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  • This video is brought to you by the School of Life For Business, click the first link in the description for more information on how the School of Life can help your business.

  • A complaint regularly aired around many careers is that in order to succeed at them, there is nowadays no option but to sell out.

  • It appears that we will inevitably face a choice between authenticity and poverty on the one hand and idiocy and wealth on the other.

  • We're familiar with the complaint in the arts, of course, but the same dilemma shows up when an interesting restaurants seems unable to make a profit.

  • When a specialist bread company goes into Receivership, when a garden supply firm focusing on rare native plants can't get a foothold in the market.

  • Behind the complaint lies a very understandable, but at the same time very ambitious yearning that are most passionately held beliefs and enthusiasms should relatively painlessly simply by virtue of their merits, become high priorities for others, young Children are particularly prone to this touching assumption they may on meeting a new adult enthusiastically suggests that they joined them in playing a favorite game, Perhaps Bruce something on a miniature kitchen stove or impersonate one of their dolls, which shows how hard it is for a child to grasp how alien its pleasures might be to another person.

  • Children aren't silly, they're just highly attuned to their own nature and spontaneously convinced that others may share it.

  • They are in a naive but representative way, illustrating an instinct that stays with us all of our lives, the supposition that others will and must be moved by what moves us.

  • It's tempting to arrive at a despairing conclusion that the economy is inherently devoted to delivering a personal insult to the better aspects of human nature.

  • The truth is a lot less vindictive, but the tendency for the market to overlook some of our more sincere and earnest efforts is real and founded on a raft of identifiable stubborn forces in economic and psychological life.

  • One of the most basic of these forces is choice.

  • It's in the nature of a growing successful economy always to expand the range of choice offers to a consumer and thereby always to minimize the a priori claims of any one product or service.

  • We can track the characteristic features of this development In relation to the media.

  • In 1952, a BBC radio broadcast of Beethoven's fifth Symphony attracted an audience of five million listeners, approximately 16 of the UK's adult population.

  • Today, such a broadcast would claim a fraction of these numbers.

  • What explains the difference is not as some cultural pessimists might claim That the UK population has over a few generations become a great deal less sensitive to the force of German romantic music.

  • The fundamental difference is that today's audience has many more options.

  • In 1952, there were very few competing sources of entertainment.

  • People listened are mass to the classical end of BBC radio because there was nothing much else to do this rather nicely gave certain highbrow things more opportunity to be attended to.

  • But it also meant that many substandard services and products could enjoy a far larger role than their intrinsic merit warranted.

  • There is a second reason why modern audiences are likely to sidestep opportunities for high minded consumption because they are so exhausted.

  • Modern work demands of punishing amount from us.

  • We typically return from our jobs at the day's close, in a state of severe depletion, in such a condition, the products and services for which we can be in the mood have to be a very particular sort.

  • We're probably two brutalist to care very much about the suffering of others.

  • We may have endured too much tedium to stay patient with arguments that are reticent and subtle.

  • We may hate ourselves a bit too much to want to eat and drink only what's good for us.

  • Our lives may be too lacking and meaning to concentrate only on what is meaningful to counterbalance what's happened at work.

  • We may gravitate instinctively towards what's excessively sweet, salty, distracting Ez zour, explosive, sexual or sentimental.

  • This collectively creates a vicious circle what we consume ends up determining what we can produce.

  • And in turn, the quality of jobs that are on offer so long as we have only the emotional resources to consume at the more narcotic and compromised end of the market will only be generating employment that is itself rather challenged in meaning and compromised indignity.

  • The price we pay for a marketplace that refuses to support high minded efforts isn't just practical and economic.

  • It is also, at some level emotional.

  • One of our greatest cravings is to be recognized and accepted for who we are.

  • We long for careful, insightful appreciation of our characters and interests.

  • This was if things went tolerably well, a bit like what happened to us in childhood when a kindly adult, through the quality of their love spared us any requirement to impress or as we might put it to market ourselves.

  • We didn't, in those early years need assiduously to sell who we were.

  • We didn't have to smile and exaggerated ways sound happier than we were put on, seductive accents or compress what we had to say in memorable jingles.

  • We could take our time, hesitate whisper, be a little elusive and complex, and as serious as we needed to be certain that another would be there to find and accept us.

  • Everything we learned of love in those days ran counter to the mechanisms of commercialization.

  • No wonder if we harbor within us A degree of instinctive revulsion about selling out.

  • The need not to sell ourselves aggressively was not just part of an earlier, simpler point in the history of the world, as scholars rightly point out, it was more poignantly.

  • Also, a moment in each of our personal histories to which we may in our hearts, always at some level belonging to return to the school of life, can help your business with training and employee well being visit the School of Life dot com slash business for more information.

This video is brought to you by the School of Life For Business, click the first link in the description for more information on how the School of Life can help your business.

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