Work Books
“Getting a job” is a process that sucks. Finding work on the other hand, when you really strike on something that feels worth putting effort in to, can be incredibly satisfying. Jobs are a drag; work can be joyful. When your life’s effort aligns with the things you care about the most, look out world.
To celebrate Labour Day, here’s a summer reading book report. It was a fun piece of work to create, and didn’t feel like a job at all.
Just Be Nice
In The Myth of the Nice Girl, Fran Hauser provides her best possible advice to women on how to balance ‘niceness’ with the desire to succeed at work. She offers methods to own ‘natural kindness’ and let it become a professional superpower.
Hauser insists she is not a people pleaser, and swears she is not telling women to just keep other people happy. She describes herself as a person who rather “uses her authentic kindness to sidestep regressive stereotypes about what a strong leader looks like.” Hauser sees the value of empathy, kindness and compassion in business, and observes the simple power a person can weild by building relationships and being a decent human.
Through over 200 pages, Hauser perpetuates some very unhelpful expectations of women in the workplace. A gentler reader might see her as just sharing a practical take on how all humans are, deep down: inherently driven by a need for human connection, with simple needs that women are uniquely skilled at meeting.
And yet, as a woman at work, it is not your job to make other people feel OK about your existence. On top of everything else that workers need to accept when fitting in to large organizations, asking women to adjust themselves further to accommodate the needs of other people and then packaging this as career advice feels like a shade too far.
Hauser also advises women to lead with competence and demonstrate their skills above all else. That seems rich in a world where plenty of people are able now to make a lack of knowledge and flagrant ignorance a leading part of their personal brands. Easy access to AI allows anyone who wants to look like a thought leader churn out a lot of words for pre-scheduled social media posts.
How does a woman balance the extra expectation on her to be ‘nice’ and counteract all of that when part of being ‘nice’ might require hiding her expertise so that those around her don’t feel intimidated by it? How does one’s competence hold up when the robots are coming? Hauser doesn’t anticipate these questions either.
She does offer tips to women on how to talk in meetings. Hauser schools women on how we often speak too quietly and use too many linguistic weakeners. Once again, failing to succeed is our own fault. Instead of demanding that people in the room become better listeners, and get used to hearing different kinds of voices, women are expected once again to make everyone feel more comfortable in our presence by adjusting ourselves to a pre-established norm.
Further advice includes that you shouldn’t ever ask why questions, because those might sound judgmental. In any interaction, start with showing what you understand about someone else, and never lead with how you see a situation. Wait to be asked before providing an opinion. And always stick to the facts when navigating conflicts. Don’t ever dare show too many feelings, because emotion can also be very off-putting.
Even if these are the things that it takes to succeed in Hauser’s working world, who wants to be part of such a place? It’s not the 1950s any more, and aren't we supposed to be enjoying the fruits of seventh wave feminism or its latest incarnation?
Some of Hauser’s best advice is to get better at failing, be more comfortable taking risks, let go of perfectionism and learn through mistakes. She cites the book Art and Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland, which recounts an experiment where potters aimed for quantity instead of quality, and made better pots because they were able to practice, try and fail.
Hauser wraps up with a quick crash course on boundaries, including how to say no clearly and with kindness. She makes it clear that we can set boundaries and still be caring, with both of those things being true at the same time.
Along the way to getting clear on your goals, and confirming that you are focused on the right things, it is also important to decide what you are not going to do any more. It’s just as important to keep a To Don’t list as it is to look at To Dos. This kind of exercise lets you build a firm envelope around yourself to protect from unwanted distractions. Time and attention are limited and incredibly valuable resources that we need to safeguard, and noone will argue with that.
Yes You Can
Janet Kestin and Nancy Vonk's Darling You Can’t Do Both provides a much more fun and distinctly Canadian look at what it takes to succeed.
Kestin and Vonk’s daring idea is to imagine a working life where you speak the truth always, clearly ask for what you need, mentor others more than promoting yourself, and work across different generations.
They are intentionally determined to push back against workplace rules that were often written to keep women small, with built-in failsafes to punish women who refuse to follow the corporate script.
As with Hauser, Kestin and Vonk provide advice on how to be and secure a great mentor by asking questions, seeing things in people that they don’t yet see, and having faith in another person's potential. Unlike Hauser, they admit that working hard and being proficient at a job is simply not enough to be recognized and truly succeed.
There aren’t too many surprises in this book and it provides helpful and familiar platitudes about how to succeed in an organization. It's important to know how to ask for what you want and need. Counter to Hauser, you should actually express yourself, and have opinions. It's good to imagine what a perfect or favourite day could look like, and do your best to create that. You must believe you are worth investing in, feeling confident in your value, so that others will feel that and see it too.
So much of Kestin and Vonk’s advice requires admitting that there is no such thing as perfection. When everything has to be just so, of course you won’t feel able to do very many things. But when you become more gentle on yourself, you create room to do more and be more. This is the key to opening the space, room and capacity to do two things that you love at the same time, and then do three, and maybe have room for a fourth and on and on.
Getting over the fear of being viewed as a failure is also key. You need to be willing to take strategic risks, with time to prepare for setbacks. Though in their view, the very worst mistakes in life come from holding back and allowing inertia to rule us all. In life, we don’t regret the things we tried; we regret the things we didn’t do. According to Sally Hogshead, “mistakes are tuition” for a life full of learning.
True success might look more like a dance from lily pad to lily pad, rather than a conventional ladder climb. Stepping off the ladder for a moment can open new opportunities you never saw before, to go beyond doing, and start to experience completely different ways of being.
From Another Dimension
In The Multi-Hyphen Life, Emma Gannon shares wisdom from her years spent building an independent career as an author, podcaster and journalist. Though Gannon has written for the New York Times, the Guardian and other major print publications, her creative career started through a series of many many side hustles.
Gannon observes how many people let their working lives be driven by the idea of some day, that we should all endure terrible jobs so that in a promised future point we can finally be in an ideal role that will allow us to do good work somewhere else and fill our lives with meaning. We tell ourselves that all will be well and ideal and different, as soon as we arrive at that idyllic destination.
What 'some day' thinking never tells you is what to do if and when you arrive at that dream job and find out that in reality, it sucks. Or if you land the job of your dreams, and then you get truly screwed over. Or the organization implodes, or the industry falls apart. Or if you get sick, or if someone you love gets really sick, or life intrudes on you in some other surprising way.
As a defense to all of this, Gannon recommends a similar kind of maximizing from Kestin and Vonk: she encourages workers by insisting that you don’t have to pick just one thing. And you don’t have to be just one thing.
Variety and range bring richness to life. Gannon sees all the uncertainty and disruption around us, and wants to embrace that as an opportunity. She finds a unique kind of freedom in being able to take on multiple projects and choose the kind of work you want to do. Outside of a conventional job, there is still plenty of space to build a working life. Gig work, while it brings a unique set of risks, also provides a certain kind of agency and power that you will not otherwise have as part of a big, complex organization.
Gannon asks, “How do we make money differently? How do we empower ourselves when we feel so let down by an outdated system?” She describes how workers can use new media to their advantage, pivot as job markets and business industries change, and quickly adapt or develop new skills. She celebrates that we live in a time when the traditional “gatekeepers are gone.” And she sounds hopefully that workers can exist in a way that is free from all the shitty things about working in a conventional office now.
Gannon aims to merge the rhythms of work and life without completely burning out. She insists that it is possible to make just as much money or more from multiple income streams than only relying on one. She wants to reveal where the opportunities are in a job market that has been turned upside down by technology. And Gannon was writing three years before the worldwide release of ChatGPT.
Gannon is very straightforward that we shouldn’t compare ourselves to others when we all started out in different places. With the recent death of Dolly Parton lots of people have been relistening to her back catalogue. Her sentimental hit Coat of Many Colours isn’t just a song about poverty, thrift and schoolyard bullies. This song is a rallying cry for anyone who has dared to wear their unique self in to the world, and been faced with people who want to shame you for who you really are. It is a chorus in favour of bringing the unique imprint of all your experiences, talents, and everything else that you are in to the school of life.
We need to get better at wearing our own patchwork coats. We need to be proud of the places, experiences, knowledge and wisdom we wear in the world. We need to look away from what Gannon calls “success porn” and so many opportunities to compare ourselves with others. And we have to build endurance for just how long these journeys may take. In the words of Elaine Welteroth, “There is no destination, but there will be breakthrough after breakthrough along the way. Our greatest obligation is to keep reaching, to continue growing, to push beyond what seems possible, to live outside the boxes created for us.”
Beyond having a job then, cultivating self-worth becomes your real new work, in a world where “jobs” may be a thing of the past altogether. In its best form, labour is a journey you are on, towards meaning and value, that will hopefully last for your entire life.
In a collection of testimonials, Gannon shows through other people’s words the kind of flexibility and joy that comes through being able to work when and how you want, where you want. People who work with agency keep their freedom to stay interesting. The multi-hyphenate worker is well-rounded, and does not need to hide their ability to be good at many things. Their brand is one with many dimensions, a brilliant diamond instead of a grey cube.
And that multi-hyphenate diamond is pointed, decisive, carefully curating where its attention goes. It is reflecting aspects of work and life all through the same structure. It is not apologizing for how much it sparkles in the light. It is always moving, receiving energy and refracting it back to the world, constantly developing ideas and iterating.
Overall, Gannon breaks with a lot of assumptions about the world of work. In her words, “things take time to bloom” and that is the opportunity she sees for all of us, to grow in new ways. She seems to appreciate that most people are not one note characters and wants to encourage that kind of potential for harmony in life, hearing the counterpoint that is possible when you are able to sing a lot of different lines.
All Hail Workism
How to know we are enough, have done enough or have enough are major themes in Simone Stolzoff’s 2023 book The Good Enough Job, which starts with a deceptively simple quote from Lao-Tzu that “He who knows he has enough is rich.”
Stolzoff challenges the very modern habit of treating work as a religion, when labour becomes the ultimate thing that gives people meaning and identity.
He calls out “Workists,” particularly those who wear white collars, for attaching their personal value as human beings so much to the measure of their service output. Unable to make tangible products, no longer measured by the traditional physical components of widgets and commodities, the service worker assesses himself in more diaphanous and damaging ways.
When work was dirty and hard, people very naturally wanted to minimize it. When work was physically exhausting, time off was necessary to recover and recouperate. Now that so much work is a service, and its goalposts are psychological instead of tangible, it has a completely different meaning. When the nature of one’s work gets conflated with the quality of one’s intelligence, status or worth in society, of course people want more of it.
We don’t talk about aspirational jobs any more, we talk about “careers,” and even using that word is relatively recent. In the old days, people laboured on farms or worked in family units or apprenticed in local shops where you learned a craft and honed some expert technical skill. The idea of being a professional professional is relatively new, and its offshoot has produced the fresh logic of pursuing work as a life partnership. This kind of romance is often performed for others with ongoing expressions of affection for the work despite how busy everyone is.
Workism is dangerous because it fills a natural vacuum with impure motivation. For the first time in North America’s history, typical people report “no religion” as their spiritual affiliation. Traditional religious institutions are fading, declining and closing, but the human search for meaning, identity and purpose remains. Work becomes a new destination for hope and belief. Work becomes the higher power.
Ancient Greeks believed that work was toil; the Latin word for business, negotium, means "not-enjoyable activity." Then Luther came along, and labour came to be viewed as serving the Lord God Almighty. Calvin equated Work and labour to value and the Elect, God’s chosen people.
Fast forward through the Internet Age and early users’ ability to find other non-believers, the union between Christianity and social conservatism, social isolation, Bowling Alone
and the Prosperity Gospels, and it starts to make sense how work emerged as a new sanctuary where modern people could hold all of their values, identity, expressions and beliefs.
People who become enmeshed with work are captive in systems that do not have their best interests at heart. To escape this kind of potentially abusive dynamic, workers may have to reckon with a seriously disruptive break in the script, especially if they were always rewarded for progress so far. Stolzoff admits that leaving Workism behind requires resilience and financial resources, and while this presents an opportunity to start new from scratch, it can be daunting and often impossible.
Stolzoff challenges readers, and workers, to start by building a clear divide between who you are and what you do. He cautions us all against letting those two things become completely blurred. You as a person, in all of your vulnerability and truth, can’t ever be in true communion with a corporation who pays you for your time. That is an unholy exchange.
For protection from this reality, Stolzoff recommends developing and holding a clear container of time around work. This should include a buffer in life where there is space to enjoy existing in all the realms of your self that only have to do with you. Time spent truly away from work naturally bolsters the parts of you that have nothing to do with work, and therefore can’t be touched by work or ruined if that role is taken away or changed.
All of this runs counter to how our current culture has shifted so much from seeing leisure as a sign of status, to now admiring busyness as a signal of importance. The Fiverr slogan to “eat a coffee for lunch” sums up the constant hustle without boundaries that comes from saying yes to everything.
As a counterweight to this, Stolzoff offers a few real life examples of workers who followed their interests, listened to their own discomfort about how they were spending time and effort, and took a break to reconnect with themselves. Professional resets can come from asking simple questions like How do you want to feel every day? Where do you want to be, who do you want to see, and what do you really want to be doing?
Stolzoff reminds us that there is not a linear relationship between putting in more hours and producing better work. He reinforces research that proves there is a link between leisure, down time and unstructured living to benefit creativity. And calls us to have an experimental approach to life, constantly trying the things that call to us, building knowledge along the way.
At the end of the day, most jobs and most work are ways to get money. We have a lot of room and psychic relief to gain when we stop comparing our insides to other people’s outsides. And in Stolzoff’s conclusion is an invitation to make more room for your non-working self. To find who you were before the ritual of a steady paycheck took hold, and bring that person back to life.
Mag Hags Rule
Daisy Buchanan begins her dark and hilarious novel Careering from a similar observation as Stolzoff’s starting premise, that “our jobs are our private fantasies, our disguises, the cloak we can creep inside to hide.”
Buchanan is a UK writer and brings some classic British irony to her work. She introduces her heroines Imogen and Harri as two scrappy women from different generations that will equally get screwed and need to reinvent themselves in the punishing publishing industry. Living and working in London, the city becomes a class-driven backdrop for all of their struggles.
This book is funny, cutting and sympathetic. When Harri is passed over for an Editor in Chief job she was expected to get, she doesn’t react except to ask a few questions, making it easier for her boss to annihilate her intended future in a situation she can do nothing about. Harri avoids fighting about the things she can’t control, and through the book becomes gradually more determined to create something new in the small space where she can still act.
Hovering over the atmosphere in this book is a sense of the general uncertainty that workers in a large organization and a tenuous industry can feel when together in an office, or talking through gossip outside of hours. Work and its potential destruction lurks in the shadows always, and every character is worried about it.
People on the outside of this universe are unable to sympathize with this kind of unease. Friends and family back home, outside of London, view Imogen as a success simply because she has made it to the city and is surviving. Very few characters show interest in understanding how she is really doing. It seems like enough for them to know that Imogen has a job, and that means she must be OK.
Imogen meanwhile is a desperate ball of fear and worry, convinced that she is about to be fired at any second. Even when her work does well, and Harri offers praise, Imogen is so ragged that she can’t hear it. When a piece of very honest writing takes off and goes viral, and Imogen becomes a celebrity for a moment, she experiences this career highlight as physical overwhelm and panic. Rather than meet with fans, Imogen runs outside and sits on a fire escape.
This is a perfect example of how overwork has the capacity to rob us of joy. Even when reaching a peak in your career, you may be run so ragged that it is no longer possible to be truly present for moments that should feel good.
Careering includes a lot of sex, partly due to the industry setting and workplace built around turning a raunchy blog in to an online magazine. This is a book about work, and work is about power. Sex can be about power too, and Buchanan makes sure that the sex in this novel makes that connection clear.
Every awkward, unfortunate or complicated sexual situation becomes an extreme analogue of the limits that work can push people to, the kind of shame and discomfort that work might want you to accept, and the personal inhibitions we might need to get over in order to truly thrive. It’s easy to draw a parallel between the psychological desire to create something new and the impulsive drive behind sex. Careering is fun to read because it doesn’t hold back in either way.
By the final chapters, Imogen and Harri are joining forces to build a business and throw themselves out to the world, hoping that people will see and believe in what you are doing.
Despite the fear and risk and exposure that comes along with Harri’s new reality, she is also suddenly experiencing “A curious joy … A sense of space... [where there is] Noone to fire me, shame me or tell me off.”
Along with this sense of freedom, Harri also acknowledges that her ability to walk away from things she used to want so badly is also a sign of growing up. After corrupt management is swept out of her old organization, she is finally offered the job of her previous dreams. This new version of Harri doesn’t want that thing any more. Both Imogen and Harri move forward with the very firm and uncomfortable knowledge that even inside the cocoon of an organization, no worker is ever truly safe from disruption, worry and harm.
As Harri becomes empowered to walk away and found her own organization, Imogen also has her own realizations:
“For a long time, I confused success with self esteem. I was constantly prepared to give all of my power away. I thought it was up to someone else to allocate a status to me. I have let my employers decide how I was allowed to feel about myself. Whether or not I was allowed to like myself. ... [Now] I’m the one who has been finding my own way. I’m not here to serve someone else’s story. This is the thought that will anchor me, for months and years to come.”
May we all feel so anchored in our own selves, supported by power from within, to go forward and fimly own the rest of our lives.
This post is a shortened excerpt from our monthly newsletter.
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