
How to find fulfilling work
As some of you know, I recently left my job with absolutely nothing lined up. If that sounds absolutely terrifying to you, I can confirm: it absolutely is.
After a 2-year period of intense personal and professional growth, it was time to check-in with the new version of myself and I was facing two choices: I could continue on my current job trajectory, which would return small, consistent personal growth with the same company I’d been with for a long time, or I could force myself into the unknown, with the intent of developing some self-knowledge that would make my next move more deliberate and more rewarding — I chose the latter.
If you’re feeling lost, and are wondering how you can start to make a map that will help you figure out what your next move ought to be, you’re not alone. That’s where I found myself.
To create some structure around my ill-defined investigation of self, I bought a book called A Job to Love, by The School of Life — an organization whose stated purpose is to help people lead more fulfilled lives through self-knowledge. I highly recommend their books and YouTube videos to anyone suffering under the sheer chaos of existence as a feeling creature.
A Job To Love is filled with exercises that facilitate the process of taking the nebulous-by-nature awareness of what energizes us, and crystallize it into a better understanding of ourselves that will help us select a job that we find properly fulfilling.
One chapter I found particularly useful describes 12 Pleasure Points of Work:
- The pleasure of making money
- The pleasure of beauty
- The pleasure of creativity
- The pleasure of understanding
- The pleasure of self-expression
- The pleasure of technology
- The pleasure of helping other people
- The pleasure of leading
- The pleasure of teaching
- The pleasure of independence
- The pleasure of order
- The pleasure of nature
In the next section I’ve included the full text of each of the 12 Pleasure Points of Work pulled directly from the book. The examples they give are so wonderfully illustrative so I felt compelled to include them at the risk of being asked to remove it.
As you read each description, notice what resonates with you or triggers relevant memories. Make notes about which Pleasure Points you feel the greatest connection to and add examples from your experiences at work that reflect them.
After your analysis, write down the list of Pleasure Points with the most important to you at the top, and the least important to you at the bottom.
I’d also suggest you talk through your results with another person. Keep in mind that your list may not point to a specific job, but it will give you a tool to measure the suitability of any job you’re considering. A particular job may satisfy some pleasures at the expense of others, but now you’ll have a better means to decide which elements are worth sacrificing in favour of other, more fundamental-to-you pleasures of work.
Good luck, and remember: no one really knows what the hell they’re doing, and learning about yourself is never a waste of time!
1. The pleasure of making money
You loved the time when you were nine and made the biscuits for a stall, sold them to people and turned a profit; it wasn’t really the money, it was the excitement of seeing that people really liked what you’d done and were happy to prove it by giving up something unambiguously valuable. Next time, you added different coloured icing, and it was fascinating to see which colours people went for and which didn’t appeal. You learned and it made you confident.
You get a thrill out of guessing correctly what other people require — though it’s not just guesswork, of course, it’s because you’re always on the lookout for little revealing signals that people don’t even know they’re sending. You love profit because it is, in many ways, an achievement of psychology: the reward for correctly guessing the needs of others ahead of the competition.
You wander through the world aware of how much could be altered: if you walk along a street you might think: ‘That early-20th-century eyesore could be flattened and a block of beautiful brick buildings put up in its place’. You notice a pile of cardboard boxes waiting to be recycled and think, ‘Isn’t there some other use for these?’ You grasp that every inefficiency is a business waiting to be born.
The special appeal of money or you is the endorsement it brings of your insights and skills; you love how the fact that this year’s profits are higher than the year before’s is a confirmation that you were right in a myriad of little decisions you took over many months. It is the clearest proof of the soundness of your judgement.
Not everyone sees this, but for you making money is an intellectual pleasure. You enjoy understanding your clients’ needs better than they do themselves; you like coming up with a solution to a problem before other people have even realized there is a problem to be solved.
You like that making money is connected to a set of down-to-earth virtues: understanding, hard work, efficiency, discipline, canniness.
You know it is nice to have a bit of money (it’s pleasant using an express lane at the airport and having the means to buy a work of art at a friend’s exhibition), but you are clear in your own mind that this isn’t a pleasure of working — it’s a pleasure that comes as a consequence of work. What you enjoy about your job is the process of generating a profit by applying your insights to the problems of the world.
2. The pleasure of beauty
You like it when a table is nicely laid: the way an elegant water glass harmonies with a well-designed knife and fork and a very plain earthenware plate. If a candlestick is placed off-centre, you feel compelled to move it to the right position.
As a child, you had a watch that you loved because the strap was a compelling colour: dark green with small red squares in a line down the middle. You loved carefully wrapping birthday presents for your parents and got bothered when you couldn’t fold the ends neatly; you always wanted to use the minimum number of sticky tape pieces (three small strips), not out of a worry that it might run out but because you loved the feeling that the fewest was also the best (although you might not have been able to articulate this at the time). You envied a friend’s bike because the wheels were a slightly unusual size and this seemed to suit their personality. You loved watching boys who were good at playing football and were struck by their different styles: one made lots of rapid, small, nervy movements, keeping the ball close to his feet; another took long, loping strides and had a way of leaning back when taking a big kick.
At school you loved carefully underlining the title of an essay: one year you experimented with wavy lines; another time you used a ruler and obsessed about the thickness of the line. Sometimes you spent so long getting the title right you didn’t have much time left for actually doing the writing.
You notice when two buildings are misaligned — it spoils the street and you wish someone had taken more care and noticed how jarring the conjunction was; you wish you could go back in time and put it right.
You like the look in winter of a brown ploughed field that led to a line of grey, leafless trees on the horizon.
You notice and appreciate a nice font on the pages of a book about German history.
You might enjoy a film because it has lovely interior shots (you are paying attention to the shape of a room, the placing of furniture, the curve of a door handle); for this, you will forgive improbable convolutions of plot or uninspired dialogue.
You notice how much more excited you have been than any of your partners when the hotel room is just right.
3. The pleasure of creativity
You were seven, and all the LEGO pieces were on the floor; this was one of the best moments as all the possibilities of the lovely things you might make were there somewhere. You were entranced by the potential. You loved cutting up cardboard boxes (the serrated edge of a bread knife was ideal for the task). There was a memorable time a washing machine arrived in a box so big you wanted to live in it; you made a window flap and stocked it with blankets, pillows, and a bar of milk chocolate. You sometimes wished your favourite songs were a bit different — maybe they should repeat a particularly nice bit, or make their voices go down instead of up at the end; you wanted to fiddle with it (even though it was lovely already). As a child, before you went to sleep at night, you used to imagine other things happening to your favourite characters in a story; how would it have been if they hadn’t missed the train — maybe they would have had a whole set of other, even more interesting, adventures? In your sexual fantasies, you’er always tiling yourselves stories about the broader lives of the protagonists: how they dress at work, what the layout of their apartment is, how they felt when they ordered a whip online; sometimes you realize you’ve even stopped thinking about sex.
You love to be asked to imagine and assess the future: should we go into the American market? Is it worth making greetings cards? Should we get involved with the Turkish company? These sorts of thought experiments come easily to you. Sometimes, you like to imagine what the ideal education system or the perfect city might be like.
You enjoy considering which images will work best with a presentation, and are always trying to come up with better ways of conveying information. One time, you hit upon a photo of a hippo up to its ears in a river to get your colleagues to see the urgency of the issue.
People think you like novelty for its own sake, but they couldn’t be more wrong; you like better solutions, you just know that they often lie in unexpected places and you love hunting them down.
4. The pleasure of understanding
You used to bother your parents with (in retrospect) slightly nonsensical questions: why are birds called ‘birds’ and not something completely different like ‘lotheropsicals’? What would baby chimpanzees look like if they were shaved? Do they have time on other planets? You wanted there to be good reasons for things.
You were a bit shocked when you realized your father couldn’t really explain why plugging in the hairdryer made it work. How could something coming out of the wall force the little fan to turn around?
One time when you were 11 a friend said she was jealous of her sister, and you were entranced by the way this idea could make sense of why someone often got angry with someone else.
You love to lay down your thoughts on paper. Your mind becomes clearer and your anxiety levels decrease. Some people drinks or go jogging to relax. You like to reflect.
At school you felt cheated when the maths teacher said she couldn’t tell you at the moment why this way of tackling a problem actually worked; all you needed to know was that it did.
You like it when a news report goes behind the scenes and explains why a compromise was reached, or why a party made a U-turn on its housing policy; it stops being a mystery (you dislike people who like mysteries) and starts to make sense.
You often feel people leave things unresolved: they don’t explain properly, and they don’t seem curious about the multiple possible explanations about why people act as they do.
You like it when a mass of seemingly conflicting facts can be given a coherent explanation. There’s usually an underlying, much simpler and clearer, pattern waiting to be discovered.
5. The pleasure of self-expression
As a child you liked it when adults asked your opinion (sometimes you got frustrated because you didn’t know what your opinion was on this thing, but you really wanted to have one).
When you were in a play at school you loved the way you could expand on a bit of yourself via character.
You get frustrated when people don’t listen; you want to make them pay attention.
Some people think you are narcissistic, but they aren’t right: it’s that you love sharing things you like with others. It’s not self-regard; it’s a kind of generosity.
There was one job you did where a senior manager took you aside after meeting and told you to pipe down a bit, because what you thought wasn’t always relevant to the agenda; later you could see their point but it really upset you.
Sometimes you run out of space on feedback forms.
You love it when people ask good questions about you.
The idea of writing an autobiography has crossed your minds.
You adore to be interviewed, but often find watching interviews excruciating. You want to shout out: get to the juice, say the real stuff!
When you do something you want it to be obvious to others that you have done it.
The idea that you could put your personality into making something — a chair, a garden, a government policy — strikes you as strangely alluring.
You love it when you feel you have ‘touched someone’s soul’.
6. The pleasure of technology
When you were little, your aunt gave you a set of screwdrivers arranged in size from micro to jumbo. You hardly ever used them, but you loved the sense that each one was designed to tackle a slightly different situation. There was a lovely moment when there was a problem with a hinge in a kitchen cabinet door and your mother said ‘where’s that little set of screwdrivers of yours?’ and you found one that fitted exactly (it was a 3mm Phillips head).
When you were around six you stopped taking cars for granted and started to think of them as machines. It was amazing that there were these metal boxes decked out with special dials and little screens and widows that — unlike at home — would open at the touch of a button (or not, if your mother had disabled the back ones). You were intrigued by exhaust pipes and radiator grilles, which hinted at the strange needs of the machine.
You love the idea that we are all still at the beginnings of the project of meeting our needs through technology. You like to imagine where we might be by 2180.
You don’t think of technology just as machines and information processing; the pencil appeals to you as a model of technology: simple, intuitive, robust, perfect for its function (you secretly love pencil sharpeners and sometimes sharpen a pencil just for the pleasure of using this perfect little mechanism and seeing a crisp little curl of wood roll off the blade). In your eyes, socks are wearable foot technology.
You hate it when people associate the future with jet packs. It will be far more interesting than that.
You love asking: what’s the essence of this problem and how could it be solved more cheaply and easily?
7. The pleasure of helping other people
As a child, you loved being allowed to join in. Your sister hated being asked to unload the dishwasher, but you rather liked it because you felt you were contributing. You liked the feeling that your mother or father could be getting on with cooking the rice or phoning the plumber because you’d freed them up.
In make-believe games you liked rescue scenarios; someone was going to be eaten by piranhas and you’d pull them back onto the raft (which was actually a sofa) just in time.
You liked it when friends told you what was bothering them. You didn’t know what you could do, but you liked trying to say comforting things (and sometimes you felt very upset when they rejected your well-intended comments).
You feel that work is meaningful because it makes a difference to other people; in some way it brings them pleasure or solves a problem they have and yu really like hearing about this. You like the idea of seeing the consequences of what you do in the lives of others.
Your father used to get frantic when he thought he’d lost the car keys; you liked being the one who could calm him down and say ‘think, what did you d when you came home yesterday evening?’ Once he found them in the bathroom.
8. The pleasure of leading
You didn’t just want to be in charge, you actually liked being in charge (it was a difference that struck you early). Lots of people at school wanted to be picked as the team captain, but they didn’t really like the responsibility, they just wanted the status. What you wanted was the job, the role, the chance to put your ideas into practice.
You like it when others turn to you for advice. You don’t just say whatever comes into your head. You want to solve their problems. You want t hem to be able to trust your judgment.
You like it when leadership is earned, not just conferred.
You enjoy hearing about leaders who haven’t succeeded by ordinary standards. When you were about 14 you read a story about a general who surrendered to save the lives of his troops; they didn’t win, but he was a real leader, you thought.
When other people get in a panic, you find yourself getting more focused; you like that about yourself.
When people say when they want to avoid responsibility if possible, your first instinct is to dislike them.
When you were little you were excited by the idea of fame. It doesn’t appeal much now; it just seems like an unfortunate side effect of being good at something.
9. The pleasure of teaching
If someone made a mistake you wanted to put them right.
You had a lovely teacher when you were seven; she knew how carefully you were listening and when you were trying (even when you got something wrong).
You love the feeling of equipping somebody else with your knowledge, of how you can turn their panic and frustration into mastery and confidence.
You know you have to be careful where you deliver your ‘lessons’; people don’t like to feel patronized, but you like nothing more than filling in the gaps in the knowledge of others.
10. The pleasure of independence
The first time you drove on your own, you never wanted to stop.
You like getting up very early before anyone else is around, when you can follow your own projects in peace and quiet.
For you, growing up has been all about getting away from people who can control you.
You like being alone; boredom rarely troubles you.
You recoil from guided tours and tour groups.
You were extremely excited when you read a story about a guy who quit his job in a bank and started a company importing avocados from Western Africa.
You really like coming to your own opinion about the emeritus of a book or work of art and it doesn’t much bother you if other people regard you as eccentric.
You’ve been accused at times of not being a team player, and there’s a degree of truth in the criticism.
An evening on your own is never a challenge. It gives you a chance to plot and to think. It annoys you how some people always just want to chatter.
11. The pleasure of order
When you were doing homework you really liked making your writing clear; if you had to rub out a mistake in pencil you were very careful that the rubbing out wasn’t visible. You hated making mistakes in ink and experimented with pasting extra little bits of paper on top of a mistake so as to preserve an overall look of neatness.
You were fascinated by the cutlery drawer; you loved the fact that each kind of thing had a special place. It bothered you a lot when your sister didn’t care and dropped a spoon nonchalantly into the fork section.
Even if you weren’t much good at science you found the periodic table strangely alluring; you liked the idea of everything being sorted into the constituent elements with the chaos of the world reduced down to a few elements only. This struck a chord, even if you found yourself looking out the window when the details were explained.
You hate it when people say ‘filing’ in a sneering way.
You like arranging sets of colouring pencils according to the colour spectrum, although there always seems to be some problems; does yellow shade into white or light green (via-greenish-yellow?).
You get annoyed when people jump around when telling a story (‘oh, I forgot to mention…’).
12. The pleasure of nature
You can’t bear how so many modern windows don’t open.
It was lovely aged eight to get down on your hands and knees and look closely at a hedgehog or a snail. You felt it could be your friend. You liked imagining its life, which seemed as interesting as any human’s.
You love camping, especially if the weather isn’t perfect. It’s a more interesting challenge to put up a tent in a storm.
You were on a long walk in the country with your family when it started to rain. Everyone complained, but you loved it; you just drew up the hood of your jacket, and liked it when you could feel the raindrops actually splashing on your nose.
You had mixed feelings about watching David Attenborough documentaries. you found them very interesting, but you didn’t want to watch them sitting on the sofa with a plate of fish fingers in your lap; you wanted to be there, in the swamps of the Serengeti plains during the wet season or clambering over the rocks of the Galápagos Islands; you wouldn’t care if you got mud up to our knees or scratched your fingers quite badly.
