The Good Enough Job: What We Gain When We Don’t Put Work First

Value self-determination is simply figuring out what you care about for yourself. Figuring out your values allows you to tailor your definition of success to your unique personality and life circumstances.

Khe’s life was a picture of résumé virtues. He hustled his way from a lower-middle-class upbringing to the 1 percent. Khe’s status, education, and finances represent the pinnacle of what our society deems successful. And yet he was miserable.

two prerequisites for creating a healthier relationship to work: (1) the structural protections to ensure employees can have a life outside of work; and (2) the cultural will to do so.

To detach our sense of self-worth from our work, though, we must first develop a self that no boss or job title or market has the

power to change. In Morrison’s words, “You are not the work26 you do; you are the person you are.”

Relying on external markers of success can leave ambitious professionals in any field feeling perpetually unfulfilled. This isn’t to say that ambition and achievement are necessarily bad. But in order to satisfy our souls’ deepest yearnings, there must be alignment between our values and the values of the games we play. We

Researchers estimate that between lost productivity,20 employee disengagement, turnover, and absenteeism, burnout costs employers as much as $190 billion a year.

I found that those with the healthiest relationships to their work had one thing in common: they all had a strong sense of who they were when they weren’t working.

At the beginning of the 1500s, the new profession of the merchant capitalist emerged. Merchants purchased foreign goods cheaply and sold them to the European aristocracy for large profits. They persuaded craftsmen to sell them their goods and then traveled from town to town in search of the best price. This meant that craftsmen now competed with ot