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We've had some big wins at my company this year. The kind of wins that mean it's time to expand. Bringing new people onto the team isn't something I take lightly. These people are going to help shape the content that goes out into the world with my brand and my name attached to it. So when I'm hiring, I need to make sure my job listing lands in front of the best possible people. Not just good, the best. Which means this is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Less stress, less time, more results when you need the right person to cut through the chaos. This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs and listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to help get your job the premium status it deserves@ Indeed.com podc podcast just go to Indeed.com podcast right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com podcast terms and conditions apply. This isn't your job. This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. I travel a lot for work. When I have to get off a flight and go straight to a meeting, an airport lounge makes all the difference. I can get something to eat and clean up a bit. That's why I was so excited to see that Chime has added airport lounge access to its travel card. But that's not even the best perk. They offer the Chime Travel Concierge to help schedule flights, book hotels and plan entertainment on your next trip. I can totally see how useful that will be on our upcoming big trip. Chime is changing the way people bank. They offer the most rewarding fee free banking. Chime members can benefit from up to $1,150 in annual rewards, fee free. They're not like traditional old banks that charge you overdraft in monthly fees built for you, not the 1%. Chime is not just smarter banking. It is the most rewarding way to bank. Join the millions who are already banking fee free today. Head to chime.comhelpwanted that is chime.com help wanted. It only takes a few minutes to sign up. Chime is a fintech, not a bank. Banking services from MyPay and ChimeCard provided by Chime's bank partners. Optional products and services may have fees or charges. Stated annual percentage yield and cash back for Chime prime only. No minimum balance required. Checking account ranking based on a J.D. power survey published October 20, 2025. For more information on APY rates, MyPay Spot Me and travel perks go to Chime.com disclosures.
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This is Help Wanted, the show that tackles all the big work questions you cannot ask anyone else. I'm Jason Pfeiffer, editor in chief of
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Entrepreneur magazine, and I'm New York Times bestselling author and money expert Nicole Lapin.
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The helpline is open. For some people, work is their passion. It is core to their identity. For others, work is just a thing that they do to earn money that they can spend on the thing that they really care about. And I'm not here to say that one is right and one is wrong. To each their own. But what happens when those two kind of people date? Well, that's where it can get complicated. And we just heard from a Help Wanted listener who is facing exactly that.
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My boyfriend is much less ambitious than I am. He gets more pleasure and meaning from the things he does outside of work, but I'm more or less the opposite. It's starting to affect our relationship because I think he's starting to resent my working late and I'm starting to resent the fact that he's resenting that I'm working late. Is this a deal breaker?
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That is such a good question. Also, that was me. Well, roles reversed because I was the boyfriend obsessed with work and my girlfriend was not. And here's what I want to do in this episode. I'm going to get personal. I'm going to tell you the story of how it went for me and then I'm going to tell you what I've learned. Okay. So many years ago I was living in Boston and I was living with a longtime girlfriend and we had very different attitudes on work. I think that what she would have said, and not unfair, is that I was obsessed with work. I had basically oriented my life around work. And that was because I was striving. I was a small time editor working at small time publications and I was aspiring to work in New York at national publication or something. I didn't, I just didn't even know what it was. But I knew that I wanted to do big things and that the only way to do that was to just absolutely devote myself to my work. And I loved my work, so it wasn't hard to. And I had created all these friends who had similar ambitions and similar lines of work. And so we all bonded over it and it was, it was great. It fueled me. But it created a lot of tension at home because my girlfriend didn't understand it as well. She had all these other hobbies and Interests. She was fulfilled in many different ways. And work. She liked her work just fine, but it just wasn't the thing that she wanted to think about all the time. She hadn't built a peer network around her work. And so she would get frustrated at the decisions that I would make about how I would spend my time and the thing that I would obsess over. And she would also get bored when she was around my friends who all talked about work. And this came to a head when, after many years of this, I finally got the job offer that I had been waiting for, which was to move to New York and take a job at Men's Health. Men's Health magazine. I didn't honestly care that much about working at Men's Health in particular, but I really cared about. About this step in my career. It felt like the thing that I was working towards. But my girlfriend did not want to move to New York. We were living in Boston. And she also just didn't understand why I kept making these decisions about life driven by work. This wouldn't be the first time that we had moved. It would have been the largest move because we had previously lived in central Massachusetts, in some smaller towns, and we had moved a couple times and then into Boston. And because of my work, I kept uprooting us. And as we were facing this crossroads where I wanted to move to New York and I wanted to take this job, and I. I mean, I'll be honest with you, I just wasn't sure what I wanted to do with the relationship, but I. I wasn't ready emotionally to just walk away from it. And my girlfriend said to me, when does it stop? When does it stop? By which she meant, when do I stop making life choices driven by work? And this question froze me for a little bit because I didn't know the answer. And also it made me wonder, am I making the completely wrong decision here? Am I walking away from a very good thing? It was a healthy enough relationship. It was a healthy enough relationship for, you know, a relationship in your 20s. It was a community in Boston that I really enjoyed. I was doing work there that I enjoyed, too. And maybe this was crazy. Maybe I. Setting myself up for a kind of endlessness. When does it stop? And what I remember is calling my parents to talk to them about this and to pose that question to them, when does it stop? And their answer to me was, it never stops. It never stops. That I will always have ambitions. I will always be in pursuit of big things. I will always want to grow. And if I didn't take this job to stay with this girlfriend in this city. The high likelihood would be that I would come to resent her and the city and maybe even my friends for it, because I might just feel trapped. And that's not to say that any of what I had wasn't good. It was good. But is it enough? Is it worth hitting pause on? And that sunk in, and I took the job in New York and the girlfriend and I broke up. And I look back on that now as a kind of sliding doors moment, but also as about the most critical decision that I've ever made in my life. Because it wasn't just me moving from one city to another. And everything that followed has shaped the person that I am. I still live in New York. I still have a big media career in New York. You hearing me right now is the result of that move, that decision. But also, it was just the first time that I had really faced and came to a conclusion about how work was going to fit into my life. And look, I'm not a workaholic in the classic sense. I do enjoy doing other things. I know how to tear myself away from work right now. My project for this year, to be honest with you, is take more walks, see more people, because I do instinctively just buckle down to try to get more done, because I love it. But I know that I need more things. And so, yeah, there's a tension there. And my identity is very much tied up in the work that I do. But I want to think of myself as well balanced, and I want to think that, yeah, I could be with someone who doesn't necessarily think that way. So I understand the impulse of the person who's asking the question here, have a good relationship. They're seeing this tension. They're wondering if it could work out. And in my case, obviously it didn't. And what came next actually was a relationship that was very much based on a shared appreciation of how much ambition matters. I met my wife, Jen, in New York. She also was very driven by work. And again, not a workaholic, has other interests in life, but that striving that ambition, that was central to her. And we found that that understanding between each other went a long way because it meant that if I had to sacrifice doing one thing because I really needed to get this other thing done, or that I was just thinking about this a lot or wanted to talk about it a lot, or just tied up my. My ambitions in my work, a lot, that she understood that and I understood it of her. And we have given each other quite a lot of passes as we've maybe gone into workholes. This right here, this is the thing that I think you need to replicate. Not that we both found it in work, but rather that we both understood what drives each other. Now, in our case, it is a lot of. Well, I understand that her work matters to her and my work matters to me, but I could imagine it going a different way. I could imagine that I was with someone who was really passionate about something that they are doing that isn't work related, but they're passionate about it. And that I understand what drives them. And that the connection that I feel is about being driven, right? It's about understanding that you are driven and the other person is driven. And we can identify the things that drive us. And that is exciting. You note the distinction there. It doesn't just have to be about work. It has to be about understanding the fuel, understanding the person's sense of purpose and excitement. And that's the thing that you need to identify. Because ultimately, whatever it is that drives you towards work and isn't a thing that's really just about work. It's about something more. I mean, if I were to try to peel it away for myself, what I would identify is that work for me is an expression of me feeling like I can do things. I always struggle, to be honest with you, to figure out the right articulation of this. I feel like I can do a lot. Like I feel like I don't know. I don't know how to say this without sounding stupid, so I'll just kind of say it and I'll sound stupid, which is, I think I'm a smart and capable person and that if given the opportunity that I can maximize all that. I can do something with it. I can turn it into value and I can create things. I can build an exciting life. I can. I don't even know. And just the avenue by which I did that was through work because I identified these skills that I enjoyed, which was storytelling and communications. And then I figured out how to. How to live in them and to funnel my sense of purpose or excitement or desire to see what I could accomplish into them. And that, I think, is the thing that drives me. And because I understand that about myself, I can recognize it in other people. You have to start with you. You can't figure out how you're compatible with somebody without understanding what part of the puzzle you are. What's your puzzle piece shape and what parts of it are going to interlock with other people's. And so if you recognize whatever it is in you that orients you to the world and that gives you a sense of purpose, then I think what you need to do is figure out how to be with someone for whom they have a version of that, however it's expressed that you relate to and respect. And what's that going to take? It's going to take a lot of stepping back and thinking about yourself. And it's going to take some conversations with the person that you're with to understand what they really want. And also, as you're having that conversation, make sure that you don't just go in trying to understand them and what drives them, but also ask them and make sure that you understand their expectations of you and the relationship. I mean, in the conversation where you're figuring out what your partner's thing is, what do they need from you? Are they resenting you? Working late because they miss you, for example? And if so, is there a way that you can budget your time to not just finish your ambitious work, but also budget your time for your partner in a more meaningful way for them? Or is that a core incompatibility? Are you just not willing to do that maybe because you just really like your work or because, frankly, you think that they're asking more of you than you are willing to give? Which is fine. It's fine if they're asking that because that's what they need. You just have to figure out if that's what you need too. I mean, to go back to the listener's question, she writes, my boyfriend is much less ambitious than I am. Okay, that's an interesting word, right? Because we're tying ambitiousness to professional ambitions. Not necessarily to say that the boyfriend couldn't be ambitious about other things, but I flag that more so that you can recognize and appreciate the state of mind that the person is in who's reaching out. He gets more. This is just going to continue. He gets more pleasure and meaning from the things he does outside of work. But I'm more or less the opposite. Okay, so see, this is really interesting. He gets more pleasure and meaning from things he does outside of work. So what are those things? And are they things that really drive that person, drive them to achieve, to build, to harness a different kind of ambition? And can the listener who we just heard from the respect that as ambition? Because clearly ambition matters to her. And that's cool. Ambition matters to me too, a lot. I wouldn't know how to be with someone who isn't ambitious in some way that I could define. But you're going to need to figure out what is that bridge of familiarity? What is that bridge between you and the other person that meets, like, where. Where it's built off of a familiarity where you see something in yourself and you see it in them, too. If you don't have that, then, yeah, I would say that this is a deal breaker. You're going to need to be able to have that conversation with them to understand really what drives them to not define it for them, but let them define it for you. And how are you going to do that? I mean, look, it's not about sitting down and just being like, can you tell me about your thing? Because obviously, if you're dating, you know about their thing thing, and it's not going to be, prove it to me that you care about this. Because then they're going to be on the defensive. But rather, maybe if you haven't yet, ask to be included, ask to come along with them. Just going back to this line from the question. He gets more pleasure and meaning from the things that he does outside of work. I want to know what those things are. I want to know how he gets pleasure from them, how he gets meaning from them, what is it that he's doing? Because maybe he's really ambitious about it. I don't know what it is. It could be anything. I don't want to assume. But what I do want our listener to do is to be able to step into that environment to say, take me with you. Can I go with you? Can I meet these people? Can I see these things? And then you'll have to evaluate for yourself whether or not what you're seeing is something that you recognize in yourself and whether or not you care enough about it to indulge in it with them. My girlfriend back in Boston, she was really into fashion, and I have to tell you, I just don't care about fashion at all. At all. And so I was excited actually, to help her indulge in that. I would get her subscriptions to things, I would get her tickets to things, because I loved feeding a passion of hers. And that was really cool. And I think that the challenge there was that we ultimately just didn't see in each other the way in which our passions were also orienting our lives. I could go with her to a fashion thing, but what I would see her do is just kind of enjoy it, because it wasn't, I think, as a driving force for her as it was for me. My work was a driving force for me, and so I didn't. I didn't understand it. I didn't know how to understand her or what she wanted, and she couldn't see that in me. And that's where the breakdown happened. So know yourself, know that other person. Do your absolute best to make sure that you're able to step into their lives. Not just the overlapping lives, not just the part of you, your life that you see with the other person when you're at home together, but really they're part of the Venn diagram that doesn't normally overlap with you. And then I think you're going to have to make a hard decision about whether or not what you see and what they see in you are familiar enough to each other that you're ultimately going to feel like this is a relationship that works. And you know what? If it's not, I have good news for you. Another relationship will. Help Wanted is a production of Money News Network. Help Wanted is hosted by me, Jason
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Pfeiffer, and me, Nicole Lapin. Our executive producer is Morgan Lavoy. Do you want some help? Email our helpline@helpwantedoneynewsnetwork.com for the chance to have some of your questions answered on the show. And follow us on Instagramoneynews and TikTokoneyNew Network for exclusive content and to see our beautiful faces. Maybe a little dance?
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Oh, I didn't sign up for that.
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All right, well, talk to you soon.