

01:19:04.520 | grounds, the tradition, the pedagogy.

01:19:07.520 | And then there's another trance that academia could mean, which

01:19:11.080 | is sort of non-tenure track.

01:19:13.040 | Typically the money's not great.

01:19:15.240 | It's a, it's a lot of teaching more adjunct style.

01:19:19.200 | And that's a, that's a different option.

01:19:21.720 | These are sort of all three options you get if you're coming out

01:19:24.080 | of an academic focused PhD.

01:19:25.800 | So first of all, be clear, which of these you're looking for.

01:19:27.960 | You know, which of these you are happy with and, and for the and each of them

01:19:33.760 | can be made into a, a component of very deep life, each of these can also be.

01:19:40.400 | Poisonous to a deep life, depending on what you're really going for

01:19:43.800 | and how you actually approach it.

01:19:45.040 | Once you know what you're looking for, will, then you got to be

01:19:47.200 | realistic, is that accessible to me?

01:19:50.320 | And this is where academia is rough.

01:19:52.000 | That's what I mean by it's tough.

01:19:53.000 | That, that first tranche of jobs, the, the one, one tenure track at a research

01:19:57.520 | institution, those are very hard.

01:19:59.680 | And you have to be coming out of essentially a top program a top PhD

01:20:05.680 | program with a good research track record.

01:20:07.600 | And people will then assume if I hire this person, they're going to be able to do

01:20:12.720 | similar types of research when they come here.

01:20:14.160 | If you, if you're not coming out of a top program with the top research record,

01:20:18.040 | those are very hard positions to get.

01:20:19.600 | And that's, you will know that right now, if you're in that position or not, these

01:20:22.800 | are not jobs that you typically work your way into later, you don't work your way up

01:20:29.000 | to these jobs, you typically fall down into them.

01:20:30.920 | So you, you're at a very good institution and then you can get one of these

01:20:33.520 | jobs at a good institution.

01:20:34.640 | Right.

01:20:35.600 | So you would know right now, if that's on, on the table, same thing that these

01:20:39.280 | elite teaching institutions are, are hard.

01:20:42.120 | And you know, you get a sense right away at the job market is, is my combination

01:20:46.400 | of, of experience, what they're looking for or not.

01:20:47.840 | The adjunct positions are more available, but you got to be very careful that you

01:20:50.520 | have a clear lifestyle vision for what you want to do with those adjunct

01:20:55.200 | positions and not trick yourself, for example, into thinking, well, if I just

01:20:58.760 | do that long enough, I'll be able to then jump up into one of these other categories.

01:21:02.160 | It, it tends to be more of a separate track.

01:21:03.960 | So we got to start with a reality check.

01:21:06.200 | I don't know what the answer is because I don't know your circumstances will, but I

01:21:09.640 | think you need to face that reality check.

01:21:11.800 | Even if in the end, you don't like the answer.

01:21:13.440 | Even if you say I've spent so much time on this academic path, but the, the

01:21:16.560 | tranche of academia I want, honestly, is not accessible to me.

01:21:19.880 | That can be frustrating, but we have to face that, that career reality, right in

01:21:25.680 | the face.

01:21:27.280 | So if you find out academia is not possible or not plausible for me, I think

01:21:34.400 | lifestyle centric career planning is the right frame.

01:21:38.600 | I think lifestyle centric career planning will integrate career capital theory.

01:21:43.240 | So here's what I mean by that.

01:21:44.280 | So we've talked about lifestyle centric career planning already on this episode,

01:21:47.800 | but work out the full lifestyle, your family, where you want to live, what you

01:21:53.320 | want your time to be like, other things, community involvements, philosophical,

01:21:57.520 | theological involvements, different aspects of your life and say, great.

01:22:00.280 | Now we need a package of decisions that gets us as close as possible to that

01:22:04.360 | lifestyle, and that's going to involve jobs.

01:22:06.120 | But now you're looking for jobs that are getting you closer to the lifestyle that

01:22:09.560 | you desire, not some sort of intrinsic fulfillment that it gives you.

01:22:12.760 | Career capital is just at this point, a factor in this decision.

01:22:18.080 | So the career capital you have by getting the, this graduate degree is just an

01:22:23.000 | opener up of options.

01:22:24.760 | It puts on the table options that otherwise would not be on the table

01:22:28.640 | without the career capital.

01:22:29.880 | Those options are probably better than options that don't at all take advantage

01:22:34.560 | of the training that you got in your academic path, but it doesn't mean

01:22:39.640 | necessarily those are the options you're going to go with.

01:22:41.440 | I mean, you might find for this lifestyle vision we have, there's this completely

01:22:46.520 | sort of unrelated job.

01:22:47.560 | It just cares that I'm a smart college graduate, but we could really build that

01:22:51.920 | lifestyle around it.

01:22:52.760 | That might actually be the right thing.

01:22:54.160 | Maybe when you're looking at the options that are specific to your specific

01:22:56.840 | academic training, yeah, these are higher level options or interesting options, but

01:23:01.120 | none of them fit with the lifestyle you have.

01:23:02.440 | So this is how I would put career capital in there.

01:23:04.080 | It opens up more options for you to consider, but your goal is not just the

01:23:08.040 | maximization of career capital.

01:23:09.760 | How do I make sure I'm taking as much advantage as possible of my existing

01:23:13.240 | training?

01:23:13.720 | Your goal is to get as close as possible to your ideal lifestyle.

01:23:17.280 | You have a lot of career capital.

01:23:18.480 | You have a lot more options about how to do it, but it doesn't mean that the path

01:23:22.440 | you end up taking needs to involve you leveraging very specific skills that you

01:23:27.360 | bought.

01:23:27.640 | And I recognize that it's annoying if you end up taking a path that did not

01:23:33.720 | directly pull from your training.

01:23:35.800 | It does feel like a loss, but it's not.

01:23:37.360 | A lot of people do that.

01:23:38.560 | That's not uncommon.

01:23:40.000 | People take big swerves.

01:23:42.680 | That's not the issue.

01:23:44.440 | I'm not typically worried about someone making a big swerve if the reason why

01:23:49.000 | they're swerving is they know where they want to head and there's an obstacle in

01:23:53.480 | the way.

01:23:53.800 | And so they're swerving to get around that obstacle so they can stay on the path

01:23:57.360 | towards what they're heading towards.

01:23:58.480 | So if you know what you're doing, if you're intentional about your life and you

01:24:01.480 | end up having to do a big swerve, then you end up having to do a big swerve.

01:24:04.080 | I'm not worried about that.

01:24:05.480 | If you know where you're heading, I worry about it.

01:24:08.760 | As I talked about in So Good They Can't Ignore You, if you're swerving for the

01:24:11.400 | sake of swerving, if you're serving, serving, swerving, because you think just

01:24:15.080 | doing something radically different maybe will make your situation feel radically

01:24:18.480 | better.

01:24:18.960 | If you're swerving to chase after a elusive happiness delivered from just the

01:24:25.880 | details of a particular job, then I get a little bit more worried.

01:24:29.600 | I tell a lot of those tales on So Good They Can't Ignore You where people try to

01:24:32.920 | fix a fundamental emptiness in their life by radically changing their job.

01:24:37.400 | And the spoiler is it doesn't.

01:24:40.120 | But a radical change that is intentional, not because you think change is good, but

01:24:44.160 | because you're trying to get closer to that destination on the horizon and

01:24:48.040 | there's a ravine in front of you.

01:24:50.520 | Not a big deal.

01:24:52.720 | So I wouldn't worry about it will as much as you are.

01:24:55.480 | Just stay clearheaded and intentional.

01:24:59.280 | All right, let's see here.

01:25:03.040 | Let's do, I think we'll do one more question.

01:25:05.360 | We'll do four instead of five today, Jesse, because we had a bit of a longer

01:25:08.080 | deep dive, but let's do one more question.

01:25:09.440 | Sounds good.

01:25:10.760 | Next question is from Jenny T.

01:25:12.640 | My last job did not support any type of deep work.

01:25:16.000 | Quick examples.

01:25:17.120 | I watched colleagues and my team place their IMs on do not disturb and then get

01:25:21.920 | in trouble from higher ups when they didn't respond within 10 minutes and would

01:25:25.520 | then bombard them with emails and phone calls.

01:25:27.720 | My superior would frequently take two meetings at one time.

01:25:31.320 | Yes, you read that right.

01:25:32.520 | He would listen to one meeting with earbuds and another one coming through

01:25:35.520 | the computer, I'm considering taking an old job at half the pay and no hope for

01:25:40.000 | advancement so I can stay far away from this type of culture.

01:25:42.920 | Is this crazy?

01:25:44.200 | It'd be funny if it turned out that Jesse had sent this.

01:25:48.880 | This was Jesse's question.

01:25:50.440 | He had just done it under a pseudonym.

01:25:51.640 | I'm just like, if I don't, if I put my IM and do not disturb, Cal is emailing

01:25:56.200 | and calling me, taking two meetings at once.

01:25:59.280 | So Jenny, let's put aside this idea about whether you should, you have to take a

01:26:04.160 | job at half pay or not to get to what I think is the fundamental point here, which

01:26:07.440 | is the environment that you describe.

01:26:09.640 | A hyperactive hive mind environment pushed to the extreme is a massive problem.

01:26:16.000 | And we need to enable people to see that type of culture as a big issue.

01:26:24.720 | The same way you might see a workplace that is not safe.

01:26:28.120 | You know, these mill gears are crushing people's hands.

01:26:33.160 | The same way you would see a workplace where you feel that you are harassed or

01:26:39.360 | disrespected because of who you are.

01:26:41.680 | We're used to those two things as saying, oh, this is a huge issue.

01:26:44.480 | I mean, yes, of course.

01:26:45.680 | There shouldn't be work cultures like this, and it's an absolutely

01:26:49.520 | good reason to avoid a place.

01:26:50.720 | I think we should add extreme hyperactive hive minds to this list

01:26:55.920 | of giant workplace red flags.

01:26:58.720 | I get into this in my book, a world without email.

01:27:02.480 | The context shifting torture, essentially, this induces on our brain when you're

01:27:09.680 | constantly having to service everything all the time, the constant stress of maybe

01:27:14.960 | someone needs something from me and I haven't given it to them.

01:27:17.080 | There's a boss who sent me an email and I don't know it.

01:27:19.280 | That constant stress and anxiety that plays upon our social circuits in a sort

01:27:24.880 | of sadistic insidious way is then coupled with the mental fatigue and cognitive

01:27:30.160 | crazy making of having to keep switching your context back and forth.

01:27:33.040 | You're never actually able to get any work done.

01:27:35.560 | It's like the, the actual torture methods that, uh, I think even our own country

01:27:42.320 | deployed of not letting someone sleep.

01:27:44.160 | You just keep putting on loud music every time they're about to fall asleep.

01:27:47.200 | It's a kind of a cognitive equivalent.

01:27:48.760 | I can never actually let my mind settle and actually focus on something.

01:27:51.480 | It's a big deal.

01:27:52.200 | It is subjectively and physiologically bad for you.

01:27:59.000 | You're going to feel bad.

01:27:59.920 | It's going to make you unhealthy.

01:28:01.000 | It's not a, not a healthy work environment.

01:28:03.320 | So what I'm, what I want to validate here, Jenny is yeah, get out of there

01:28:05.840 | and don't feel guilty about it.

01:28:07.800 | Just like you're not going to feel guilty about, Hey, the ceiling kind of collapses

01:28:13.440 | every once in a while and people get piled in rubble or, you know, these people

01:28:17.600 | are really disrespectful or they're harassing me.

01:28:20.120 | There's a complete culture of disregard.

01:28:22.120 | You're like, yeah, I'm going to get out of there.

01:28:23.160 | Feel the same way about a extreme hyperactive hive mind workflow, especially

01:28:26.760 | if that really clashes with, with what you like, I want it immediately though.

01:28:30.680 | Just say.

01:28:31.320 | My only option is to cut my pay in half and go back to an old

01:28:34.840 | job with no hope for advancement.

01:28:36.440 | I think we can be a little bit more broad and expansive about this.

01:28:39.600 | I think you can look at your career capital.

01:28:43.000 | What are my skills?

01:28:44.240 | Okay.

01:28:45.600 | And what are my options for deploying these skills in other places that maybe

01:28:48.800 | have a better version of this culture?

01:28:51.040 | I, I think most places don't necessarily have a culture this extreme.

01:28:55.880 | And so there might just be a lateral jump lateral in terms of

01:28:59.960 | salary and job responsibilities.

01:29:02.480 | But forward a jump way forward when it comes to the subjective enjoyment of

01:29:07.240 | the actual work by just going to a similar job in another place, there might be also,

01:29:11.840 | as you mentioned, another jump towards a different structure of work that

01:29:14.400 | for sure will free you from that.

01:29:15.720 | I'm moving towards freelance and moving towards consulting.

01:29:17.920 | I'm moving towards a relationship where it's accountability based

01:29:21.760 | and not accessibility based.

01:29:23.200 | And that might not be a bad idea that, that guarantees you that you're

01:29:26.640 | not going to have those issues, but it also could be more risky.

01:29:28.720 | And I essentially, what I'm trying to say here is don't believe that any job, like

01:29:35.120 | the one you have now is going to have that bad culture, a lot of places don't.

01:29:38.600 | And so you don't necessarily have to make an extreme change to get away from that,

01:29:43.000 | but you do, you do need to get away from this particular job.

01:29:46.680 | It's not working for you.

01:29:47.400 | It's not working for most people as well.

01:29:48.840 | So anyways, that's, that's the bigger point I want to make here is to

01:29:52.320 | validate people who feel that the hyperactive hive mind hum of their

01:29:57.760 | company or their team is a real source of negativity in your life.

01:30:01.920 | It is.

01:30:02.400 | And I validate that.

01:30:03.280 | And it's a, a completely reasonable justification for making major changes.

01:30:08.560 | All right.

01:30:11.520 | So what I like to do at the end of the show is switch gears to talk about

01:30:15.360 | something interesting that you, my listeners have sent in first.

01:30:18.880 | I want to mention a, another sponsor that makes this show possible.

01:30:22.560 | This show is sponsored by better help.

01:30:26.080 | It's easy to get caught up in what everyone else needs from you, including,

01:30:32.120 | for example, like we just talked about in that last question, the boss that

01:30:36.440 | always wants a response, the colleagues that always need you to come to their

01:30:39.440 | thing, or to give them the information they need or to help them solve

01:30:41.960 | the problems that they have.

01:30:42.880 | It's easy to get caught up in that and what everyone else needs for you.

01:30:46.280 | And in doing so never take a moment to think about what you need from yourself.

01:30:50.720 | How is your own mental life doing in the moment?

01:30:57.120 | Is it sustainable?

01:30:58.720 | Or do you find yourself racked with anxiety?

01:31:00.840 | Do you find yourself racked with occasional senses of hopelessness?

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01:31:07.720 | I think this issue is increasingly relevant and urgent in a professional

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01:31:29.760 | We open up our mind to all sorts of different potential deviations from

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01:31:43.080 | Just like if your leg hurts, you're going to see a leg doctor.

01:31:46.280 | If your mind is not where you want it to be, you'll see a mind doctor.

01:31:50.400 | What we would call a therapist.

01:31:52.720 | The hard part of course, is finding a therapist.

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01:31:57.440 | Uh, it's awkward.

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01:34:42.840 | All right, Jesse, let's switch gears to talk about something interesting.

01:34:46.960 | This is where I take an email that you and my listeners have sent to my

01:34:50.560 | interesting@calnewport.com email address.

01:34:53.680 | And I find something that caught my attention and we talk about it.

01:34:58.760 | Today, I want to look at an article that was published on May 12th

01:35:02.720 | in the wall street journal.

01:35:04.360 | Now, if you're watching this, you can see the article on the screen.

01:35:09.000 | If you want to watch this is episode.

01:35:12.080 | What do we have?

01:35:12.480 | Jesse two 49 episode two 49@youtube.com/calnewportmedia or episode

01:35:19.120 | two 49@thedeeplife.com.

01:35:21.200 | I will of course narrate what I'm reading as well.

01:35:23.200 | If you're just listening, all right, here's the article.

01:35:26.280 | It's I'm going to warn everyone.

01:35:27.640 | We're going to temporarily return to tech nerd territory, but

01:35:31.400 | we won't stay there long.

01:35:32.320 | Uh, here's the article.

01:35:33.920 | Apple is breaking its own rules with a new headset.

01:35:38.600 | Apple soon to be revealed mixed reality device will likely cost $3,000.

01:35:44.760 | Requires a separate battery pack and is still experimental.

01:35:47.840 | Jesse, I'll show you a picture of this mixed reality headset.

01:35:51.000 | That's not it.

01:35:52.360 | That's Oculus.

01:35:53.240 | That's magic leap.

01:35:56.160 | Ooh, maybe they don't have it on here.

01:35:57.440 | Well, I'll put up another pair.

01:35:58.560 | All right.

01:35:59.240 | So I don't know.

01:36:00.360 | This is a magic leap I'm showing on there.

01:36:02.000 | The, the Apple one looks sort of similar to that as well.

01:36:04.800 | So if you're watching this, it's not exactly the coolest thing, but

01:36:08.080 | here's why I'm talking about this.

01:36:09.240 | This article is a little bit dismissive.

01:36:10.640 | They say this is a Apple is breaking its own rules because it's putting

01:36:13.720 | this thing out there that's not a fully polished product, the iPhone,

01:36:18.640 | the iPad, the Apple watch.

01:36:20.200 | Typically Apple's MO is this a fully polished, a beautiful consumer

01:36:24.240 | product, and once it's out there, it's ready to go here, there being

01:36:27.440 | a little bit more experimental.

01:36:28.680 | They say, we think the mixed reality is going to be important.

01:36:31.040 | We're releasing our product.

01:36:33.080 | It's not a fully polished, ready to go.

01:36:36.200 | This is the version that a hundred million people are going to buy yet,

01:36:38.480 | but we want to put in the market even in this early state.

01:36:41.320 | So that's a little bit different for Apple.

01:36:42.720 | Now the article is a little dismissive.

01:36:44.000 | It's just, yeah, it has this battery pack.

01:36:45.520 | It looks kind of nerdy.

01:36:46.400 | They don't really know what to do with this technology.

01:36:49.440 | I'm bringing it up, however, because I think this is an

01:36:53.360 | important development in the technology world that no one is

01:36:56.240 | talking about at the moment.

01:36:57.560 | And this comes back to my theory about what the biggest disruption,

01:37:02.400 | the consumer technology space is going to be over the next 15 years.

01:37:05.240 | I'm not convinced as I've talked about before that the mantle of biggest

01:37:09.840 | disruption is going to get placed on generative AI.

01:37:12.880 | It might.

01:37:13.600 | I do think AI is going to be a big part of the future of the

01:37:18.520 | consumer technology space.

01:37:19.760 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:37:21.800 | consumer technology space.

01:37:22.880 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:37:25.120 | consumer technology space.

01:37:26.240 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:37:28.400 | consumer technology space.

01:37:29.480 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:37:31.440 | consumer technology space.

01:37:32.480 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:37:34.800 | consumer technology space.

01:37:35.800 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:37:37.880 | consumer technology space.

01:37:38.920 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:37:40.840 | consumer technology space.

01:37:41.840 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:37:43.800 | consumer technology space.

01:37:44.800 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:37:46.840 | consumer technology space.

01:37:47.840 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:37:49.840 | consumer technology space.

01:37:50.840 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:37:52.840 | consumer technology space.

01:37:53.840 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:37:55.840 | consumer technology space.

01:37:56.840 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:37:58.840 | consumer technology space.

01:37:59.840 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:38:01.840 | consumer technology space.

01:38:02.840 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:38:04.840 | consumer technology space.

01:38:05.840 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:38:07.840 | consumer technology space.

01:38:08.840 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:38:10.840 | consumer technology space.

01:38:11.840 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:38:13.840 | consumer technology space.

01:38:14.840 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:38:17.840 | consumer technology space.

01:38:18.840 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:38:20.840 | consumer technology space.

01:38:21.840 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:38:23.840 | consumer technology space.

01:38:24.840 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:38:26.840 | consumer technology space.

01:38:27.840 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:38:29.840 | consumer technology space.

01:38:30.840 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:38:32.840 | consumer technology space.

01:38:33.840 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:38:35.840 | consumer technology space.

01:38:36.840 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:38:38.840 | consumer technology space.

01:38:39.840 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:38:41.840 | consumer technology space.

01:38:42.840 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:38:44.840 | consumer technology space.

01:38:45.840 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:38:47.840 | consumer technology space.

01:38:48.840 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:38:50.840 | consumer technology space.

01:38:51.840 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:38:53.840 | consumer technology space.

01:38:54.840 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:38:56.840 | consumer technology space.

01:38:57.840 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:38:59.840 | consumer technology space.

01:39:00.840 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:39:02.840 | consumer technology space.

01:39:03.840 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:39:05.840 | consumer technology space.

01:39:06.840 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:39:08.840 | consumer technology space.

01:39:09.840 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:39:12.840 | consumer technology space.

01:39:13.840 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:39:15.840 | consumer technology space.

01:39:16.840 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:39:18.840 | consumer technology space.

01:39:19.840 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:39:21.840 | consumer technology space.

01:39:22.840 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:39:24.840 | consumer technology space.

01:39:25.840 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:39:27.840 | consumer technology space.

01:39:28.840 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:39:30.840 | consumer technology space.

01:39:31.840 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:39:33.840 | consumer technology space.

01:39:34.840 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:39:36.840 | consumer technology space.

01:39:37.840 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:39:39.840 | consumer technology space.

01:39:40.840 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:39:42.840 | consumer technology space.

01:39:43.840 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:39:45.840 | consumer technology space.

01:39:46.840 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:39:48.840 | consumer technology space.

01:39:49.840 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:39:51.840 | consumer technology space.

01:39:52.840 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:39:54.840 | consumer technology space.

01:39:55.840 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:39:57.840 | consumer technology space.

01:39:58.840 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:40:00.840 | consumer technology space.

01:40:01.840 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:40:03.840 | consumer technology space.

01:40:04.840 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:40:07.840 | consumer technology space.

01:40:08.840 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:40:10.840 | consumer technology space.

01:40:11.840 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:40:13.840 | consumer technology space.

01:40:14.840 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:40:16.840 | consumer technology space.

01:40:17.840 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:40:19.840 | consumer technology space.

01:40:20.840 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:40:22.840 | consumer technology space.

01:40:23.840 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:40:25.840 | consumer technology space.

01:40:26.840 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:40:28.840 | consumer technology space.

01:40:29.840 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:40:31.840 | consumer technology space.

01:40:32.840 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:40:34.840 | consumer technology space.

01:40:35.840 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:40:37.840 | consumer technology space.

01:40:38.840 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:40:40.840 | consumer technology space.

01:40:41.840 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:40:43.840 | consumer technology space.

01:40:44.840 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:40:46.840 | consumer technology space.

01:40:47.840 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:40:49.840 | consumer technology space.

01:40:50.840 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:40:52.840 | consumer technology space.

01:40:53.840 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:40:55.840 | consumer technology space.

01:40:56.840 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:40:58.840 | consumer technology space.

01:40:59.840 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:41:02.840 | consumer technology space.

01:41:03.840 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:41:05.840 | consumer technology space.

01:41:06.840 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:41:08.840 | consumer technology space.

01:41:09.840 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:41:11.840 | consumer technology space.

01:41:12.840 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:41:14.840 | consumer technology space.

01:41:15.840 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:41:17.840 | consumer technology space.

01:41:18.840 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:41:20.840 | consumer technology space.

01:41:21.840 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:41:23.840 | consumer technology space.

01:41:24.840 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:41:26.840 | consumer technology space.

01:41:27.840 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:41:29.840 | consumer technology space.

01:41:30.840 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:41:32.840 | consumer technology space.

01:41:33.840 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:41:35.840 | consumer technology space.

01:41:36.840 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:41:38.840 | consumer technology space.

01:41:39.840 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:41:41.840 | consumer technology space.

01:41:42.840 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:41:44.840 | consumer technology space.

01:41:45.840 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:41:47.840 | consumer technology space.

01:41:48.840 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:41:50.840 | consumer technology space.

01:41:51.840 | And I think that's going to be a big part of the future of the

01:41:53.840 | consumer technology space.

01:41:54.840 | >> All right, thanks, John.

01:41:55.840 | >> All right, thanks, John.

01:41:56.840 | >> All right, thanks, John.

01:41:57.840 | >> I think we have a couple of questions.

01:41:59.840 | I'm going to go ahead and get started with one.

01:42:01.840 | I think we have a couple of questions.

01:42:03.840 | I'm going to go ahead and get started with one.

01:42:05.840 | I think we have a couple of questions.

01:42:07.840 | I'm going to go ahead and get started with one.

01:42:09.840 | I'm going to go ahead and get started with one.

01:42:11.840 | I'm going to go ahead and get started with one.

01:42:13.840 | I'm going to go ahead and get started with one.

01:42:15.840 | I'm going to go ahead and get started with one.

01:42:17.840 | I'm going to go ahead and get started with one.

01:42:19.840 | I'm going to go ahead and get started with one.

01:42:21.840 | I'm going to go ahead and get started with one.

01:42:23.840 | I'm going to go ahead and get started with one.

01:42:25.840 | I'm going to go ahead and get started with one.

01:42:27.840 | I'm going to go ahead and get started with one.

01:42:29.840 | I'm going to go ahead and get started with one.

01:42:31.840 | I'm going to go ahead and get started with one.

01:42:33.840 | I'm going to go ahead and get started with one.

01:42:35.840 | I'm going to go ahead and get started with one.

01:42:37.840 | I'm going to go ahead and get started with one.

01:42:39.840 | I'm going to go ahead and get started with one.

01:42:41.840 | I'm going to go ahead and get started with one.

01:42:43.840 | I'm going to go ahead and get started with one.

01:42:45.840 | I'm going to go ahead and get started with one.

01:42:47.840 | I'm going to go ahead and get started with one.

01:42:49.840 | I'm going to go ahead and get started with one.

01:42:51.840 | I'm going to go ahead and get started with one.

01:42:53.840 | I'm going to go ahead and get started with one.

01:42:55.840 | I'm going to go ahead and get started with one.

01:42:57.840 | I'm going to go ahead and get started with one.

01:42:59.840 | I'm going to go ahead and get started with one.

01:43:01.840 | I'm going to go ahead and get started with one.

01:43:03.840 | I'm going to go ahead and get started with one.

01:43:05.840 | I'm going to go ahead and get started with one.

01:43:07.840 | I'm going to go ahead and get started with one.

01:43:09.840 | I'm going to go ahead and get started with one.

01:43:11.840 | I'm going to go ahead and get started with one.

01:43:13.840 | I'm going to go ahead and get started with one.

01:43:15.840 | I'm going to go ahead and get started with one.

01:43:17.840 | I'm going to go ahead and get started with one.

01:43:19.840 | I'm going to get started with one.

01:43:21.840 | I'm going to get started with one.

01:43:23.840 | I'm going to get started with one.

01:43:25.840 | I'm going to get started with one.

01:43:27.840 | I'm going to get started with one.

01:43:29.840 | I'm going to get started with one.

01:43:31.840 | I'm going to get started with one.

01:43:33.840 | I'm going to get started with one.

01:43:35.840 | I'm going to get started with one.

01:43:37.840 | I'm going to get started with one.

01:43:39.840 | I'm going to get started with one.

01:43:41.840 | I'm going to get started with one.

01:43:43.840 | I'm going to get started with one.

01:43:45.840 | I'm going to get started with one.

01:43:47.840 | (upbeat music)

Ep. 249: The Good Enough Job (w/ Simone Stolzoff)

Chapters