AI Summary
5 min read"Forty to fifty percent of people don't use it." That is Susie Welch, professor at NYU Stern and former Harvard Business Review editor-in-chief, talking about paid vacation time in America. She is also one of those people, describing how she and her late husband Jack Welch cut their honeymoon short after one day because they were bored and wanted to get back to work. This conversation with host Naima Raza is about why adults don't get summer vacation, but it quickly becomes about something deeper: how we organize our lives around values we may not even know we hold, and the gap between what we say matters and what we actually do.
What Values Are (and Aren’t)
Welch has built the largest data set on human values in the world, drawing from nearly a quarter-million respondents. She starts by clearing up a common confusion: values are not virtues. Virtues like honesty are cultural constructs everyone agrees on. Values are different. They are "your deeply held motivations and beliefs that galvanize your actions and decisions." They are the organizing principles of your life, the screen you put your actions and decisions through when you wake up in the morning.
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:22) **Why Don't Adults Get Summer Vacation?** - Naima introduces the episode's core question and her guest, Susie Welch, a professor and author who studies what people value.
- 2 (02:27) **Values vs. Virtues: The Core Distinction** - Susie defines what a value is and, more importantly, what it is not, clearing up a common misunderstanding.
- 3 (05:23) **Work Centrism and the "Hustle Culture" Debate** - The conversation explores how work centrism differs from the cultural phenomenon of "workism" and how it shows up in data.
- 4 (09:52) **The Gen Z Values Gap** - Susie reveals a major finding from her research: a fundamental mismatch between what Gen Z values and what hiring managers want.
- 5 (12:05) **"Bring Your Whole Self to Work" and the Always-On Culture** - The conversation critiques the popular corporate mantra and examines the reality of modern work-life boundaries.
- 6 (14:49) **The Future of the Work Week: 3 Days or 6?** - Naima and Susie discuss historical predictions for shorter work weeks and what the data suggests about people's actual desires.
- 7 (19:40) **Breaking Down the 16 Values: Naima's Top 5** - Naima shares her personal results from Susie's values assessment, starting with her top value: "belovedness" (romantic love).
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Guests on this episode
Show Notes
Is Gen Z Unemployable? And/or are the rest of us addicted to work? NYU Stern Prof and bestselling author Suzy Welch joins Nayeema in this first episode of the SGDQ “What Even is Work?!” series to figure out what we value and how we spend our days.
Suzy breaks down the 16 values that organize our lives. You can take the test here. (get the *free* assessment or use SGDQ50 for 50% off). They analyze Nayeema’s results, which rank love and voice higher than, um, work. They also talk about trends from hustle culture, work as identity, “bringing your whole self” to work, job hugging, and resume botoxing?? Yeah, Nayeema didn’t know what those were either.
This episode and the "What Even is Work?!" series are presented by @Zoom. Learn more about how Zoom can help you catch a break (and a chill first day back) at zoommate.com. Nayeema thinks of it as vacation-maxxing for adults who want to holiday good and do other stuff good too.
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