How to Find Fulfilling Work (School of Life) by Krznaric Roman & The School Of Life

Author:Krznaric, Roman & The School Of Life [Krznaric, Roman]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780230766112
Publisher: Macmillan Publishers UK
Published: 2012-05-09T22:00:00+00:00

I Flow, Therefore I Am

The quest to find fulfilling work begins with acting, but is resolved by reflecting. Because even when we have tested a selection of our possible selves, we still need to judge which is the best option (or combination of options, for wide achievers). How can we know which career is right for us at this time in our lives? We ought to ask ourselves some basic questions about the worlds of work we’ve dipped into through branching projects or other experiments:

• How were the careers you explored different from what you had expected?

• Which kind of work did you find yourself talking to people about afterwards with most enthusiasm?

• Which best provides the kinds of meaning you’re looking for in a career?

The last question is vital, because meaning is the ballast of a fulfilling career. But we should recognize that meaning is not sufficient for human fulfilment: you might use your talents as a sculptor, but nevertheless feel lonely much of the time as you hack away at the stone. Most of us also want to enjoy our jobs on a day-to-day basis. That prompts another question about the jobs you tried:

• Which gave you the best ‘flow’ experience?

Flow has the potential to provide this sense of daily enjoyment. Never heard of it? Don’t worry. Let me explain what this mysterious elixir of flow is, and how exactly it can help us choose a career.

The concept of flow dates from the 1970s, when it was first developed by the Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (and you thought Krznaric was difficult to pronounce). It is now widely accepted as one of the most fundamental indicators of ‘life satisfaction’ or ‘happiness’. A flow experience is one in which we are completely and unselfconsciously absorbed in whatever we are doing, whether it is scaling a rock face, playing the piano, doing pilates, giving a conference presentation, or conducting a surgical operation. As Csikszentmihalyi puts it, we are ‘so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter’. When this happens, we are ‘in flow’, a state that athletes often describe as being ‘in the zone’. He says that we enjoy such activities because they are ‘autotelic’, or intrinsically motivating: the action is valuable in itself, not a means to an end. In a typical flow experience, we feel totally engaged in the present, and future and past tend to fade away – almost as if we were doing Buddhist meditation. In his renowned study of surgeons, Csikszentmihalyi found that when performing operations, 80 per cent of them lose track of time or feel that it passes much faster than usual. They’re in the zone.62

One of the curious characteristics of flow, according to Csikszentmihalyi, is that it is not limited to ‘high-end’ professions like being a surgeon, but can equally be experienced by butchers, welders or farm workers. He would certainly recognize the presence of flow in the following scene from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, when the shy aristocrat Levin joins the peasants on his country estate in a day of scything:

Swath followed swath.

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