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Studs Terkel / Photo by James Warden

What is the greatest book on working ever written? Easy. Studs Terkel's Working: People Talk about What They Do All Day and How They Feel about What They Do. The Chicago oral historian and radio host died in 2008 while I was researching my own book, How to Find Fulfilling Work, and I dedicated it to his memory. Every day a copy of his 1974 classic sat on my desk while I was writing, providing inspiration, solace, and a reminder of the universal themes that shape the everyday experience of working life.

Terkel's book offers his own special brand of oral history — recordings with workers from all walks of life talking about their memories and thoughts related to their jobs, each edited down to around five pages of vibrant text, with people speaking in their own voices. Between the covers you will discover the lives of steel workers and janitors, receptionists and cab drivers, professors, jockeys, stockbrokers, and dentists.

The opening lines of the introduction tell us that Working ...

When The School of Life launched its new practical philosophy book series, we celebrated with an event in London where each of the six authors — amongst them philosopher Alain de Botton — did a 15-minute talk distilling the most important and inspirational ideas from his or her book. We did our very best to live up to the promo poster, which promised the audience "An Evening of Fast and Furious Enlightenment."

Below you will find the video of my own talk on How to Find Fulfilling Work. In it I discuss five essential insights on the art of finding a job that is big enough for your spirit:

1. Confusion is perfectly normal
2. Beware of personality tests
3. Be a wide achiever, not a high achiever
4. Find where your values and talents meet
5. Act first, reflect later

As you'll see, in the middle I managed to get a thousand people talking in pairs about this question:

Imagine three parallel universes. In each you have a year to try any kind of work you want. What three jobs would you be excited to try?

I can recommend all the videos ...

How are you supposed to discover your ideal job? The standard method is to fill out lots of questionnaires about your strengths and weaknesses, take some psychometric tests, and spend hours researching various professions. Well, here's an alternative. It's an exercise called The Personal Job Advertisement, which I devised for the courses on career change I teach at The School of Life in London.

The concept behind this task is the opposite of the 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 the desire to work overseas. Make sure you don't include any particular ...

For the last century everyone from career advisers to nagging parents have been telling us that the best way to use our talents is to become a high achiever — an expert in a narrow field. But one of the surprising discoveries I made while writing my latest book, How to Find Fulfilling Work, is that there is mounting evidence that this is neither a likely route to job satisfaction nor smart thinking in our current era of job insecurity.

Is being a specialist really the most effective way to use our talents? Of course the world needs skilled surgeons, and we can gain personal satisfaction and a feeling of pride from exercising our expertise. Yet the cost of being a top specialist or high achiever may be that we forgo the benefits of being a generalist or "wide achiever," which are to nurture the many sides of who we are and to use our multiplicity of talents.

Few career counselors today would advise you to be a wide achiever: they remain obsessed by the ideal of the specialist. But if you had gone to a careers fair during ...