Hello, everybody. It's Sam from the Financial Samurai Podcast and I have a special guest with me, Simone Stolzoff. Say hello. Hi, Sam. Nice to be here. So, Simone is based in San Francisco and he recently wrote a book called The Good Enough Job with Portfolio Penguin Random House. So, he's a fellow author and the subtitle is called Reclaiming Life from Work.

I love this topic because as you all might know, I left my day job in banking in 2012, my wife left her day job in finance in 2015 and we haven't gone back. And so, every year that goes by, it's kind of like us looking from the outside in wondering what's going on with work and purpose and life and all that.

So, I'm here to have Simone tell me why he started writing this book, why he wrote this book and what he discovered on his journey. Yeah. So, first, thanks for having me on, Sam. I've been a long-time listener, so it's a pleasure to be here. There's sort of two ways into the book for me.

The first is I'm a journalist by training and for as long as I've been a journalist, my beat has been work, the workplace, how different companies operate, also the labor market at a broader scale. And I was observing how central work had become to so many American, in particular, identities, senses of meaning and purpose in life.

And then the second is personal. So about four years ago, I ended up leaving the newsroom to take a job at this design agency called IDEO. And in that sort of transition between being a journalist to being a designer, it didn't feel like I was choosing between two jobs as much as it felt like I was choosing between two versions of me.

And so I started wondering, so how did my identity become so entwined with my career? And I knew that it wasn't just me. So in my research in the past few years, it's really exploring this question of how do we conflate who we are with what we do and why is this phenomenon particularly prevalent here in the US?

Yeah, definitely. So I didn't realize this until you pointed out because I'm wearing a hat from San Francisco University High School, which is a private school here in San Francisco. And you attended this private school. And the reason why I wear this hat is because I was a coach for three years from 2017 almost to 2020 when the pandemic hit.

And so going to SF University High School, you then went to Penn, an Ivy League school, and you studied creative writing. And how long were you working after Penn until you went to Stanford for your master's in journalism? Yeah, I had about six years or so. I guess I was like 27 when I went back to school to rebrand myself as a journalist.

And so I was really playing Goldilocks with careers in my 20s. I moved right back to San Francisco. In college, I studied creative writing and poetry, but also economics. And so there was this tension between sort of the pursuit of art and the pursuit of commerce in my life.

I came back and I worked in advertising for a few years. I worked in tech for a few years. All the while trying to find a dream job, kind of a perfect job that encapsulates all of my interests. And then I went back to grad school to square my hips towards journalism.

And so as a writer myself, I've written in the past how being a professional writer is very difficult. To actually do it as a full-time job, it's not easy. I think most people, just kind of like maybe actors, they have being an actor or writer as a part-time job and then they have a day job doing something else.

So as an attendee of some of these schools, which are all very expensive, how did you kind of reconcile the commerce part of it where you wanted to graduate and make money and also do what you wanted to do? How does one reconcile that? Because I'm a parent myself and I'm thinking to myself, "Wow, is college really going to cost $750,000 in 15 years for my daughter if she goes to a private school and gets zero scholarships?" Yeah, it's like one of the central tensions in my own life is how do I think about the security and stability that a stable, well-paying job might provide me with my own desire to pursue art or pursue things that feel more in line with the creative side of me.

Fast forward, there's a great irony in that leaving journalism, leaving the newsroom is actually the best thing that happened to my writing career. It allowed me to write the book. It allowed me to have a job that didn't expend all of my editorial energy and time. But going back to college, especially at a place like Penn that's very pre-professional, a lot of my peers were in Wharton, in the business school.

They were very much on a track that provided a lot of legibility into what is the step, what is the next step, working at places like Goldman, like yourself, or maybe the big consulting firms. It was hard to try and pursue something that was maybe more risky or less known in terms of what the outcome would be.

I think that's actually a big disservice for places that are really pre-professional like Penn is that there were a lot of dreams deferred. Even for me, as a poetry student, I ended up trying to find the business application of poetry, which was copywriting. And my friends that were urban studies or even theater kids ended up going to work for McKinsey or BCG because there was not real comfort with uncertainty.

I think we see that a lot, especially among young people. Not to say that this is something that we should blame them for, especially coming out of a place like a private institution where you might have to assume a lot of student debt in order to graduate. It makes sense to try and find lucrative, stable job opportunities on the other end.

Thankfully, my parents helped out with college. I paid for a portion of it myself but didn't graduate with any debt or loans. That's probably what allowed me to have a little bit more of a meandering career. Right. That's the one thing. I'm sure you remember your college application essays about creative writing, poetry, just the creatives, humanities, and stuff like that.

It seems like about 60% of the graduates from Penn go on to tech, consulting, finance. I always wonder what happened to the idealism of youth because it seemed like it was crushed by the necessity of making money after college. I like your story because you ended up pursuing what you wanted to do since high school at least, poetry and writing.

You did go to IDEO. Is that a tech company or a design company? It's a design agency. Its specialty is this thing called design thinking. Essentially, it's a creative consultancy that helps create brands, helps create new products. It really made a name for itself in the early days with designing the first Apple mouse.

It's a product design shop based in Silicon Valley. Now, it's a global consultancy. There's nine offices around the world. It's fun, but it's also corporate. It's a job where you're doing project-based work for clients. I really enjoyed it there. I think a lot of times people will look at the title of my book, The Good Enough Job, and think it's this slacker manifesto or this way for people to askew the traditional paths in favor of something that is more creative or aligned with your values.

I think there's actually a lot of value in working for a bigger company, especially early in your career where you can learn skills and get mentorship. Some people do what they love for work. Like me in this situation, I did what I had to do for work so that I could pursue the book on the side.

How did you decide to become a freelance writer and quit or leave your corporate job? Also, how did the book deal come about? Yeah, I mean, they go hand in hand. I started writing the book in 2019 before the pandemic. I was still working full-time. I ended up working at IDEO through 2022, so I finished the manuscript while I still had a full-time job.

There's a certain tension there where I'm writing this book about the culture of overwork in America, and I did the lion's share of it while also working a job. I took a book leave during my time at IDEO for four months to just focus on the book. And then it wasn't until, I guess, the fall of last year, the fall of 2022, when I decided that, "Okay, I think I've amassed enough career capital and skills that I can work for myself, and I'll give this solopreneurship thing a try." But to be clear, I am a writer.

I write freelance articles. I have been working on this book and hope to write another one, but I also have other gigs in my portfolio career that are more about economic stability. And so even when I left my job in the fall, I took on a four-month consulting project that was a few days a week.

And I think in some ways I like that balance of having a set of different things that all mount up to my income, and it allows me to pursue different interests and balance some of the inherent risk in being a full-time writer with some of the economic stability of more paid corporate work.

Right. It is one of those greatest challenges, leaving that corporate day job behind, the 401(k), the healthcare benefits. Are you a freelancer now? Yeah, I'm a freelancer. I recently started my own LLC. And I think I'm cautious to give prescriptive advice about this is a path that everyone should pursue.

I think it's definitely not. There's a lot of uncertainty and risk associated with it. One of the things that I found is that even after leaving the grind of corporate work, I was often my own worst manager. When you don't have necessarily the infrastructure around you to be able to separate work from life, it can be hard to not let work seep into all of the unoccupied space in your days.

And so especially in the first few weeks and months of working for myself, I had to be even more conscious about the time that I was on and off the clock. I think there's this sort of dream that's painted about autonomy and a lack of Slack notifications or meetings that will enable freelancer independent workers to be able to just go on jogs at 11am and dance through the fields.

But in actuality, it can be that much more difficult when you're only rising and falling with your own professional accomplishments and you're solely responsible for all of your wins. It's pretty scary. There's nobody to blame or to award but yourself. One of the ideas that I've come across or that I've proposed is that the FIRE movement in terms of financial independence retire early is becoming more obsolete.

I helped kickstart the movement back in 2009 when I was talking about trying to escape my corporate banking job and then I finally left my job in 2012. But this year, I decided it seems like it's getting a little bit more obsolete because of so much more work flexibility.

I play pickleball nearby where you live and during the middle of the day from 10.30am to 1.30pm all the time and I see a lot of young folks ages 25, 35, 40 playing pickleball for like an hour and a half, two hours. And I'm thinking to myself, "Man, if I had a day job that enabled me or allowed me to play pickleball for an hour and a half, two hours, take a nap and then just get my stuff done when I needed to, I don't think I would have wanted to have retired early at age 34 to do my own thing." What are your thoughts about the evolution of work now post-pandemic since there seems to be so much more flexibility for knowledge workers at least?

I think the pendulum swings both ways. I think in the early aughts in 2010s, we were in this moment of work centricity and hustle culture and girl bossing. I think the FIRE movement really provided an alternative vision for what work could be more of a means to an end as opposed to an end in and of itself.

And now I think we have movements like Quiet Quitting that I know you've talked about on the show in the past and the cultural cachet that comes with being anti-work or anti-capitalist. But I think a lot of people are learning that the nihilist work sucks point of view is not necessarily a recipe for fulfillment either.

Even someone like you who has had the opportunity to retire many years ago, there's still labor in your days through your writing and your podcast. I think people want to find ways in which they can contribute to the world. I think the great promise of remote and hybrid work is that workers can have a lot more control over how they get their work done.

I think that's one thing that gives me a lot of excitement and optimism about the future is that instead of using these proxy metrics like how much time you spend in an office chair as an indication of the type of work that you're doing, we're actually in a place where we can hopefully let the work speak for itself and managers are hopefully instilling more trust in their employees to get the work done when they want.

I think that's sort of the utopian vision of this future of work where people are able to design their days around when they have the energy to do work and they can get their work done on their own schedule. But I think the risk of this is that if we pair this ability to work at any hour with this sort of capitalist understanding that if you're not somehow getting ahead, you're falling behind, it can drive people to overwork and be almost as dangerous as a manager that's making their employees work 60 to 70-hour weeks.

Yeah, it's quite a balance and it does seem like more and more companies are encouraging or demanding employees come back to work after the bear market in 2022. Seems like I think Facebook met a just set after laying off another thousands and thousands of people, mandatory three days in the office from soon on.

But it always seems soon on. And here in San Francisco, it just seems like nobody really wants to go back to work because they're having such a good time or a better time with the flexibility, especially if you have children or if you have other things you want to do on the side.

Can you share some of stories of people you've encountered where people have been struggling with the idea of going back to work or actually leaving to be a freelancer? Yeah, I'll share one of the stories that I write about in the book because it rhymes with a lot of the stuff that you talk about both in your writing and on the show, which is a story of a Wall Street banker that I profiled.

His name is Kay He. Some of the listeners might be familiar with him. He has his own sort of community of people rethinking their relationship to work. But in many ways, Kay represented the paradigm of sort of the American dream. He was a Cambodian-American immigrant growing up, lower middle class in New York City.

He spent his high school years really working hard to try and get into a top college. He was the valedictorian of his class, went to Yale for college, and then in college was trying to figure out, "Okay, what are the most lucrative potential job paths for me? I could be an engineer.

I could be a doctor. I could be a lawyer. I could go into finance." He chose the latter, went to work on Wall Street, rose his way up the ranks at BlackRock, became one of the youngest managing directors in BlackRock's history, was making seven figures before he turned 30 years old.

But it came to a head in his mid-30s when he realized that he was climbing a ladder that he didn't actually want to be on. He looked up at the people above him at the org chart and asked himself, "Do I want their life?" And the answer was no.

And so he ended up leaving and going, it's in many ways the most cliche story of the book. He goes to move to California. He starts surfing every day. He starts working for himself. But I think the wisdom in his story is that on one end of the spectrum, you get people that are just listening to what the market values.

They're just trying to make career decisions based on what pays the most or what's the most prestigious or what might give them the highest status. On the other end of the spectrum, you get people who are just making decisions based on what they themselves value without regarding what the market values.

And that might drive people to say, take on a lot of student debt to pursue a graduate degree that might not lead to stable job prospects on the other end or to go all in to pursue art but become so preoccupied with how you're going to pay rent that you can't actually focus on the art that you want to create.

And so I think the upshot is that we have to take these things in consideration. On one hand, what the market values, on the other hand, what we value and try and find work at their intersection because there are dangers to indexing too far on either extreme. I agree.

And so in that story, I know K.E. before, he has actually profiled Financial Samurai in the past and I definitely should get him on the podcast because I do have a question for him and that is about his path and his decision to actually hire people. One of the things I decided in 2012 was to hire nobody for Financial Samurai because I didn't want to manage anybody.

I wanted the most simple, streamlined business, if you would call it, as possible so I could be free to do what I want. I work with my wife but that's fine. And I do like his story a lot and definitely I should get him on the podcast. But I do question his desire and he's living what he wants but I want to know why he decided to hire so many people and start the 401k process and all that he mentioned because that's a lot of work unto itself.

I'm wondering for you, Simone, why don't more people, once they get to a certain level of financial stability, let's say it's after 10 years, 15 years, maybe 20 years of working, if you're saving as a normal person, well, the average American is only saving like 5% to 7% but let's say you're above average and you're saving a little bit more and you're investing, why don't more Americans and more people in the world, workers, try to jump off that thing that they're doing that isn't giving them any joy to do something they want to do?

Why don't more people take risks? Yeah. I mean, I think there's a few reasons. One is that in our country, I think part of the reason why work is so fraught is because the consequences of losing work are so dire. It's not just your paycheck but it's often your health insurance, it's if you're an immigrant, your ability to stay in this country.

And so there isn't a very robust social safety net to catch you if something falls through. The second is that there's this level of moving the goalposts. We have this heat in the stick adaptation that gets us comfortable with these new lifestyle changes that we make in our lives and then we put ourselves into situations where we have to earn a certain level of money and there isn't much slack built into our financial systems.

There's this Harvard study that I'm sure you've referenced before about interviewing millionaires and they interviewed people that had $1 million in the bank and $2 million in the bank and $5 million in the bank and $10 million in the bank. And they asked people, "How happy are you on a scale of one to 10?" People gave their answers and then they asked, "What would it take for you to get to 10 out of 10?" And all people that they interviewed, no matter how much money they made, said that, "I would be happy once I have twice as much as I have now." And so there's this sort of keeping up with the Joneses element and this measuring stick that we hold ourselves to.

It's hard to understand what your level of enough is because the default here in the US is that more is better. Yeah, I've been trying to solve that problem for a while on Financial Samurai and we can use 25 times expenses. I use 10 to 20 times your income as your net worth target to feel like enough.

So let's say you make $100,000 and once you get 10 times that or a million, you start feeling, "Okay, I got some financial independence. I got some momentum." And then once you get to 20 times or greater, you're set. I feel strongly that you can do whatever you want and take those risks that you want.

But it is different for everybody. And I do want to challenge people to think about how much is enough by going backwards, doing the calculations. It's true, once you get there, you might experience, "Ah, the one more year syndrome to keep on working another year," or you might want a little bit more or you might want to have kids or something.

As a young, early 30s man in San Francisco, how do you view what is enough for you? Because this is one of the most expensive cities in America, if not the world, and you're on this journey of freelance and you eat what you kill. It's a great feeling, the correlation with effort and reward.

How do you forecast or model out your future living in this expensive city? Yeah, I think it's definitely something that I'm considering on a daily, if not weekly, basis. One of the things that I like about the framework of the book, the title is "The Good Enough Job." The idea with "good enough" is that it's subjective.

So for some people, a good enough job might be a job that earns a certain wage, or for others it might be a job that has a certain title or is in a certain industry. And for someone else, it might be a job that gets off at a certain hour so that you can pick up your kids from elementary school each day.

So for me, I think about the life I want to live as sort of the North Star. And all my family and my partner's family are both here in the Bay Area, and so there is a certain level of financial responsibility that we have to earn a living in order to stay here.

And it wouldn't be responsible for us to, say, both quit our jobs and just travel full-time for multiple years if we also have these other goals, like starting a family and saving for college. And so I don't have it in a science as much as an art, which is the art is that I want to start with my vision of a life well-lived and then think about what type of work or what type of income I need in order to support that vision.

And so even though that I'm taking a risk to a certain extent in working for myself and pursuing writing, I want to make sure that this is an ongoing conversation that me and my partner have. And thankfully, she has a W-2 job, and we can sort of think about how we can rely on each other at different points in our life.

But even though I've written this book about right-sizing works placed in our life, I'm also not above the idea that I might return to the corporate world at some point. I really believe in sort of the seasonality of work. And right now, I'm in a season where I'm partnered with no kids.

We have a pretty stable rent situation. And so I don't need to necessarily optimize for the most income that I can make on a yearly basis. But who knows? Maybe if we have some kids, it might change the calculation. And I hope that the listeners take away that none of this advice is prescriptive.

It's different strokes for different folks. And especially even in my own life, I imagine that in different phases, I'll have a different calculus for what I need. Yeah, it's hard to know what you don't know. Can you go through an exercise now? Do you see a scenario where you can see your blind spot?

By definition, it's hard to see your blind spot. I'm 45, so I can kind of imagine your future a little bit because I left around 34 and then I'm a writer and I have this podcast. Do you foresee a scenario that you cannot see is my question? Yeah. I mean, I feel insecure about the choices that I've made in my career to a certain extent, especially when I'm comparing myself to a lot of my peers.

Most of my friends in college and even in high school have pursued very tracked, stable professions. Even if it's not finance, it's something like medicine or law or have worked in tech for a number of years. And the thing I try and remind myself is that I can't compare my insides to other people's outsides.

Although other people might have from the outside this sort of shiny veneer of economic stability and a lack of stress because of it, that's not necessarily my game. That's their game. And so I think one of the things that I wonder about is paying out of pocket for health care each month and is trying to write books, which if you calculate the hourly wage of writing a book, you're making basically pennies on the hour.

Are these things responsible? Not just for me. Obviously, I can center my own hedonistic desires and my love for writing, but I'm moving into a place in my life where it's not just about me. It's about me and my partner and my family and my ability to care for my parents.

And so I think my biggest blind spot, if you could call it that, is wondering whether I'm doing enough to plan for my future. And I think for most people, that creates a lot of risk aversion where they say, "Well, because I don't know what the future holds, I might as well stay in this job that I hate for a long time." But there's actually something that Kay told me that I think has really stuck with me, which is it's actually riskier for his kids to be interacting with him in a job that he hates where it brings down his mood, where it makes his daily experience miserable, than to take the risk of trying to pursue something that's more value aligned.

Yeah, I agree. I think a lot of people, something like 70% of people are disengaged from their jobs. So if you're disengaged or you hate your job, you bring that mood back to your home and that could be like a virus that spreads to your loved ones who are innocent and that would be no good.

So I guess for you, there's two things here. One is the good enough job where you want to, it's a subjective term where you want to do what you want, balance the commercial and your desires. And at the same time, there's a comparison because we can't help but compare, but then unfortunately it makes us a little bit miserable sometimes because there's always someone better, more successful, richer, more famous, better looking, whatever.

How do you reconcile that? What is a good enough job for you on your new journey and what would be the ideal situation for you in five years in terms of your writing career? Yeah, I think my own aspirations have changed a lot over the course of writing the book.

I came into it thinking that, "Okay, maybe I'll take some time, I'll write this book and then my aspirations are still to say rise up the corporate ranks or manage a team or be in the C-suite, what have you." And now I have a different North Star, which is that at least in the professional realm, I loved the process of writing books.

And so if I think about the pie chart of how I spend my professional life, I hope to spend a larger and larger proportion of my time on long form editorial or writing projects. But in the interim, I hope that I can balance some of that with a few other things like teaching or consulting or paid writing that might help balance some of the uncertainty and instability of pursuing a path of being an author.

And so I think like many people that listen, I'm not just one note, both professionally and outside of my professional life. Of course, I love writing, but I also love thinking about politics and I like collaborating with others on creative ideas and I love teaching and sharing what I know.

And so one of the things that I've enjoyed about pursuing this path thus far is that it allows me to have varied days. Maybe in the mornings I spend a few hours working on my next book and then I do a few calls or podcast interviews like this and in the afternoon maybe teach a class and maybe tomorrow looks completely different from today.

But what I'm trying to hold on to is an awareness of how energized I feel throughout the day and hopefully in five years, I'm still doing things that allow me to be the person that I want to be. That's sort of what I see as the goal of having a good enough job.

It's to have a job that supports the life that you want to lead. Sure. For those interested in reading The Good Enough Job, why should they read the book and what do you think they'll get out of the book after finishing it? Yeah. So I came into the book with maybe a little bit more of a hot take about the dangers of work-centricity and how our culture in the US has become obsessed with work.

The thing that I have enjoyed about the process is that my hot take tempered into something a little bit more mild. I think there's this inclination, especially when we're thinking about careers and work, to either lionize or villainize our jobs. There's people that say, "Do great work. That's your impact in the world.

If you don't do what you love, you can never do great work. If you haven't found a dream job, keep searching," on one side. Then there's the anti-work people that say, "Work sucks. We have to burn it all down. It's a necessary evil. We deserve to get paid UBI from the government and to be able to do whatever we want with our time." I think the truth is not on either extreme.

It's something in the middle. That's the core question of the book. It's how do you pursue meaningful work without letting what you do for work subsume who you are? I think that's the best case that I can make for any potential readers. It's a book that is a mirror.

Hopefully through the stories of the different people that I profile, you'll see aspects of yourself and it'll force you to try and consider what relationship you want to have to your job, how work fits into your vision of a life well-lived. It's very individual. I think it happens on a person-to-person basis, but rarely do we have the opportunity to really reflect on where we are and where we want to go.

In your book writing journey and your interview journey finding people, did you ever encounter anybody who actually had a lot of money, was financially independent, and then argued, "Work sucks. You should do what you want, be free, and do what you want." The irony of that story is kind of like maybe Warren Buffet saying, "We should all pay more taxes," yet he doesn't pay more taxes himself.

I'm trying to get that side of the story where people are that extreme. Did you ever encounter anybody like that? Yeah. I think it showed up in a few different ways. There's a guy that I profiled recently in an article for The Atlantic that was an advertising executive and he rose up the ranks in advertising and was making well over six figures.

Then he decided to do something pretty drastic, which is leave the world of advertising that he had come up in and set a cap for the number of hours he works each week. Instead of trading his expertise for more money as is customary in the US, he decided to trade his expertise and the career capital that he had amassed for more time.

He runs this thing called The Experiment where there's three precepts. He only works 10 to 15 hours a week. He only works on work that he finds personally meaningful. He only works for companies that feel aligned with the type of change he wants to see in the world. It provides such a counter narrative to how we're taught to think about work, which is the more you can make, the more you should make.

Here's someone that said, "Okay, this is my level of enough." Then there's a lot of people, because of the nature of the book, I chose to focus on stories of people that had made some big change in their life. I think there are a lot of people that work corporate jobs that maybe they don't enjoy, but they understand how their job allows them to pay for their material existence, support the people around them, and are willing to swallow the bitter pill of a job that isn't necessarily aligned with personal fulfillment each and every day because they can attach it to this wider mission.

I think that the course take would be, "Okay, we should all quit our jobs and try and find something that's more aligned with our values." In actuality, I don't think there's anything wrong with corporate work or well-paid work or work that is not necessarily fulfilling in every single moment, as long as you recognize that that's a conscious choice that you're making, as opposed to some default script that you've inherited.

Mad Fientist Yeah, it's tough. I think about the movie The Matrix, plugging in, plugging out a lot. It's very correlated to early retirement and doing what you want. Sitting on the other side from employee to now potential employer, I've hired freelance writers before. No, not writers, but people who help with my tech stuff.

It's an interesting viewpoint because the reason why we hire employees is so that they provide better value, more value, and we pay them less than the value that they can create. Otherwise, we're not going to hire them. That's just capitalism. I do want to understand more from other people.

When they listen to this podcast or read Financial Samurai, they're like, "Well, you've done it. You've got passive investment income. Of course, you can say, 'Yeah, go play pickleball all day,' but that's not really relevant for me." I guess in conclusion, what are your thoughts on how people can be more methodical in choosing the life that they desire while balancing everything?

Is there a time frame for you specifically where you're like, "Okay, this freelance thing, this writer thing isn't going to work out. I'm going to go back to work"? Do you have any kind of framework to help people think about this balance a little bit more strategically? I think when we think about work-life balance, we often think about how we spend our time and our energy.

Rightfully so, that is one version of how work shows up in our lives. One of the cases that I make in the book is about the value of diversifying our identities as well. Much as an investor benefits from diversifying the sources of their investments, we too benefit from having diverse sources of meaning and identity in our lives.

The idea of deprioritizing work is not very actionable. Sometimes you think, "Okay, I can try and care less about my job, but what does that exactly mean?" The thing that I often try and instill in people is that on the other side of prioritizing work is prioritizing life. They aren't necessarily oppositional, but by taking an active role and investing in those other identities that exist within you, maybe it's pickleballer, but also it can be father or friend or citizen or neighbor.

We can have a more diverse portfolio of our identity, which the research shows makes us more resilient in the face of adversity. This makes sense if you're attaching your identity to your job and it's a bad day at work, or your boss says something disparaging that can spill over into all other facets of your life.

But it can also create better workers. It can make people more innovative or creative when they have other interests or passions that are feeding their ability to think about problems in the office. Perhaps most importantly, and the one that I really harp on in the book, is that it makes us more well-rounded people.

It allows us to contribute to the world in ways that don't just lead to financial returns or creating economic value for your employer. I think that's the thing that I really hope people take away, is that a work-centric existence doesn't just take our best time, it takes our best energy as well.

In order to cultivate other sources of meaning in your life, in order to really find other identities that exist within you, you need to invest in them with your energy. Similar to a plant, it needs watering and time in order to grow. That's how you gain a more diverse identity portfolio.

It's by making bets. It's by investing with your attention. I love that. Diversifying your identity. I totally see that. Imagine, folks, if you were all in on your career and you got laid off one day. It would be devastating. But if you diversified your identity and said, "I am a worker.

I'm a parent. I'm a writer. I'm an athlete. I'm religious. I'm faithful." That does help soften the blows and it creates much more variety in life and much more interest and excitement because we can only live one life. But if we can diversify our identities outside of work, that would be awesome.

So I totally agree with that. Thank you for that perspective. So Simone, it's been great talking to you. Thanks so much for your time. Where can listeners find your book and what's next for you? Yeah, thanks so much, Sam. The best place to go is thegoodenoughjob.com. That's where you can learn more about the book as well as find me on social media.

In terms of what's next, I'm not sure. I think that's kind of how I like it. I'm trying to get comfortable with that ambiguity. I've started to think a little bit about a second book about the concept of doubt and how doubt shows up in our life. But for now, I'm just going to take some time to rest and recover from the book tour and then we'll see what comes next.

All right. Well, take care and maybe I'll see you around the neighborhoods of San Francisco. Sounds good. Bye-bye. That's good. Bye-bye.