Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories
Political economy
Weblink
https://www.simonestolzoff.com/

THE GOOD ENOUGH JOB

Simone Stolzoff

THE GOOD ENOUGH JOB is a challenge to the belief that work is more than a job - and a call to reclaim our lives from our living.

When designer and journalist Simone Stolzoff had a choice between his dream job, or a good job - with interesting-enough work, great benefits, and much more money - the choice should have been easy, but instead it was agonizing. He realized that at stake was not his well-being, but his identity: "Who are you, and what are you worth?"

THE GOOD ENOUGH JOB is the story of Stolzoff's journey to understand a peculiar pathology, defined by productivity hacks and #hustle: workism. Drawing on hundreds of interviews with Michelin star chefs, Wall Street bankers, overwhelmed teachers, and other laborers across the economy, Stolzoff found that while many feel overworked and underpaid, we are still obsessed with our work, seeking from our jobs emotional fulfillment instead of better conditions.

If we want to be happy, he asks, how can we emotionally disentangle ourselves from our work? When is it good enough?

Through provocative critique and deep reporting, Stolzoff punctures the myths that keep us chained to our jobs. By exposing the lies we - and our employers - tell us about the value of our work, THE GOOD ENOUGH JOB makes the urgent case for reclaiming your time. Because your coworkers aren't your family. You aren't what you do. And above all, there is no dream job.
Good enough is great!

Simone Stolzoff is a journalist and designer from San Francisco. A former staff writer for Atlantic Media (Quartz/The Atlantic), he is now a design lead for the global design and innovation firm IDEO, where he designs programs for companies like Google, Microsoft, and Facebook on how to best educate, engage, and retain their employees. His feature writing on the intersection of labor and Silicon Valley has appeared in The Atlantic, WIRED, The San Francisco Chronicle, and numerous other publications. When he's not working, he runs an online book club, writes poetry, and can generally be found outdoors.

Available products
Book Published 2023-05-23 by Portfolio
Book Published 2023-05-01 by Portfolio

Comments

The Good Enough Job is a thorough, insightful, and much-needed reminder that we are not what we do at work. Weaving his own experiences with surprising stories and research, Simone reveals why the modern world makes it so easy to fall under workism's spell - and how we can finally disentangle ourselves from its clutches.

British Commonw.: Ebury Edge ; Arabic: Jarir ; Chinese (compl.): Infortresss Publishing ; Korean: Woongjin

Simone Stolzoff provides an important corrective to the modern impulse to either villainize or lionize our jobs, arguing that it's okay for our work to be just one element among many that contribute to a life well-lived.

Superb. A fascinating and deeply reported challenge to the idea that our work should - or ever could - be the only center of meaning, self-worth, or community in our lives. The real-life stories fill the reader with the liberating sense that we absolutely could put work back in its place - and that the result would be both richer lives and more effective work.

The Good Enough Job is an incredibly propulsive read, filled with characters whose stories will be at once familiar and astonishing - and it will absolutely challenge you, in the best way possible, to change the way you think about work. This isn't a book about burnout, or addiction to a certain type of work - at least not precisely. It's a book about how so many people have come to root their entire sense of value in the work that they do for pay - and what happens when that strategy begins to sour.

I couldn't stop reading The Good Enough Job. It's packed with sharp analysis about modern work culture and vivid, surprising, page-turning stories of people who have sought - often clumsily, always bravely - to detach their sense of meaning and self-worth from their productivity as workers. In this timely dissection of what our overworked culture is doing to our psyches, I was startled to recognize myself. You will, too.

The Good Enough Job is a super-helpful guide for anyone looking to renegotiate their relationship with work and to better fit their career goals into a happier, more fulfilling life.

His straight-shooting style makes for a blistering takedown of American corporate culture. Workaholics would do well to check this out.

A journalist makes a timely, compelling case for designing work around our lives instead of squeezing our lives into the space around work. It's a wakeup call for people who feel overworked and leaders who have lost sight of their humanity.