Outrospection blog | Roman Krznaric

New book! How to Find Fulfilling Work by Roman Krznaric

By Roman Krznaric | Published: 10 May 2012

My new book How to Find Fulfilling Work is out today.

About the book
Part of a new series of guides to everyday living from The School of Life (edited by Alain de Botton), How to Find Fulfilling Work aims to help people navigate the labyrinth of career choices out there and to find a job that is big enough for their spirits. It busts plenty of myths along the way, such as the idea that you can trust personality tests to guide you to the right job, and offers wisdom from philosophy, psychology, history and literature. There are plenty of unusual solutions to our career dilemmas too, including taking a radical sabbatical and aspiring to be a wide achiever rather than a high achiever, as well as timely career advice from Leonardo da Vinci, Marie Curie and even Zorba the Greek. And you will meet a woman whose 30th birthday present to herself was to try 30 different jobs in one year.

You can find out more about the book here and buy it from Amazon or your local bookstore.

The School of Life series is being launched with events around the UK and beyond.

Other authors in the series include Alain de Botton, Philippa Perry, John-Paul Flintoff, Tom Chatfield and John Armstrong.

Best wishes and happy reading! Roman

Extract from the opening of Chapter 1: The Age of Fulfilment

Rob Archer grew up on a housing estate in Liverpool where there was 50 per cent unemployment and the main industry was heroin. He fought his way out, studying hard and getting to university, and found a great job as a management consultant in London. He was earning plenty of money, he had interesting clients and his family was proud of him. ‘I should have been very happy, but I was utterly miserable,’ he recalls. ‘I remember being put on assignments in which I had no background but was presented as an expert. I was supposed to know about knowledge management and IT, but it all left me cold, and I always felt like an outsider.’ He did his best to ignore his feelings:

I assumed I should be grateful to just have a job, let alone a ‘good’ one. So I focused harder on trying to fit in and when that didn’t work, I lived for the weekend. I did this for ten years, burning the candle at both ends. Eventually it caught up with me. I became chronically stressed and anxious. Then one day I had to ask the CEO’s personal assistant to call me an ambulance because I thought I was having a heart attack. It turned out to be a panic attack. That’s when I knew I couldn’t go on. The problem was that all the alternatives – changing career, starting over again – seemed impossible. How could I trade in the security of my comfortable life for uncertainty? Wouldn’t I be risking all the progress I had made? I also felt guilt that I should even be searching for such luxuries as ‘meaning’ and ‘fulfilment’. Would my grandfather have complained at such fortune? Life appeared to offer an awful choice: money or meaning.

You can read the rest of Chapter 1 here.

Posted in conversation, creativity, ethics, family, history, interviews, money, philosophy, simple living, work | Leave a comment

The Six Habits of Highly Empathic People

By Roman Krznaric | Published: 1 April 2012

This is the video of a talk I gave at the Royal Society of the Arts, which describes six ways to expand our empathic potential, drawing on everything from the empathy experiments of George Orwell to developments in industrial design, from the struggle against slavery in the eighteenth century to the Middle East crisis today. Discover why the 21st century needs to become the Age of Outrospection.

The full version of this talk is available as a podcast.

The ideas in this talk are discussed in my new book The Wonderbox.

Posted in background, belief, climate change, conversation, empathy, empathy through conversation, empathy through education, empathy through experience, ethics, history, literature, podcasts, politics, psychology, public policy, science | 2 Comments

The greatest meeting of strangers in history

By Roman Krznaric | Published: 21 March 2012

I am in the midst of a long-term project to document instances when empathy has flowered on a mass scale and shifted the course of human history. While empathy has periodically collapsed on a collective scale – just think of colonialism in Latin America or the Holocaust – there have also been moments when it has emerged as a force for positive and radical social change. If we want to tackle today’s global crises – from wealth inequality and armed conflict to climate change and food insecurity – we need to learn from the past and understand how empathy can be harnessed as a powerful tool to shift human behaviour and ignite social action. And one of the most interesting places to look is the evacuation of British children in World War Two. Read More »

Posted in conversation, empathy, empathy through conversation, empathy through experience, ethics, family, history, politics, public policy | 3 Comments

Why George Orwell is my empathy hero

By Roman Krznaric | Published: 12 February 2012

I was recently interviewed by The Browser – a fabulous site which compiles quality writing from around the web - about my five top books on the art of living. In the following extract I discuss George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, a book which has been a major inspiration for all my work on empathy.

George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London is your second choice. What does it teach us?

I think that Orwell was one of the great travel adventurers of the 20th century. The reason I think that is because in Down and Out in Paris and London he showed that empathy could become an extreme sport and the guideline for the art of living. It’s the second half of the book that I particularly like, in which he describes how he went tramping in east London. He would dress up as a tramp and go into the streets of London, fraternising with beggars and people living on the streets. He was trying to empathise with people who lived on the social margins. Read More »

Posted in background, conversation, empathy, empathy through conversation, empathy through experience, ethics, history, interviews, literature, politics | 2 Comments

The lost history of the househusband

By Roman Krznaric | Published: 21 January 2012

The following article originally appeared in The Guardian.

The great tragedy of modern parenting is that we’ve forgotten its history – and mothers are paying the price. Contrary to popular belief, the superdad who takes on a serious share of childcare and housework is not a new invention. Before the industrial revolution – a mere couple of hundred years ago – most men were stay-at-home fathers, skilled at comforting wailing babes and bathing squirming toddlers. I didn’t know this four years ago when my partner, Kate, became pregnant with twins. I had never wanted to have children, worrying that it would scupper my hopes of becoming a writer, so I panicked. How was I going to embrace the seismic shock of double-dose fatherhood? Read More »

Posted in belief, ethics, family, history, love, work | 2 Comments

Five dead people to follow in 2012

By Roman Krznaric | Published: 7 January 2012

Browse the self-help shelves of your local book store and you’ll spot that most titles draw on psychology, philosophy and religion for their wisdom. But there is one realm where few of them have sought inspiration: history.

When asking the big questions about life, love, work and death, we sometimes forget that people have been grappling with these issues for centuries – and that means we’re missing out. As Goethe put it, ‘he who cannot draw on three thousand years is living from hand to mouth’.

So how can characters from history help lead our lives in new directions in 2012? Here’s my personal selection of five icons from the past who offer good ideas for better living.

1.Matsuo Basho: make an alternative pilgrimage

The seventeenth-century Japanese poet Basho was a compulsive wanderer who reinvented the art of travel. On one of his pilgrimages, lasting over two years, he naturally visited the holiest Buddhist shrines. But his originality was also to make pilgrimages to non-religious sites that held deep personal meaning for him, such as seeking out the willow trees described by his favourite poets. Read More »

Posted in belief, conversation, creativity, empathy, empathy through conversation, money, politics, senses, simple living, time, travel, work | Leave a comment

Is social media killing the art of conversation?

By Roman Krznaric | Published: 2 January 2012

Ready for a digital diet in 2012? In this article just published in the Independent on Sunday – and based on my new book The Wonderbox: Curious Histories of How to Live – I argue why we need less electro-chatter and more thoughtful, face-to-face conversation. (You’ll also find out why Dr Samuel Johnson is the most disastrous conversationalist in British history.)

There is a crisis in the art of conversation, and it’s making us hungry. On the one hand, we face a famine of quality conversation in our relationships. The typical British couple spends more time watching television together – on average, 55 minutes a day – than talking to each other. And the most common reason given for divorce in the West is wives complaining that their husbands don’t speak or listen to them.

On the other hand, thanks to technology, we are awash with superficial talk. Think of all the staccato texts and Facebook posts sent last year – how many of those words really added depth and meaning to our lives? We’re stuffing ourselves with chatter, but ending up starved of the quality conversation that Socrates savoured.

So should 2012 be the year to put ourselves on a digital diet, as several self-help gurus have suggested? Is it time to worry less about inches on our waistline and more about our hours online?

Read the full article here.

Posted in conversation, empathy through conversation, ethics, history | 1 Comment

New Book! THE WONDERBOX by Roman Krznaric

By Roman Krznaric | Published: 16 December 2011

My new book, THE WONDERBOX: CURIOUS HISTORIES OF HOW TO LIVE (Profile Books), will be in bookshops from December 22 – just in time for a last-minute Christmas stocking filler.

It’s about what the last three thousand years of human history can tell us about better living, and explores twelve universal topics, from work and love to money, creativity and empathy. What might we learn from the Ancient Greeks about the different varieties of love, from the industrial revolution about changing career, or from ancient Japanese pilgrims on the art of travel?

‘The Wonderbox is a cornucopia of delights. Completely fascinating, beautifully written and brimming with insights that challenge our entrenched and predictable ways of seeing and doing, it draws on an amazing range of stories from the history of human culture to explain how we can find true meaning in life. Every thinking home should have one!’ – Michael Wood, historian, broadcaster and author of The Story of England

Find out more about the book here. You can buy it from Amazon here.

The book is being launched with a series of five talks at The School of Life, Life Lessons from The Wonderbox, starting January 11 with ‘The Six Varieties of Love’.

Best wishes and happy reading!

Roman

Posted in climate change, empathy through collaboration, empathy through conversation, empathy through education, empathy through experience, ethics, general, history, nature, philosophy, religion, travel | 2 Comments

The radical origins of compassion

By Roman Krznaric | Published: 3 November 2011

So you think compassion means being nice to people? Sure, its Latin root literally means ‘to suffer with another’, which is pretty close to the psychological concept of ‘affective empathy’, where you share in or mirror someone else’s emotional state. When I feel your pain or suffering, I may well do something to help you out.

But there’s much more to compassion than that. It’s time we recognised it as a source of radical social change which can erode prejudice, create human bonds across social divides, and spur political action. A flowering of compassion was at the roots of the anti-slavery movement in the eighteenth century, the creation of organisations to tackle child poverty in the nineteenth, and countless other political initiatives. ‘So often when people hear about suffering in our world they feel guilty,’ says Desmond Tutu, ‘but rarely does guilt actually motivate action like empathy or compassion.’ Read More »

Posted in art, empathy through experience, ethics, film, history, religion | 1 Comment

To smack or not to smack? An interview with Christopher Wakling

By Roman Krznaric | Published: 13 October 2011

Christopher Wakling’s new novel, What I Did, is a brilliant, dark and often excruciatingly funny journey into a family nightmare. Narrated by a six-year-old boy obsessed with the animal kingdom, it has been the recipient of scintillating reviews, was nominated for the Booker Prize and is fast becoming a book club favourite. I talked to the author – who is also a respected teacher of creative writing – about what it takes to write through a child’s eyes, and what can happen to you when you do. Read More »