How to find fulfilling work - Roman Krznaric Flashcards
1/ The Age of Fulfilment
Work sometimes appears to offer and awful choice: money or meaning. Work and self can seem out of alignment.
The desire for fulfilling work is a modern invention. We have entered a new age of fulfilment, in which the great dream is to trade up from money to meaning.
Two new afflictions have emerged in the modern workplace, both unprecedented history: a plague of job dissatisfaction, and a related epidemic of uncertainty about how to choose the right career.
Is it really possible to find a job in which we can thrive and feel fully alive? 2 ways of thinking about these questions:
1/ Grin and bear it approach - we must recognise that work, of the vast majority of humanity - including ourselves - is mostly drudgery and always will be.
‘Anguish emerges from craving life to be other than it is.’
The message of this approach is to put up with it and pursue our ‘real life’ outside office hours.
2/ Life-enhancing approach - it is possible to find work that broadens our horizons and makes us feel more human.
The search for a fulfilling career has only become a widespread aspiration in the West since the end of the Second World War. It has its roots in the rise of individualism in Renaissance Europe. This was the era in which celebrating your uniqueness became fashionable.
The Renaissance is well known for having produced extraordinary advances in the arts and sciences, which helped to shake off the shackles of medieval Church dogma and social conformity. It also gave birth to highly personalised cultural innovations, such as the self-portrait, the intimate diary, the genre of autobiography and the personal seal on letters. In doing so, it legitimised the idea of shaping your own identity and destiny. We are the inheritors of this tradition of self-expression.
There are three essential ingredients to a fulfilling career: meaning, flow and freedom.
Reject the myth that there is a single, perfect job out there waiting for us to discover it.
We should act first and reflect later, doing experimental projects that test-run our various selves in the real world. Treat yourself to a ‘radical sabbatical’.
What is your current work doing to you as a person - to your mind, character and relationships?
2/ A Short History of Career Confusion
There lie 3 fundamental reasons why career choice is often such a conundrum: we are no psychologically equipped to deal with the expansion of choice in recent history; we are burdened by our own pasts, especially the legacy of our early educational choices; and because personality testing rarely helps us pinpoint fulfilling careers.
We have been tyrannised by the expansion of choice and the chance to scramble up the social hierarchy.
A life without choice is almost unbearable, but we can reach a tipping point when having an abundance of options becomes an overload. At this point, choice no longer liberates, but debilitates.
One effect of having so many options is that it produces paralysis rather than liberation. 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.
First, we should limit our options. Second we should satisfice more and maximise less. We should buy something that is ‘good enough’.
The sense that we might be squandering everything we have struggled to achieve is one of the greatest psychological barriers facing those contemplating career change. The upshot is that we can find ourselves in a constant struggle with our pasts, unable to make a decision try something new because of an allegiance to the person we have been, rather than to the person we hope to become.
‘If there is anything worth fearing in the world, it is living in such a way that gives one cause for regret in the end.’
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), the world’s most popular psychometric test, which is based on Jung’s theory of personality types.
We are far more complex creatures than psychometric tests can ever reveal.
3/ Giving Meaning to Work
There are 5 different aspects of what can make a job meaningful: earning money, achieving status, making a difference, following our passions, and using our talents.
Money and status are extrinsic whilst the latter three are intrinsic i.e. the work is valued as an end in itself.
The pursuit of wealth is an unlikely path to achieving personal wellbeing - the ancient Greek ideal of eudaemonia or ‘the good life’.
We typically get caught on the ‘hedonic treadmill’: as we get richer and accumulate more material possessions, our expectations rise, so we work even harder to earn more money to buy more consumer goods to boost our wellbeing, but then expectations rise once more, and on it goes.
Even those who promise themselves they will only stay in a soulless big-money job for a limited period, almost always get caught on the treadmill and fail to keep their promise.
‘Although we have relative material abundance, we do not in fact have emotional abundance.’
There is now abundant empirical evidence to suggest that if we truly aspire to live the good life, then we would be rash to allow money to be our primary goal.
Like the ancient Romans, we still have a strong yearning for reputation and glory. Status can be an important way to boost our self-esteem.
The universal desire for reputation, in which we judge ourselves through other people’s eyes, is fraught with dangers.
Who do you imagine is judging your status? Do you want to give them that power?
By respect, we don’t mean being treated with deference by others. We mean being appreciated for what we personally bring to a job, and being valued for our individual contribution.
The lesson, in our quest for fulfilling work, is that we should seek a job that offers not just good status prospects, but good respect prospects.
Our greatest hope for personal fulfilment is dedicating our lives - an if possible working lives - to a ‘transcendent cause’ that is larger than ourselves, especially one such as animal rights, poverty alleviation or environmental justice.
‘Our time here is short and we must be willing to take risks and make fools of our ourselves. The stakes are so much higher than any of the status or money rewards of the rat race.’
A challenge is the tensions that can arise between making a difference and making money - the Body Shop eventually lost its ethical drive.
‘One of the biggest mistakes I made was to go public and on the stock market’.
We can offer our accounting experience to an investment bank or a mental-health charity. Ultimately, the choice is ours.
‘We should strive to develop a ‘play ethic’ in our lives, which places yourself, your passions and enthusiasm at the centre of your world.’
Our culture of specialisation conflicts with something most of us intuitively recognise, but which career advisers are only beginning to understand: we each have multiple selves.
The greatest Renaissance generalist of them all was Leonardo da Vinci. He was ‘the most relentlessly curious man in history’.
Adopting the more positive Renaissance perspective, pursuing several careers at the same time is a way of thriving and being true to our multiple selves.
Our motivations and ambitions evolve throughout the course of our lives, and we are often poor judges of our future interests.
4/ Act First, Reflect Later
Fear of failure is close to being a universal affliction. We must reject the traditional model of career change, replacing it with an alternative strategy of act now and reflect later. We must enter a more playful and experimental way of being. We learn who we are by testing reality.
People are much more sensitive to negative than to positive stimuli. We have strong negative bias that means we focus much more on potential drawbacks than benefits.
It might be because early humans developed a high sensitivity to danger as a means of survival on the badlands of the African savannah: we are the products of the primal terror experienced by our hominid ancestors.
We must therefore circumvent our inbuilt evolutionary aversion to risk.
One of the greatest obstacles to change is that we get trapped by the strictures of our social circle and peers.
Our social milieu strongly determines what the German sociologist Karl Mannheim called our Weltanschauung or ‘worldview’ - our underlying mental frame of reference and belief system.
Our worldview is a psychological straitjacket that restricts us from pursuing new possibilities.
Meaning is the ballast of a meaningful career
Flow - we are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter. We enjoy such activities because they are ‘autotelic’: the action is valuable in itself, not a means to an end.
The best way to discover whether a career has flow content potential is to have a go at doing it.
5/ The Longing for Freedom
We must recognise the virtue of idleness and challenge the ideology of ‘having it all’.
Why do we sacrifice vitality for security?
If we have a choice between security and freedom, I say choose freedom.
Chris McCandless (Into the Wild): In reality, nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future.
‘All work is a form of voluntary enslavement’.
Attractive financial package for a job you despise - the classic Faustian bargain of the modern workplace.
In Japan, they have a special word for death by overwork: karoshi.
In Praise of Idleness - Bertrand Russell
‘There is far too much work done in the world’ and ‘immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous’.
We must recognise the virtues of leisure.
Are we making a living or making a dying?
Liberated women have won the right to be terminally exhausted.
We need to unchain ourselves from the culture of overwork by living a simpler life with more space for pursuing our passions. There is no need for us to be captive slaves, to ‘be enslaved by machines, bureaucracies, boredom and ugliness’.
6/ How to Grow a Vocation
‘Without work, all life goes rotten, but when work is soulless, life stifles and dies’, wrote Albert Camus.
Vocations are grown and grown into, rather than found.
We have no choice but to take risks that promise us the gift of a more profound and vibrant existence.
We can put our faith in the power of public declarations. Don’t forget the power of the written word: try writing your obituary.
Most of us live bound by our fears and inhibitions. Yet if we are to move beyond them, if we are to cut the rope and be free, we need to treat life as an experiment and discover the little bit of madness that lies within us all.
