How to Find Fulfilling Work: The School of Life

From the 1820s, writes one historian, ‘many job advertisements asked applicants to submit a phrenological report along with their letter of reference’, and thousands were issued with career guidance based on their head measurements.

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

Picasso’s philosophy: ‘art is the elimination of the unnecessary’.

we can find ourselves in a constant struggle with our pasts, unable to make a decision to try something new because of an allegiance to the person we have been, rather than to the person we hope to become.

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

‘I thought that there was no way I would or could quit only a short time after qualifying – I’d worked so hard to get there. I would be letting myself down.’ This kind of thinking resembles what economists describe as a decision based on ‘sunk costs’: if you buy an expensive pair of shoes that turn out to be incredibly uncomfortable, you won’t want

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.

In his book Good Work, the visionary economic thinker E.F. Schumacher lyrically describes the ‘longing for freedom’ that has become so widespread in Western society. This desire, he says, encapsulates a range of liberating ideas:

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.