A Job to Love (The School of Life Library)

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 ha

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

We are often exposed primarily to the people in the public realm who have been unusually good at externalising their talents and acting on their ambitions. By necessity we hear more about these people even though they are in fact pretty rare and, hence, not a reasonable or helpful base for comparison.

3. A lack of a coherent goal But one major obstacle to finding a suitable job remains, and it is one that has received much less attention than the other two, even if it is the most important of them all: the painful challenge of working out what kind of job one is well suited for and would love to do. Not knowing what one seeks is simply the most imp

The point of examining these instances of entrepreneurship is to shift the internal blocks around our own ideas about the kind of work we really want to do. The fact that an idea hasn’t yet been carried out doesn’t mean that it isn’t a good idea. What makes it a good idea is really the precision and clarity with which it latches onto our own sense

Rather than putting pressure on ourselves to plan and execute a major move, we might try out branching projects or small adventures on the side. What small changes can you make that would help you to see if you have talents in an area, without making the big, revolutionary step of committing to it? For instance: – Ask to try out a different area of

Our search is for work we can love, not work we have done – and so we need to get to know a lot about what we love and why before we move too quickly to the formulation of a career plan.

(the people we call great writers are in the end merely people who’ve known how to manipulate the butterfly nets required to catch their own flightiest, airiest, shyest thoughts).

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,