The Good Enough Job Test
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- —
Stolzoff's title comes from the British paediatrician Donald Winnicott, who watched mid-century English parents try to shield their children from every negative emotion and take each tantrum as evidence of personal failure. Winnicott's alternative, the good enough parent, valued sufficiency over perfection and served both child and parent: the child learned to self-soothe, the parent stopped dissolving into the child's emotions. Stolzoff draws the parallel to work, which — like a crying toddler — is not always in our control. His definition is deliberately broad and subjective: a good enough job is one that allows you to be the person you want to be. The test inverts the default ordering, asking how the job supports your vision of a life well lived rather than how life fits into work's margins.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Drop the dream-job standard, not your standards
Replace 'don't settle, keep searching' with sufficiency. Stolzoff is emphatic this is not a slacker manifesto or an excuse to sit on the couch: you still get to define what good enough means to you.
Watch out Treating 'good enough' as a fallback rather than as the goal reproduces the same searching loop under a new label.
- 2
Define the person you want to be first
Before evaluating any role, describe the life and the person the job is meant to support — the identities, relationships and community memberships you want to have time and energy for.
Pro tip Write it as a normal Tuesday and a normal Sunday, not as a list of achievements.
- 3
Write your own definition of sufficiency
Stolzoff's examples vary wildly: a salary that supports a family; a job that lets you talk to interesting people and make videos; a job that finishes at four so you can catch a West End play, collect a child from daycare, or take an afternoon bike ride.
Pro tip Make it concrete enough that you could hold a real offer against it and get a yes or no.
- 4
Check which is at the centre
Ask whether the job supports your vision of a life well lived, or whether work sits at the centre of your existence and everything else is squeezed into the margins. Stolzoff says most people are running the second arrangement without ever having chosen it.
- 5
Define the purpose yourself, or it gets defined for you
If you do not define what work is for, your boss or employer will gladly do it — as a quarterly sales quota, or as passing another creator's subscriber count. Those outcome goals are immediately falsifiable: you can hit them and realise it was the wrong altar.
Pro tip Prefer purposes that cannot be revoked by an algorithm change, a pandemic or an economic headwind.
Watch out Work is extremely falsifiable; treating it as an object of worship guarantees eventual disillusionment.
- 6
Recognise it when you find it, and stop searching
The payoff of a defined threshold is the ability to notice you have crossed it — which, in Stolzoff's phrase, is what frees you to spend an idle Sunday doing something other than working. A healthy level of detachment is also good for the work itself.
In the wild
Ali describes a team member, Allison, head of customer success, who is very good at her work but says plainly that at the end of the day it is just a job. It ticks her boxes: she talks to struggling YouTubers and gives them emotional support, it is flexible, it pays okay. That lets her spend her real energy elsewhere — friends, plays in London, travel. She says she is the happiest person she knows, and if she lost the job tomorrow she would shrug, because her sense of self comes from elsewhere.
→ A job explicitly designed as good enough, funding an identity portfolio held outside work.
Observing English parents in the mid-twentieth century, paediatrician Donald Winnicott saw a generation trying to shield their children from any negative emotion, then taking the inevitable frustration or fear personally, as a reflection of their own shortcomings. He proposed valuing sufficiency over perfection. The result benefited both sides: the child learned to self-soothe and handle some of their own problems, and the parent learned not to lose themselves in the child's emotions. Stolzoff draws the direct parallel — our jobs, like a crying toddler, are not always in our control.
→ Sufficiency, not perfection, produced a healthier outcome for both parties.
Common mistakes
Reading 'good enough' as settling
Stolzoff calls the framing deliberately subversive: he takes an idea we normally treat as a fallback option and proposes it as the goal. The mistake is hearing it as permission to disengage, when it is actually a demand that you define your own sufficiency threshold rather than inherit someone else's ceiling.
Letting your employer set the purpose
If you do not answer what work is for, the answer arrives by default from the organisation — hit the quarterly number, beat the rival's subscriber count. Those goals are achievable and therefore falsifiable, and people routinely reach them only to find they were praying at the wrong altar.
Deferring happiness to the next milestone
The 'once I hit a million subscribers, once I make VP, once I make my first million, then I'll be fulfilled' pattern never resolves. Stolzoff's point is that once you reach the peak of one hill you simply start scanning for the next, so the threshold has to be defined in terms of the life it supports, not the summit.
From the transcript
“he believed that an approach that valued sufficiency more than Perfection would benefit both the child and the parent”
“I think a good enough job is a job that allows you to be the person that you want to be”
“this isn't a case for dropping your standards you still get to Define what a good enough job means to you”
From the episode
Life’s Meaning Outside of Work - Simone Stolzoff
Simone Stolzoff