Simone Stolzoff | Reclaiming Life from Work

Srini: Simone, welcome to the Unmistakable Creative. Thanks so much for taking the time to join us. 

Simone Stolzoff: I appreciate you having me on

Srini: . Yeah. It is my pleasure to have you here. So you actually have a new book out that is published by our mutual publisher portfolio called A Good Enough Job, which I just had a chance to finish reading.

And given the subject matter of the book, I thought I would start by asking you what was the very first job that you ever had and how did that end up impacting what you ended up doing with your life

Simone Stolzoff: and your career? Yeah. Great foundation to start. I was a summer camp counselor in Yosemite. I grew up in the Bay Area and I spent my summers at this hippie Jewish summer camp called Camp Towonga.

And it was there that I learned how to backpack and be outdoors. I had my first kiss, all the sort of rites of passage in the early ages. And then as a 16 year old, I came back as a counselor. And in many ways, it's still the best job that I've ever had. Just being able to be surrounded by my friends.

And there was a really profound professional development training just in that first week. And it was still the best sort of onboarding to any job that I've had in my career. And so maybe I peeked too soon. So

Srini: you mentioned the fact that it was a Jewish summer camp, but I couldn't let that go because every Jewish guest I've had here tells me that growing up with Jewish parents is pretty similar to growing up with Indian parents.

So when it comes to the narrative about work were you like a typical Jewish kid whose parents like Dr. Lurie engineer?

Simone Stolzoff: Yeah I had an interesting mix. So my mom is Italian. Just moved a few years before I was born to the States and her four siblings still live in the same small Italian town where she grew up.

And my dad is just a Jew from LA. My Instagram handle is the pizza bagel because this kind of mix of Italian and Jewish. And I think there's two different sort of cultural foundations that led me to be the person who I was. On my mom's side there was this different prioritization of work.

If I was one of my cousins, I probably would have grown up in the same town, gone to the college that's closest, gone to work for my father, and still live within a 10 block radius of all of my generation of the family. My dad had a little bit more of a pre professional approach. He is a psychologist, as is my mom.

And I think grad school and the academic path was always instilled in me as a potential North Star. And so I think in my early years, I very much followed that rubric. I went to private elementary school and private high school in San Francisco, went to Ivy League college, and I was very much just Going and looking for the next hoop to jump through.

And it wasn't until I was 24 years old where there was something that broke up the script. My best friend is a soccer player and he was living in Finland at the time. And he called me and said, Hey, I don't know how I got here, but I'm on this. Travel blog, and there's this technical glitch on priceline.

com. And if you buy this very particular itinerary from San Francisco to New York to Milan, and then eight days later from Prague to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. The whole ticket is 229. And it was like my literal golden ticket moment. It was the first time where this opportunity came about where I could break the script of just going toward the next professional goal or academic goal in my life.

So I thought about it for about 30 seconds and I bought the ticket and I put in my two weeks notice at the advertising job that I was working. And I spent a year traveling and that was really the first thing that helped shake me out of the sort of spell of work as an achievement culture to understand that, wow, I actually do have a lot more autonomy and agency over how I design my life.

Srini: I think that there are two things I wonder about when it comes to this narrative where we've talked about parents, but you grew up in Silicon Valley and San Francisco and you went to an Ivy League school. I went to Berkeley, so I understand what that narrative is like. I very clearly remember it was like.

You just are forced down a couple of default paths when you're in those environments. So I wonder impact the environments you were raised in, particularly when you're thinking about sort of San Francisco, Silicon Valley, as well as the Ivy League education had on your internal narrative about work prior to this idea of breaking the script.

Simone Stolzoff: Yeah, it's a good question. And I grew up in the nineties. And it was a little bit before tech's rise to prominence, at least in terms of my consciousness. It wasn't really the highest sex appeal industry quite yet, I still. Revered the professionals like lawyer, doctor some friends that went into finance, of course, Penn, where I went to college is a very pre professional school, and so there was very much this sort of track mentality of you get the internship at Goldman Sachs, and then it leads to the analyst position.

Then you work your way to manager and vice president and director. And I saw how you know for a lot of my peers, a lot of their aspirations or their unique personalities were deferred in favor of the stability that a very legible career provides. Coming out of college where I studied poetry and economics, there was already a tension in my life between commerce and art.

And moving back to the Bay I very much lean toward the commerce side of things I wanted to be a writer, but I thought the business world had more financial upside. And so I became a copywriter, the most palatable business equivalent of what my passion was. And I looked around and I saw so many of my friends, many of whom had these sort of nuanced professional desires and maybe were studying urban studies or their most important hobby was theater, go and conform towards these paths that were easier to comprehend, where the path towards the top was easy to see from an early age.

I think that's part of the seduction of some of these industries that have really established tracks and programs is if you're good at school, if you're used to always being able to jump over the bar that's set for you, you can just continue that mentality. Now, maybe it's in the tech world or before it might've been on wall street, but the barometer for what success looks like is very easy to comprehend.

Yeah,

Srini: absolutely. If there's something about me that wonders you had this moment where you called it your golden ticket, where there's literally a glitch, right? Where you say, okay, like there was a glitch and somehow that was what forced you to break the script. And I wonder why so many people sit around waiting for the glitch.

Do you ever wonder what would have happened if that glitch wasn't there?

Simone Stolzoff: Yeah, all the time and I likely would have stayed in advertising and set creative director as my North star and continue to passively go through my career. I think the glitchless life is best.

Exemplified by people who just listen to what the market values to think about what jobs pay the most, what job might be perceived as the most prestigious or help you accrue the most status. And I think it's definitely important to consider what other people value or what the market values.

But I think the risk, and I chronicle this in one of the profiles in the book about a Wall Street banker, is that if you're solely living by other people's rubric, you can find yourself in a position where You are playing a game that you don't actually have interest in winning, or you're climbing a career ladder that you don't actually want to be on.

And mind you, I think there's risk on the other end of the spectrum as well. If you're just listening to what you value without considering what the market values, that can drive you to a position where, for example, you assume a lot of bad debt in order to pursue a degree that doesn't. actually lead to stable jobs on the other end, or you go all in to pursue your art, but you're so preoccupied with how you're going to pay rent that you can't actually focus on the art that you want to create.

So I think for all of the listeners out there, it's this And how do you think about what the world values in one hand, what you value in the other hand and try and find something at their intersection? I appreciate that so much because I think that the sort of follow your passion and the money will follow narrative had become so pervasive in the personal development blogger space.

Srini: I remember I think like back in probably 2007, 2008, when I first started, it was just like this digital nomad thing was all the rage and it was like, Oh go live on a beach in Thailand for a thousand dollars a month. You can have everything you ever wanted. And I think for a lot of people who actually did it, it was such a wake up call to realize it's this isn't all that it's cracked up to be.

Simone Stolzoff: Yeah, definitely. I think one of the. The great benefits of having some level of financial freedom or success earlier in your life is that you can recognize that wherever you go, there you are even if you're able to live on the beach in Thailand, you still have to face all of your own insecurities and your fears, and no amount of money or status will ultimately make that go away.

Srini: Let's get into the book. You opened the book early on by saying that the modern ideology of workism asks two distinct pursuits of money and inner fulfillment to coalesce. These pursuits are not always aligned, and yet we increasingly look to our jobs to satisfy both. So the question is, how do we get here?

Simone Stolzoff: Yeah there's a few different ways to explain it. There are economic reasons, there are historical reasons, political reasons. But what I really focus on in the book is a social reason, a cultural understanding that work is the center of life and the rest of our lives should be pushed into the margins.

But if you think about the history of this country the Protestant work ethic and capitalism were really the two strands that entwined to form America's DNA. Now, if your last name is Miller or Baker, you might quibble with the idea that conflating work and identity is something new, but I think especially in the latter half of the 20th century, the decline of other institutions like organized religion, like neighborhood and community groups, the need for belonging and purpose and community and identity remain.

And yet we didn't have those institutions that normally played that role in people's lives. And so a large portion of Americans, and particularly white collar college educated men, look to the workplace to satisfy all of those needs.

Srini: Yeah. You say that the more wealth you have, the less you work because 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 can afford to work the least are working more than ever. That's such an odd paradox.

Simone Stolzoff: Yeah, it is. It is strange. I think this exists at both the individual and the country level the wealthier country has been in history, the less that they worked as well as individuals the more money you make, the more leisure you can support supposedly afford.

But there's a strange trend where, say, in the 1970s, the average American and the average German worked the exact same number of hours each year. And yet, while our peer nations have continued to decrease their work time, The average American now works 30% more than the average German. The question is how did we get here?

I think there are a lot of potential explanations for that as well. On one hand, one of the reasons why our relationship to work is so fraught here in the United States is because the consequences of losing work are so dire. When, for example, your healthcare is tied to your employment, or if you're an immigrant, your ability to stay in the country is tied to employment.

There's also an argument to be made for the fact that work has gotten better for a lot of people. There has been an opportunity with technological advances, some of the organized labor to pursue more interesting, meaningful work. But I guess the question that I ultimately ask in the book is, at what cost?

What does the, what is the upshot of all of this kind of work centricity that we live with here in the U. S. You

Srini: say that there's a growing expectation that work ought to be a source of personal fulfillment and meaning called the new American work ethic. This new ethic changed the relationship millions of people have to their work.

And to read that, especially because I think back to hundreds of conversations I've had on this show about making your work meaningful, the word meaningful probably would be one if we literally transcribed every single episode and made it searchable, I'm sure the word meaningful would come up at least a thousand times.

Simone Stolzoff: Yeah I think the pursuit of meaning is inherent to humanity and there's nothing wrong with looking to work as a source of meaning or looking to work as a identity or a source of fulfillment. But I think it becomes risky when it is the sole source of identity or meaning or fulfillment in your life.

As so many people have found out in the last few years due to the pandemic if your work is your identity and you lose it, what's left? It's a very sort of narrow platform to balance on.

Srini: I think that could be said for almost anything, because I remember I had this woman, Jenny Tate's here who wrote a book called how to be single and happy.

And she'd said the same thing about relationships. She's your person can't be your everything. She said, you want to have a diversified. Portfolio of meaning, but how do we get to a point where we made work such an integral part of how we get our sense of meaning, like why has that happened and what role do you think that sort of in the internet and media has played in shaping that?

Because I feel like just even by having this conversation and thinking back to all the conversations wow, I have perpetuated the narrative that you're talking about by doing what I do.

Simone Stolzoff: Yeah I don't think it's necessarily problematic in a vacuum as long as people are also investing in other aspects of who they are and trying to cultivate other sources of meaning.

I think it's important to recognize that meaning isn't something that is just bestowed upon us. We have to take an active role in seeking it out. And it's the result of how we spend our attention. We'll find more meaning from things that we water with our time and our energy.

And so I think there's like a top down approach of how we got here and a bottom up. From the top down I think the rhetoric that you can change the world doing meaningful work was really co opted by companies and in the past 40 or 50 years, especially as wages have stagnated for the majority of Americans, employers have had to find other means of attracting employees to work for them.

This is particularly pronounced in the tech sector where You go to any sort of jobs page and the headline is do the most meaningful work of your life or come here and change the world or be on the right side of history, et cetera. But I don't think that employers are solely to blame.

I think a lot of this is driven from the bottom up as well, from employees who. Are looking for a dream job or looking for self actualizing work and I don't blame them with all of the media that we received about the benefit of following your passion Steve Jobs had that famous commencement speech where he said the only way to do great work is to

,

do what you love.

And so if you haven't found what you love, keep searching, don't settle On the walls of WeWork, we plaster always do what you love, we treat CEOs as celebrities. If you are scrolling through Instagram or TikTok, it seems that every third or fourth post is about the benefit of monetizing your hobbies or finding a side grind as a passive form of income.

We live in a culture where identity and work are one and the same for so many of the different arenas in which we operate. And so it's no wonder why people are looking for work to be their be all and end all. But as you said, much like it's unrealistic to expect a spouse to be your social and emotional and financial and romantic source of all fulfillment, it's the same for a job.

You

Srini: mentioned that you went to college in the nineties and I think we probably went to college around the same time because I graduated high school in 1996. And these kinds of conversations were just not things I thought about. It was. Pretty much what we were talking about earlier. It's okay, let me find a job that gives me a decent paycheck.

And I remember why I went into sales because I didn't have the grades to go into banking or consulting. And so I thought, all right, I want to make the same amount of money your friends make. And I ended up hating every job I had, but that's a whole other story. But that's really changed a lot in the last 15 to 20 years.

Like it, I just I think about what the average college senior is like thinking about when. They are thinking about the job market when they graduate, and I'm sure it would be unrecognizable to somebody who was in school when you or

Simone Stolzoff: I graduated. Yeah I think it's about visibility and exposure, and especially with social media, there's so much parading of our professional accomplishments around for the world to see.

I saw a survey recently of Gen Z and the most desirable job that younger folks have right now is to become an influencer and it makes sense if you see all of the highlight reels of the influencers out there that are sitting on the beach and working for two or three hours a day and making tens of thousands of dollars a month.

It's important not to compare our insides to other people's outsides. Yeah. And it's very easy when. The line between our professional identities and our personal identities blur to think that everyone else has it figured out while we're just floundering. But in actuality if the characters that I profile in the book are any indication, even the people that have the most on paper success, what David Brooks would call, have the most resume virtues, it's not necessarily a recipe for contentment or fulfillment either.

Srini: One thing that you say is 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. So talk to me about that idea in more detail, because first, let's start with the idea of what kinds of expectations do people place on their jobs?

And then how do they change them so that work doesn't become this sort of single

Simone Stolzoff: source of identity? Yeah I think there are three risks to thinking that your job is your sole means of self actualization or treating work akin to a religion. The first is what we already talked about is the potential of losing your job and it doesn't even have to be a complete getting fired or furloughed.

It can just be your, the nature of your work changing. I think the second is this fact rotations piece that. You just brought up, which is if you think about happiness as the difference between our expectations and our reality, if we're always expecting work to be a dream, if we're always expecting it to be perfect, then it leaves a lot of room for disappointment.

And the truth is, every line of work has mundane or menial aspects of it. Work is, by its very nature, labor. And so expecting it to always be something that you love can be an unrealistic standard. And the third is that by living a work centric existence, we can neglect other parts of who we are.

We are all more than just workers. We are. Neighbors and friends and parents and siblings and citizens, and if we are giving all of our attention to work, it leaves room for little else. Esther Perel, the therapist, has this great line where she says, too many people bring the best of themselves to work and bring the leftovers home.

And I think when I heard that for the first time, it resonated so deeply in my bones. And even though I've been lucky enough to find work that I find meaningful, Still is the question remains what am I trading off in order to give so much of my time and energy to my livelihood? Yeah. It makes me think back to the beginning of the pandemic when we were all stuck inside and we were working from home and we'd always work from home and it was me and two friends living in a house together.

Srini: And it got to the point where There seemed to be no line between work and when we were done with work. And I remember my roommates would get on my case you're literally just gonna sit here and read. And I get to the point where I didn't want to go out. They're like, And I could not draw a line.

I couldn't draw a

Simone Stolzoff: boundary. Yeah. Yeah. I think one of the framings that has always stuck with me is it felt more like living at work than working from home. Yeah. And I think as these sort of temporal, but also like spatial and. spiritual boundaries between work and non work blur, it becomes that much more important to be conscious and make intentional decisions about when we're on and off the clock.

Srini: So there's something else that caught my attention in the book. You said perhaps the most American I am label is a producer. Workers are measured by their productivity, companies are measured by their growth, and the country's GDP. And I've seen this idea of measuring GDP as a nice metric that you can quantify, but not necessarily one that truly measures like people's satisfaction in a

Simone Stolzoff: country.

Yeah I think like we can think about it on the individual scale. When we say someone is successful, we rarely mean they're happy or healthy. We mean they've made a lot of money. And the same could be said at the country scale. If we look at GDP as the single proxy that determines the health of a country, it tells one story, but it doesn't tell the whole picture.

Yes increasing GDP tends to have these other positive externalities that affect people's health, happiness and health. It's just one lens through which we can see the health of a country or one lens through which we can see the health of a person. And... I think one of the risks is that if we don't diversify our individual identities, if we're not actively thinking about how we can invest in other sides of ourselves, we can get into this trap where you are treating your income as a measure of your self worth or your productivity as a measure of your self worth.

And that's a perilous game to play if you're just rising and falling on your professional accomplishments. It can be tricky in the best of times that you can feel like you never have enough. And in the worst of times, you can lose sight of who you are. Yeah, I appreciate that.

Because

Srini: I wonder how you're feeling about this right now with having had a book come out and your first book, because I remember there was a certain point where I realized it's wow, I'm measuring my self worth and sense of self and podcast downloads and book sales.

Simone Stolzoff: Yeah, it's common. And I think like part of the what makes them so seductive, these metrics is because they are quantifiable.

They are measurable. And you can return to the Amazon page every day and see how many people have downloaded your book. And I think it's hard to say just care less about this or just deprioritize work. And so one of the things that I've been thinking about a lot is Instead of advocating for lessening the importance of work in our life, how can we promote the idea of increasing the importance of other sides of who we are?

And the research backs this up. It shows that people who have greater what they call self complexity, people who have cultivated different facets of their being, tend to be more resilient in the face of adversity. This makes intuitive sense. Imagine if you are so attached to your job and then your boss has something disparaging or you have a bad day at the office, it can spill over into all other aspects of your life unless you've cultivated a more stable foundation.

And then the research also shows that people who have greater interests, more passions, different things They look to do outside of work can improve the quality of their work as well. They tend to be more creative, more innovative, especially in the knowledge economy that we currently live in, where there isn't always a direct correlation between how many hours we spent working and the quality of our work.

It becomes even just if you're making the business case, a better recipe for success. If you're not too close to the work that you're doing on a day to day basis.

Srini: Yeah it makes sense that some of the best work I ever did, the work that led to a self published Wall Street Journal bestseller was literally on a three week surf trip to Costa Rica.

Simone Stolzoff: Yeah I think a lot of our standards for working are holdovers from a more industrial age. And maybe if you're working on an assembly line and manufacturing, the amount of hours you put in are directly related to the amount of widgets that you can get out. But when the deliverable is a book or a headline for a marketing campaign or a vision for the strategic future of a company.

It's not necessarily just about the brute forcing, putting in your hours and sitting in the chair. It's about having that space for you to be able to synthesize all of the inputs that you're taking in. To be able to let the ideas bounce off of each other in your mind and marinate. And as many people have found out during the pandemic, the amount of time we spend working It's not always linear you can have the same assignment take four hours or one hour depending on how much you allot for it.

And I think people are waking up to this reality that it's much more about the quality of the work as opposed to some of these proxy metrics, like the amount of hours that you spend in the chair.

Srini: One thing you're talking about was our relationship with a company where you say, regardless of whether companies, employees or executives say their family, the sentiment can never be genuine.

Families and businesses have fundamentally different goals. What companies generally mean when they say they're like a family is that they look out for their employees. Familial relationships, however, are unconditional. At will employment, by definition, is not loyalty to the business. We'll always supersede loyalty to employees.

And it's funny because I have believed that for so long, like I inherently knew that like I just, and because I've been fired from every job I had to me, I was like, I have an inherent distrust of corporations.

Simone Stolzoff: Yeah, I think like in the past few weeks around when we're recording this episode, this has been in full display for particularly workers in the tech industry that might have bought into this idea of loyalty or companies looking out for them.

Only to, to lay their employees off by the thousands like the. The idea, the rhetoric that we'll look out for each other, we care about each other here as people is all well and good, but once it intersects with an economic downturn or a company falls on hard times, those words start to feel pretty empty.

Srini: Yeah, I remember seeing a tweet from somebody who had worked at Google for 20 years and they said, you know what, I basically got an email this morning, didn't even get to go back to the office or something like that. Yeah, after 20 years.

Simone Stolzoff: Yeah, and it's just. It's always been the case where employers treat employees transactionally they hire employees when they add value and fire employees when they don't.

And I think it's high time that employees start to look at their relationship to work a bit more transactionally as well. This might sound crass, especially given the culture has told us that we should follow our passion and do what we love, we should treat our work like a calling or a vocation.

But perhaps a clear eyed vision of the economic contract that is our job the understanding that this is what I'm giving and this is what I'm getting can help people develop a healthier relationship in the long term.

Srini: So talk to me about this whole idea of systemic reform, because you say perhaps the biggest barrier to systemic work time reform is simply employers resistance to change, which is why studies like the ones in Iceland.

If you can reference what that was for people are so important. They proved that data, they proved with data, the reforms like reduced work hours can boost employees wellbeing and increase their output. Workers were literally being able to get the same amount of work done in fewer hours.

Simone Stolzoff: Yeah. When we think about topics like work life balance and developing a healthier relationship to work, so often the onus is put. on the individual. We say things like set a boundary or practice self care this weekend or download this meditation app. But I actually think that companies and maybe institutions more broadly, like the government, are in the place that can actually enact the types of reforms that will protect workers.

Lives outside of the office and make for a more sustainably productive workers as well You know I think a lot of the data coming back from these four day workweek studies whether it's the one in Iceland that I reference in the book or the ones in the UK that just came out or some of the individual pilot programs at different companies around the world Are showing that there isn't a direct relationship between hours worked and the quality of the work that we've produced.

And that's what I think is one of the biggest bright spots coming out of the pandemic in this new world of hybrid and remote work. We are hopefully moving towards a place where the quality of the work can speak for itself. I'm reminded of someone I talked to for the book who works at a law firm and lawyers and attorneys more broadly are a great example of the sort of anachronistic norms that we have around the workplace where they have to clock their hours in six or 15 minute intervals and say exactly what they're doing.

And I was talking to this early career lawyer, and he was saying, I have no incentive to do work efficiently or even to improve much of the quality of my work. My only incentive from the company perspective is to spend the most amount of time so we can build clients. And that's just a backwards way of thinking we want to move to a more enlightened approach to work.

We have to instill trust in employees to be able to get their work done. And a lot of these studies are proving that it doesn't have to come at the expense of output or productivity or the bottom line.

Srini: Like I'm thinking about this from a standpoint of both managers and employees. And I feel like if an employee was reading this, the book, they're probably screaming hell yes.

And I wonder have you faced resistance from anybody to these

Simone Stolzoff: ideas? Yeah I think there's a few good arguments that can play devil's advocate to the case that I'm making. One of the things that I think about a lot is, yes the United States has such a work centric culture, and in the past few centuries, we've also been exceptional in the way that we've brought growth and wealth and innovation to the rest of the world.

And so is there a direct relationship between this culture

,

of treating work like a religion and all of the innovation that's come out of the United States? And I think it's a fair point and I think especially in early stage startups or companies that are trying to bring things that are net new into the world, there will be seasons of grinding if you're trying to push something to market, maybe you do need to stay late for a few nights or work really hard with a shared Vision with a team, but I just hope that seasonality is balanced out of other seasons where there's a different prioritization of what we work on.

And the thing that I think about a lot is in the short term, really grinding is perhaps what you might need to bring something to market or it's the end of the quarter, you have to hit your numbers. But in the long term, that same mentality is only going to lead to burnout and churn and people who get sick and can't work at all.

And so if we want to take a step back as managers or bosses or entrepreneurs and think about what. will lead to sustainability over the long term. It's actually about creating systems and norms around people's ability to be at the job and do great work, but then also to be off the clock and to go home.

I've often think of the best sort of productivity hack is just your presence. And everyone knows if you're on our 11 of a 12 hour shift, you're not firing in all cylinders. It's easier to get distracted. You're not necessarily producing your best work. And so how as enlightened managers and bosses, can you think about ways in which you are incorporating rest and balance into the cultures that you're creating?

And it starts with you. It starts with you being able to model the type of culture that you want to work in.

Srini: So I'm thinking about this and I talked to my sister, she's a doctor and so she works in shifts and when she's done with work, she's done with work and she comes home and I can't tell you the number of times I'm like that's different than what I do.

I don't ever feel like I'm done with work. I don't feel like there's a boundary between when I'm off and on. It's just always thinking about it.

Simone Stolzoff: Yeah. Yeah. There's this distinction that I cite in the book from these researchers at Wharton that talk about the difference between integrators and segmenters.

Integrators are people maybe like you that don't mind a more porous boundary between when they're working or when they're not working. They're the folks that might want to take a run at 3 p. m. and then come back online after dinner once they put the kids to sleep and check their email on their phone.

And then segmenters are people that want a more firm boundary between the two. They want clear expectations and want to start at a certain time, end at a certain time, and know what the standards are of when things have to get done. I think it's important to understand nuance like that, both from the perspective of our own self awareness as workers, but also if you're a manager if you have a bunch of Integrators on your team, they might love a more porous idea of when something has to be due or a timeline that isn't as fixed, but that same policy for a segmenter might stress them out where they want to know when they have to get their work done and then be able to close their laptop and proverbially leave it at the office.

And I think it's different strokes for different folks, which is why I try not to be too prescriptive in the book. And the current moment that we're living in work is very leaky. We all have offices in our pockets and it's easy to exist in a perpetual state of half work where you're swiping down at dinner to see if any new work emails have come in.

And I think especially for people like you and I who are self-employed and have the potential for work to expand like a gas and fill all of our unoccupied space to be conscious about when we want to be on the clock and when we don't. How have you

Srini: seen this narrative around work differ across different cultures?

Simone Stolzoff: Yeah I think the foundation for the book was the fact that I had a cross-cultural upbringing. My. Mom's side of the family is Italian, as I mentioned, and it's a very different prioritization of work. Maybe family is number one, and faith is number two, and work is important, but it's very much a means to an end.

It's a way to pay for our material existence. I think there are Lots of cultures that are even more extreme than the United States I'm thinking of some of the East Asian cultures like Japan and Korea One of the stats that I quote in the book is that Japan has one of the most progressive Parental leave policies in the world.

I think new fathers are entitled to up to a year of paid time off But in the last data that I looked at, a paltry 5% of fathers took the time that they were allowed. And so it points to these sort of two prerequisites that we need in order to develop a healthier relationship to work or to carve out more space for our non work selves.

We need both the policy in place to allow workers to be able to do things other than work. But we also need the cultural will to do unless people are interested in, say, doing things other than work, no amount of policy in the world can cure workaholism. And so that's why I think the cultural change that we're seeing right now, where people are pushing back against some of the hustle culture and girl boss narrative is really healthy for helping people find a more intentional way that they're approaching their

Srini: careers.

So for you personally, like how has your own sort of way of thinking about how you define success change from, like, when you finish college to now.

Simone Stolzoff: Yeah. I think this book writing process has been really illustrative. I worked in the corporate world and that IDEO and then in different sort of newsrooms over the years.

And I think. My past career aspirations were maybe to write the book and then go back to a newsroom or a company and work my way up the ranks and manage more people and accrue more responsibility. And now that's changed I think I really enjoyed the process of writing the book and the reporting process and the editing process.

And now my North Star is to hopefully write more books. But I think one thing I realized once I started working for myself is that it wasn't always just my manager or the culture of the company. That I worked for that drove me towards overwork, it was often myself when I left the corporate world, I realized that I was often my own worst manager I would push myself towards these really ambitious goals.

And if I didn't hit my, say, weekly writing word count, I would. Inevitably open the laptop on the weekend, even though I vowed not to, and I wouldn't be very productive because I hadn't taken much time to rest or recharge, which, by my own twisted logic, would drive me to work even more. And so as we shift into a world where more people are working for themselves or have different arrangements with how they're earning their income.

It becomes even more important to set those boundaries and think about when we are on and off

Srini: the clock. This is a tangential question that's not entirely related to the book, but how do you think AI is going to

Simone Stolzoff: affect all of this? Yeah, it's a good question. And it's a question that I've gotten a lot over the course of my book tour and promoting the book.

And I think it's on everyone's mind for a good reason. It does. pose an existential threat. And often people like to make the parallel to other step change technological innovations and say over a long enough time horizon, it tends to benefit society. And of course there'll be some collateral damage along the way.

Which I tend to agree with, I consider myself a techno optimist, but it does feel like this innovation is exponential. It's not just this like change that is a incremental increase in the way that we do work. And I think what it's really going to do is increase the gap between the haves and the have nots.

People who are able to leverage AI and these different automation technologies. In a way, we'll be able to be more productive than ever, and maybe one software engineer in the future can do the work of ten mediocre engineers. And so that'll be great for people that can successfully wield these tools.

And for people that don't have access to the education or the ability to leverage these tools in their line of work, we'll really be left behind. And I think it's incumbent on people are developing these technologies and policymakers who are thinking about. How we can protect the most vulnerable populations to be conscious of the fact that the world is changing right before our eyes at a faster rate than it's ever changed before.

But yeah, I'll also throw that question back to you as a creative, as someone. Who writes and podcasts, how do you think I will change your work?

Srini: So I have been diving deep into AI, like probably deeper than most. In fact, I started a company called Workflow Genius that I liked. And even before we built a website already had paying clients to.

I was showing them some of the things you can do with AI, like I contacted another author because I loved her book and I was like, Hey, do you want some advice on, on book marketing? I think she's also a portfolio author and her book is coming out. We're going to have her as a guest. And she'd asked me a few questions and I was showing her a few different things and she was like, okay, how do I hire you?

And I was like, and I'd had three or four people say, you just rocked my world in 30 minutes. And so I think the reason I took to it so quickly was because when you have the body of work the size that I do, the ability to like actually put that information to use and repackage and repurpose it at scale.

is incredibly valuable. You're talking about 1000 podcast episodes. Just imagine all those transcripts. I built a product that I haven't released publicly yet, which is basically an AI based database that allows you to converse with our transcripts. You can go into the search and ask any question about any interview.

Which to me was invaluable because like I had a guest who told me which was a neuroscientist and I want to know what do you think is the happened to my brain as a byproduct of a thousand interviews? What has happened to the structure? And she said something that was very flattering and she was go yours is the kind of brain we're going to want to have access to when we can upload our consciousness to the internet.

And I, like as flattering as that was. I thought to myself it's not my brain, it's the information I've acquired. And part of it was the fact that it wasn't accessible in the way that it is now. So in my mind, AI is really one of the greatest economic power shifts in the history of the world.

Because if you remember Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations said, division of labor is the key to maximizing output, but labor has always been prohibitively expensive. What? In my mind, AI does to your point, like one engineer could do the work of 10 engineers is AI makes division of labor at scale available to the masses.

And that to me is incredibly powerful if you start to think about it in very creative ways. But the other huge advantage I realized I had is I have so much existing knowledge from all these interviews that I can take and apply. So I'll give you an example. I read Jonah Berger's book, Contagious, and I interviewed Jonah Berger a long time ago.

And one day it just occurred to me, I was like, you know what, Jonah Berger's book, Contagious, is all about virality. So I literally went into chat GPT, I was like, take this blog post and revise it and apply the principles from Jonah's book to my blog post. Wow. And the only reason I think that is because I have like thousands of mental models.

I think that Like I, I said this somewhere, I was like, AI isn't gonna make idiots into geniuses. I think it's going to enable people who are very good at what they do to do it better and faster and focus on the most, the highest value producing parts

Simone Stolzoff: of their work. Yeah. I tend to agree, and I also think that the jury is still out.

We're just in the early days and we'll see how this play plays out. Ultimately. I think like one of the questions that I have is, Will it create more room for leisure? I think in some of the innovations in the mid 20th century the common examples are like the dishwasher and the washing machine.

Everyone thought that with these innovations, it would create a lot less labor, especially for housewives. And the result was actually much more nuanced where people continued to do more housework and find other things. They just raised the standards of what cleanliness looked like in the home.

And who knows, like maybe work is something that we just want to fill our days and even if we don't have to from a material standpoint. We will choose to, or maybe at its most extreme, people will pay to. Absolutely. This has been really fascinating. So I have one final question for you, which is how we finished all of our interviews with the Unmistakable Creative.

Srini: What do you think it is to make somebody or something unmistakable?

Simone Stolzoff: Yeah, I know I've listened to too many episodes of this show in the past, and it's hard to distill unmistakability into a single trait. I'm reminded of the definition of porn from the Supreme Court, which is you know it when you see it.

But I think in my line of work, what I apply the most value to is all things original. And especially in an age where... There's the ability to take in more inputs than ever before, with AI's ability to synthesize those inputs. What I think unmistakability stands from, stems from, is the ability to really have original thoughts and to think about things that only you can think about.

As a journalist when we pitch articles, there's sort of four questions that we have to answer. It's what's the story, why should people care, why now, and why you? And I think that last question is really the most important when it comes to unmistakability, thinking about what are the things that you can uniquely offer to the story, this life, this job that no one else can, and how can you lean into that in the future?

Srini: I can't thank you enough for taking the time to join us and share your story, your wisdom, and your insights with our listeners. Where can people find out more about you, your work, the book, and everything else you wrote?

Simone Stolzoff: Yeah, the best place is thegoodenoughjob. com. That's where you can learn about the book and I'm at Simone Stolzoff on social media.

Srini, thanks for you so much for having me on. My pleasure.

Srini: And for everybody listening, we will wrap the show with that. Did you catch our recent pilot episode of How They Met Each Other? If you enjoyed hearing the stories of how couples met, then we've got some great news. We're working on making a full season of the show, but we need your help to make it happen.

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