How to Craft an Anti-Mimetic Career

Simone Stolzoff is a former design lead at the global innovation firm IDEO whom I had the pleasure to speak with and get to know in 2021. I’m grateful to present this guest post from him today—an Anti-Mimetic original tied to thick desires, which coincides with the launch of his debut book,?The Good Enough Job . It is a wonderful read.

It was Halloween in San Francisco. Little witches and lions clasped their parents’ hands on the sidewalk. I paced like a caged animal. I had two enticing job offers and couldn’t decide which to choose. A recruiter for one of the jobs was calling in two hours.?

I’d waffled for weeks. I solicited the advice of everyone I loved. And my yoga teacher. And my Uber driver. I sought out a career coach. With the tacit endorsement of Michael Pollan, I even tried to see if psychedelics could help make up my mind. Zero progress.

Each time I came to a pseudo-decision, I thought of all the reasons the other job was better.?Maybe I should get a job as a devil’s advocate??

I ran through the options again. The first offer was to be a staff writer for a trendy online magazine. I had spent my twenties playing Goldilocks with careers—a few years in advertising, a few years in tech—all the while dreaming of writing full-time. I had done some freelance journalism on nights and weekends, but every time I said “I am a writer,” it felt like a white lie. This was the first job I’d ever been offered with the title to back it up.?

The second offer was to be a designer at a prestigious design agency. I had wanted to work there ever since I heard the founder speak in grad school. “Work for this man!” I’d jotted in the notebook I kept tucked in my back pocket. A few years later, I had the opportunity to do so. It paid 50 percent more than the journalism job.?

On some level, I knew how ridiculous my conundrum was:?oh, the agony of deciding between two attractive job offers. I judged myself for caring, for ascribing so much significance to the decision. If a friend of mine were complaining about this, I’d tell them to get over themselves. “It doesn’t matter,” I’d say. “You’ll be fine either way.”?

But on another level, it really?did?matter. It wasn’t just about my job; it was about my identity. It was about how I’d answer the question “What do you do?” which I took to mean “Who the hell are you?” I worked more than I did anything else. More than I ate. More than I slept. More than I saw my friends. Annie Dillard’s famous words, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives” echoed in my head like an admonition.?

The recruiter was calling in an hour. I decided to get a haircut. Something to get my mind off of the treadmill. Then, at least if I made the wrong choice, I would have gotten a haircut. Unlike my hair, my desires were thin.?

“Thin desires are highly mimetic, socially derived, fleeting, easily blown away in the mimetic winds of the present moment,” Luke?writes . In the context of careers, thin desires lead us to jobs that sound better than they feel, the types of jobs that people accept for their prestige rather than the experience of actually doing them. On that Halloween in San Francisco, I knew that I wanted a job that other people thought was “cool,” but I didn’t have a keen sense of what actually mattered to me.?

Luke describes thick desires as “diamonds that have been formed deep beneath the surface, nearer to the core of the Earth… protected from the volatility of changing circumstances in our lives.” Thick desires breed career decisions grounded in our values, not the changing tides of others’ perceptions,?

For the rest of this piece, I’m going to share four principles I’ve found in the reporting of?my book ?that may help you get in touch with your thick desires and how to craft an anti-mimetic career.?

Start where you are

In?Wanting , Luke shares the practice of mining your life for deeply fulfilling actions or what he calls “fulfillment stories.” The same practice can help us get in touch with what we value in our professional lives. While there are many ways to uncover values—like?journaling ,?card sorts , and?online quizzes —I’m partial to the narrative approach because it allows you to embody the?experience?of living your values.?

So, I want you to think about a time when you got to be a version of your professional self that felt like the best version of you. This doesn’t have to be the sparkliest moment or a moment that’s easily legible to others—like the job offers or the promotions or the raises. Rather, it can be a micro-moment—a conversation, a brainstorm, or a deep creative flow. For just a second, try to travel back there.?

Ask yourself:

• Was anyone with you??
• What was the space like? What did it feel like in your body??

Now, try to dissect that moment.?

• What about it resonated with you??
• What are your deeper wants for your career, beneath the superficial accolades?

Starting with what you know to be true from your past experience tends to be a more reliable compass than canvasing hypotheticals about what you could want. You’d be surprised by how your thick desires begin to reveal themselves through concerted reflection.?

Remove the noise

A brief anecdote. After working in tech for five years, I was considering going to graduate school to study journalism. Of course, unlike law or medicine, a journalism degree is not a prerequisite to actually doing the work, but nonetheless, I applied to a handful of the top schools.?It can’t hurt, I thought. It wasn’t until I was admitted to a few that I had to consider whether I actually wanted to go.?

I sought the advice of a mentor, the author?Robin Sloan . We met for coffee on a drizzly morning at a café under an Oakland freeway overpass. After listening to me ramble on about the pros/cons list I had sketched in my head, Robin asked me a question that cut through the noise: “If you could go, but you couldn’t tell anyone that you went, would you still do it?”

That question had a powerful, anti-mimetic effect on me. Was I actually interested in learning, or just in being someone with a graduate degree? Did I want to play the game, or did I only want to win??

I decided to go back to school, and I’m glad that I did. Robin helped me recognize that I was interested in taking classes and working on my craft, not just having a credential. But if it weren’t for him, I may have never taken the time to ask myself what mattered to me, irrespective of others’ perceptions.

So I want to reflect Robin’s question back to you. If you could achieve whatever professional goals you’ve set out for yourself, but you couldn’t tell anyone that you’d achieved them, would you still want them? The question can help remove the noise of other’s opinions and center the desire that are uniquely your own.

Diversify your identity

There’s been a growing movement—especially in the U.S.—to look to work for self-actualization. With the decline of other sources of meaning such as religious and community groups workers are increasingly looking to work as their primary source of identity, community, and purpose. And yet, crafting an anti-mimetic career requires developing a professional identity that no company, boss, or market has the power to sway.

In order to do so, it’s important to conceive of your career as part of, but not the entirety, of who you are. Much as an investor benefits from diversifying the stocks in their portfolio, we too benefit from diversifying the sources of identity and meaning in our lives. So, my last tip for crafting an anti-mimetic career is to actively invest in other aspects of who you are.?

To be clear, I don’t believe diversifying your identity needs to come at the expense of identifying with your work or caring about your job. Rather, by cultivating different aspects of ourselves, we can become more well-rounded workers?and?people.?

It may seem obvious, but if you want to derive sources of identity and meaning outside of work, you need to?do?things other than work. Identities are like plants—they need energy and attention to grow. One of the risks of a work-centric existence is that our jobs don’t just take our best hours, but our best energy too. As psychologist Esther Perel?says , too many people bring the best of themselves to work and bring the leftovers home.?

Get out of your own way

On that Halloween in San Francisco, I mistook my job for my identity. It didn’t feel like I was choosing between two jobs as much as I was choosing between two versions of me. Part of my problem was a lack of clarity on my thick desires — I was more motivated by what others would perceive as prestigious than what I actually wanted — but another aspect of my struggle was a lack of awareness of who I was when I wasn’t working.

I ended up taking the job at the design firm. But for the first few months on the job, I was burdened with existential angst. I wish I could say some grand epiphany helped me move on. In fact, I just needed to get out of my own way. I loosened my grip on work and started to get back into my weekly routines. I played pickup soccer and read for pleasure. I went to the park with friends and cooked dinner with my housemates. At work, I tried to focus my attention on the aspects of my job that I enjoyed rather than dwell on the myriad of other things I could be doing. More than anything, I stopped obsessing so much about my choice.??

The key to thick professional desires, in my mind, is to craft a personal definition of success that takes into account what you value and what the market values — in the words of theologian Frederick Buechner, to figure out “where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” Some of that gladness may come from your working life. Some of it might come from what your job allows you to do when you’re not working. But getting clear on what you care about — independent of any particular job, title, or company — is a good place to start.?