This childhood experience dovetails with a basic feature of the human condition. We know ourselves from the inside, but others only from the outside. We’re constantly aware of all our anxieties, doubts and idiocies from within. Yet all we know of others is what they happen to do and tell us – a far narrower and more edited source of information. We

These industries don’t sit under the heading of journalism, but they all have needs and opportunities that offer exactly the same pleasures that were initially and rather superficially associated with journalism.

In order to face our troubles in a slightly calmer state of mind, we should admit the inherent dignity and complexity of the problem of working out what to do. Rather than follow a Romantic-era faith in intuitive feeling, the process of working out what to do, or what to do next, should be recognised for what it is: one of the most tricky,

in any consideration of the concept of happiness, we must take another element into consideration: the issue of expectations. How happy we can be in any context depends crucially on how happy we expect to be. Our happiness is dependent not simply on how good things are, but on how they stack up in comparison with what we imagined could plausibly

Successful introspection of a kind that leads to innovation involves a good deal of bravery because of how much of what we sincerely like, want or are opposed to differs from what society defines as normal. Prevailing assumptions about procedures and products often contain ideas and stock responses that have drifted very far from underlying truths,

Mediocrity is the result of being guided more by what other people typically do and say than by the thoughts and feelings that are circulating (just below the surface) in our own minds. We know inside, in a muddled way, what could be done, but don’t trust our quiet intuitions. We in effect abide by a submissive, feudal story: that it is only other

In essence, a creative entrepreneur is someone in command of an accurate thesis about what others truly want.

A very common way to identify what job we might like to do is to set our sights on industries that produce the sort of things we enjoy consuming. We enjoy their outputs, and therefore seek to partake professionally in their inputs. This means that we’re pretty likely to write off whole areas of the economy, because they’re not obviously connected

The ‘regret-free life’ exists only in songs. The way to diminish regret is to alleviate the sense that one had the option to choose correctly, and failed.