financial-samurai-po_simone-and-sam_full-length-jun-6-2023-002_composer-rhp3pmrd4_clip_2023-jun-05-1634pm-utc-riverside
00:00:00.000 | Hello, everybody.
00:00:01.880 | It's Sam from the Financial Samurai Podcast and I have a special guest with me, Simone
00:00:06.240 | Stolzoff.
00:00:07.240 | Say hello.
00:00:08.240 | Hi, Sam.
00:00:09.240 | Nice to be here.
00:00:10.240 | So, Simone is based in San Francisco and he recently wrote a book called The Good Enough
00:00:16.800 | Job with Portfolio Penguin Random House.
00:00:19.000 | So, he's a fellow author and the subtitle is called Reclaiming Life from Work.
00:00:25.440 | I love this topic because as you all might know, I left my day job in banking in 2012,
00:00:31.800 | my wife left her day job in finance in 2015 and we haven't gone back.
00:00:36.920 | And so, every year that goes by, it's kind of like us looking from the outside in wondering
00:00:42.200 | what's going on with work and purpose and life and all that.
00:00:47.640 | So, I'm here to have Simone tell me why he started writing this book, why he wrote this
00:00:52.880 | book and what he discovered on his journey.
00:00:56.560 | Yeah.
00:00:57.560 | So, first, thanks for having me on, Sam.
00:01:00.200 | I've been a long-time listener, so it's a pleasure to be here.
00:01:03.120 | There's sort of two ways into the book for me.
00:01:04.960 | The first is I'm a journalist by training and for as long as I've been a journalist,
00:01:09.360 | my beat has been work, the workplace, how different companies operate, also the labor
00:01:14.300 | market at a broader scale.
00:01:16.400 | And I was observing how central work had become to so many American, in particular, identities,
00:01:23.240 | senses of meaning and purpose in life.
00:01:25.360 | And then the second is personal.
00:01:27.000 | So about four years ago, I ended up leaving the newsroom to take a job at this design
00:01:33.000 | agency called IDEO.
00:01:35.280 | And in that sort of transition between being a journalist to being a designer, it didn't
00:01:40.360 | feel like I was choosing between two jobs as much as it felt like I was choosing between
00:01:45.320 | two versions of me.
00:01:47.520 | And so I started wondering, so how did my identity become so entwined with my career?
00:01:52.400 | And I knew that it wasn't just me.
00:01:54.720 | So in my research in the past few years, it's really exploring this question of how do we
00:01:59.180 | conflate who we are with what we do and why is this phenomenon particularly prevalent
00:02:05.360 | here in the US?
00:02:06.720 | Yeah, definitely.
00:02:08.400 | So I didn't realize this until you pointed out because I'm wearing a hat from San Francisco
00:02:12.800 | University High School, which is a private school here in San Francisco.
00:02:17.280 | And you attended this private school.
00:02:19.560 | And the reason why I wear this hat is because I was a coach for three years from 2017 almost
00:02:25.040 | to 2020 when the pandemic hit.
00:02:27.680 | And so going to SF University High School, you then went to Penn, an Ivy League school,
00:02:34.180 | and you studied creative writing.
00:02:37.120 | And how long were you working after Penn until you went to Stanford for your master's in
00:02:41.880 | journalism?
00:02:42.880 | Yeah, I had about six years or so.
00:02:47.240 | I guess I was like 27 when I went back to school to rebrand myself as a journalist.
00:02:52.280 | And so I was really playing Goldilocks with careers in my 20s.
00:02:55.840 | I moved right back to San Francisco.
00:02:58.280 | In college, I studied creative writing and poetry, but also economics.
00:03:01.800 | And so there was this tension between sort of the pursuit of art and the pursuit of commerce
00:03:05.560 | in my life.
00:03:06.560 | I came back and I worked in advertising for a few years.
00:03:09.440 | I worked in tech for a few years.
00:03:11.760 | All the while trying to find a dream job, kind of a perfect job that encapsulates all
00:03:16.240 | of my interests.
00:03:17.520 | And then I went back to grad school to square my hips towards journalism.
00:03:21.920 | And so as a writer myself, I've written in the past how being a professional writer is
00:03:26.600 | very difficult.
00:03:28.440 | To actually do it as a full-time job, it's not easy.
00:03:32.080 | I think most people, just kind of like maybe actors, they have being an actor or writer
00:03:38.440 | as a part-time job and then they have a day job doing something else.
00:03:42.200 | So as an attendee of some of these schools, which are all very expensive, how did you
00:03:48.720 | kind of reconcile the commerce part of it where you wanted to graduate and make money
00:03:54.240 | and also do what you wanted to do?
00:03:56.760 | How does one reconcile that?
00:03:58.160 | Because I'm a parent myself and I'm thinking to myself, "Wow, is college really going to
00:04:01.920 | cost $750,000 in 15 years for my daughter if she goes to a private school and gets zero
00:04:08.560 | scholarships?"
00:04:09.560 | Yeah, it's like one of the central tensions in my own life is how do I think about the
00:04:15.800 | security and stability that a stable, well-paying job might provide me with my own desire to
00:04:23.440 | pursue art or pursue things that feel more in line with the creative side of me.
00:04:30.400 | Fast forward, there's a great irony in that leaving journalism, leaving the newsroom is
00:04:34.960 | actually the best thing that happened to my writing career.
00:04:37.640 | It allowed me to write the book.
00:04:39.360 | It allowed me to have a job that didn't expend all of my editorial energy and time.
00:04:45.440 | But going back to college, especially at a place like Penn that's very pre-professional,
00:04:49.920 | a lot of my peers were in Wharton, in the business school.
00:04:54.160 | They were very much on a track that provided a lot of legibility into what is the step,
00:05:00.160 | what is the next step, working at places like Goldman, like yourself, or maybe the big consulting
00:05:05.720 | firms.
00:05:07.160 | It was hard to try and pursue something that was maybe more risky or less known in terms
00:05:15.120 | of what the outcome would be.
00:05:16.760 | I think that's actually a big disservice for places that are really pre-professional like
00:05:20.680 | Penn is that there were a lot of dreams deferred.
00:05:24.640 | Even for me, as a poetry student, I ended up trying to find the business application
00:05:29.560 | of poetry, which was copywriting.
00:05:31.960 | And my friends that were urban studies or even theater kids ended up going to work for
00:05:38.240 | McKinsey or BCG because there was not real comfort with uncertainty.
00:05:44.640 | I think we see that a lot, especially among young people.
00:05:47.360 | Not to say that this is something that we should blame them for, especially coming out
00:05:51.560 | of a place like a private institution where you might have to assume a lot of student
00:05:56.560 | debt in order to graduate.
00:05:57.880 | It makes sense to try and find lucrative, stable job opportunities on the other end.
00:06:03.080 | Thankfully, my parents helped out with college.
00:06:05.480 | I paid for a portion of it myself but didn't graduate with any debt or loans.
00:06:11.000 | That's probably what allowed me to have a little bit more of a meandering career.
00:06:15.040 | Right.
00:06:16.040 | That's the one thing.
00:06:17.280 | I'm sure you remember your college application essays about creative writing, poetry, just
00:06:23.640 | the creatives, humanities, and stuff like that.
00:06:26.240 | It seems like about 60% of the graduates from Penn go on to tech, consulting, finance.
00:06:34.000 | I always wonder what happened to the idealism of youth because it seemed like it was crushed
00:06:41.520 | by the necessity of making money after college.
00:06:45.240 | I like your story because you ended up pursuing what you wanted to do since high school at
00:06:50.440 | least, poetry and writing.
00:06:53.920 | You did go to IDEO.
00:06:55.400 | Is that a tech company or a design company?
00:06:58.520 | It's a design agency.
00:07:01.720 | Its specialty is this thing called design thinking.
00:07:04.040 | Essentially, it's a creative consultancy that helps create brands, helps create new products.
00:07:09.840 | It really made a name for itself in the early days with designing the first Apple mouse.
00:07:16.000 | It's a product design shop based in Silicon Valley.
00:07:19.880 | Now, it's a global consultancy.
00:07:22.800 | There's nine offices around the world.
00:07:26.120 | It's fun, but it's also corporate.
00:07:29.400 | It's a job where you're doing project-based work for clients.
00:07:32.920 | I really enjoyed it there.
00:07:34.320 | I think a lot of times people will look at the title of my book, The Good Enough Job,
00:07:40.120 | and think it's this slacker manifesto or this way for people to askew the traditional paths
00:07:47.400 | in favor of something that is more creative or aligned with your values.
00:07:53.400 | I think there's actually a lot of value in working for a bigger company, especially early
00:07:58.560 | in your career where you can learn skills and get mentorship.
00:08:02.840 | Some people do what they love for work.
00:08:05.160 | Like me in this situation, I did what I had to do for work so that I could pursue the
00:08:09.400 | book on the side.
00:08:10.960 | How did you decide to become a freelance writer and quit or leave your corporate job?
00:08:17.440 | Also, how did the book deal come about?
00:08:19.440 | Yeah, I mean, they go hand in hand.
00:08:22.800 | I started writing the book in 2019 before the pandemic.
00:08:27.720 | I was still working full-time.
00:08:29.240 | I ended up working at IDEO through 2022, so I finished the manuscript while I still had
00:08:34.960 | a full-time job.
00:08:35.960 | There's a certain tension there where I'm writing this book about the culture of overwork
00:08:40.720 | in America, and I did the lion's share of it while also working a job.
00:08:44.680 | I took a book leave during my time at IDEO for four months to just focus on the book.
00:08:49.760 | And then it wasn't until, I guess, the fall of last year, the fall of 2022, when I decided
00:08:56.080 | that, "Okay, I think I've amassed enough career capital and skills that I can work for myself,
00:09:02.600 | and I'll give this solopreneurship thing a try."
00:09:06.840 | But to be clear, I am a writer.
00:09:09.520 | I write freelance articles.
00:09:12.160 | I have been working on this book and hope to write another one, but I also have other
00:09:17.640 | gigs in my portfolio career that are more about economic stability.
00:09:23.480 | And so even when I left my job in the fall, I took on a four-month consulting project
00:09:28.360 | that was a few days a week.
00:09:29.760 | And I think in some ways I like that balance of having a set of different things that all
00:09:38.160 | mount up to my income, and it allows me to pursue different interests and balance some
00:09:43.960 | of the inherent risk in being a full-time writer with some of the economic stability
00:09:49.400 | of more paid corporate work.
00:09:51.520 | Right.
00:09:52.520 | It is one of those greatest challenges, leaving that corporate day job behind, the 401(k),
00:10:00.600 | the healthcare benefits.
00:10:02.480 | Are you a freelancer now?
00:10:03.880 | Yeah, I'm a freelancer.
00:10:06.120 | I recently started my own LLC.
00:10:10.080 | And I think I'm cautious to give prescriptive advice about this is a path that everyone
00:10:17.880 | should pursue.
00:10:18.880 | I think it's definitely not.
00:10:20.600 | There's a lot of uncertainty and risk associated with it.
00:10:24.640 | One of the things that I found is that even after leaving the grind of corporate work,
00:10:30.880 | I was often my own worst manager.
00:10:34.440 | When you don't have necessarily the infrastructure around you to be able to separate work from
00:10:39.600 | life, it can be hard to not let work seep into all of the unoccupied space in your days.
00:10:45.680 | And so especially in the first few weeks and months of working for myself, I had to be
00:10:50.240 | even more conscious about the time that I was on and off the clock.
00:10:56.240 | I think there's this sort of dream that's painted about autonomy and a lack of Slack
00:11:02.200 | notifications or meetings that will enable freelancer independent workers to be able
00:11:09.000 | to just go on jogs at 11am and dance through the fields.
00:11:14.080 | But in actuality, it can be that much more difficult when you're only rising and falling
00:11:19.920 | with your own professional accomplishments and you're solely responsible for all of
00:11:24.480 | your wins.
00:11:25.480 | It's pretty scary.
00:11:27.040 | There's nobody to blame or to award but yourself.
00:11:31.160 | One of the ideas that I've come across or that I've proposed is that the FIRE movement
00:11:37.280 | in terms of financial independence retire early is becoming more obsolete.
00:11:40.880 | I helped kickstart the movement back in 2009 when I was talking about trying to escape
00:11:44.300 | my corporate banking job and then I finally left my job in 2012.
00:11:48.360 | But this year, I decided it seems like it's getting a little bit more obsolete because
00:11:53.640 | of so much more work flexibility.
00:11:56.480 | I play pickleball nearby where you live and during the middle of the day from 10.30am
00:12:02.640 | to 1.30pm all the time and I see a lot of young folks ages 25, 35, 40 playing pickleball
00:12:09.560 | for like an hour and a half, two hours.
00:12:12.120 | And I'm thinking to myself, "Man, if I had a day job that enabled me or allowed me to
00:12:15.680 | play pickleball for an hour and a half, two hours, take a nap and then just get my stuff
00:12:20.120 | done when I needed to, I don't think I would have wanted to have retired early at age 34
00:12:27.080 | to do my own thing."
00:12:29.200 | What are your thoughts about the evolution of work now post-pandemic since there seems
00:12:34.260 | to be so much more flexibility for knowledge workers at least?
00:12:38.160 | I think the pendulum swings both ways.
00:12:41.200 | I think in the early aughts in 2010s, we were in this moment of work centricity and hustle
00:12:48.720 | culture and girl bossing.
00:12:50.680 | I think the FIRE movement really provided an alternative vision for what work could
00:12:57.040 | be more of a means to an end as opposed to an end in and of itself.
00:13:02.840 | And now I think we have movements like Quiet Quitting that I know you've talked about on
00:13:08.200 | the show in the past and the cultural cachet that comes with being anti-work or anti-capitalist.
00:13:13.560 | But I think a lot of people are learning that the nihilist work sucks point of view is not
00:13:20.960 | necessarily a recipe for fulfillment either.
00:13:25.960 | Even someone like you who has had the opportunity to retire many years ago, there's still labor
00:13:32.240 | in your days through your writing and your podcast.
00:13:35.520 | I think people want to find ways in which they can contribute to the world.
00:13:39.920 | I think the great promise of remote and hybrid work is that workers can have a lot more control
00:13:47.880 | over how they get their work done.
00:13:50.720 | I think that's one thing that gives me a lot of excitement and optimism about the future
00:13:56.080 | is that instead of using these proxy metrics like how much time you spend in an office
00:14:01.280 | chair as an indication of the type of work that you're doing, we're actually in a place
00:14:07.960 | where we can hopefully let the work speak for itself and managers are hopefully instilling
00:14:13.160 | more trust in their employees to get the work done when they want.
00:14:17.160 | I think that's sort of the utopian vision of this future of work where people are able
00:14:22.840 | to design their days around when they have the energy to do work and they can get their
00:14:29.120 | work done on their own schedule.
00:14:30.640 | But I think the risk of this is that if we pair this ability to work at any hour with
00:14:36.920 | this sort of capitalist understanding that if you're not somehow getting ahead, you're
00:14:42.160 | falling behind, it can drive people to overwork and be almost as dangerous as a manager that's
00:14:48.760 | making their employees work 60 to 70-hour weeks.
00:14:52.040 | Yeah, it's quite a balance and it does seem like more and more companies are encouraging
00:14:58.640 | or demanding employees come back to work after the bear market in 2022.
00:15:03.960 | Seems like I think Facebook met a just set after laying off another thousands and thousands
00:15:08.920 | of people, mandatory three days in the office from soon on.
00:15:13.800 | But it always seems soon on.
00:15:15.580 | And here in San Francisco, it just seems like nobody really wants to go back to work because
00:15:20.480 | they're having such a good time or a better time with the flexibility, especially if you
00:15:24.920 | have children or if you have other things you want to do on the side.
00:15:29.480 | Can you share some of stories of people you've encountered where people have been struggling
00:15:35.880 | with the idea of going back to work or actually leaving to be a freelancer?
00:15:40.240 | Yeah, I'll share one of the stories that I write about in the book because it rhymes
00:15:45.760 | with a lot of the stuff that you talk about both in your writing and on the show, which
00:15:50.800 | is a story of a Wall Street banker that I profiled.
00:15:53.920 | His name is Kay He.
00:15:55.080 | Some of the listeners might be familiar with him.
00:15:57.040 | He has his own sort of community of people rethinking their relationship to work.
00:16:01.320 | But in many ways, Kay represented the paradigm of sort of the American dream.
00:16:07.600 | He was a Cambodian-American immigrant growing up, lower middle class in New York City.
00:16:13.320 | He spent his high school years really working hard to try and get into a top college.
00:16:19.720 | He was the valedictorian of his class, went to Yale for college, and then in college was
00:16:25.160 | trying to figure out, "Okay, what are the most lucrative potential job paths for me?
00:16:29.800 | I could be an engineer.
00:16:31.400 | I could be a doctor.
00:16:32.400 | I could be a lawyer.
00:16:33.400 | I could go into finance."
00:16:35.040 | He chose the latter, went to work on Wall Street, rose his way up the ranks at BlackRock,
00:16:41.120 | became one of the youngest managing directors in BlackRock's history, was making seven
00:16:46.360 | figures before he turned 30 years old.
00:16:49.800 | But it came to a head in his mid-30s when he realized that he was climbing a ladder
00:16:55.720 | that he didn't actually want to be on.
00:16:57.920 | He looked up at the people above him at the org chart and asked himself, "Do I want their
00:17:03.080 | life?"
00:17:04.080 | And the answer was no.
00:17:05.880 | And so he ended up leaving and going, it's in many ways the most cliche story of the
00:17:12.400 | book.
00:17:13.400 | He goes to move to California.
00:17:14.400 | He starts surfing every day.
00:17:15.880 | He starts working for himself.
00:17:17.680 | But I think the wisdom in his story is that on one end of the spectrum, you get people
00:17:23.720 | that are just listening to what the market values.
00:17:27.440 | They're just trying to make career decisions based on what pays the most or what's the
00:17:31.640 | most prestigious or what might give them the highest status.
00:17:36.680 | On the other end of the spectrum, you get people who are just making decisions based
00:17:41.440 | on what they themselves value without regarding what the market values.
00:17:46.200 | And that might drive people to say, take on a lot of student debt to pursue a graduate
00:17:51.160 | degree that might not lead to stable job prospects on the other end or to go all in to pursue
00:17:56.720 | art but become so preoccupied with how you're going to pay rent that you can't actually
00:18:01.700 | focus on the art that you want to create.
00:18:03.720 | And so I think the upshot is that we have to take these things in consideration.
00:18:08.520 | On one hand, what the market values, on the other hand, what we value and try and find
00:18:13.400 | work at their intersection because there are dangers to indexing too far on either extreme.
00:18:20.440 | I agree.
00:18:22.040 | And so in that story, I know K.E.
00:18:24.000 | before, he has actually profiled Financial Samurai in the past and I definitely should
00:18:27.320 | get him on the podcast because I do have a question for him and that is about his path
00:18:32.840 | and his decision to actually hire people.
00:18:36.220 | One of the things I decided in 2012 was to hire nobody for Financial Samurai because
00:18:40.080 | I didn't want to manage anybody.
00:18:41.920 | I wanted the most simple, streamlined business, if you would call it, as possible so I could
00:18:47.140 | be free to do what I want.
00:18:48.440 | I work with my wife but that's fine.
00:18:51.400 | And I do like his story a lot and definitely I should get him on the podcast.
00:18:55.880 | But I do question his desire and he's living what he wants but I want to know why he decided
00:19:01.720 | to hire so many people and start the 401k process and all that he mentioned because
00:19:06.360 | that's a lot of work unto itself.
00:19:09.680 | I'm wondering for you, Simone, why don't more people, once they get to a certain level of
00:19:17.240 | financial stability, let's say it's after 10 years, 15 years, maybe 20 years of working,
00:19:23.120 | if you're saving as a normal person, well, the average American is only saving like 5%
00:19:26.880 | to 7% but let's say you're above average and you're saving a little bit more and you're
00:19:30.120 | investing, why don't more Americans and more people in the world, workers, try to jump
00:19:36.760 | off that thing that they're doing that isn't giving them any joy to do something they want
00:19:44.360 | to do?
00:19:45.360 | Why don't more people take risks?
00:19:46.920 | Yeah.
00:19:47.920 | I mean, I think there's a few reasons.
00:19:50.400 | One is that in our country, I think part of the reason why work is so fraught is because
00:19:55.720 | the consequences of losing work are so dire.
00:19:58.320 | It's not just your paycheck but it's often your health insurance, it's if you're an immigrant,
00:20:02.760 | your ability to stay in this country.
00:20:05.120 | And so there isn't a very robust social safety net to catch you if something falls through.
00:20:10.720 | The second is that there's this level of moving the goalposts.
00:20:16.680 | We have this heat in the stick adaptation that gets us comfortable with these new lifestyle
00:20:21.640 | changes that we make in our lives and then we put ourselves into situations where we
00:20:26.920 | have to earn a certain level of money and there isn't much slack built into our financial
00:20:31.200 | systems.
00:20:33.240 | There's this Harvard study that I'm sure you've referenced before about interviewing millionaires
00:20:38.760 | and they interviewed people that had $1 million in the bank and $2 million in the bank and
00:20:43.720 | $5 million in the bank and $10 million in the bank.
00:20:47.440 | And they asked people, "How happy are you on a scale of one to 10?"
00:20:51.920 | People gave their answers and then they asked, "What would it take for you to get to 10
00:20:56.320 | out of 10?"
00:20:57.560 | And all people that they interviewed, no matter how much money they made, said that, "I would
00:21:02.640 | be happy once I have twice as much as I have now."
00:21:05.920 | And so there's this sort of keeping up with the Joneses element and this measuring stick
00:21:10.720 | that we hold ourselves to.
00:21:12.760 | It's hard to understand what your level of enough is because the default here in the
00:21:19.280 | US is that more is better.
00:21:21.280 | Yeah, I've been trying to solve that problem for a while on Financial Samurai and we can
00:21:28.680 | use 25 times expenses.
00:21:30.600 | I use 10 to 20 times your income as your net worth target to feel like enough.
00:21:36.240 | So let's say you make $100,000 and once you get 10 times that or a million, you start
00:21:40.520 | feeling, "Okay, I got some financial independence.
00:21:43.120 | I got some momentum."
00:21:44.120 | And then once you get to 20 times or greater, you're set.
00:21:48.080 | I feel strongly that you can do whatever you want and take those risks that you want.
00:21:54.160 | But it is different for everybody.
00:21:56.320 | And I do want to challenge people to think about how much is enough by going backwards,
00:22:00.480 | doing the calculations.
00:22:02.040 | It's true, once you get there, you might experience, "Ah, the one more year syndrome to keep on
00:22:06.680 | working another year," or you might want a little bit more or you might want to have
00:22:10.320 | kids or something.
00:22:12.280 | As a young, early 30s man in San Francisco, how do you view what is enough for you?
00:22:20.400 | Because this is one of the most expensive cities in America, if not the world, and you're
00:22:26.360 | on this journey of freelance and you eat what you kill.
00:22:30.600 | It's a great feeling, the correlation with effort and reward.
00:22:34.440 | How do you forecast or model out your future living in this expensive city?
00:22:39.840 | Yeah, I think it's definitely something that I'm considering on a daily, if not weekly,
00:22:46.960 | basis.
00:22:48.200 | One of the things that I like about the framework of the book, the title is "The Good Enough
00:22:51.600 | Job."
00:22:53.120 | The idea with "good enough" is that it's subjective.
00:22:56.360 | So for some people, a good enough job might be a job that earns a certain wage, or for
00:23:01.920 | others it might be a job that has a certain title or is in a certain industry.
00:23:06.720 | And for someone else, it might be a job that gets off at a certain hour so that you can
00:23:10.480 | pick up your kids from elementary school each day.
00:23:14.300 | So for me, I think about the life I want to live as sort of the North Star.
00:23:19.440 | And all my family and my partner's family are both here in the Bay Area, and so there
00:23:25.120 | is a certain level of financial responsibility that we have to earn a living in order to
00:23:31.600 | stay here.
00:23:32.600 | And it wouldn't be responsible for us to, say, both quit our jobs and just travel full-time
00:23:39.480 | for multiple years if we also have these other goals, like starting a family and saving for
00:23:44.800 | college.
00:23:46.000 | And so I don't have it in a science as much as an art, which is the art is that I want
00:23:51.880 | to start with my vision of a life well-lived and then think about what type of work or
00:23:56.560 | what type of income I need in order to support that vision.
00:24:01.080 | And so even though that I'm taking a risk to a certain extent in working for myself
00:24:06.560 | and pursuing writing, I want to make sure that this is an ongoing conversation that
00:24:11.920 | me and my partner have.
00:24:13.440 | And thankfully, she has a W-2 job, and we can sort of think about how we can rely on
00:24:21.080 | each other at different points in our life.
00:24:23.120 | But even though I've written this book about right-sizing works placed in our life, I'm
00:24:27.560 | also not above the idea that I might return to the corporate world at some point.
00:24:32.440 | I really believe in sort of the seasonality of work.
00:24:36.080 | And right now, I'm in a season where I'm partnered with no kids.
00:24:41.380 | We have a pretty stable rent situation.
00:24:44.160 | And so I don't need to necessarily optimize for the most income that I can make on a yearly
00:24:51.880 | basis.
00:24:52.880 | But who knows?
00:24:53.880 | Maybe if we have some kids, it might change the calculation.
00:24:58.160 | And I hope that the listeners take away that none of this advice is prescriptive.
00:25:04.000 | It's different strokes for different folks.
00:25:06.120 | And especially even in my own life, I imagine that in different phases, I'll have a different
00:25:11.440 | calculus for what I need.
00:25:13.200 | Yeah, it's hard to know what you don't know.
00:25:18.720 | Can you go through an exercise now?
00:25:20.600 | Do you see a scenario where you can see your blind spot?
00:25:25.600 | By definition, it's hard to see your blind spot.
00:25:28.400 | I'm 45, so I can kind of imagine your future a little bit because I left around 34 and
00:25:35.240 | then I'm a writer and I have this podcast.
00:25:38.440 | Do you foresee a scenario that you cannot see is my question?
00:25:43.200 | Yeah.
00:25:44.200 | I mean, I feel insecure about the choices that I've made in my career to a certain extent,
00:25:50.120 | especially when I'm comparing myself to a lot of my peers.
00:25:55.640 | Most of my friends in college and even in high school have pursued very tracked, stable
00:26:02.160 | professions.
00:26:03.160 | Even if it's not finance, it's something like medicine or law or have worked in tech for
00:26:09.560 | a number of years.
00:26:11.880 | And the thing I try and remind myself is that I can't compare my insides to other people's
00:26:17.720 | outsides.
00:26:18.720 | Although other people might have from the outside this sort of shiny veneer of economic
00:26:26.080 | stability and a lack of stress because of it, that's not necessarily my game.
00:26:31.880 | That's their game.
00:26:33.200 | And so I think one of the things that I wonder about is paying out of pocket for health care
00:26:41.040 | each month and is trying to write books, which if you calculate the hourly wage of writing
00:26:49.880 | a book, you're making basically pennies on the hour.
00:26:53.480 | Are these things responsible?
00:26:55.540 | Not just for me.
00:26:56.540 | Obviously, I can center my own hedonistic desires and my love for writing, but I'm moving
00:27:03.800 | into a place in my life where it's not just about me.
00:27:07.220 | It's about me and my partner and my family and my ability to care for my parents.
00:27:14.320 | And so I think my biggest blind spot, if you could call it that, is wondering whether I'm
00:27:20.440 | doing enough to plan for my future.
00:27:23.000 | And I think for most people, that creates a lot of risk aversion where they say, "Well,
00:27:28.300 | because I don't know what the future holds, I might as well stay in this job that I hate
00:27:31.840 | for a long time."
00:27:33.920 | But there's actually something that Kay told me that I think has really stuck with me,
00:27:37.080 | which is it's actually riskier for his kids to be interacting with him in a job that he
00:27:43.040 | hates where it brings down his mood, where it makes his daily experience miserable, than
00:27:48.480 | to take the risk of trying to pursue something that's more value aligned.
00:27:52.040 | Yeah, I agree.
00:27:53.360 | I think a lot of people, something like 70% of people are disengaged from their jobs.
00:27:58.040 | So if you're disengaged or you hate your job, you bring that mood back to your home and
00:28:02.480 | that could be like a virus that spreads to your loved ones who are innocent and that
00:28:07.200 | would be no good.
00:28:08.960 | So I guess for you, there's two things here.
00:28:12.920 | One is the good enough job where you want to, it's a subjective term where you want
00:28:16.840 | to do what you want, balance the commercial and your desires.
00:28:21.160 | And at the same time, there's a comparison because we can't help but compare, but then
00:28:25.520 | unfortunately it makes us a little bit miserable sometimes because there's always someone better,
00:28:29.120 | more successful, richer, more famous, better looking, whatever.
00:28:32.460 | How do you reconcile that?
00:28:33.720 | What is a good enough job for you on your new journey and what would be the ideal situation
00:28:39.960 | for you in five years in terms of your writing career?
00:28:43.960 | Yeah, I think my own aspirations have changed a lot over the course of writing the book.
00:28:49.320 | I came into it thinking that, "Okay, maybe I'll take some time, I'll write this book
00:28:54.080 | and then my aspirations are still to say rise up the corporate ranks or manage a team or
00:29:00.000 | be in the C-suite, what have you."
00:29:02.320 | And now I have a different North Star, which is that at least in the professional realm,
00:29:05.720 | I loved the process of writing books.
00:29:07.720 | And so if I think about the pie chart of how I spend my professional life, I hope to spend
00:29:13.240 | a larger and larger proportion of my time on long form editorial or writing projects.
00:29:19.840 | But in the interim, I hope that I can balance some of that with a few other things like
00:29:26.600 | teaching or consulting or paid writing that might help balance some of the uncertainty
00:29:34.160 | and instability of pursuing a path of being an author.
00:29:38.000 | And so I think like many people that listen, I'm not just one note, both professionally
00:29:44.720 | and outside of my professional life.
00:29:46.600 | Of course, I love writing, but I also love thinking about politics and I like collaborating
00:29:52.640 | with others on creative ideas and I love teaching and sharing what I know.
00:29:58.760 | And so one of the things that I've enjoyed about pursuing this path thus far is that
00:30:03.400 | it allows me to have varied days.
00:30:06.240 | Maybe in the mornings I spend a few hours working on my next book and then I do a few
00:30:12.080 | calls or podcast interviews like this and in the afternoon maybe teach a class and maybe
00:30:18.440 | tomorrow looks completely different from today.
00:30:21.160 | But what I'm trying to hold on to is an awareness of how energized I feel throughout
00:30:28.360 | the day and hopefully in five years, I'm still doing things that allow me to be the
00:30:34.200 | person that I want to be.
00:30:35.880 | That's sort of what I see as the goal of having a good enough job.
00:30:40.520 | It's to have a job that supports the life that you want to lead.
00:30:44.160 | Sure.
00:30:45.160 | For those interested in reading The Good Enough Job, why should they read the book and what
00:30:52.400 | do you think they'll get out of the book after finishing it?
00:30:55.280 | Yeah.
00:30:56.280 | So I came into the book with maybe a little bit more of a hot take about the dangers of
00:31:03.560 | work-centricity and how our culture in the US has become obsessed with work.
00:31:11.040 | The thing that I have enjoyed about the process is that my hot take tempered into something
00:31:16.560 | a little bit more mild.
00:31:17.880 | I think there's this inclination, especially when we're thinking about careers and work,
00:31:22.660 | to either lionize or villainize our jobs.
00:31:26.520 | There's people that say, "Do great work.
00:31:29.200 | That's your impact in the world.
00:31:30.520 | If you don't do what you love, you can never do great work.
00:31:32.960 | If you haven't found a dream job, keep searching," on one side.
00:31:36.680 | Then there's the anti-work people that say, "Work sucks.
00:31:40.640 | We have to burn it all down.
00:31:41.840 | It's a necessary evil.
00:31:44.160 | We deserve to get paid UBI from the government and to be able to do whatever we want with
00:31:48.960 | our time."
00:31:49.960 | I think the truth is not on either extreme.
00:31:52.520 | It's something in the middle.
00:31:54.040 | That's the core question of the book.
00:31:55.760 | It's how do you pursue meaningful work without letting what you do for work subsume who you
00:32:02.080 | are?
00:32:03.080 | I think that's the best case that I can make for any potential readers.
00:32:08.280 | It's a book that is a mirror.
00:32:11.200 | Hopefully through the stories of the different people that I profile, you'll see aspects
00:32:15.800 | of yourself and it'll force you to try and consider what relationship you want to have
00:32:21.880 | to your job, how work fits into your vision of a life well-lived.
00:32:27.240 | It's very individual.
00:32:29.000 | I think it happens on a person-to-person basis, but rarely do we have the opportunity to really
00:32:34.880 | reflect on where we are and where we want to go.
00:32:39.020 | In your book writing journey and your interview journey finding people, did you ever encounter
00:32:43.240 | anybody who actually had a lot of money, was financially independent, and then argued,
00:32:50.000 | "Work sucks.
00:32:51.760 | You should do what you want, be free, and do what you want."
00:32:55.560 | The irony of that story is kind of like maybe Warren Buffet saying, "We should all pay
00:32:59.800 | more taxes," yet he doesn't pay more taxes himself.
00:33:02.960 | I'm trying to get that side of the story where people are that extreme.
00:33:08.320 | Did you ever encounter anybody like that?
00:33:09.920 | Yeah.
00:33:10.920 | I think it showed up in a few different ways.
00:33:13.000 | There's a guy that I profiled recently in an article for The Atlantic that was an advertising
00:33:18.480 | executive and he rose up the ranks in advertising and was making well over six figures.
00:33:25.840 | Then he decided to do something pretty drastic, which is leave the world of advertising that
00:33:31.960 | he had come up in and set a cap for the number of hours he works each week.
00:33:37.880 | Instead of trading his expertise for more money as is customary in the US, he decided
00:33:43.640 | to trade his expertise and the career capital that he had amassed for more time.
00:33:49.200 | He runs this thing called The Experiment where there's three precepts.
00:33:52.320 | He only works 10 to 15 hours a week.
00:33:55.120 | He only works on work that he finds personally meaningful.
00:34:00.160 | He only works for companies that feel aligned with the type of change he wants to see in
00:34:07.560 | the world.
00:34:08.560 | It provides such a counter narrative to how we're taught to think about work, which is
00:34:16.800 | the more you can make, the more you should make.
00:34:20.640 | Here's someone that said, "Okay, this is my level of enough."
00:34:25.600 | Then there's a lot of people, because of the nature of the book, I chose to focus on stories
00:34:30.440 | of people that had made some big change in their life.
00:34:33.480 | I think there are a lot of people that work corporate jobs that maybe they don't enjoy,
00:34:40.680 | but they understand how their job allows them to pay for their material existence, support
00:34:48.200 | the people around them, and are willing to swallow the bitter pill of a job that isn't
00:34:53.400 | necessarily aligned with personal fulfillment each and every day because they can attach
00:34:58.960 | it to this wider mission.
00:35:01.120 | I think that the course take would be, "Okay, we should all quit our jobs and try and find
00:35:07.000 | something that's more aligned with our values."
00:35:08.920 | In actuality, I don't think there's anything wrong with corporate work or well-paid work
00:35:13.280 | or work that is not necessarily fulfilling in every single moment, as long as you recognize
00:35:19.560 | that that's a conscious choice that you're making, as opposed to some default script
00:35:24.040 | that you've inherited.
00:35:25.040 | Mad Fientist Yeah, it's tough.
00:35:27.640 | I think about the movie The Matrix, plugging in, plugging out a lot.
00:35:31.960 | It's very correlated to early retirement and doing what you want.
00:35:37.800 | Sitting on the other side from employee to now potential employer, I've hired freelance
00:35:42.120 | writers before.
00:35:43.120 | No, not writers, but people who help with my tech stuff.
00:35:47.200 | It's an interesting viewpoint because the reason why we hire employees is so that they
00:35:52.280 | provide better value, more value, and we pay them less than the value that they can create.
00:35:57.400 | Otherwise, we're not going to hire them.
00:35:59.240 | That's just capitalism.
00:36:01.080 | I do want to understand more from other people.
00:36:05.800 | When they listen to this podcast or read Financial Samurai, they're like, "Well, you've done
00:36:10.000 | it.
00:36:11.000 | You've got passive investment income.
00:36:12.320 | Of course, you can say, 'Yeah, go play pickleball all day,' but that's not really relevant for
00:36:16.560 | me."
00:36:17.560 | I guess in conclusion, what are your thoughts on how people can be more methodical in choosing
00:36:27.380 | the life that they desire while balancing everything?
00:36:31.880 | Is there a time frame for you specifically where you're like, "Okay, this freelance thing,
00:36:36.640 | this writer thing isn't going to work out.
00:36:38.080 | I'm going to go back to work"?
00:36:39.240 | Do you have any kind of framework to help people think about this balance a little bit
00:36:44.840 | more strategically?
00:36:45.840 | I think when we think about work-life balance, we often think about how we spend our time
00:36:52.800 | and our energy.
00:36:53.800 | Rightfully so, that is one version of how work shows up in our lives.
00:36:59.760 | One of the cases that I make in the book is about the value of diversifying our identities
00:37:04.740 | as well.
00:37:05.740 | Much as an investor benefits from diversifying the sources of their investments, we too benefit
00:37:11.320 | from having diverse sources of meaning and identity in our lives.
00:37:16.960 | The idea of deprioritizing work is not very actionable.
00:37:22.240 | Sometimes you think, "Okay, I can try and care less about my job, but what does that
00:37:26.620 | exactly mean?"
00:37:28.400 | The thing that I often try and instill in people is that on the other side of prioritizing
00:37:33.800 | work is prioritizing life.
00:37:37.820 | They aren't necessarily oppositional, but by taking an active role and investing in
00:37:44.000 | those other identities that exist within you, maybe it's pickleballer, but also it can be
00:37:49.080 | father or friend or citizen or neighbor.
00:37:53.080 | We can have a more diverse portfolio of our identity, which the research shows makes us
00:37:59.860 | more resilient in the face of adversity.
00:38:02.520 | This makes sense if you're attaching your identity to your job and it's a bad day at
00:38:07.960 | work, or your boss says something disparaging that can spill over into all other facets
00:38:11.920 | of your life.
00:38:12.920 | But it can also create better workers.
00:38:15.360 | It can make people more innovative or creative when they have other interests or passions
00:38:20.360 | that are feeding their ability to think about problems in the office.
00:38:25.120 | Perhaps most importantly, and the one that I really harp on in the book, is that it makes
00:38:29.080 | us more well-rounded people.
00:38:31.240 | It allows us to contribute to the world in ways that don't just lead to financial returns
00:38:38.400 | or creating economic value for your employer.
00:38:42.200 | I think that's the thing that I really hope people take away, is that a work-centric existence
00:38:48.200 | doesn't just take our best time, it takes our best energy as well.
00:38:52.120 | In order to cultivate other sources of meaning in your life, in order to really find other
00:38:57.440 | identities that exist within you, you need to invest in them with your energy.
00:39:03.720 | Similar to a plant, it needs watering and time in order to grow.
00:39:09.280 | That's how you gain a more diverse identity portfolio.
00:39:12.960 | It's by making bets.
00:39:14.660 | It's by investing with your attention.
00:39:17.760 | I love that.
00:39:19.240 | Diversifying your identity.
00:39:20.240 | I totally see that.
00:39:21.240 | Imagine, folks, if you were all in on your career and you got laid off one day.
00:39:25.720 | It would be devastating.
00:39:27.400 | But if you diversified your identity and said, "I am a worker.
00:39:31.480 | I'm a parent.
00:39:32.480 | I'm a writer.
00:39:33.480 | I'm an athlete.
00:39:35.080 | I'm religious.
00:39:36.560 | I'm faithful."
00:39:38.280 | That does help soften the blows and it creates much more variety in life and much more interest
00:39:45.000 | and excitement because we can only live one life.
00:39:47.400 | But if we can diversify our identities outside of work, that would be awesome.
00:39:51.800 | So I totally agree with that.
00:39:52.960 | Thank you for that perspective.
00:39:55.080 | So Simone, it's been great talking to you.
00:39:57.280 | Thanks so much for your time.
00:39:58.640 | Where can listeners find your book and what's next for you?
00:40:02.160 | Yeah, thanks so much, Sam.
00:40:04.320 | The best place to go is thegoodenoughjob.com.
00:40:08.120 | That's where you can learn more about the book as well as find me on social media.
00:40:13.200 | In terms of what's next, I'm not sure.
00:40:15.240 | I think that's kind of how I like it.
00:40:17.000 | I'm trying to get comfortable with that ambiguity.
00:40:19.520 | I've started to think a little bit about a second book about the concept of doubt and
00:40:24.400 | how doubt shows up in our life.
00:40:26.560 | But for now, I'm just going to take some time to rest and recover from the book tour and
00:40:32.160 | then we'll see what comes next.
00:40:33.800 | All right.
00:40:34.800 | Well, take care and maybe I'll see you around the neighborhoods of San Francisco.
00:40:38.480 | Sounds good.
00:40:39.480 | Bye-bye.
00:40:39.480 | That's good.
00:40:40.480 | Bye-bye.