How to Find Fulfilling Work: The School of Life

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

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 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.

‘If the diver always thought of the shark, he would never lay hands on the pearl,’ said Sa’di, a Persian poet from the thirteenth century.

Aristotle, who is attributed with saying, ‘Where the needs of the world and your talents cross, there lies your vocation.’

our working identity is not a hidden treasure waiting to be discovered at the very core of our being – rather, it is made up of many possibilities . . . we are many selves.53

haranguing

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

the ancient Greek ideal of eudaimonia or ‘the good life’.

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.