I first heard of the book The Good Enough Job on some podcasts (see Other resources at the end) and decided to add it to my reading list. I have been working for the last few years on being less workaholic and doing more things for fun and the book seemed to be the right fit for me.

The message from the book The Good Enough Job is good (perhaps it is a confirmation bias due to my life moment) but the books could be better. It has too many personal stories and it seems that sometimes the stories don’t even illustrate the point desired by the author.

For sure it is me, but I was expecting a bit more based on studies than stories and also I found that it could be shorter, like half shorter as it is too many stories.

Let’s see a bit more about the book The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work

This post is part of the series Learnings from books where my goal is to share what I learned from the book that I read. It is a mixture of review and summary with a bit of my opinion and point of view. But, as reviews, these learnings can say more about me than the book itself, so I trust that you the smart reader will take it with a grain of salt.

Learnings from The Good Enough Job

Despite my high expectations that were not fulfilled, the book has some good learnings and I will share the 5 most important learnings from the book.

career is a relatively new concept

It is hard to imagine a different world than we live in and due to that, we sometimes think that things were always the way they are now, but that is for most things not true. Carrer is one of the things. We can think that people always had career in their “jobs” but according to the book, “two hundred years ago, almost no one had a career—at least not in the way we currently conceive of careers as stories of progress and change.”

don’t be defined ONLY by what you produce

This is one of my biggest points to work on (and it is probably it is yours as well). We as a society (at least in the ones that I lived) usually define or value people by what they do and what they produce. I don’t see a big problem in taking that view as it is the way we have a functional and growing economy, but I think the problem is when we are defined ONLY by what we produce. We should be able to be defined also as things that we do only for fun with no meaningful or useful outcome.

play for playing sake

Similar to “rest for the sake of rest” from the book Four Thousand Weeks, the idea here is to have hobbies or activities that you don’t have an output or a goal, besides the goal to enjoy the process itself. We have hobbies (like this blog) we have some kind of outcome (posts) so it turns out to be work as the author mentions “[…] striving for a goal still imposes a frame of improvement, which implies work in a fundamental sense.”

So we should play more, as in the book “Play is a natural antidote to workism. It indexes not on utility, but on curiosity and wonder. It cares not about “better,” but only about our present experience.“

perks are a kind of trap

As I work in tech I have close contact with the famous perks of tech companies. Actually, my company has very few perks compared to Google and other big tech, but we still have snacks, free lunches on Tuesdays, and free drinks on Thursdays.

And who does not love some perks?! (I can say that I don’t when trying to lose some weight, I have to fight my willpower, which is not so good for food).

But companies don’t give things for free because they are nice, they do because most of the time, the return on the investments is worth it. And they do that because you tend to stay more in the office and also to tie your social life with coworkers. One study cited in the book found that “While there, she found that two organizational “perks” – dinner and a free ride home – were central to the long hours synonymous with banking culture. If workers stayed at the office until seven p.m., they could order dinner on the company dime.”

you are not the work you do

Kind of related to the other topics above is the idea that you are not the work you do, we have to detach our sense of self-worth from the work we do. As the book states, “A good enough job is a job that allows you to be the person you want to be.”

Here is also useful to have other identities, not only a professional one. You have other identities, like father (or mother), husband (or wife), hiker, musician, curious person, etc.

Favorite quotes

These are my 5 favorite quotes from the book.

  • ”Of course, we do all manner of things. But in the United States, how we make money is shorthand for who we are. Our livelihoods have become our lives.”
  • ”The answer, in short, is that the expectation that work will always be fulfilling can lead to suffering”
  • ”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.”
  • ”I worshipped work, and as a result, settling for anything less than a job that was absolutely perfect felt like a failure. It was only by removing work from its pedestal that I was able to see my work as part, but not all, of who I was”
  • ”If workism is the religion, dream jobs are the deities.”

Other resources

This section is extra and here I compliment the post with content from other sources that resonate with the book.

These are my learnings from the book The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work written by Simone Stolzoff. A special thanks to Vancouver Public Library (VPL) for allowing access to the book for free.

Cheers.