Simone Stolzoff > 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

“I’m not sure if I can write a love poem while it’s still just a prospect pirouetting on the horizon, but when I do find that love, like a five dollar bill resurfacing from folds of denim, you’ll be the first to know.”
― Simone Stolzoff

“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

“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

“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. 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

“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

“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

“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.”
― Simone Stolzoff, The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work

“Good enough is an invitation to choose what sufficiency means—to define your relationship to your work without letting it define you.”
― 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

“Here, capitalism is not just an economic system; it’s also a social philosophy—a philosophy that says a person is as valuable as their output. In the United States, productivity is more than a measurement; it’s a moral good.”
― Simone Stolzoff, The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work

“Not everybody has the same springboards and safety nets to parlay their passions into gainful employment,” Erin Cech, a sociologist who researches fulfillment at work, told me. “If people are told to follow their passions, but we don’t provide an equal playing field in which they can do that, then telling people to follow their passions helps reinforce inequality.”
― Simone Stolzoff, The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work

“We seek status because we don’t know our own preferences,”
― Simone Stolzoff, The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work

“The founders vowed never to sell the company, and to measure success by the number of creative projects they helped bring to life, not the size of their profits. They asked employees to buy into this mission, which meant accepting less-than-market-rate salaries and forgoing the stock options that often convince people to assume the risk of joining a startup in its early days. In exchange, employees got to work for a company with a social mission, alongside coworkers with similar values.”
― 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

“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. Tethering your sense of self-worth to your career is a perilous game.”
― 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

“In 1965, CEOs were paid twenty times more than their average employee. By 2015, CEOs were paid over two hundred times more than their average employee.”
― 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.”
― Simone Stolzoff, The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work

“I can’t tell you what to worship. But I do know that when you don’t take an active role in determining what you value, you inherit the values of the systems around you. And when you invest in multiple sources of meaning—when you, like Ryan, hold multiple definitions of what makes life valuable—you invest in yourself in a way no company, boss, or market can control.”
― Simone Stolzoff, The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work

“My father built a time machine and then he spent his whole life trying to figure out how to use it to get more time. He spent all the time he had with us thinking about how he wished he had more time, if he could only have more time.”
― Simone Stolzoff, The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work

“In 1975, Americans and Germans worked the exact same number of hours on average. In 2021, Americans worked more than 30 percent more.”
― 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

“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