Category Archives: history

Four Ways to Rethink ‘Having It All’ (Without Leaning In)

By Roman Krznaric | Published: 8 May 2013

Here’s an article I just wrote for the Wall Street Journal on the dilemmas of balancing work and family life. Is Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, author of Leaning In, right to think that women can ‘have it all’ if only they really believe in themselves? My approach is not to answer the question ‘Is it possible [...]

Also posted in belief, family, money, politics, psychology, public policy, simple living, travel, work | Leave a comment

Six Ways to Stop Worrying and Find Work You Love

By Roman Krznaric | Published: 3 May 2013

To celebrate the launch of the US edition of my book How to Find Fulfilling Work, I’ve written a short essay that draws out what I think are the most important, useful and hopefully inspiring ideas within its pages. It’s called Six Ways to Stop Worrying and Find Work You Love, and is published by [...]

Also posted in conversation, emotions, work | Leave a comment

Valentine’s Day Video: The Six Varieties of Love

By Roman Krznaric | Published: 12 February 2013

The Ancient Greeks would have considered us modern creatures incredibly unsophisticated in the way we talk about love. We tend to use a single word to cover so many different kinds of relationships and emotions. On Valentine’s Day you may well whisper ‘I love you’ to your soulmate over a candlelit meal, but then the [...]

Also posted in family, love, philosophy, psychology, videos | 1 Comment

How Goethe can change your life – 3 lessons for 2013

By Roman Krznaric | Published: 1 January 2013

So you’ve drawn up your list of New Year’s resolutions. Some are probably achievable, like giving up eating chocolate for breakfast. Others may be more daunting because they represent a long-held desire to take your life in a new direction, anything from changing career to renewing family relationships. If you’ve resolved to make a big change, I suggest [...]

Also posted in belief, love, travel, work | 6 Comments

The Power of Outrospection

By Roman Krznaric | Published: 3 December 2012

What do Mr Spock, Che Guevara and Gandhi have in common? They all appear in my new RSA Animate, The Power of Outrospection, about how empathy can create radical social change. If you want to know more about my ideas on empathy, a good place to start is my book The Wonderbox: Curious Histories of [...]

Also posted in art, conversation, empathy, ethics, politics, psychology | 11 Comments

Can reading a novel change the world?

By Roman Krznaric | Published: 24 July 2012

‘It was through books that I first realised there were other worlds beyond my own; first imagined what it might be like to be another person,’ wrote novelist Julian Barnes in a recent Guardian essay. It’s an enticing thought that reading fiction might help us escape the straitjacket of our egos and expand our moral [...]

Also posted in art, belief, empathy, empathy through education, empathy through experience, ethics, family, literature, love, philosophy, religion | 2 Comments

High Achiever or Wide Achiever?

By Roman Krznaric | Published: 10 July 2012

We should all be worried about the £20 note, which features the eighteenth-century economist Adam Smith staring fixedly at workers toiling in a pin factory. Smith argued that this factory would produce far more pins if workers specialised in just one or two tasks – such as straightening the wire or sticking on the head [...]

Also posted in art, money, work | 2 Comments

Jubilee’ve the hype? One hundred years of royal PR

By Roman Krznaric | Published: 4 June 2012

Over a million rain-soaked loyal subjects watched the Queen’s barge and a thousand support vessels bobble along the Thames this weekend to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee. And around the country many more millions joined the festivities at street parties, country fairs, community dances and cake sales. But now the Union Jacks have been put away, [...]

Also posted in belief, politics, public policy | 3 Comments

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 [...]

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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 [...]

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

  • Welcome to OUTROSPECTION, my blog on empathy and the art of living. You'll find articles, interviews and news on the fundamental questions of how to live, with an emphasis on outrospection, which is about discovering who we are by stepping outside ourselves and exploring the lives of other people and cultures.

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