Sustainable Ambition Forum - 10.29.24
Let me start by saying—I like to work, to be engaged, to be doing. I get nervous about getting bored. At times, these days, I already feel a bit bored, which is why I wrote in the last newsletter about being restless and seeking a new challenge and ambition.
Yet, I’m also someone who values being well-rounded and taking breaks. I like variety, and I appreciate having multiple, personal interests rather than having my career be the only focus of my ambition. I also revel, I mean really love, taking time away and doing activities that feed my soul and fill me up.
Over the years, I’ve learned to be intentional about how I manage all I want to do across my life and work, because it’s not easy to juggle it all, even when I’m involved in activities I truly want to do.
And when it comes to work in our modern world, for most of us, it’s hard to keep it in a box, to not have it consume more of our lives and our identities than we want.
Plus, some of us may have workaholic tendencies. 🙋♀️ If you relate, don’t feel bad; you aren’t alone. Almost 50% of U.S. workers classify themselves as workaholics, with 66% of Millennials claiming this distinction. And even if we don’t call ourselves workaholics, many of us likely overwork.
The downside of putting too much of our time and attention on our work, even if we love it, may be that we are crowding out aspects of our lives that truly matter to us and feed our resilience and, in turn, our sustainability.
That’s what I discussed with my two latest podcast guests. These were some of my favorite conversations this year.
Simone Stolzoff is the author of The Good Enough Job which came out last year. I was thrilled he was open to being on with me. Simone and I discussed how we are better served creating a more robust identity for ourselves and broadening our lens around ambition so that work doesn’t take over our lives.
I also had on Dr. Malissa Clark who wrote Never Not Working: Why the Always-On Culture Is Bad for Business—and How to Fix It. She’s an associate professor of industrial/organizational psychology at the University of Georgia and director of the Healthy Work Lab. Malissa and I spoke about the effects of workaholism and overwork. Workaholism is a nuanced topic, and it isn’t solely about the number of hours we devote to work. So, I appreciated our conversation and her book, which offer tips on how to break away from these tendencies both personally and within organizations.
I think these are both important conversations and lenses for us to create more sustainability in our lives and work. I highly encourage a listen! (Links below.)
Simone and Malissa made me question: What percent of our identities do we want work to take up? What percent of our time and energy do we want work to consume? Do we think about these questions enough?
So, boo! Can I shock you into challenging yourself to make a small shift this Halloween to possess more of your life for what matters most to you? And to possess more of your identity to become more of who you want to be outside of work?
Let’s acknowledge that work does bring meaning and fulfillment to our lives, while also knowing that it shouldn’t haunt our life and identity and crowd out other aspects that build a richer tapestry of a well-lived life.
With that, wishing you a Happy Halloween!
Cheers!
Kathy
Founder of Sustainable Ambition
📖 Come Behind the Book!
My book, Sustainable Ambition: How to Prioritize What Matters to Thrive in Life and Work, will be coming out next June!
I’ve been sharing details about my experience with the book journey and plan to offer more behind the scenes opportunities in the new year as I prep for the launch.
Want to be a part of the early launch team and get access to additional details, workshop opportunities, and more?
I’d love it if you’d join me!
You can sign-up here.
Thank you!!
The Monthly Round-Up: You+Life+Work
Ideas on becoming consciously ambitious and thriving in life and work
✨ Cultivate your contentment. Recent research suggests that contentment isn’t a cop out. Rather, finding contentment is a unique, positive emotion distinct from happiness and contributes to our well-being. The researcher says, “Contentment makes us more accepting of ourselves.... It can bring [people] the strength to accept the good and bad sides of their lives.”
Where might you bring contentment to how you view your work and career today?
✨ Create spaciousness. A few weeks ago I was sitting in my backyard and caught a butterfly flitting about. I paused to watch and found myself desperately wanting it to stop. To pause. But alas, it would not. The butterfly kept moving and flapping its wings and only for a brief moment, what felt like less than a second, would it rest on a leaf or a stem. I grew anxious watching it and realized, “Oh, that’s what I sometimes do to myself! I don’t let myself come to rest... to pause... to slow down time... to settle in.”
This essay by Heidi Lasher doesn’t necessarily present a new view, but is still a beautiful read that speaks to this concept of allowing ourselves to both lead full lives and create spaciousness. She writes, “I lay there in bed and imagined myself as an atom, using my elbows to summon the electrical charge to fill my life with a kind of spaciousness I need more of. The kind of spaciousness that arises from emptying vessels of time, instead of filling them.”
How might you create spaciousness and moments of empty vessels of time?
✨ Slow down time. This is a dated article from a past podcast guest, Rainesford Stauffer, author of All the Gold Stars: Reimagining Ambition and the Ways We Strive. It offers tips for how to slow down time. Go down to the section, How Do We Actually ‘Make the Most’ of It?.
Here’s a high-level summary of the tips:
Give yourself a break, and don’t blame yourself.
Schedule less.
Meditate regularly.
Do one thing at a time.
Move to your own pace.
Be present to how you want to feel at this moment.
What tip might you want to practice with this month?
✨ Structure your workday to optimally work. This article by a neuroscientist points out why it’s important to structure our work in various ways to work most effectively. For example, research suggests we’re wired to do work in 90-minute cycles. And within that, there is an optimal way to structure our time. She writes:
“Perform the hardest tasks in the first twenty minutes.
Do slower, easier work for the remaining forty to seventy minutes.
Take a break for ten minutes.
Repeat.”
But that isn’t the case if one is doing creative work. Our mind needs more freedom to explore. But in general, deep thinking work should be limited to four hours a day; more than that will create fatigue that can carry over into the next day, kind of like how sleep deprivation builds over time.
What’s one thing you could try this week to test a lesson from this article and optimize how you work?
This is a great episode of Cal Newport’s podcast featuring Oliver Burkeman discussing his new book Meditations for Mortals. I still have to read the book, but I appreciated their conversation where they explore where their points-of-view overlap and perhaps don’t. It’s a great reminder to embrace our human limitations and that the productivity game is a losing one.
😀 Smiling: Success is making time for what matters to you.
Mark Randolph, a cofounder of Netflix, posted this on LinkedIn last year:
“I’ve worked hard, for my entire career, to keep my life balanced with my job. In my book, I write about my Tuesday date nights with my wife. For over thirty years, I had a hard cut-off on Tuesdays. Rain or shine, I left at exactly 5 pm and spent the evening with my best friend. We would go to a movie, have dinner, or just go window-shopping downtown together.
Nothing got in the way of that. No meeting, no conference call, no last-minute question or request. If you had something to say to me on Tuesday afternoon at 4:55, you had better say it on the way to the parking lot. If there was a crisis, we are going to wrap it up by 5:00.
Those Tuesday nights kept me sane. And they put the rest of my work in perspective.
I resolved a long time ago to not be one of those entrepreneurs on their 7th startup and their 7th wife. In fact, the thing I’m most proud of in my life is not the companies I started, it’s the fact that I was able to start them while staying married to the same woman; having my kids grow up knowing me and (best as I can tell) liking me, and being able to spend time pursuing the other passions in my life.
That’s my definition of success.”
What might you want to protect and make time for in your life? What would you want to do this quarter to make the year feel successful to you on your own terms?
The Sustainable Ambition Podcast
🎙️ E142: The “Good Enough Job” and Shaping Broader Identities with Simone Stolzoff
A conversation on the role of work in our modern lives and how work became such an enmeshed part of our identity for so many Americans. Simone invites us to embrace more sides of ourselves as we write our stories and, through a broader lens on identity, be more intentional about the role of our work and the ambitions we pursue.
Listen on your favorite player here or on our website here
🎙️ E143: Dr. Malissa Clark on Breaking Free of Workaholism
A conversation about workaholism and overwork, what drives it, why more people are struggling with it, and what organizations and individuals can do about it.
Listen on your favorite player here or on our website here
You can also find the podcast, subscribe, and listen on Apple, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast, and more. Get it here.
“This is my final recommendation: Think about the metric by which your life will be judged, and make a resolution to live every day so that in the end, your life will be judged a success.”
— Clay Christensen, former Harvard Business School professor and author of How Will You Measure Your Life?