Jen Hatmaker Has Had Enough

A conversation with the bestselling author and podcaster on resisting 'do more, be more culture'

Today we are joined by Jen Hatmaker, who wants to change how she — and we — think about what is enough.

Jen is a multiple New York Times bestselling author, award-winning podcaster and sought after speaker. This quote from her website captures Jen’s essence so well:

“I want a legacy dripping with human connection, up to its eyeballs in memories and adventures and weathered storms and gladness. I hope to leave a wake of victory, a life of full integrity. I want to say it all, risk it all, own it all.” — Jen Hatmaker

Please enjoy the interview. I’ve included a transcript if you would rather read than watch.

TRANSCRIPT (LIGHTLY EDITED)

Kirsten Powers:

This is Jen Hatmaker…and what we're going to talk about today is changing the channel on how we think about what is enough.

Jen Hatmaker:

This feels acute to me right now because it's the beginning of the year. So every message, at least in my nearby vicinity, is kind of like what to do better this year, what to do more of, how to increase and really increase, just fill in the blank, whatever the thing is, get more of it, have more of it, do more of it, be more it.

And I regularly find this time of year paralyzing because of all that. And so I'm just reflective, I think right now I’m thinking about what is enough?

At what point do, I mean I can't speak collectively for the world, but at what point do I hit a space where I say to myself, I am satisfied with my life. I love what I have. I will steward what it is that in my purview I will be careful with my family and career, but what I have is enough and I will just love it and I will enjoy it and I will tend to it and I will nurture it without always having my eye on that next pasture down the road.

Kirsten Powers:

Well, and this is the thing: that we're trained to think this way. A lot of people probably think, well, this is the way life is, right? But we've talked about this before, that actually you can go to other countries, Italy, for example where they don't have this mentality.

I also want to just point out if Jen Hatmaker feels [like she needs to be doing more] you can only imagine what the average person feels like, because you are crushing it. You are just so successful and have done all the things, and you're still sitting there [wondering if it’s enough].

That's the dirty secret—you get to the place [where you are] and other people think, “If I could just get to that place, then I won't need any more.” And yet you get there and you're still feeling like there's something more.

Jen Hatmaker:

Right? There's no ceiling, there's no ceiling on it. If we just hook into the system as is, if that's the system we're satisfied with, and that's the one that we refuse to challenge or resist or even reject on some levels, that's the game. And there's not an end.

Just this year, a few weeks ago, kind of in December of the tail end of the year, I had a two day meeting with my whole team and it was all the things. It was, let's talk about 2023, what went right wrong? Let's talk about 2024. What are our hopes and goals and projections? By the way, this is a perfectly normal thing to do. I run a small business. It is normal for my business partners to say let's discuss the business. So there's nothing wrong with any of that. But I remember sitting there when we were thinking about 2024, having a pretty successful 2023 and imagining how can pretty much every one of these categories be more all of it.

Like downloads, book sales, social media follows, subscribers, every category. And I felt myself kind of just going quiet. I mean, I'm the leader of the ship there, and I just had this feeling like this weight on my chest.

There's never ever a moment I don't have to feel this. It's always going to be this. It's always going to be more and more and more. And frankly, we have a lot to steward as it is. It's a pretty big community, and there's a lot going on, and it is beautiful.

What I have right now is beyond my wildest imaginations from even 10 years ago, the kind of community that I have, the quality of the women in my community, the exciting things I get to put my hands to being a creator in a sub community that wants that and comes with what a dream. I'm literally living a dream. I'm living a dream life.

And I have beautiful elements of my life outside of work too. My family is so special and my kids, I'm enjoying them so much in their older ages, and I've in love and I feel like I'm in charge of my, there's so much to be happy about.

And so the fact that I can sit here and just think I'm still not doing enough, I'm not trying hard enough. I'm not working hard enough. I'm not putting in enough hours.

What is going on? I don't like this system.

Kirsten Powers:

Well, it's programming, right? It's like we've been conditioned to think this way, and it's like the Protestant ethic on steroids.

Jen Hatmaker:

God really.

Kirsten Powers:

So it's gotten so out of control and I just wrote something about this, about saying no to productivity, just to name what we're talking about. This is not normal. It's not normal.

Jen Hatmaker:

No, it isn't.

Kirsten Powers:

Everything about it is just designed to make us unhappy and we have to make a conscious decision to say no to this way of thinking.

Jen Hatmaker:

No, I know. I've been, of course reading what you've been writing lately. Obviously, you and I have had this conversation for years now at this point. And you're doing it. You're pulling out, you're pulling up anchor, and you're going to build a different rhythm and a different life with different markers of happiness. And you will have a completely different benchmark for what feels like enough in a life. So Frances [Mayes] says.  

It's funny because, Kirsten, even as I'm reading your stuff with absolute awe and respect and envy, even as I'm reading it, I struggle to have it permeate. I'm like, “I know…but I have staff. I know, but I pay for people's healthcare.” There it is. It comes roaring in like a lion. And of course, I am absolutely predisposed to it. I'm an Enneagram three. I'm an achiever by nature. I am the bullseye of this particular target,

Kirsten Powers:

Yes, I think there's obviously the reality of life and the things that you feel responsible for, and then I think there's a question of looking at what we have added on to that. I even think about before I left CNN of, I actually thought that I couldn't afford to [not have an income for a little while] I thought, “I'll be poverty stricken living on the street if I don’t have that job”. And then the reality is I just cut out basically all of my expenses and my husband actually has a job. He's a journalist not making tons of money, but we're actually able to do it, and I just am not doing as much stuff [in terms of spending].

So it's kind of like we get bought into this idea that we have to do certain things, and you don't realize that actually there's ways to shift things, or I'm sure you're adding stuff on that you may not even be conscious of. An example would be the way Americans decide for their weddings, that they're basically the Kennedys and they're going to a three day thing and in another [city or country] and then it ends up being the most stressful thing. They're in more debt. That's an example of how we take this whole thing and then we create more stress, right?

Jen Hatmaker:

So right. What could potentially just be kind of pure and simple, and still every bit is meaningful?

Jen Hatmaker:

Yeah, exactly right. I've got a son getting married in March, and so this is my first time in that particular seat going are you joking me with flowers? They're going to be dead. Nobody cares about your flowers. So we've paired it down. We've really said, what really matters in this day.

But you're a hundred percent right. We could list a thousand categories like that in which we take something that is potentially just kind of lovely, simple and pure, and we just complicate it beyond all measure. We make it more expensive than it needs to be, more competitive than it needs to be. We just put it through this grinder of American bootstrap and productivity culture.

Kirsten Powers:

And add more and more things. It's like even look at our coffee mugs! [holds up giant mug] When you're in Italy, their coffee is tiny.  Everything we do is [bigger].

Jen Hatmaker:

And this is my second cup [holding gup huge mug].

Kirsten Powers:

It's just so funny how everything we do is bigger. The car is bigger, the houses are bigger, everything is bigger. So we have to have the bigger house. [Italians] live in really little houses. You can't have as much stuff and then you can't go into much debt. It's kind of built around simpler life. But here we're just creating more and more stress for ourselves by buying this idea [of consumer culture].

Jen Hatmaker:

I agree. And so it's fun to sit in the pocket of this question and think about what is possible. So yes, I hardly know anybody who would disagree with the conversation you and I are having that this ‘do more, be more culture’ has worn us out and broken our hearts. I think that's ubiquitous. I mean, even for people who are not naturally predisposed toward achievement or whatever success, even then, it doesn't matter.

How can my kids be more, how can they do better in school? How can they be more success? How can they get into a better college? It hits everything.

So it's fun to flip it forward a hair and think, what could it be? What would have to change? Or is it just an inside job? Is it an internal shift that moves the goalposts back a little or forward a little and readjusts expectations, or is it something like you have done, which is just shock and awe. I mean, it is. It's scorched earth. We're going to move to another damn country.

Kirsten Powers:

It's a combination, I think. There was a lot of internal work I had to do to get to that [point of deciding to move].  So, a lot of internal work. Actually working with the Enneagram really helped me lot in shifting as an Eight. Type Eights can do a lot of the same stuff as Type Threes around identity with work.

Spending time in other places and around people who think differently [helped a lot]. And one of the things that really struck me in the area in Italy where we often go, my husband loves it in northern Italy. So we'll go to a really nice restaurant like a Michelin star restaurant. This family has owned this restaurant [forever]. It's the only restaurant they own. Everyone in the family works there. All the people, the waiters have been working there their entire lives. They're now in their fifties and this is what they do, and they have a stable job.

It's a fantastic, just fantastic restaurant. And my husband pointed out, if this was the US what would happen is “let's replicate it. Let's scale it. Let's make it bigger. Now let's put one in Rome.”

But for them, they're like, we have everything that we want. We have a restaurant that we love and we have free time, and we take a month off when we go away. And my husband and I will l be driving around and he'll say, “Those are the people that make that cheese. So it's just this one kind of cheese. This family has always made this cheese. They never went, oh, now we're going to dominate the cheese market and we're going to buy all the cheese makers. They're just going to [focus on their cheese] make their cheese a little better and make it really well.

Jen Hatmaker:

That's it.

Kirsten Powers:

They want to be near their family. They want to have downtime. They don't want to work crazy hours. They think we're insane. And so I think it is kind of getting to that point. And then you have to go through this detox process. So this is, I think even you're saying, well, I'm reading [your Substack post] and I'm kind of feeling resistance. Because if you actually tried to do [what I’m talking about], your body is going to [feel like it’s going off] heroin [as you slow down]. And so there's this whole process you have to go through.

Jen Hatmaker:

Yeah, you're right.

Kirsten Powers:

Noticing [something is wrong] is what's so important.

Jen Hatmaker:

Yeah. Yeah. I think you're right. I think there are a million steps.

Right, [we need] to attend to and to pay attention to and to figure out how to alchemize just a degree at a time, probably because to your earlier point, I mean, I know I have certainly at this moment structured my life around this capacity. So now I have to keep up with it if I want to maintain it, which is across the board, that's not just financial. It's sort of in every way, but financially, certainly.

And so yeah, it would have to be a step down, which would start inside with me saying, as the leader of apparently my own business this year we're going to focus on quality, not quantity. This year we're going to choose our yeses far more judiciously. That's possible. People do it all the time. It's not impossible, but somebody has to pull the trigger on that.

Kirsten Powers:

And I also think the thing that I have found is that you weirdly, a lot of times when I have stepped back from things, things have grown even more. We have this idea that the way to make things happen is to overwork and to over plan, versus creating space for whatever's meant to come in. Sometimes we have to have this kind of fallow time where it doesn't mean you're doing nothing. I mean, it could mean you're doing nothing, but it could just mean you're just, what you're just saying. We're just going to keep doing what we're doing. We're not going to add anything, we're not going to try to get any bigger. We're just going to recognize is great and not try to dominate the world. Right?

Jen Hatmaker:

Yeah. The cheesemaker, you already have really good cheese. Just focus on it. Just do what you do. Do what you do, and do it well and drill into it. And instead of trying to become a bread maker, why can't the cheese be enough?

Kirsten Powers:

And also, I think they also recognize intuitively that as you kind of over extend yourself, the quality actually does decrease, right?

Jen Hatmaker:

For sure.

Kirsten Powers:

You can't do that well.

Jen Hatmaker:

Yeah. You're so right. One thing I'm looking forward to this year, and this is just, it'll force my hand. So this will not be because I have an iron will or that I am guided entirely by integrity, but it's a book year. It's a writing year. So I'm writing a book right now, which is just incredibly time consuming and a heavy lift.

And it doesn't just happen in gaps. I'm not that kind of writer. I labor over every paragraph. It does not just fly out of me. It's work in a good way. It's my favorite work. It's my favorite thing I do out of everything I do. But because this is a writing year and I know exactly how much time it takes me to write something I'm proud of, I have already told everybody a bunch of other stuff is coming down 10 degrees.

I can't do it all and I can't add forever. So these other things are going to have to be less or triaged or in some cases evaluated that they've maybe reached the end of the road. And so I feel excited that just simply by virtue of what's on my plate this year, I will be doing less of everything else and focusing on my one thing I love to do the most.

So, I'm excited to see how that feels in my body this year to come with intention, not just like there's the possibility that I would be doing that work and still be thinking I'm not doing enough in every other category, or I'm letting the other categories down.

So I'm hopeful to take a different intention into it and to feel very satisfied in the work that I'm doing, knowing that it matters, it's meaningful, it counts. I'm focused on it. I'm not spreading myself so thin that project's getting my scraps. And so we'll see how I do. Kirsten, I don't know. It is not my instinct to feel that way, but I would love to feel that way.

Kirsten Powers:

I think all Americans feel this way for the most part--or at least people we know. I guess that's also maybe part of the problem. You can surround yourself with people who believe your identity really is “I'm loved because I achieve.” I saw some quote, I think it's Ian Morgan Cron who said “an Enneagram Three in America is basically an alcoholic living in a saloon.” You know what I mean? That's your addiction, and it's just everywhere. And then you get rewarded for [overwork].

Jen Hatmaker:

It's rewarded. It works. That's the problem.

Kirsten Powers:

Yeah. And so you want to just keep doing that. So this is totally natural, but I do think, and I'll just wrap it up on this because I’m  already over time with you, which I knew would happen of course, that I think that the thing I have learned is that we don't understand what a big deal it is to notice that something's off.

That noticing is a huge, it's huge growth, and it is the first step to change.

A lot of times we'll almost beat ourselves up like, “now I see this and everything's out of whack, and how didn't I see this before?” But you're seeing it now. And that's a really big deal, especially in this country that really has conditioned us to not see it.

It's something totally different. So this has been growing in you because we've talked about this before. And I think really for an Enneagram Three, for you to name it and say, this is huge. So I'm excited and we will check back. We'll find out what's going on in your journey, and thanks for helping us think about this differently and being so transparent about what the struggle is for you about changing the channel on how we figure out what's enough. So thank you.

Jen Hatmaker:

Always a good conversation. I hope in a couple of years we don't have anything to say about it. On the other side of that, I hope we don't have this conversation over and over and over year after year. So let's check back in on it.

Kirsten Powers:

I love that. Thank you.