Pod Insights Something You Should Know How Random Events Can Impact Your Health & Do You Make Your Job Too Important? : SYSK Choice About this episode Why is it that people seem to come up with good ideas in the shower? Could there really be something special about the shower experience that generates great thoughts and simple solutions? This episode begins with some interesting research about the magic of the shower. https://www.headspace.com/articles/shower-epiphanies
The strangest things can affect your health. For example, your birthday or if there is a parade or a 10K in your town. Even if there is EZ Pass on a highway somewhere near you can affect your health. It sounds odd and you may ask: How can that be? To answer that and explain all of this is my guest Anupam B. Jena. Bapu, as he is called, is a medical doctor, economist, Harvard professor and author of the book Random Acts of Medicine: The Hidden Forces That Sway Doctors, Impact Patients, and Shape Our Health (https://amzn.to/3Y54hF4).
In our culture people take great pride in their work and career. A job can become part of our self-worth and identity. Is that a good thing? For some it is – but it is not true for everyone according to Simone Stolzoff. He is a journalist who has written for The Atlantic, WIRED and numerous other publications. He is also author of the book The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work (https://amzn.to/44MYZjI). Simone explains why seeking out the perfect job at the expense of other aspects of life can be trouble.
Could brushing your teeth help you lose weight? Maybe. It’s apparently all about WHEN you brush them. Listen as I explain how good dental hygiene can reduce the size of your waistline. https://www.popsci.com/does-brushing-your-teeth-affect-your-appetite/
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:01 Speaker 00 Low energy, unfocused, foggy? You might be dehydrated. Whether it's hot yoga, over 100-degree weather, or too much sun. Gator Light, with a specialized blend of five electrolytes, was scientifically designed to help move fluids into the body faster for rapid rehydration. Shop now at retailers nationwide. Gator Light: Hydrates Faster Than Water. Is it in you? Symptoms noted are signs of mild to moderate dehydration. Consult a healthcare professional if symptoms persist.
0:31 Mike Carruthers? Today on Something You Should Know, why do people seem to get great ideas in the shower? Then, the strangest things that can impact your health, like your birthday, if your doctor's out of town, and, this is weird, if there's EZ Pass on a highway near you.
0:48 Speaker 02 It's totally random, right? You live in an area, you don't move there, thinking, "Oh, there's this new technology called EZ Pass that's going to be introduced." But it does get introduced. And if you look at infant mortality in areas when EZ Pass gets introduced, mortality falls.
1:02 Mike Carruthers? Also, how brushing your teeth can help you lose weight. And are we too focused on job and career? Should we maybe look at our work differently?
1:12 Speaker 03 The idea is, rather than starting with work at the center and thinking about how our life can support work, we start with our vision of what is a life well-lived and think about how our career and our work can support that vision.
1:25 Mike Carruthers? All this today, on Something You Should Know.
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2:56 Speaker 04 Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers.
3:09 Mike Carruthers? Hi, welcome. Thank you for joining me today for another episode of Something You Should Know. You often hear people talk about how they get good ideas in the shower, and I sometimes think that's where I get good ideas, or at least I get clarity on a problem. But is this a real thing, getting good ideas in the shower? Apparently so, according to research from Drexel University. They put showering to the test and found it to be one of the most effective problem-solving techniques out there. In the shower, your attention naturally broadens and mental barriers tend to fade. Showering shuts down sensory stimulation from the outside world and puts you in a state
3:54 Mike Carruthers? that is similar to meditation. If you focus on the issue at hand in the shower, chances are you'll conjure up some more creative solutions than you would almost anywhere else. And that is something you should know.
4:12 Mike Carruthers? While there are a lot of things you do deliberately that can impact your health, good or bad, there are also a lot of things affecting your health that you have no idea about. These are random occurrences, chance events. Things like when you're born, whether or not there's a parade or some other event in your town today, whether the highway near you has toll booths or EZ Pass. All these things affect people's health. And you're probably thinking, what in the world is he talking about? Well, give me a second here to introduce you to a really interesting guy. His name is Dr. Anupam B. Jena.
4:53 Mike Carruthers? He is an economist, but also a medical doctor, Harvard professor, and he is host of the podcast Freakonomics MD. He's also author of a fascinating book called Random Acts of Medicine, and he goes by the name of Bapu. Hey, Bapu, welcome to Something You Should Know.
5:11 Speaker 02 Thanks for having me.
5:13 Mike Carruthers? So to get people on board here, give an example of one of these random chance events, random acts of medicine things that you would never imagine that affect people's health.
5:24 Speaker 02 I think my favorite example is a story from my wife. She ran a race a few years ago and asked me to watch her on the race route, and I couldn't get to the place where I wanted to park, which happened to be the hospital where I worked. It was on the race route, and I couldn't get there because the roads were blocked. And I see her a few hours later, and she says to me, well, what happened to everybody that needed to get to the hospital that day? And I was like, hmm, good question. So what we showed in the study, which is something that we read about in the book, is that when a city hosts a marathon, the mortality rate for people who have a heart condition, an older person, not someone running the marathon, goes up about 15% on the exact day of the marathon compared to all the surrounding days in that city.
6:05 Speaker 02 And the reason why is because the roads are closed, and ambulances and people who are driving, people who need to get to the hospital, can't get there fast enough. So it's a random act or a chance occurrence because you don't choose to have your heart attack on any particular day if you're a 75-year-old American. It just happens, and it's chance that it happened on the day of a marathon. But that chance occurrence led to a delay in care, and we show a 15% increase in mortality.
6:33 Mike Carruthers? Well, and has anybody gone to the powers that be and say, you know, this, we have a problem here. People are dying because of our race and they do something about it? Or that's just, it is what it is?
6:45 Speaker 02 Yeah, I mean, unfortunately, it is what it is. And when this paper came out a few years ago, we published in the New England Journal of Medicine, and it came out actually the week of the Boston Marathon. And so the Boston EMS crews are aware of this problem. They try to adjust by locating ambulances in certain areas along, on both sides of the route. But still, it's a huge problem because it's 26 miles or more that's blocked, and you cannot bisect the route to get from one place to another. If the quote unquote "good hospital" is on the other side of the route, how are you going to get there? And we talked to a bunch of cities EMS agencies, and they weren't even aware of the problem. So I wish I could tell you that A, they were aware of it, and B, that they were doing
7:28 Speaker 02 something about it. But they certainly weren't aware of it. And I don't think that they were doing a lot about it.
7:33 Mike Carruthers? Well, see, that's such a great example of, and that's probably why you chose it, because that's a random act that really, like, kills people.
7:43 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah. I mean, I, like, I met a woman a few years ago giving a talk, and she came up to me, it was a huge audience, she came up to me afterwards, and she says, you know, "I've got this problem, a problem with my colon that predisposes me to have bleeding." And she was at work one day, and she had a gastrointestinal bleed. She called the ambulance. There was a marathon right outside her workplace, and the ambulance couldn't get to her. And so she called her grandma, who's like a 75-year-old woman, who basically drove a, who lived nearby her work, who drove a minivan on the sidewalk. People had to move out, picked up her granddaughter, which is the woman, rushed her to the hospital,
8:26 Speaker 02 and by the time she got to the hospital, her heart had actually stopped. So she had what we call cardiac arrest. And she lived to tell me the story.
8:33 Mike Carruthers? So you say that babies born in Pennsylvania, in New Jersey, after EZ Pass was introduced are less likely to be born premature. What, how could that, what?
8:45 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's totally randomized. So this is some work by economists named Janet Currie and Reed Walker. And basically, what they were interested in trying to figure out is how does pollution impact health? And it seems like an obvious question to study, but it's not obvious how you study it. So if you look at areas that are heavy polluted versus areas that are not, you can't just compare outcomes, health outcomes in those two places, because the populations of people who live in those areas are very different. And you can't then say it's the pollution that's causing the health outcome that's bad. Could be all sorts of other different risk factors in those two different groups. So their insight was, let's look at how EZ Pass was differentially introduced across
9:25 Speaker 02 different cities, across different points in time. And what EZ Pass does is it allows cars who were previously just stalling on highways emitting pollutants to now go through the toll booth faster. And the local pollutants are less as a result of that, because there's not that congestion. And if you look at infant mortality in areas, when EZ Pass gets introduced, mortality falls. And they link it to a reduction in pollutants. So sort of a clever way to get at this question of how does air quality affect health. It's totally random, right? You live in an area, you don't move there thinking, oh, there's this new technology called EZ Pass that's going to be introduced. But it does get introduced randomly in your
10:06 Speaker 02 area versus another. And your child's outcomes might matter, might depend on the introduction.
10:13 Mike Carruthers? I was reading just before we started talking about this idea that presidents have a shorter life expectancy, or they live a couple of years less than the runner-up. But there's a lot of professions that seem to impact longevity. So talk about that.
10:31 Speaker 02 Yeah. So if you look at photos of President Obama or Clinton back in the day, they grade considerably. And I think you would look at that and say, wow, is it the stress of being in office that's leading these two men to have a lot more gray hairs than they started with? More than you would expect for eight years of aging. And it's possible, right? Being president or prime minister is an enormously stressful job, and the lifestyle is very difficult. All things that might accelerate your aging. But it's a hard question to study, because if you look at The presidents or prime ministers, they live longer than the general population, and that shouldn't be a surprise, right? They come from a different educational groups.
11:14 Speaker 02 They're very typically wealthy, so it's just a whole different ballgame. You can't make that comparison. So what we said is, all right, is there a natural control group? A group of people who could have been presidents or could have been prime ministers, but for the flip of a coin, almost randomly by chance, did not. And so that's what we did. We compared presidents and prime ministers and chancellors, the country's leaders, to runners-up in the elections. And what we see is that being elected the leader of a country shaves off about two and a half years' worth of life. So it does speak to this idea that running a country can be stressful and have an impact on your health.
11:56 Mike Carruthers? But that's as close as you get to a real answer, right? I mean, it's more of a generic-y. It must be the stress of the job.
12:04 Speaker 02 That's right, correct. Because the way in medicine that we would solve this problem, if we wanted to figure out cause and effect, we would say we'd take a bunch of people and we'd randomize some of them to be a world leader and randomize a bunch not to. And because we've randomized the two groups, they're basically going to be similar on average, but only differ by the exposure to being a leader of a country versus not. Now, no one would ever do that in a democracy, right? But think about elections. They're basically 50-50. So it's almost by chance that someone is exposed to the life of being a leader of a country versus not. Now, is it the stress? Is it the lifestyle, meaning lots of hours? Is it what they eat, the lack of exercise?
12:48 Speaker 02 All these other things that have an impact? It's impossible to say. But what we think is happening, it is the cumulative effect of being a leader of a country, whether it's stress of financial markets, stress of war, diet, lifestyle, all those things combined, we can't say.
13:04 Mike Carruthers? All of these random act things are really interesting, but you pick one of your favorites that you found in the research.
13:12 Speaker 02 All right, so let me tell you one of my favorite ones. This is something that I experienced as I'm a medical doctor and also an economist. And when I was in training here in one of the Boston teaching hospitals, I happened to be... Working in the cardiac intensive care unit during the dates that cardiologists have these national conventions, so there's two conventions that are big. One's called the American Heart Association and the other is called the American College of Cardiology. And these are enormous scientific conventions that lots of cardiologists go to. And I remember being in the hospital as a young trainee thinking, hmm, the staffing just feels a little bit different here.
13:54 Speaker 02 And I couldn't put my finger on it, but it made me wonder whether or not people who are hospitalized with heart conditions would have worse outcomes during the dates of these meetings because all the cardiologists were out of town. And so I dug into the data and what I found was actually the opposite. What you see, I'm just going to pick cardiac arrest. It's a life-threatening condition. To give you some numbers, 70% of people who have a cardiac arrest, who are lucky enough to make it to the hospital, 70% of people are dead within 30 days. So it's enormously a life-threatening condition. If you happen to have a cardiac arrest, though, on the day of one of these two cardiology
14:37 Speaker 02 meetings, or in the few days surrounding it, your mortality falls from 70% to 60%. And to give you a sense of the magnitude, that reduction in mortality is larger than what you get by taking aspirins, blood pressure medications, cholesterol medications, having a stent put in your heart if you had a heart attack, all those things, you put them together, they don't generate that same magnitude of mortality benefit as we observe for people who, again, by chance, randomly happen to have a heart attack when all the cardiologists are out of town. And the last thing of that piece of the puzzle that we found out was that there is something about the intensity of care that changes.
15:19 Speaker 02 It actually looks like it's lower during the dates of those meetings, maybe because there's less cardiologists around to do procedures or to do more invasive medical things. And so it suggests to us that at least for some group of people...
15:35 Speaker 02 Reducing the intensity of medical care that they receive could actually be better for them. An idea that we sometimes say less is more.
15:42 Mike Carruthers? Isn't that amazing? So maybe you should just leave people alone.
15:48 Speaker 02 Sometimes, yeah, sometimes. The way I describe this or I think about is imagine there's two people. One is a 40-year-old guy who is a construction worker, and let's say the only thing that his only vice that he smokes, otherwise no other medical problems. And he has a heart, he has chest pain when he's at the construction site, and he gets taken to the emergency department, and they do an EKG, and it shows that he's having a heart attack. What happens? He's going to get taken to the cardiac catheterization lab, where someone will put him in a stent, and he'll recover, and he'll go home in maybe a couple of days and live a long, happy life. Then you've got a nine-year-old woman who
16:31 Speaker 02 has the exact same chest pain when she's at her nursing home. She gets brought to the emergency department. She has the exact same EKG, but on top of her chest pain, she also has seven or eight different medical problems. She's on a number of different medications. But because she had a quote-unquote "heart attack," she also receives a stent, but then she passes away two weeks later from complications of the procedure. Now, that kind of story in medicine, we see all the time, and it's disheartening to see that. But these two people had the same quote-unquote "condition," but their likelihood of benefit was so different from the procedure. And so for her, maybe if we had not done the procedure,
17:14 Speaker 02 she had, she would have done better. And so that idea that less is more, we've started to kind of understand that there's a lot of instances where we probably over-involve ourselves in the medical care of somebody.
17:29 Mike Carruthers? We're discussing how random events, chance occurrences, can impact people's health significantly. And my guest is Dr. Bapu Jena. He is host of the podcast Freakonomics MD and author of the book, Random Acts of Medicine.
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18:45 Mike Carruthers? So, Bapu, you say that kids born in August are more likely to get the flu than kids born in September, and that just makes no sense to me.
18:54 Speaker 02 Yeah, this is totally random, and this is also based on a story of mine. We have got two kids. A few years ago, one of them was three years old, our son, and I took him to the pediatrician's office in August for his three-year-old checkup. And anybody who has kids would know that you go for your annual checkup for your kid around their birthday. So he's got an August birthday. I took him for his three-year-old checkup in August. And I'm walking out the door, and the nurse says to me, "Oh, come back in a few weeks, we'll have the flu shot ready for your son." And I was like, huh. You know, had my son just been born two or three weeks later...
19:37 Speaker 02 I would have gotten the flu shot in the office. But because of his birthday, I had to actually come back to the office. And I probably, Mike, I probably spent hours trying to arrange it because all the flu shot appointments filled up. I couldn't take him to a CVS or a Walgreens where you can go as you're, if you're an adult. And finally, I was able to get him a flu shot. But it got me wondering, you know, maybe kids with these summer birthdays, because they go to their pediatrician's office before the flu shot is actually available in doctors' offices, that happens around late August or early September, they might be less likely to get the flu shot because it's not just automatically given to them when they're at their doctor's office.
20:18 Speaker 02 And if you look at the data, kids who have, let's say, October birthdays, they're about 15 percentage points more likely to get the flu shot than a kid with, let's say, a July birthday, simply because they go for their three-year-old checkup or four-year-old checkup in October, the vaccine is already available in the office, and the pediatrician says, well, you're here, just get the vaccine, just done. And then, no surprise, those summer-born kids who are less likely to get the flu shot, they're also more likely to get the flu. And their family members, we show in the data, their family members are also more likely to get the flu because it's infectious.
20:59 Mike Carruthers? Just because they don't have to come back for a second visit to get the shot?
21:04 Speaker 02 Exactly, yeah. I mean, think about, in medicine and in healthcare, we think a lot about why it is that people don't get the health outcomes that we want them to get. And there's so many factors, things like insurance coverage. We spend a lot of time thinking about the cost of care. One of the things that we don't think about as much is the, sort of the non-financial cost of care or the convenience, right? The time it takes a parent to take their child to the doctor's office, it can be half a day. So if you've got a busy job or your job doesn't let you do that, you're not going to take your child to the doctor, you know, without giving it some, some thought. Or if you live in a major city and the hospital is in the city and the parking is $20, on
21:49 Speaker 02 the margin, that's going to make you less likely to want to go to the doctor for yourself or for your child unless you absolutely need to. So there's all these other things that affect access to care and, and health outcomes that we don't really think about.
22:01 Mike Carruthers? Yeah, well, I've often thought about that because, just because... Like you say, if you need to go to the doctor for something really simple like a flu shot, depending on what it is, maybe not the flu shot, but you know, how often have you had to wait an hour past your appointment time because the doctor's been... and so you... it starts to build up in your head is this is gonna take half the day.
22:25 Speaker 02 And it does take half your...
22:27 Mike Carruthers? Yeah, it does.
22:28 Speaker 02 For example, for our kids, when I... my job is fortunately more flexible than my wife's, but anytime we've got an appointment for the kids, I literally block out half a day on the calendar because I know if I get out in less than half a day, I'm lucky and I'm considered a blessing. But typically, it's a, you know, full ordeal. You gotta drive there, you gotta park, there's often delays, you gotta come back home. So it all takes a lot of time. And I don't think we fully appreciate how much convenience and access or accessibility matters for getting medical care.
23:00 Mike Carruthers? There's something you write about that I think is so interesting, and it's that cognitive bias thing about a person's age. So explain how that works in medicine.
23:11 Speaker 02 The way I describe it is if you go to the store and you see a bag of Doritos that's a dollar and 99 cents, you might think to yourself, why is it a buck 99 and not $2? And the reason why is because of a cognitive bias that human beings fall victim to, which is called left-digit bias. It's the tendency of the mind to focus on the leftmost digit in a string of numbers. So 199 is technically cheaper than $2. It's only a penny cheaper, but it feels more... much more cheap because of that 1. The 1's like, oh, this is a $1-ish item versus a $2-ish item. And that sort of thing that, you know, leads a car salesman
23:53 Speaker 02 to, you know, say that the car is... should be, you know, $9,999 as opposed to $10,000, that same sort of trick. You might not think that it applies to medicine and to a high-stakes decision like cardiac surgery, but it turns out that it does. So if you look at patients, look at people who have a heart attack, and they come to the hospital, and let's say they're 79 years old and 51 weeks, they are more likely to be offered a cardiac bypass surgery than someone who is 80 years old and one week, literally just two weeks apart. And the reason why is because... The older that patients are, the less likely doctors are to want to intervene on them in a, in a sort of invasive way. So you see a patient who's 80 years old in
24:38 Speaker 02 a week, oh, this person's in their quote unquote 80s. You see a person who is 79 years old in 50 weeks, oh, this person is in their quote unquote 70s. And so because this person's in their 80s, maybe I don't want to recommend a cardiac bypass surgery. And so that same behavior that you see in grocery store pricing tactics also applies to a decision-making process that cardiac surgeons go through. And the really interesting thing is that the people who are 79 years old in 50 weeks or 51 weeks, who are more likely to be offered the cardiac bypass surgery, their mortality rate a year later is no different, even though they're about 20% more likely to get the surgery. So it suggests
25:21 Speaker 02 that on the margin, those people who are receiving a cardiac bypass surgery is a major surgery, they don't do any better than the people who just turned 80, who are 20% less likely to get the surgery.
25:35 Mike Carruthers? Well, I love these kind of conversations where two disciplines, economics and medicine, collide and, and reveal all these things that, that nobody ever knew. I've been speaking with Dr. Anupam B. Jena. He is an economist and medical doctor, Harvard professor. He's host of the podcast Freakonomics MD and author of the book Random Acts of Medicine. And there's a link to the podcast and to the book in the show notes. Thanks, Bapu. Appreciate you coming on.
26:04 Speaker 02 Thanks, Mike. It's been a pleasure and look forward to connecting later.
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26:39 Speaker 06 Whenever fall comes back around, it always feels like a fresh start. This year, I've been layering in some styles from the new Lululemon Fall Drop, because the weather is shifting and I find I have to be ready for the entire day and not just one part of it. Lululemon's Fall line has some really versatile transitional pieces, so I can just wake up, throw on a matching set, add a jacket or a fleece, and head out, knowing that I'll feel comfortable enough to go wherever the day takes me. Check out the new fall arrivals in store and online now at lululemon.com.
27:11 Mike Carruthers? It's safe to say that for many of us, work, our job, our career, it's a big part of life. When you meet people, one of the first questions is, so what do you do for a living? We identify, or at least many of us do, with our job. We often create a personal life around our job, because a job can take you to a different part of the country. It can eat up a lot of your time and attention. And many of us have grown up believing that the way to a good life is to work hard, grow in your career, and that work is what will fulfill you. Yet more and more, people are questioning that thinking. Should we put career first and everything else second?
27:55 Mike Carruthers? One person who has explored this topic thoroughly is Simone Stolzoff. Simone is an independent journalist and consultant, whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, Wired, The San Francisco Chronicle, and numerous other publications. And he is author of a book called The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work. Hi Simone, welcome to Something You Should Know.
28:17 Speaker 03 Thanks for having me, Mike.
28:19 Mike Carruthers? So I imagine other people have said this, and when I first saw the book, the title of your book, and I thought, well, you know, here's a guy that's like telling people to lower their sights, don't shoot for the stars, settle, and it's not that. And how is it not that?
28:38 Speaker 03 No, yeah, no, even just looking at the title of the book, The Good Enough Job, it would be easy to assume that it's this slacker manifesto that's letting workers off the hook and letting them kind of sit on their couches and relax. But in fact, it's about just right sizing work's role in our life. And so I argue that the best benefit that we can have for our lives, both in and out of the office, is if we diversify our identities beyond just what we do for work. I have nothing, no problems with doing excellent work or striving to find a job that aligns with your interests. It just becomes risky when work is the sole source of meaning and identity in your life.
29:17 Mike Carruthers? There has been and always has been, I remember, you know, when you get, when you're looking at graduating from school, there's this idea of what do you want to do? You know, what's your dream job? You need to like find a path and follow it. And it kind of becomes all consuming that that's what you live for.
29:38 Speaker 03 Yeah, and it starts even earlier when we start asking children what they want to be when they grow up. You know, I think it's nothing new to conflate our identity with our profession. If your last name is Miller or Baker, you might know this firsthand. But in the last 40 years or so, with the decline of other sources of meaning and identity, things like organized religion and neighborhood and community groups, work has come to fill an outsized role. It's something people are looking to not just for a paycheck, but also for their primary source of identity and community and meaning. And this is our burden that our jobs are not always designed to bear.
30:18 Mike Carruthers? Well, but then, then how did they get to be that way?
30:22 Speaker 03 Yeah, you know, there's a few different ways in. One is the consequences of losing work, particularly in the US, are so dire when, for example, we tie our healthcare to our employment status. Then there's sort of the upside of work, you know, the way that our economic system is set up in this country, starting from Early days when capitalism and Protestant work ethic entwined to form our country's DNA into our current tax structure that allows people to consolidate more wealth with the more hours they work. But the one I really focus on, the idolization of the dream job. And it's no wonder, with the decline of some of these other sources of identity and
31:05 Speaker 03 community, people are turning to where they spend the majority of their time. Certainly, an office can be a social hub. It can be a great source of meaning or a vehicle for making a difference in the world. But as so many people found out during the pandemic, if your job is your sole source of identity and you lose your job, what's left?
31:26 Mike Carruthers? Yeah, I've always found it interesting that people so identify with their work. I mean, I do. I have a successful podcast. I'm the host of a pretty successful podcast. But I also, I also like to cook. I'm a husband and a father. I like to travel. I play ping pong pretty well. But nobody wants to hear that. Or nobody, when they ask, what do you do, wants to hear about my ping pong playing. They want to know about the podcast, what I do for a living, what makes me money. People identify with what they do to make money.
32:01 Speaker 03 Yeah, and even when we define success, we rarely mean someone is happy or healthy. When we say someone is successful, we mean that they've made a lot of money. In addition to the extreme case of losing your job, I think there are also a few other risks, one of which is just the expectations that we put on our jobs. So even the title of the book, The Good Enough Job, is an allusion to this theory that was devised in the mid 20th century by this British pediatrician named Donald Winnicott. And Winnicott was observing how there was this growing idolization of parenting in England where he lived in the 1950s, 1960s. And these parents were hoping to be the perfect parent.
32:44 Speaker 03 They wanted to shield their kid from experiencing any negative emotion or harm. And then when the kid inevitably felt frustrated or sad or angry, the parent took it extremely personally. They thought it was a reflection of their own shortcomings. And Winnicott proposed an alternative. He said, rather than thinking about trying to be the perfect parent, what if you could try and be the good enough parent? Or more specifically, the good enough mother was the title of the book. And he thought with this approach that valued sufficiency over perfection, both the kid and the parent would benefit. The kid would learn how to self soothe and take care of some of their own issues. And the parents wouldn't lose themselves in their children's emotions. So obviously, I'm making a direct parallel to the working world.
33:29 Speaker 03 And I think part of what creates so much disappointment and suffering are these sky high expectations that we have for our jobs, that they should always be perfect, that they should be free of tedium or the mundane aspects that exist in any line of work. So there's that sort of expectations argument. And the third is just the neglect of other aspects of who we are. Certainly, we are more than just workers. We are neighbors and friends and citizens. But the psychologist Esther Perel has this great phrase, too many of us bring the best of ourselves to work and bring the leftovers home.
34:05 Mike Carruthers? What does it look like? You've painted the picture of what things are and how people are very focused, centric on their job. In your view, what's the better picture look like?
34:20 Speaker 03 So much as an investor benefits from diversifying the sources of their investments, we too benefit from diversifying the sources of meaning and identity in our lives. It might sound simplistic, but if we want to derive meaning outside of work, we have to do other things than work. So it's a little bit difficult to think about how you can deprioritize work. But as an alternative, I advocate for prioritizing the other aspects of your life, finding space in your days, in your weeks, in your months, where work is not an option, and filling those spaces with other relationships, activities, behaviors that reinforce other identities.
35:03 Mike Carruthers? And when you talk about the good enough job, what is a good enough job?
35:09 Speaker 03 In short, I think a good enough job is a job that allows you to be the person that you want to be. That definition is sufficiently vague, but what I like about it is it's subjective. So you get to define what good enough means to you. Perhaps it's a job for one person that pays a certain income or is in a certain industry or has a certain job title. But perhaps for someone else, it's a job that is more of a means to an end, a job that gets off at a certain hour so they can pick up their kids from elementary school or allows them to go on that weekend bike ride that they so crave. The idea is to, rather than starting with work at the center and thinking about how our life can support work, we start with our vision of what is a life well-lived
35:54 Speaker 03 and think about how our career and our work can support that vision.
35:58 Mike Carruthers? Which sounds great, but I imagine if you've lived the other way for a while, it's very hard to do that. It's not, it's not a simple, like, it's kind of like, where do you even put your toe in the water there?
36:11 Speaker 03 Yeah, definitely. You know, I interviewed this psychologist and she told me that she sees a lot of sort of ambitious type A folks. And when she encourages them to try things other than work, they say, okay, I've got it. I'm gonna sign up for an Ironman or I'm gonna try and read 52 books this year. And in many ways, they just convert their leisure into another form of work. And so what she advocates for is starting small, you know, thinking about how you can find a weekly friend date where you can have breakfast with your best friend or to invest in learning a new language or an instrument, not to become a master or fluent, just for
36:53 Speaker 03 the joy of the actual learning process itself. It's in these little votes of our attention and our energy that we can begin to derive meaning in other forms. You know, one of the problems with a work-centric existence is it doesn't just take our best time, but our best energy as well. And it's no wonder. Why so many people go home and all they have the energy to do is to to turn off their brains and to maybe turn on Netflix and you know, nothing against Netflix. But if we want to derive meaning at their sources of our lives, we have to actively find forms of leisure that can nourish us, that can give us the relationships and meaning and community
37:35 Speaker 03 that actually reinforces these these different parts of who we are.
37:39 Mike Carruthers? I I get I get what you're saying. It's and it makes perfect sense. But why can't you do all these things and also have a great, perfect job?
37:48 Speaker 03 I don't think it has to be at the expense of having a job you enjoy. I just think the expectations of a job being perfect are unrealistic. And especially for young people where we tell them messages like, the only way to do great work is to do what you love. And if you haven't found what you love, keep searching, never settle. Or, you know, we work the coworking space clusters always do what you love on the walls of their offices. It just creates this system, this belief that there's something perfect waiting there for me. And if I haven't found it, I should be spending all of my energy trying to find it, rather than thinking about a more balanced point of view, where some people do what they love for work
38:33 Speaker 03 and other people do what they have to for work so they can do what they love when they're not working. And neither is nor is more noble. I think we live in a culture that loves to revere people whose identities and their jobs neatly align. And the truth is, the majority of people don't work to self factualize. They they work to survive and they really find more meaning and love outside of their jobs.
38:58 Mike Carruthers? You know, I remember talking to Mike Rowe about this. This idea of, you know, you go to a four year college and then you get some big professional career underway. And that just leaves out a huge percentage of people who have no interest in that at all. And they do very well in more what you would call blue collar jobs, you know, mechanics, air conditioning, those kind of jobs. And it's not that those people are lying in bed at night, thinking about air conditioning and and fixing cars. It's their job and that's what they do, but they have other things in life. And that that is a lot of people, a big percentage of people.
39:38 Speaker 03 Yeah, you know, the research shows that people who have more obsessive passion for what they do often burn out at a higher rate than, you know, people who have wider, what researchers call more self-complexity, who have cultivated other sides of who they are, tend to be more resilient in the face of adversity. You know, this makes sense if you have tethered your sense of self-worth to your work and you have a bad day at the office, or your boss says something disparaging, it can spill over into all the other facets of your life if you haven't, you know, cultivated other parts of who you are. The research also shows that people who have more diverse interests and hobbies tend to be more creative
40:20 Speaker 03 problem solvers and innovative. I think we're entering this new age, especially with knowledge work, where there isn't always a direct relationship with the number of hours you put in and the quality of the output that you get out. And so I think many people are learning both from these clinical trials and these four-day work week experiments that actually cultivating our lives outside of the office can not only make us more well-rounded humans, but better workers, too.
40:49 Mike Carruthers? We've talked before on this podcast about this whole idea of, you know, follow your passion and the money will follow. And that the fact is that a lot of people, probably most people, don't have a passion that then translates into some career. You could be passionate about cooking, or, you know, coin collecting, or, you know, bicycling, but it's tough to turn that passion into a job that's going to pay you money. That you may have passions, but that doesn't make them necessarily good careers.
41:26 Speaker 03 For most people, passion is the result of expertise, not the cause of it. It's we work hard at something and through that hard work, we develop a passion for what we're doing, rather than the other way around. And, you know, in a recent op-ed that I wrote for The Times, I argued that passion or this kind of labor of love ethic can often be treated by employers as a stand-in for fair pay, or fair compensation, or job security. It can be used as sort of air cover to cover up exploitation that exists in many of these creative, or mission-driven, or prestigious fields. And so, you know, for young people in particular, as they're thinking about
42:10 Speaker 03 different paths to choose, I always try and encourage them to develop expertise, to try and find a skill that they can really cultivate. In the words of Cal Newport, "Try to be so good that they can't ignore you, and the passion will follow."
42:28 Mike Carruthers? Well, I've always found it interesting, too, that, you know, we ask kids in high school, you know, or younger, you know, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" Well, how would they know? They haven't experienced anything that would give them any clue other than some sort of maybe intrinsic skill, like they're a good artist, or a good, you know, whatever. But they have no sense of what's out there, and to make them come up with an answer to that question seems somewhat ridiculous to me.
42:57 Speaker 03 Yeah, and even most of the most interesting adults that I know have had meandering careers. You know, this idea of what do you want to be assumes this sort of static state that once you maybe get a law degree, or become a doctor, that defines you. But for the majority of most interesting adults that I know, you know, some really identify with what they do for work, and others don't. Others really get meaning from the community organization that they're a part of, or the recreational softball team, or their identity as a parent, or as a grandparent. And I think, you know, limiting who someone is to their job title is a failure of imagination.
43:40 Speaker 03 And I think we're pushing that expectation on young people to younger and younger ages, as this sort of professionalization of school starts to creep into not just high school, but middle school and elementary school, too.
43:57 Mike Carruthers? One thing I've always found interesting is if you ask people who are fairly far along in their career, how did they end up there? How did they get into that career? It's very often very happenstance, chance events, or maybe it's a business their father or mother were in. It's not this planned, straight line. It's often just, life happens and here you are.
44:26 Speaker 03 And one of the most interesting things that I'm taking away from the reporting process is interviewing and spending time with people who are very, quote unquote, "successful." They've achieved all of what David Brooks would call the "resume virtues." They've risen to the top of whatever career ladder they were climbing. And many times, and not across the board, but the case has been true where people reach the top of the org chart and realize that the perch isn't all that it was cracked up to be. I think when we solely live our lives thinking about what the market values as opposed to considering what we ourselves value, people can find themselves playing a career game
45:11 Speaker 03 that they don't actually want to win, or being on a ladder that they don't actually want to be on. But I think it's important to caution against the alternative as well. If you're solely living based on what you yourself value without considering what the market or what the world values, it can create its own host of problems as well. Where, for example, a student might assume a lot of debt to go into pursuing a degree that might not lead to stable job prospects on the other end. Or someone wants to go all in on their art but is so preoccupied with how they're going to pay rent that they can't actually focus on the art that they hope to create. And so I think the balance that we must strike is like holding what the world values
45:56 Speaker 03 in one hand, what we ourselves value in the other hand, and trying to find a way to make a living that sits at their intersection.
46:06 Mike Carruthers? I know plenty of people and I think I would put myself in this group of people that I've been very focused on my career most of my life and it's a big part of my life and I think, you know, if that's what you want to do, that's fine. But it is interesting when you think about that there will come a time when your career is over, but life goes on. And then what do you do?
46:31 Speaker 03 Definitely, yeah. An interesting demographic of people that the book has seemed to really resonate with are recent retirees. You know, these are often people that were very career focused, that derived a lot of their identity from their job and then retired and had to sort of build their identity back up from the bottom. And so even if you are very aligned with what you do or really identify or derive a lot of meaning from your work, I hope that you're also investing in other aspects of who you are as well. It becomes a more stable foundation upon which you can stand as opposed to sort of rising and falling with your professional accomplishments, which can be a very narrow platform to balance on.
47:15 Mike Carruthers? Well, it certainly gives you something to think about, especially people who have been very driven in their career and made a lot of sacrifices for their career and maybe have come to think, is it really worth it? I've been speaking with Simone Stolzoff. He is author of the book, The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life From Work. And if you'd like to read the book, you can get it at Amazon and there's a link to the book at Amazon in the show notes. Thanks, Simone.
47:44 Speaker 03 Thank you so much for having me on, Mike.
47:50 Mike Carruthers? There's a weight loss strategy that people don't talk about much, but it really does seem to work and it has to do with brushing your teeth. There isn't a lot of research to indicate why it works, but it seems to have to do with association. When you brush your teeth at night before bed, you make that association that... The day's over, so you're pretty much done eating for the day. So if you brush your teeth earlier in the evening, you will make that association that you're more or less done eating for the day. So you're less likely to binge on snacks later in the evening. And the flavor of your toothpaste could also be playing a role. Most toothpastes on the market today are mint flavored,
48:34 Mike Carruthers? and mint itself is often used as sort of a refreshing taste to cleanse the palate and signal the conclusion of a meal, which will also reinforce the idea that you're done eating for the day. And that is something you should know. As always, I would love it if you would tell someone you know, or a total stranger, about something you should know and suggest they give a listen. I'm Micah Brothers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.
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