How to Find Fulfilling Work: The School of Life

We get so worried about regretting making a bad choice that we may end up making no decision at all, and remain frozen in our current unfulfilling career.

As Martin Luther King said, ‘Everybody can be great because everybody can serve.’

position at Harvard that would have allowed him to write poetry for a living, but he turned it down to stay in his insurance job.

We must adopt Leonardo da Vinci’s adventurous credo, ‘experience will be my mistress’.

A helpful way to think about this is that we are caught between two forms of regret. On the one hand, the regret of abandoning a career into which we’ve put years of time, energy and emotion. And on the other, the possibility of looking back on our lives in old age and regretting that we didn’t leave a job that was not offering us fulfilment. So wh

Leonardo da Vinci called a discepolo di esperienza, a disciple of experience.

Then indecision brings its own delays, And days are lost lamenting o’er lost days. Are you in earnest? Seize this very minute; What you can do, or dream you can, begin it; Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.

the ancient Greeks’ aspiration to perform some virtuous and noble deed that would give their lives a sense of purpose and ensure their immortality in historical memory.

As Tolstoy noted, most people ‘instinctively keep to the circle of those people who share their views of life and their own place in it’. When was the last time you spent an afternoon with a bee keeper or a shamanic healer?

I don’t want to join the rat race. Not be enslaved by machines, bureaucracies, boredom, ugliness. I don’t want to be a moron, robot, commuter. I don’t want to become a fragment of a person. I want to do my own thing. I want to live (relatively) simply. I want to deal with people, not masks. People matter. Nature matters. Beauty matters. Wholeness m