A Job to Love (The School of Life Library)

1. The pleasure of making money

The successful innovators, be they in art or business, are those who can remain true to insights that would have seemed, when first made, to be very close to bizarre. Edward Hopper (1882–1967) could not have been the first person to feel the lonely charm of the railway station or the strangely comforting anonymity of the late-night diner or the eer

question of all those we envy: ‘What could I learn about here?’

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

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.

For a time, until we are stronger, we should be courageous enough to adopt a more generous perspective on ourselves. We may have failed, but we have not thereby forfeited every claim to sympathy and compassion. We were defeated not merely because we were cretins, but also: 1. Because the odds were against us We fell so readily and heedlessly in lov

In 1841, the American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson published his most profound essay, ‘Self-Reliance’. In it, he set himself the task of trying to understand where greatness comes from, in business, government, science and the arts – and his answer was touchingly close to home. Geniuses are those who know how to introspect and trust in their own

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

The difference between the creative and the uncreative mind isn’t, therefore, that the creative person has different thoughts, but that the creative person takes what is in their mind more seriously. What enables them to do this is a quality very dear to Emerson: a capacity to resist the fear of humiliation.