Full Transcript for When Ambition Leads to Burnout with Rainesford Stauffer

better way, a better way to be simultaneously ambitious and not exhausted, not burnt out. So first things first, what is burnout? Burnout is a state of emotional, physical, and mental exhaustion caused by excessive and prolonged stress. It occurs when you feel overwhelmed, emotionally drained, and unable to meet constant demands. As the stress continues, you begin to lose the interest and motivation that led you to take on that certain role or those responsibilities. 00:03:47 Speaker 2: Or that task in the first place. 00:03:49 Speaker 1: Burnout reduces productivity, SAPs your energy, and it leaves you feeling helpless, hopeless. Maybe even a little resentful or cynical, and eventually you just feel like you have nothing more to give. 00:04:04 Speaker 3: I've been there. 00:04:05 Speaker 1: It happened this year for the first time, and I share that story in this episode, and I got to share it with our guest Rainsford Staffer. She's an accomplished author and journalist. She's contributed to renowned publications like The New York Times, The Cut, New York Magazine, Wall Street Journal Magazine, Teen Vogue, The Atlantic. 00:04:24 Speaker 3: The list goes on. 00:04:26 Speaker 1: But in her latest book, All the Gold Stars, she explores how the cultural, personal, and societal expectations around ambition are driving the global burnout epidemic. 00:04:38 Speaker 2: I think exhaustion can come from burnout and be a result of burnout, but to me, exhausting is something where we need to take care of ourselves, where we know we need that rest. Burnout, I think is the aftermath of total structural crises that have pumped the burden of those crises on individuals and told them if you work a little bit harder, if you do a little bit more, if you log more hours, it's all going to be okay. 00:05:06 Speaker 1: She says, it's actually limiting our imaginations. Her own ambition crisis, which is what she calls it led her to interview women across the country suffering the exact same thing. She was determined to figure out how so many of us got to this place of burnout, and what she discovered were the common factors driving us all peeling back layers of family expectations, capitalism, self esteem that dangerously tie up our worth in our output. 00:05:35 Speaker 2: I think that one of the traps that we sometimes fall into with ambition is thinking that if it changes, if it ebbs and flows, it means that we're quitting, and that quitting is always a bad thing. I think quitting can be a really ambitious thing, first of all, but I also think it's really natural for our ambition to change in shape as we do. 00:05:57 Speaker 1: Interviews with students, parents, workers, psychology, labor organizers, and more allowed her to reframe and retool ambition as more collective, imaginative, and rooted in caring for ourselves and each other. 00:06:12 Speaker 2: I think that that is a total structural failing, and the most unimaginative idea we could have about ambition, that

it only looks one way. 00:06:24 Speaker 1: One of the things I really valued about our conversation is that Rainsford is not telling us to stop being ambitious. She says she's still very ambitious. She is simply saying maybe we've been looking at ambition all wrong, that there is a deeper, more creative way to be ambitious. You know, I love flipping words on their head. So another way of looking at ambition required a bit of thought about the questions we're asking ourselves. So here's what I came up with. We all hear, try harder, work harder, try harder, and you'll get there. But what if if we flip it? What would our ambitions and our goals look like if we tried easier. 00:07:13 Speaker 3: So, Rainsford, you are a writer. 00:07:16 Speaker 1: You've been writing for years, and then you decided to write this book called All the Gold Stars, which is right behind you, has a beautiful green and gold cover. 00:07:24 Speaker 3: I'm obsessed with your cover. 00:07:26 Speaker 2: I can take no credit for that. What an amazing designer we had working on this cover. I'm very lucky. 00:07:32 Speaker 1: Well, it makes sense because All the Gold Stars really is sort of alluding to ambition, like gold stars that you would get at school. This book is about ambition and overwork and burnout. And in the first chapter you write ambition felt alluring to me. I could time my life on goals. I could feel the flood of relief when a teacher or bus or random stranger on the Internet thought I'd done a good job. I lit up, not at accolades or accomplished, but at the acknowledgment that came with them. So I got what you were saying. I relate to you in a lot of ways. How would you characterize or describe your ambition? 00:08:11 Speaker 3: Early on? 00:08:14 Speaker 2: Early on, when I think of my ambition, I think about people pleasing. I think about a desire to earn self worth and the idea of worthiness. I think that if I could articulate it in one word, it would actually be earning. I felt like my ambition was my opportunity to prove that I was good enough. And so, whereas I think other people were really focused on a specific goal or getting a straight A, what felt so alluring to me was not really getting the gold stars, so to speak. It was that I had poured my entire self into something and that maybe I would feel worthy on the other side of that. And it's really interesting to think back now as an adult, how early that manifested. I don't think obviously I would have articulated it that way when I was an elementary schooler, a middle schooler, But I think that that was kind of the constant current running through my ambition, was this desire to feel safe and secure and good enough. 00:09:16 Speaker 1: This is a lofty question, but your attachment to ambition, like you said in Money Ways, was tied to self worth. Have you sort of unpacked having written this book and I'm sure done therapy, have you unpacked where your attachment to ambition came from? 00:09:35 Speaker 2:

Oh my gosh, yes, so many different facets of that. I really do think it's one of those things where it was a lot of threads tied together. And I think that honestly, having the conversations I got to have while reporting this book really helped me think more critically about not just how my own ambition manifested, but my own relationship to it. So as a backstory, I I'm chronically ill and I have obsessive compulsive disorder, and now it is very easy for me to kind of see the pattern that when I fell out of control in my own body, when I felt a little bit out of control in my own mind, ambition kind of became an outlet for that. I knew I couldn't control outcomes. I couldn't control you know, if I got cast is the part I wanted in the childhood Dance performance. But I could be the one that showed up early and the one that stayed late. I may not be able to control getting an A on a test, but I could certainly control the amount of hours I put into overdoing my homework. And I think the slippery thing about all of that is that on the surface, it looks like really positive things. It looks like somebody who's hard working or diligent or all of these good qualities that we tend to align with a certain kind of ambition that presents in a certain way. And I think that the detrimental aspect of that is I didn't realize how much it was apping on to these other parts of my life, to OCD, to very low self esteem, to feeling like I was an imposter, and a lot of the things I wanted to do or the work that I was passionate about, And I think that it kind of trickled into not necessarily being ambitious because I cared so much, but being ambitious because I was trying to protect myself. I was trying to make sure everything was going to be okay. 00:11:26 Speaker 1: Yeah, the protection is such a huge aspect of that. One of the quotes I wrote down that stood out to me is when you said, if ambition felt like such a part of me, that it was responsible for all the good stuff, what bad habits or mistakes or misprioritization had my own ambition enabled? So you mentioned some of those negative things that it enabled. At what point did you decide that you needed to reflect on your own ambition. 00:11:55 Speaker 2: This is so funny because basically my first book was about to come out, which was about Expectations and young adulthood and really talked mostly to people in their late teens and early twenties about this pressure to have the time of your life that we know is not happening for people for personal reasons and really structural reasons, where there's a lot of systemic factors that kind of come to fruition in adulthood. So I had been doing all of this research, I had been doing work that I was really passionate about, on top of work I needed to do to pay my bills, and it was one of those moments where there was just kind of a cascade of hard life things all at once. My health was getting worse, and no one could figure out why. I was going through a lot of interpersonal struggles just in my relationships. Everything felt like it was in flux and falling apart at once. And my default setting before was to double down and get more ambitious when I felt like I was in crisis. That was kind of my crisis response. Silly as it sounds. I was going to start a new project. I was going to be the person that organized everything. I was going to make sure everyone else was okay. And it's like my second gear had gotten stuck all of a sudden. I couldn't push through at work, and I couldn't show up the way I wanted to show up personally, and it felt beyond drained. It felt as though I had lost the sense of self and was sort of staring at who I used to be through this fog and wondering why I couldn't get back to that person. And so I started thinking about ambition in relation to that, and where had my ambition gone and had I lost it? And who was I without it? And more conversations I had with people, the more I realized that ambition intersex was so much of how we think of work, of how we think of earning it, of how we think of deservedness. It bumps up against all of these different structural or systemic issues. And that's when the reporter writer part of my brain got involved and was like, I don't want to just think about my own ambition. I want to talk to a lot of other people who know more, who feel more about theirs. And I think it was through those conversations that it showed me a different way forward for myself as well. 00:14:19 Speaker 1: So you decide to interview people about ambition, and throughout your book you did interviews with students and parents and psychologists and even labor organizers workers. I want to talk to you about a few specific examples, for sure, but before that, did you find a common thread at all about ambition or was everybody's ambition a bit different? 00:14:43 Speaker 2: This is so interesting and it's been interesting to think about both while I was reporting and afterward, because I think the thing about ambition is it does feel deeply personal. For some people, their ambition is a huge point of pride. Others feel like ambition has almost been use to exploit them and it's caused a lot of harm in their lives. But everyone talked about the different structural factors that enabled or upheld a certain social script of who an ambitious person was supposed to be, what kind of things did they do, what kind of timeline did they do them on? And I was really interested to see how in every single conversation it pointed back to these larger structural crises honestly, and lack of resources that kind of led to lack of choices or feeling like lack of agency, and how you wanted ambition to inform your life and your choices. So I think that I think that, as wild as it sounds, that was kind of the common thread. The other one that surprised me that I really didn't expect going into it is how many people wanted to talk about ambition. There are so many important interviews with such

incredible people that did not make it into the final copy of this book, just because we only had so many pages and we only had so many words, And as my editor can attest to, I really tried to fit them all in because they're all important. But I was astounded by how many people were willing to sit and talk with me sometimes for hours about this and how they felt like it had impacted their sense of self and their life. 00:16:22 Speaker 1: That lack of agency that you mentioned sticks out to me, at least personally, any moment in my life that I have felt burnt out now that you mention, it does feel like. 00:16:34 Speaker 3: I just don't have a choice. 00:16:35 Speaker 1: I have to keep working because I have to pay my bills or I have to just get through the next month. And it is that lack of agency that is so exhausting. I've never thought of it that way, absolutely, and. 00:16:45 Speaker 2: I think we see that all the time across all different fields of work and experiences. It's low wages, it's lack of paid leave, it's not having access to universal health care, universal basic income, or care infrastructure, all of these things that people pointed to in the book is solutions that would actually allow them to be more ambitious about things that they care about more deeply. And I think that's one of the takeaways that I had, is we really can help create a more sustainable version of ambition, a more imaginative version of ambition if people have more autonomy and more resources. 00:17:26 Speaker 1: So there's a woman named Kendra in your book, and she starts to self medicate. She's exhausted, she's not feeling well, and you write. Rather than the workload slowing down to account for a deadly virus, her workload increased as she worked from home with the company of her cat. She says, I just started to self medicate. I didn't even have the energy to address what was going on. I was drinking beyond excess. And that stood out to me because I heard a version of that story so often throughout COVID. There was something about the isolation of working from home, the uncertainty coupled with it, and then just the immense pressure of work. 00:18:08 Speaker 3: What's the line between burnout and exhaustion? 00:18:11 Speaker 2: Ooh? First of all, Kendra is an incredible human being. I am so honored to have that conversation in the book and so grateful for what was shared in that conversation. I think line between burnout and exhaustion. I think, first of all, they go hand in hand and they relate to each other. I think that one kind of begets the other. I think that when we're burnt out. To me, burnout is a systemic and structural crisis. Burnout is not something, in my opinion, that you are going to lay down on the couch and have a lazy weekend and emerge feeling refreshed and renewed come Monday morning. I think burnout is a depletion of resources, a lack of access to meaningful, sustainable support, and I think a lack of access to sustainable work or personal situations overall. I think exhaustion can come from burnout and be a result of burnout, But to me, exhaustion is something where we need to take care of ourselves, where we know we need that rest. Burnout, I think is the aftermath of total structural crises that have dumped the burden of those crises on individuals and told them, if you work a little bit harder, if you do a little bit more, if you log more hours, it's all going to be okay. And I think what people are narrating all over the place is that it's really not okay, and that the work is not fixing any problems. In some ways, it is creating more of them. 00:19:44 Speaker 3: Have you felt burnt out before? 00:19:47 Speaker 2: Oh my gosh. Honestly, I think in retrospect, I think when I started having this loss of ambition or this crisis of ambition, I think I was so burnt out and so fried, I don't even think I would have been able to articulate that to you. I think I was so far gone and so focused on just trying to hold all of these really heavy things that were happening in my life together that I didn't realize that I was burning the candle at both ends and down the middle. And I'm saying with a lot of privilege. I am a white woman. I was able to work from home throughout the pandemic. I do have access to a lot of resources that most people just don't. And so I grappled with does this classify as burnout? Is that what this is? Should I be able to push through this? I am? Should I be able to handle it? And I think it finally hit the point where the question was no longer can you handle it? Or should you be able to handle it? It's that you're just not. And I think that that moment of just total surrender and kind of emotional collapse stemmed, in a lot of ways from being burnt out. 00:20:59 Speaker 1: So I'm going to admit something to you that feels embarrassing. I used to think that burnout was kind of a myth. I am very wary of colloquialisms, especially on the internet, because, for instance, self care, I think we've totally co opted self care, and the actual meaning of self care is important. The way like beauty brands have taken it over, I think is really damaging. 00:21:25 Speaker 3: So that's just an example. 00:21:26 Speaker 1: And I used to feel that way about the word burnout because I had heard it online all the time, and I never really, I never felt like anybody got to the meat of what it was. I was like, Oh, you're tired, take a nap. And then this year I got to a point where and I won't bore you with the steps leading up to it, but I got to a point where I was in New York for work and I pushed through that final day of work and I got to my friend's house and I collapsed on the couch and I started and they said what's like, what's wrong? 00:22:03 Speaker 3: And I tried to. 00:22:03 Speaker 1: Explain it, and they were like, well, it sounds like you need to rest. And the words out of my mouth were this, there is no amount of sleep that can cure what I'm feeling like.

There's no amount of rest. It's not about rest. But I didn't have the words to explain what was going on, and your book gave me those words. I've never heard anybody articulate it the way you do because it's sort of this obtuse philosophical idea and you made it really, really practical. But you don't think of ambition as a negative thing. You're just calling out the systemic issues there. So I guess that story aside the systemic issues is what I kept coming back to, And I sort of had this thought like, is there this consensus that we all just girl boss too hard realized it sucked? Or were girls raised to be perfect without complaining perfect, without looking like you're trying hard but on the inside trying really hard? And is it the double bind that's exhausting? Like were you able to unravel sort of what it is? 00:23:08 Speaker 2: Oh my gosh, I think that there's so much I think, First of all, I don't think ambition can be separated from the different cultural, structural, institutional forces that shape it and context that it kind of exists in. I think that when you go back to researchers who have looked at kind of the origins of ambition and where the roots come from, I think that it's important to name that a lot of those origins, A lot of those norms were grounded in a kind of ambition that was predominantly white, it was predominantly male, cisgender able bodied, usually with some access to resources, and again, kind of the autonomy of having choices. And I think we can see that all the time in how ambition shows up. Now. I think it's in whose ambition is celebrated versus whose ambition is tolerated. 00:24:05 Speaker 3: What do you mean by that? Can you give me an example? 00:24:07 Speaker 2: Oh, my gosh, I think that there are so many. I think that you can take it from sort of the social script of achievement angle, where you know, we celebrate things like college graduations, and that's a wonderful thing to celebrate. What are we not acknowledging that young people are doing, or that people of all ages are doing. There was a source that I spoke to the book, Asia, who talked about earning her associate's degree, taking care of her son, who she had when she was a teenager, and having this epiphany when she was in high school with her child, where all of a sudden, people stopped asking her questions about her future. They stopped asking if she wanted to go to college. They stopped asking what she saw for herself, and she was a very ambitious person. This was a young parent who was navigating housing in security, who was doing the best she could for her child, who was working, who was going to school, and yet, as Asia pointed out, she was not thought of as an ambitious person. And I think that that is a total structural failing and the most unimaginative idea we could have about ambition, that it only looks one way, that it can only be for one kind of person, who does one type of work in one kind of order. And I think about that example all the time, first of all because getting to talk to her was a pleasure, but also because it shows how limiting the norms of ambition are. And I think that when we zoom out and look at the broader context of systemic racism in this country, lack of resources, who is underpaid, who's living in an environment and having access to jobs that are dignified and are safe, who is given the opportunity to pause long enough and think, Okay, hey, what am I ambitious about? What brings meaning to my life? And I think that it can kind of go both ways, because I think ambition is in some ways a privilege to have the chance to slow down and even think about what you want your aspirations to be, to even have that moment in the day where you think about that clarity. And then I think, on the other hand, it's kind of used in a way where people are supposed to out ambition structural forces and structural barriers to them getting what they need to thrive. And I think that that's bound up in how we think about ambition, our own navigation of ambition, but also how it's kind of used structurally to reinforce really harmful barriers to everyone having what they need. 00:26:48 Speaker 1: I like that you brought up Asia because I wrote down this quote from her chapter. She said, I just want to be ambitious about caring for myself and caring for the people I love. Though ambition is often tied to material things, Asia's getting more ambitious about her values. One example that comes to mind is when she was recruited to lead communications for a huge organization, a role that came with a significant title and in. 00:27:10 Speaker 3: Theory, a bigger role. 00:27:12 Speaker 1: The answer was a hard no, and Asia says, I'm really ambitious about doing the least, and that's a sentiment that I hear echoed on TikTok all the time we start, we keep hearing about soft girl era. And yes, that is definitely a colloquialism that's on TikTok, But I think it's a trend for a reason. Everybody is so tired totally. 00:27:35 Speaker 2: I think, not to correct you, but I do want to make sure she gets credit. I think that quote might have been from Kendra. 00:27:40 Speaker 3: Oh, I'm sorry, Oh no, you're all good. 00:27:42 Speaker 2: I just want to make sure she gets the credit because it's your right. Yes, much an important point. I think that when people here doing the least, I think because of the endless turd of capitalism and how our worth is tied to our labor output, I think they really flinch and they hear, well, I don't want to work, I want to do the least. I want to do the bare minimum, and then I'm want to go home. But I think what was so important about what she shared in that specific conversation was doing the least in one way was not doing the least at all. It was such a more meaningful, substantive, sustainable kind of ambition. I think that sometimes doing the least in one area actually lets us be a lot more ambitious about some of the others, as backward as that might sound.

00:28:34 Speaker 1: So do you kind of feel like in a pragmatic way because most of us have to work for money obviously, do you think the answer is that there are seasons in life and you can be ambitious about different things at different times. 00:28:48 Speaker 2: I think that that's definitely true. I think that again just because of what I've heard in the reporting. I think that sometimes collectively we act like this is a problem with a solution. And what I loved about the people that I spoke to is they pointed to really concrete policy solutions that would absolve a lot of this stress and strain around work. And I think what was so important about that is people weren't describing not working or not caring about something they cared about so much. I think it's just that when people have resources, we give them the capacity to own their time. And I think that that comes out in what they're ambitious about and who they take care of in their lives and communities, and I think it makes ambition a lot richer. I certainly think that there are stretches where we are more ambitious about one area of our life than another, and I think that that's probably true in every scenario. Just like you hopefully are learning different things about yourself as you grow, you hopefully are reprioritizing where you can accordingly. And I think that one of the traps that we sometimes fall into with ambition and is thinking that if it changes, if it ebbs and flows, it means that we're quitting, and that quitting is always a bad thing. I think quitting can be a really ambitious thing, first of all, but I also think it's really natural for our ambition to change shape as we do. 00:30:18 Speaker 1: I really really like that you said there are many solutions to this, because we do talk about it like there aren't any, and it is. 00:30:27 Speaker 3: It's a systemic issue. 00:30:28 Speaker 1: There's one aspect of this that you kind of like peppered in there that I hadn't thought about. You said, I could outwork loneliness by constantly giving myself something new to look forward to. 00:30:43 Speaker 3: What's the link between loneliness and ambition? 00:30:46 Speaker 2: Oh, my gosh. I can talk about mine personally, But I think that for a long time, ambition, as I was using it was filling a kind of void. And I think the void in my own life came from not feeling good enough or worthy enough of the things that I desperately wanted, which were deep friendships, connections. And I also think that it came from a sort of hyper self reliance that I would not expect of anyone else in my life. I think that the way individualism is all over so much of our society is responsible for a multitude of ills. I think that when we see movements toward collectivity and how organizers are bringing that out in so many different ways around so many different issues in their communities, we can see very clearly that individualism, that going it alone is just not the way forward. But for a long

time, for me personally, that's what my ambition looked like. It looked like I can't ask for help because I don't deserve it. I can't need anything from anyone because what if they say no? And then I've asked for too much? And oh no, what do I do from here? Just spiraling off in all directions. And I think that the deeper I got into that self reliant mode of I need to do everything myself. I need to be self reliant, I need to be able to take care of myself Obviously it's easy for me to say, now, of course you were going to end up lonely. You are completely isolating yourself and playing by these rules that you have only set for you. They don't make any sense. But I think a lot of the time, I think ambition can be used to fill a void, because I think that when we're ambitious about something it's meaningful. We're craving meaning, and I think that that's an incredible important thing. I also think it's important to dial it back and figure out, Okay, does this thing bring meaning to my life? Or am I trying to use it to fill this hole where meaning could be drived somewhere else? What am I really craving that I'm ambitious. 00:32:54 Speaker 1: There's this book called Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam, and I read it in college, and the idea is that in the nineteen fifties there were bowling leaks and everybody would meet on a Wednesday night or something with their collective uniform matching, like matching bowling shirt and their shoes, and they had a night together. And then he explains through each decade how we are now bowling alone. And it's like about individualism, and it's very, very difficult to do anything great alone personally or professionally. But for some reason, that's where our society has tracked. I don't know how we become more communal. 00:33:38 Speaker 2: It's awful because I even think about the book. It's always felt like the biggest scam to me, honestly that my name is the one on the cover of this because so and it sounds sappy, but I really do mean it. I think about like, this book would not exist without over one hundred people who sat down and made time out of their very big days, they're very ambitious lives to talk to me about some weird little project, right, it would exist without my agent and my editor and my fact checker and the editorial team. So even work wise, I think the idea of the person that is totally self made that never had any help. 00:34:19 Speaker 1: That I hate that term self Nobody is self made. You're not a self made man, You're not a self made woman. Every somebody helped. 00:34:27 Speaker 2: Always, always, And I think that obviously do some people have more resources than others one hundred percent, But I think that not only is it probably inaccurate for most of us, I would dare to say I also think it's really limiting, and I think that that's really lonely. I think the greatest privilege of our lifetime is needing each other and having people to think when we accomplish something that's really meaningful to us, or we hit a moment in our life where we're like, I feel good about I feel good about where I'm at. I think it's the most profound gift we can give each other is to be ambitious about each other and to need each other. So I look to a lot of organizers on the ground right now, from workers' rights and strikes and people unionizing their workplaces, I think people organizing around abortion access in their communities. I think that throughout history there have been people who have guided us toward more collectivity and leaning on each other. And I do think that there are so many examples of that that are happening right now as we speak. And I think that the more conversations we have with each other about how limiting this idea of the individual going it alone is, I think we open up even more opportunities to connect with each other. And I do think that that's a worthy thing to be ambitious for. 00:36:00 Speaker 1: It feels like the holidays sneak up on us faster every single year. Just when you think you have all the time in the world, it's time to start checking off your gift list. I pride myself on giving thoughtful gifts and when in doubt, I've had three go tos because I think they're things that everybody loves but don't necessarily want to buy for themselves. Candles Cute Pajamas are the ultimate Ocea's super Glow body set. I've used Osea for years, actually ever since my friend Brent introduced me to the founder years ago. 00:36:31 Speaker 3: They sent me a few products and I. 00:36:33 Speaker 1: Was hooked, hooked to the body care especially That's why I'm excited about this box set. It has three of the body care products in one set, the full size Algae body oil, the cleansing body polish, and a travel sized Algae body butter. They're packed in a beautiful box, so it eliminates the need to give wrap, which I love because it saves time and it's better for the planet. Speaking of the planet, you know, I go hard for any company with a do well, do good mission well. Ocea has been a trusted skincare brand for over twenty seven years. Creating seaweed and fused products that are clean, vegan, cruelty free, and climate neutral certified. You never have to compromise your values or your health for beautiful skin. 00:37:17 Speaker 3: Osea products feel luxurious. 00:37:19 Speaker 1: They leave my skin feeling silky soft, and they give me that little glow that I love so especially as we head into colder weather. The super Glow Body set is a go to gift this holiday season, and with the pretty Smart discount, I think it's a really. 00:37:34 Speaker 3: Great price point for a holiday gift. 00:37:36 Speaker 1: It's already thirty percent off, so with the pretty Smart code you save forty percent on the set at Ocea Malibu dot com. 00:37:43 Speaker 3: Give the gift of. 00:37:44 Speaker 1: Glow this holiday season with clean vegan skincare from Osea. And right now we have a special discount just for our listeners. Get ten percent off your

first order site wide with the code pretty smart at Ocea Malibu dot com. Head to Osea Mala dot com and use code pretty smart for ten percent off. How do you determine or take stock in your ambition? What questions do I ask to say? Okay, is this valuable ambition or is this wounding ambition? 00:38:19 Speaker 2: I think that what came through in the research and over the course of conversations with people who are much smarter about all this than me, is that where ambition can become harmful is when it starts eclipsing all of your other needs, for example, your need for rest, your need for belonging, your need for community. When it is so one track and so all consuming that all of a sudden it kind of cancels everything else out. That's when we've started to dip into territory where it can be really harmful to well being. And of course that's tricky because for a lot of people, how much they work and the hours they log is directly correlated to their quality of life in very specific, immediate ways. And so I think again that goes back to the structural crisis part of it. But I think that when you are working beyond excess, beyond what you need for financial security, beyond what you need for personal fulfillment, and it dips over into that other category where all of a sudden, you can't talk about anything else, you can't think about anything else, you can't recognize anyone else's needs, you can't recognize your own needs. I think that's when it goes too far. I think ideally ambition should feel full. I don't think it should feel endless. I think it should create opportunities for us to pause and think about why something is meaningful. And I think that when we find ourselves running out of time to do that, that's maybe where it's dipped into a little bit of a scarier place. 00:39:58 Speaker 1: Imagination is a word that comes up in the book a lot and I saw online years ago. Imagination is intelligence having fun. And I kind of loved that idea, because it is you have to be imaginative, you have to be very intelligent. But you say that people are sort of imagining their ambition in different ways. 00:40:20 Speaker 3: I love that idea. 00:40:21 Speaker 1: I'm also sort of a very practical, grounded person, and I want to be able to imagine ambition without misery, but also really strive and I find great pleasure in accomplishing goals. So are there tools that we can use to sort of reframe our ambition? 00:40:44 Speaker 2: Absolutely? And I appreciate this question because something I've heard a lot is sort of this scotcha of like, you wrote a book, are you saying you're not ambitious about it? And No, that's not what I'm saying at all I did. I have to be honest when I set out to report the book when it was it's just a little kernel of an idea that I didn't even know was going to be a book. I was thinking about it through the vein of what happens if we get rid of this altogether? Who are we? Do we need it? Is there a way to bring it back if we do? What happens when you lose it? And it was really over the course of these conversations not to keep coming back to that that I was like, well, people aren't just talking about abandoning it, they're talking about expanding it. And so to me, that's where the imagination comes in. I don't think it inherently means don't have goals related to your work, don't strive for anything, settle in where you are, and be content with that. I think there's a lot to be said for contentment. I think that that is actually as backward as it sounds, something we can be ambitious about. I think we can be ambitious about noticing where we are and what we value in our lives right now, and we can be ambitious about the thing that's meaningful to us. So I actually think that the best pool that I've come across is instead of thinking of ambition as a one lane, one track kind of single shot goal, how can I spread my ambition around? If I'm really ambitious about this project at work, how can I also throw some ambition toward making sure I call my friends and check in on how their weeks have been. How can I be ambitious about showing up for my community, even if it's not giving one hundred hours of time? What can I do to be a resource or a support for other people just where I can? And I think the thing about a lot of this is just like ambition ebbs and flows, so does our capacity in our time for all of these different things. So I think it's less about moving down the checklist of everything we need to be ambitious about over the course of the week and more noticing where we can. Okay, I know I've got this long term goal I'm working toward. I know it's meaningful to me because of XYZ. Now, how can I spread some of that ambition around, even if it's in smaller way? And I think over time that small stuff really does add up to reshape it and make it seem more expansive. Than all consuming. 00:43:10 Speaker 1: My takeaway from your book in terms of tool was to make sure that we're all decoupling self worth from ambition. Because if you're able to make sure that your ambition lives in that world alone, you're good and you get to decide what to be ambitious about and how far you want to go. But as soon as it's tied to your identity and your self worth, that's when it's dangerous. It reminded me I had a very successful friend and they were an athlete, so their career was sort of over early, and I was at lunch with them one time and they said, you know, if I'm being honest and vulnerable, I'm really worried about retirement because I'm worried people aren't going to like me without being an athlete. I'm worried that I'm not going to get the same amount of attention. I'm worried that I'm not going to have cool opportunities. I'm worried that my friends aren't going to think I'm as shiny. And I had a hard time sort of rebuttling because he was in a shiny profession and I was like, there probably will be some people that fall off right, But they weren't your people anyways. And as I

got older, I reflect on that conversation a lot because I realized I probably had a little bit of that in me too, And when I really loved myself, I didn't care if anybody loved me for any of the shiny things, And so it was really about self love and self worth. It all tied back to that same place that you were talking about. 00:44:45 Speaker 2: And I think that that's so true, and I think that it's hard because when we hear self worth or self love, I think it can in our minds, or at least in my mind, I'll speak for myself equate to I need to sit here and I need to do more work on myself to get to that point. And again, just speaking for myself, that never worked. There's research in the book that talks about these incredible researchers who did a lot of work on self esteem and self worth and contingencies. So are self worth being contingent on a career outcome or contingent on people liking us? And they point out in that research that is incredibly hard, especially in America, if not impossible, to have self worth and self esteem that is contingent on nothing, because so much of our identities are wrapped up in for what we produce. It's really hard. This goes I think back to the capitalism of it all, the individualism of it all, and so they had a hard time giving the advice of try to have self worth that's contingent on nothing. You just like yourself as is. Is that the ideal situation? Of course? Is that really hard for most of us to do. I think so. But when your self work is contingent at least in part, or your self esteem is contingent in part on how you are interacting with other people, how you are showing up for them, how your passion or your interest extends beyond just you, that can help. And I don't think it's any secret that that kind of collectivity, in terms of our contingencies of self worth or self esteem, to me, ties right into this idea that we don't get anywhere alone. Everyone to some degree wants to be liked. Everyone wants to feel valued for what they bring to the table, whether that's work in the home, outside the home, not related to work at all, maybe it's a hobby. We all want to be recognized and celebrated for that, and I think that one of the things that I've taken away about self worth and ambition and how all of this runs together is the more that we can extend it beyond us, the more we will feel in our own ambition, the more creative we will be able to be with that ambition, and hopefully the more meaningful it feels to everybody. 00:47:09 Speaker 1: Okay, I'm going to say something as a pushback, but not because I agree with it. Yes, I think this is going to be what some people are thinking. This all sounds really lovely, but I already don't have time. Yeah, how do I go find time to serve? Like? I am already so depleted? What do you think about that? 00:47:30 Speaker 2: First of all, I'm with you, I think everybody is. And yeah, totally, a lot of this sounds really good in theory and is really borderline impossible to do an execution. But I do think it's one of those instances where even starting small, even starting inconsistently, matters than not starting at all. I talk to some researchers in the book who did a lot of work around mutual aid, and what they stressed is there can kind of be this default that we have in America where we recognize a problem and we think that we alone need to be the one to start a nonprofit to solve it or an initiative to solve it, when in reality, there are probably more things in our communities that exist for that already. And it's not about being the one who does it the most or does it the best. It's you're grabbing groceries, can you grab a couple extra things and drop off at a community fridge? It's can you venmo someone who needs it twenty bucks if you've got it in your budget. Can you listen to a friend who needs someone to talk to? And I know how small these things sound, because again, we need the structural support. 00:48:43 Speaker 3: I don't think they sound small. 00:48:46 Speaker 2: Well, I think in the scheme of things that can sound small, because people were talking about this in the book right alongside you know, universal basic income, universal healthcare, that would free up a lot of time for us to be more attentive not just to our needs but to our communities' needs. But I think these small instances where we sometimes feel like we're really doing nothing, and if we can't really do it and really help, why bother? I think bothering, even if it's once a month, even if you've got it in your budget to set up a recurring donation to an organization on the ground in your community, that counts because we are not going to get through it alone. We need one another. And I think that the more we can lean into the fact that this is reciprocal. Other people need us, We need other people. Our communities need us, We need our communities, the easier it becomes to kind of chip away at building that into the routine. It doesn't have to be everything, it doesn't have to be all of your time. I think that just doing what you can with what you've got is the starting point that at least I have tried to really prioritize in my life, and that I do think is better than doing nothing. 00:49:59 Speaker 1: Okay, I do some rapid fire questions. So people in your book described being ambitious about friendship, even about fun and sort of the many forms that community can take. What are you personally being ambitious about right now? 00:50:14 Speaker 2: Two primary ambitions. I am working with some incredible youth journalists in Kentucky, which is where I'm from, and I am so ambitious about their work, their approach to issues how they think about it. I'm ambitious about supporting them, and I have two cats, and I'm very ambitious about the cats, very enthusiastic about that unabountably. 00:50:38 Speaker 3: So I love that. That's amazing. Okay. What is a book that changed your life? Something you think everybody should read? 00:50:45 Speaker 2: Oh my gosh, this is an endless list. We'd be here all day. Okay, I'm going to go for one. I read recently, You Are Someone You Love by Hannah Matthews, who, among being just a gorgeous writer, is an abortion doula and it is a gorgeous book. I highly recommend it. 00:51:05 Speaker 1: Okay, pretty smart question. I'm kind of hoping you get the one that says, what's the best thing you ever quit? 00:51:10 Speaker 3: But you tell me when to stop? 00:51:14 Speaker 2: Okay, stop? 00:51:15 Speaker 1: Oh my gosh, Okay, Oh this is interesting. What's the earliest memory or example of what success looked like and how did that impact you? Oh that's a great question, particularly for you in this interview. 00:51:32 Speaker 2: Oh my gosh, I think it changed. I think that when I was a lot younger, I was a dancer growing up. That's what I wanted to do. I would have said that, you know, getting cast is the lead in something was probably the example of success. But when I look back at it now, I had a teacher when I was in like first or second grade who was really into me, sitting and writing stories in my shaky little child handwriting, and she was an artist who when she had time, would draw illustrations for my stories on like the back of an envelope or like a scrap of paper, just when she just when she could. And that changed the course I think of my entire life. And so I think that success for me looked like an adult slowing down to recognize that a kid was really into something and taking it really seriously. And I would love to be that adult for someone. So that's my example of success. 00:52:29 Speaker 1: That is one of my favorite stories anybody's told on this podcast. Thank you for sharing that. 00:52:33 Speaker 2: I think about it all the time now. I never would have said that at the time, but now I truly think about it, like once a week. 00:52:40 Speaker 1: Okay, my last question, what is the smartest decision you've ever made. 00:52:44 Speaker 2: Depending on other people? It's a hard one. It's I have to practice it consciously, practice it. My best friends can tell you every day, but needing other people and letting myself have that need. 00:52:59 Speaker 1: You know, as you say it out loud, it sometimes makes me shudder, like even you saying it gives me permission to need and want that too. I think that your book and your words will do that for a lot of people. 00:53:12 Speaker 2: Thank you. That is the biggest compliment. 00:53:19 Speaker 1: Okay, you know what time it is. Today's a good day. To have a good day. I'll see you next week.