The Good Enough Job Quotes

“We seek status because we don’t know our own preferences,” Agnes Callard, a philosopher at the University of Chicago, told me. “When we don’t trust our own definition of what is good, we let other people define it for us.”
― Simone Stolzoff, The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work

“Work will always be work. Some people work doing what they love. Other people work so that they can do what they love when they’re not working. Neither is more noble.”
― Simone Stolzoff, The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work

“We shouldn’t work less just because it allows us to be better workers. We should work less because it allows us to be better humans.”
― Simone Stolzoff, The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work

“Psychological research shows that when we invest, as Divya did, in different sides of ourselves, we’re better at dealing with setbacks. In contrast, the more we let one part of who we are define us, the less resilient we are to change.”
― Simone Stolzoff, The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work

“If I could go back in time and give myself a message, it would be to reiterate that my value as an artist doesn’t come from how much I create. I think that mind-set is yoked to capitalism. Being an artist is about how and why you touch people’s lives, even if it’s one person. Even if that’s yourself, in the process of art-making.”
― Simone Stolzoff, The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work

“If you are under someone else’s power, you should have a say in how that power is used. That’s the world I believe in. That’s the world I want to build. And anyone who claims those as their principles is commanded to organize their workplace today.”
― Simone Stolzoff, The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work

“Even the language we commonly use for rest—unplug, recharge—presumes rest is simply a prerequisite for getting back to work.”
― Simone Stolzoff, The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work

“when you don’t take an active role in determining what you value, you inherit the values of the systems around you.”
― Simone Stolzoff, The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work

“And yet, the antidote is not as simple as to not care about your job. The average person will spend a third of their life—roughly eighty thousand hours—working. How we spend those hours matters.”
― Simone Stolzoff, The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work

“Research aside, we know intuitively that sky-high expectations are a recipe for disappointment. When we expect work to help us self-actualize—to constantly motivate and fulfill us—settling for anything less can feel like a failure. A job, like a baby, is not always something that you can control.”
― Simone Stolzoff, The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work

“The answer, in short, is that the expectation that work will always be fulfilling can lead to suffering.”
― Simone Stolzoff, The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work

“At the organization level, generous vacation policies and wellness benefits without a reduction in the amount of work managers expect from workers do little to change the culture.”
― Simone Stolzoff, The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work

“The answer, in short, is that the expectation that work will always be fulfilling can lead to suffering. Studies show that an “obsessive passion” for work leads to higher rates of burnout and work-related stress. Researchers have also found that lifestyles that revolve around work in countries like Japan are a key contributor to record-low fertility rates. And for young people in the United States, inflated expectations of professional success help explain record-high rates of depression and anxiety. Globally, more people die each year from symptoms related to overwork than from malaria.”
― Simone Stolzoff, The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work

“There’s a growing body of research that proves how leisure and unstructured free time benefit creative work. Brain scans show that idle time and daydreaming create alpha waves that fuel creative insights and innovative breakthroughs. In one study, four days hiking in nature without access to technology increased participants’ creative problem-solving ability by as much as 50 percent.”
― Simone Stolzoff, The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work

“Every year, the average American works about six hours per week more than the average Frenchman, eight hours—a full workday—per week more than the average German, and three and a half hours more than the notoriously overworked Japanese.”
― Simone Stolzoff, The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work

“Throughout history, wealth has been inversely correlated with how many hours people work. The more wealth you have, the less you work because, well, you can afford not to. But in the last half century, the highest earners are responsible for some of the greatest increases in work time. That is to say, the same Americans who can afford to work the least are working more than ever.”
― Simone Stolzoff, The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work

“Part of the reason vocational awe is so dangerous is because it preys on the fact so many workers do feel a passion—if not a calling—for the work that they do,” she told me. “Institutions rely on the fact that there will always be more passionate workers if the current workers leave.”
― Simone Stolzoff, The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work

“Our society treats those who haven’t found a calling—who don’t love what they get paid to do—as if they’ve committed some kind of moral failure. “The only way to do great work is to love what you do,” Jobs proselytized at Stanford. “Life is too short not to follow your passion,” read proverbs on Instagram and LinkedIn. However, the notion that we should always love our job creates outsized expectations for what a job can deliver. It ignores the tedium that exists in every line of work, blinds us to the flaws a dream job may have, and creates conditions in which workers are willing to accept less than they deserve.”
― Simone Stolzoff, The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work

“Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life” cliché in favor of a new phrase: “Do what you love and you’ll work super fucking hard all the time with no separation or any boundaries and also take everything extremely personally.”
― Simone Stolzoff, The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work

“On the other side of deprioritizing work is prioritizing life.”
― Simone Stolzoff, The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work

“Goal-oriented hobbies like signing up for a marathon or reading a certain number of books in a year can provide accountability to do things outside of work. But striving for a goal still imposes a frame of improvement, which implies work in a fundamental sense. This isn’t to say these types of hobbies are bad. But I can’t help thinking that, through all of our quantified ambition, we lose sight of the wisdom we all knew as children: the joy of play.”
― Simone Stolzoff, The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work

“Diversifying our identity is about more than mitigating the shock of losing our job. We shouldn’t do it just to avoid the sting of negative feedback or the disorientation of retirement. We should diversify our identities because doing so allows us to be more well-rounded people. It allows us to contribute to the world in different ways and to develop a sense of self-worth beyond the economic value we produce. And ironically, research shows that people who have hobbies, interests, and passions outside of work tend to be more productive workers, too.”
― Simone Stolzoff, The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work

“But none of us is just one thing. We are workers, but we are also siblings and citizens, hobbyists and neighbors. In this way, identities are like plants: they take time and attention to grow. Unless we make a conscious effort to water them, they can easily wither.”
― Simone Stolzoff, The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work

“Unfortunately, Seau’s story is not an isolated incident. From professional athletes to military veterans, CEOs to supermodels, losing your professional identity can be a shock to the system—especially if you haven’t had the time or made the effort to invest in other sources of meaning in your life.”
― Simone Stolzoff, The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work

“When you grow up an athlete and you live in a world that praises you all the time . . . the frequency of praise that comes your way increases,” Miles McPherson, a teammate of Seau’s, told ESPN after his passing. “All that one day stops. But your body, mind and heart are conditioned to such a high level of excitement, adrenaline rush, challenge, and then you’re like taken off the drug, cold turkey.”[*]”
― Simone Stolzoff, The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work

“Overidentifying with just one aspect of yourself can also be dangerous. Take Junior Seau, a linebacker who played twenty years in the National Football League. He led his team, the San Diego Chargers, to a Super Bowl championship and was voted to a record twelve-straight Pro Bowls. But less than three years after retiring, Seau tragically committed suicide.”
― Simone Stolzoff, The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work

“This makes intuitive sense. If your identity is entirely tied to one aspect of who you are—whether it be your job, your net worth, or your “success” as a parent—one snag, even if it’s out of your control, can shatter your self-esteem. But if you cultivate greater self-complexity and distinct sources of meaning, you’ll be better equipped to weather the inevitable challenges of life.”
― Simone Stolzoff, The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work

“Psychological research shows that when we invest, as Divya did, in different sides of ourselves, we’re better at dealing with setbacks. In contrast, the more we let one part of who we are define us, the less resilient we are to change. For example, in one study, Patricia Linville found that subjects with a more differentiated idea of themselves—what she calls having greater “self-complexity”—were less prone to depression and physical illnesses following a stressful event. When people who had less self-complexity experienced a stressful event, it was more likely for that stress to “spill over” to other parts of their lives.”
― Simone Stolzoff, The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work

“Sufficiency isn’t two steps up from poverty or one step short of abundance. It isn’t a measure of barely enough or more than enough. Sufficiency isn’t an amount at all. It is an experience, a context we generate, a declaration, a knowing that there is enough, and that we are enough. Brené Brown”
― Simone Stolzoff, The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work

“Developing a healthier relationship to work is not as simple as quitting your job or taking up knitting. Not everyone has the ability to dictate their hours or choose their profession. What we can control, however, are the expectations we place on our jobs. We can choose to subordinate work to life, rather than the other way around. It starts with a simple acknowledgment: you aren’t what you do.”
― Simone Stolzoff, The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work