How to Find Fulfilling Work: The School of Life

So many people live with unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future.73

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

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

‘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

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

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

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?

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

A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labour and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To hims