1. The Modern Age Has Made It Hard for Us
In 1700, in Western Europe, there were some 400 different kinds of jobs you could choose from. Nowadays, there are approximately 500,000. No wonder if we sometimes have a bit of trouble settling on what we might want to do.
2. You Are Not the Only One
As with relationships, it’s an immense relief – and no sign of meanness – to know that other people are also very unhappy around their work. Not feeling alone is a significant, dignified consolation.
3. The Idea of Happy Work Is the Genius, Malevolent Invention of the Bourgeoisie
The modern meaning of life is that our deepest interests should find external expression in a form that others will find useful, and that will bring in sufficient funds for a bourgeois life. The ambition is enormous, beautiful and worthy of solemn respect for its trickiness. It is only in very recent history that we’ve even attempted not just to make money at work, but also – extraordinarily – to be happy there as well. How deeply peculiar the idea would have sounded to most of our ancestors: especially the aristocrats who never worked and the working classes who would mostly strongly have wanted not to. Happy work is the genius, malevolent invention of the bourgeoisie.
4. Your Talents Are Real Even If They Don't Make You Money
Our career crises are aggravated by the sense that our talents aren’t real unless: a) they make us money; b) we mine them fully all the time; c) they aren’t just hobbies. Such dogmas are, at the very least, open to question.
5. Gradual Evolution is Valid
We often don’t make any change to our careers because we are fixated on enormous transformations – and disregard the role of evolutions. But a whole new career might germinate from an enrolment on an evening class once a week.
6. True Success is Not Measured by Money/Status
Reflecting back on our most satisfying childhood interests matters in part because we were at that stage free of the two great anxieties that later inhibit the flowering of our real working selves: the need for money and the longing for status. True success might mean, by fifty, having returned in key ways to what it was fun to do at five.
7. Entertain the Ridiculous
Look back to the most ‘ridiculous’ ideas for a business you ever had: imagine they were not as ridiculous as all that. Listen to Emerson: ‘In the minds of geniuses, we find – again – our own neglected thoughts.’
