Roman Krznaric > Quotes

“If the diver always thought of the shark, he would never lay hands on the pearl,’ said Sa’di, a Persian poet from the thirteenth century.”
― Roman Krznaric, How to Find Fulfilling Work

“What is your current work doing to you as a person – to your mind, character and relationships?”
― Roman Krznaric, How to Find Fulfilling Work

“Without work, all life goes rotten, but when work is soulless, life stifles and dies,’ wrote Albert Camus.”
― Roman Krznaric, How to Find Fulfilling Work

“Aristotle was especially aware of the importance of this benevolent form of self-love, when he wrote, “All friendly feelings for others are an extension of man’s feelings for himself.”54”
― Roman Krznaric, Empathy: Why It Matters, and How to Get It

“ZORBA: Damn it boss, I like you too much not to say it. You’ve got everything except one thing: madness! A man needs a little madness, or else… BASIL: Or else? ZORBA:…he never dares cut the rope and be free.”
― Roman Krznaric, How to Find Fulfilling Work

“At this moment in history the dominant force is clear: we live in an age of pathological short-termism. Politicians can barely see beyond the next election or the latest opinion poll or tweet. Businesses are slaves to the next quarterly report and the constant demand to ratchet up shareholder value.”
― Roman Krznaric, The Good Ancestor: How to Think Long Term in a Short-Term World

“He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how.”
― Roman Krznaric, How to Find Fulfilling Work: The School of Life

“Empathy is a constant awareness of the fact that your concerns are not everyone’s concerns and that your needs are not everyone’s needs, and”
― Roman Krznaric, Empathy: Why It Matters, and How to Get It

“Imaginary Lives Imaginary Lives is a thought experiment I have adapted from two important career-change thinkers, Julia Cameron and John Williams, which aims to take your ideas a stage closer towards specific job options.55 It’s simple but potentially powerful. • Imagine five parallel universes, in each of which you could have a whole year off to pursue absolutely any career you desired. Now think of five different jobs you might want to try out in each of these universes. Be bold in your thinking, have fun with your ideas and your multiple selves. Your five choices might be food photographer, member of parliament, tai chi instructor, social entrepreneur running a youth education project, and wide-achieving Renaissance generalist. One person I know who did this activity – a documentary film maker who was having doubts about her career – listed massage therapist, sculptor, cellist, screen-play writer, and owner of her own bar on a tiny, old-fashioned Canarian island. Now come back down to earth and look hard at your five choices. Write down what it is about them that attracts you. Then look at them again, and think about this question: • How does each career measure up against the two motivations in the previous activity that you chose to prioritize in the future? If you decided, for instance, that you want a combination of making a difference and high status, check whether your five imaginary careers might provide them. The point is to help you think more deeply about exactly what you are looking for in a career, the kind of experiences that you truly desire.”
― Roman Krznaric, How to Find Fulfilling Work

“Spitz’s shocking research revealed that human affection may be even more critical to survival than food and shelter or was at least of equal importance in our hierarchy of needs.”
― Roman Krznaric, Empathy: Why It Matters, and How to Get It

“One other thing. And this really matters for readers of this book. According to official Myers–Briggs documents, the test can ‘give you an insight into what kinds of work you might enjoy and be successful doing’. So if you are, like me, classified as ‘INTJ’ (your dominant traits are being introverted, intuitive and having a preference for thinking and judging), the best-fit occupations include management consultant, IT professional and engineer.30 Would a change to one of these careers make me more fulfilled? Unlikely, according to respected US psychologist David Pittenger, because there is ‘no evidence to show a positive relation between MBTI type and success within an occupation…nor is there any data to suggest that specific types are more satisfied within specific occupations than are other types’. Then why is the MBTI so popular? Its success, he argues, is primarily due to ‘the beguiling nature of the horoscope-like summaries of personality and steady marketing’.31 Personality tests have their uses, even if they do not reveal any scientific ‘truth’ about us. If we are in a state of confusion they can be a great emotional comfort, offering a clear diagnosis of why our current job may not be right, and suggesting others that might suit us better. They also raise interesting hypotheses that aid self-reflection: until I took the MBTI, I had certainly never considered that IT could offer me a bright future (by the way, I apparently have the wrong personality type to be a writer). Yet we should be wary about relying on them as a magic pill that enables us suddenly to hit upon a dream career. That is why wise career counsellors treat such tests with caution, using them as only one of many ways of exploring who you are. Human personality does not neatly reduce into sixteen or any other definitive number of categories: we are far more complex creatures than psychometric tests can ever reveal. And as we will shortly learn, there is compelling evidence that we are much more likely to find fulfilling work by conducting career experiments in the real world than by filling out any number of questionnaires.32”
― Roman Krznaric, How to Find Fulfilling Work

“empathy is the art of stepping imaginatively into the shoes of another person, understanding their feelings and perspectives, and using that understanding to guide your actions.1”
― Roman Krznaric, Empathy: Why It Matters, and How to Get It

“There is one last way to break with your past and begin a new stage of your career journey, which is to take some advice that appears at the end of the 1964 film Zorba the Greek. Zorba, the great lover of life, is sitting on the beach with the repressed and bookish Basil, an Englishman who has come to a tiny Greek island with the hope of setting up a small business. The elaborate cable system that Zorba has designed and built for Basil to bring logs down the mountainside has just collapsed on its very first trial. Their whole entrepreneurial venture is in complete ruins, a failure before it has even begun. And that is the moment when Zorba unveils his philosophy of life to Basil: ZORBA: Damn it boss, I like you too much not to say it. You’ve got everything except one thing: madness! A man needs a little madness, or else… BASIL: Or else? ZORBA:…he never dares cut the rope and be free. Basil then stands up and, completely out of character, asks Zorba to teach him how to dance. The Englishman has finally learned that life is there to be lived with passion, that risks are there to be taken, the day is there to be seized. To do otherwise is a disservice to life itself. Zorba’s words are one of the great messages for the human quest in search of the good life. 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.”
― Roman Krznaric, How to Find Fulfilling Work

“What might our descendants wish we had done better for them?”
― Roman Krznaric, The Good Ancestor: A Radical Prescription for Long-Term Thinking

“Leonardo da Vinci’s adventurous credo, ‘experience will be my mistress’.”
― Roman Krznaric, How to Find Fulfilling Work

“In a culture obsessed with hard work and career success, it can be difficult to wean ourselves off the work ethic. And we may not want to if we are engrossed in a career that is making us feel fully alive. But if we do seek the advantages of a four-day week, and the space to nurture other parts of who we are, then we might be wise to put our hopes in the virtues of simple living,”
― Roman Krznaric, How to Find Fulfilling Work: The School of Life

“the most emotionally corrosive form of regret occurs when we fail to take action on something that matters deeply to us.”
― Roman Krznaric, How to Find Fulfilling Work

“The Personal Job Advertisement These two activities are likely to have encouraged some clearer ideas about genuine career possibilities, but you should not assume that you are necessarily the best judge of what might offer you fulfilment. Writing a Personal Job Advertisement allows you to seek the advice of other people. The concept behind this task is the opposite of a standard career search: imagine that newspapers didn’t advertise jobs, but rather advertised people who were looking for jobs. You do it in two steps. First, write a half-page job advertisement that tells the world who you are and what you care about in life. Put down your talents (e.g. you speak Mongolian, can play the bass guitar), your passions (e.g. ikebana, scuba diving), and the core values and causes you believe in (e.g. wildlife preservation, women’s rights). Include your personal qualities (e.g. you are quick-witted, impatient, lacking self-confidence). And record anything else that is important to you – a minimum salary or that you want to work abroad. Make sure you don’t include any particular job you are keen on, or your educational qualifications or career background. Keep it at the level of underlying motivations and interests. Here comes the intriguing part. Make a list of ten people you know from different walks of life and who have a range of careers – maybe a policeman uncle or a cartoonist friend – and email them your Personal Job Advertisement, asking them to recommend two or three careers that might fit with what you have written. Tell them to be specific – for example, not replying ‘you should work with children’ but ‘you should do charity work with street kids in Rio de Janeiro’. You will probably end up with an eclectic list of careers, many of which you would never have thought of yourself. The purpose is not only to give you surprising ideas for future careers, but also to help you see your many possible selves. After doing these three activities, and having explored the various dimensions of meaning, you should feel more confident about making a list of potential careers that offer the promise of meaningful work. What should you do next? Certainly not begin sending out your CV. Rather, as the following chapter explains, the key to finding a fulfilling career is to experiment with these possibilities in that rather frightening place called the real world. It’s time to take a ‘radical sabbatical’.”
― Roman Krznaric, How to Find Fulfilling Work

“The consequence is that we often become psychologically paralysed, like a rabbit caught in the headlights. 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.”
― Roman Krznaric, How to Find Fulfilling Work

“Giving people a death nudge might prompt immediate shifts in behavior but still may not go far enough in creating the deep psychological shifts required to embed the values of the good ancestor in society.”
― Roman Krznaric, The Good Ancestor: A Radical Prescription for Long-Term Thinking

“There is an Apache saying, “We do not inherit the land from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children.”18 In the end it is not just our own children, but all children who will judge us from the future.”
― Roman Krznaric, The Good Ancestor: A Radical Prescription for Long-Term Thinking

“So what will it be? A radical sabbatical, a branching project, or a conversational exploration? The moment has come to lay this book aside and take action. My advice at this point is as follows: • Brainstorm three possible selves, then think of three ways you could ‘act now, and reflect later’ to test each of these selves. Give yourself half an hour right now and get started. Phone an organization that interests you and ask if they take on volunteers. Register a domain name for a business idea you have. Order a prospectus for a training course you could take. Email a wide-achiever friend and ask if you could meet to discuss how they manage it.”
― Roman Krznaric, How to Find Fulfilling Work

“Thanks to the wayfinders, the grandmothers, the social cooperators, and the toolmakers of the past, we have a profound new story about human nature, one telling us that we are not merely prisoners of our marshmallow brains but that we also have acorn brains wired into us.”
― Roman Krznaric, The Good Ancestor: A Radical Prescription for Long-Term Thinking

“Simply by devoting ourselves to work that gives us deep fulfilment through meaning, flow and freedom (though a fourteen-hour day might be overdoing it a little). Over time, a tangible and inspiring goal may quietly germinate, grow larger, and eventually flower into life.”
― Roman Krznaric, How to Find Fulfilling Work: The School of Life

“it is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act.”
― Roman Krznaric, Empathy: Why It Matters, and How to Get It

“When Britain colonized Australia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it drew on a legal doctrine now known as terra nullius—“nobody’s land”—to justify its conquest and treat the indigenous population as if they didn’t exist or have any claims on the land.8 Today our societal attitude is one of tempus nullius: The future is seen as “nobody’s time,” an unclaimed territory that is similarly devoid of inhabitants.”
― Roman Krznaric, The Good Ancestor: A Radical Prescription for Long-Term Thinking

“If the children don’t trust that the researcher will return, they are more likely to grab the marshmallow, and those from wealthier backgrounds find it easier to resist the treat; a lack of trust and fear of scarcity can push us toward short-termism.7”
― Roman Krznaric, The Good Ancestor: A Radical Prescription for Long-Term Thinking

“THE VANISHING ART OF SEIZING THE DAY The hijack of carpe diem is the existential crime of the century – and one that we have barely noticed. It might seem odd to claim that a phrase from a dead Roman poet has been ‘hijacked’, but the evidence is compelling. Who, or what, are the hijackers in question? First, the spirit of ‘seize the day’ has been surreptitiously hijacked by consumer culture, which has recast it as Black Friday shopping sprees and the instant hit of one-click online buying: in essence Just Do It has come to mean Just Buy It. Alongside this is the growing cult of efficiency and time management that has driven us toward hyper-scheduled living, turning the spontaneity of Just Do It into a culture of Just Plan It. A third hijacker is 24/7 digital entertainment that is replacing vibrant life experiences with vicarious, screen-based pleasures, and contributing to a new age of distraction. Rather than Just Do It, we increasingly Just Watch It instead. Finally – and though it might seem counterintuitive – carpe diem has been hijacked by the booming mindfulness movement. While practising mindfulness has many proven benefits, from reducing stress to helping with depression, one of its unintended consequences has been to encourage the idea that seizing the day is primarily about living in the here and now. Just Do It has become Just Breathe. Confronted by these four hijackers, the art of seizing the day is vanishing before our eyes and we urgently need to do something about it, or else risk losing touch with the carpe diem wisdom of humanity that has accumulated over the past two millennia. I will be exploring in detail how this cultural hijacking has happened, and how we might best respond.”
― Roman Krznaric, Carpe Diem Regained: The Vanishing Art of Seizing the Day

“The first lesson history teaches is that nothing is inevitable until it happens. We should feel hope when remembering that colonialism and slavery came to an end.”
― Roman Krznaric, The Good Ancestor: A Radical Prescription for Long-Term Thinking

“All friendly feelings for others,’ he wrote, ‘are extensions of a man’s feelings for himself.’ The message was that when you like yourself and feel secure in yourself, then you will have plenty of love to give. Similarly, if you know what makes you happy, then you will be in a stronger position to find a way of extending that happiness to those around you. If, on the other hand, you are uncomfortable with who you are, or harbour some self-loathing, then you will have little love to offer others.”
― Roman Krznaric, How Should We Live?: Great Ideas from the Past for Everyday Life