smshoot/Shutterstock
Forget about searching for your dream job or even good work in higher education. You’re better off finding a job that’s “good enough.” You might already have one. Then you can work toward becoming the professional and, more importantly, the person you want to be.
A good enough job doesn’t mean lowering your ambition or standards. Rather, it’s choosing how you internalize work in a way that will lead to greater rewards, performance, and satisfaction in all areas of your life.
But what is “good enough”?
Journalist Simone Stolzoff wrote a recent book titled “The Good Enough Job” in which he observed how work has become more than a job. Work has become who you are and your contribution to the world. The definition of “good enough” will depend on each person, but that’s the point.
“Good enough is an invitation to choose what sufficiency means — to define your relationship to your work without letting it define you,” Stolzoff wrote. “A good enough job is a job that allows you to be the person you want to be.”
Higher education professionals are particularly vulnerable to allowing others define what’s sufficient. On one hand, you can become paralyzed by impostor syndrome or the multitude of expectations, and, on the other hand, you can become intoxicated by your pursuit of external validations, leading to unhealthy amounts of time working and self-worth derived from your job.
Here are three paths to finding your good enough job in higher education:
Downplay the Status Game
A major barrier to good enough for higher education professionals is status. Job titles, letters by people’s names, and regalia academics wear — they all signal status.
Because colleges and universities award the degrees, they also reward job candidates with certain degrees when making hires. A degree from a prestigious, highly ranked institution is valuable currency on the job market.
And to keep your faculty job and earn tenure, professors must publish a certain number of articles in reputable peer-reviewed journals. Unfinished manuscripts, learned behaviors, or other experiences that shape who you are don’t matter in the status game.
There’s no denying status. You need external validation to fill up your resume or CV and get a job or a promotion. But obsessing over status leaves many higher education professionals unfulfilled in their careers.
“When someone else determines what it means to be successful, there is no need to define it for yourself,” Stolzoff wrote.
In this sense, achieving status is easy. There’s clarity. There’s one scoreboard in your profession. Just as investment bankers gain status by how much money they make, higher education professionals are measured by the reputation of the organizations in which they are affiliated. The scoreboards are rankings, Carnegie classifications, and journal citations.
Agnes Callard, a philosopher from the University of Chicago, told Stolzoff that people seek status because they don’t know their own preferences.
The harder, more satisfying route is to choose what’s good enough for you. People are more fulfilled when they are intrinsically motivated by their values and identity.
Invest Your Values
People work in higher education because they value mission over money. You might value intellectual inquiry, educating and mentoring students, or collaborating to support the greater good.
Everyone has their own sets of values and preferences: there are leadership styles that inspire you, your natural pace of work, your idea of success, or simply having coworkers who know the names of your children.
“When you don’t take an active role in determining what you value, you inherit the values of the systems around you,” Stolzoff wrote.
One of those systems is the job market. You might feel the need to contort your values to fit whatever jobs are available. Don’t be tempted. Your job shouldn’t dictate what you value.
Recognize your virtues that are expressed when you’re doing your best work. Define your values. Make a list. And take them with you wherever you go in your career.
“In order to satisfy our souls’ deepest yearnings, there must be alignment between our values and the values of the games we play,” Stolzoff wrote. “We need to make sure our notions of success are truly our own.”
People wrestle with career choices as if their values depend on it. These are the same people who heed the advice to “follow your passion” or to figure out what you enjoy doing and what the world needs and do that. Neither is good advice, because if you don’t find your passion or if you lose your job, then you’re a failure.
Stolzoff recommends investing in yourself in a way no company, boss, or market can control. That means having multiple sources of meaning and ways to invest your values. It might be outside of your job, but working in higher education provides many opportunities to invest in your values that go beyond teaching, scholarship, and service. For example, faculty and staff can join a campus advocacy group or advise a student organization.
To avoid chasing status and pursue success that’s truly your own, try asking yourself a question someone posed to Stolzoff when he was considering graduate school: “If you could go, but you couldn’t tell anyone that you went, would you still do it?”
Diversify Your Identities
The same way that you disperse your values across work and life, you should also diversify your identities and not let your job subsume your entire sense of self.
Higher education professionals are hyper-specialized. You’re expected to be recognized as an expert in your discipline. It’s easy to let that identity become attached to your self-worth.
That’s not to say you should become a generalist or a polymath. But being great at one job is more risky than being good enough in several areas. What happens when your expertise is no longer desired or your skill becomes automated by artificial intelligence?
“Diversifying our identity is about more than mitigating the shock of losing our job,” Stolzoff wrote. “We should diversify our identities because doing so allows us to be more well-rounded people. It allows us to contribute to the world in different ways and to develop a sense of self-worth beyond the economic value we produce.”
Even if you’re not concerned with being a better citizen, you can benefit from having different identities. According to Stolzoff, research shows that people with hobbies, interests, and passions outside of work tend to be more productive workers, too.
Give yourself permission to try something new and not be “good” at it. Your efforts could lead to becoming great at your job — or your next job.
A single identity is for the status game. It’s what the world expects. Don’t limit yourself to cryobiologist, grant writer, or data analyst. Expanding your identities even if you’re only “good enough.”
“Whatever your good enough job is, recognize when you have it,” Stolzoff wrote. “There is no universal answer to the question of what role work ought to play in our lives. Our relationship to work is not fixed, nor should we want it to be. It’s by wrestling with work’s place that we uncover what we care about.”
