I am slow. I like to think things through. It has got me into trouble. But that is where my ideas come from.

The world rewards speed, quick replies, fast pivots, instant outputs. But can we afford not to pause? Can slowness itself be a form of progress? (I sure hope so)

The word philosopher carries a faint ring of elitism, a whiff of ivory towers and abstract debate. The word rich can sound shallow, even crass.

Perhaps a better framing is this: the contemplative life and the useful life. A pursuit that does not appear practical, thinking, reading, observing, and an occupation that clearly is.

So perhaps the real question is: can a contemplative be useful?

The story (from Aristotle’s Politics) goes that Thales of Miletus, often named the first philosopher, was mocked for his poverty. His critics said philosophy was useless. One winter, studying the stars, Thales predicted a bumper olive harvest. Before spring arrived, he put small deposits on all the olive presses in his city. When the harvest proved abundant, demand for presses soared. Thales rented them out at high rates and made a fortune.

He was not trying to become rich. He was making a point. A philosopher can be practical when he chooses.

The story still matters. Today, we treat the contemplative as indulgent and the practical as virtuous. We praise productivity, efficiency, and scale, and quietly mistrust the slow and reflective. Yet almost every meaningful advance begins in silence: an unhurried thought, a question that resists a quick answer.

The challenge is not to pick between usefulness and contemplation, but to fuse them. That fusion, of imagination and execution, is what makes work meaningful.

We live in silos. Work here, family there, leisure somewhere else. Our minds follow suit. We treat knowledge like a warehouse i.e neat aisles, separate shelves.

But creativity does not respect labels. It thrives in the gaps. When the walls fall, patterns emerge between chemistry and myth, art and algorithms, trade and philosophy.

Caterina Fake, co-founder of Flickr and early investor in Etsy, trained in literature and art. She noticed something others missed, that people wanted not only to consume but to create and to support each other’s making. Her background in culture helped her see the shape of a new market long before the metrics did.

The German chemist Friedrich August Kekulé found his great insight in a daydream. Struggling to understand the structure of benzene, he imagined a snake eating its own tail, Ouroboros, a symbol from Greek mythology that fascinated him. The image revealed the ring structure that defined the molecule.

Both examples show the same pattern: connection across disciplines. When ideas from different drawers share the same table, they start to combine.

This is how discovery works. Logic helps us prove; intuition helps us see.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb built much of his trading philosophy on the work of David Hume. According to Hume, inductive reasoning depends on the idea that nature will behave in future as it has in the past, but he insisted that this idea itself cannot be rationally demonstrated. You can observe a million white swans but all it takes is one black swan to shatter that world view

Taleb used that insight to design portfolios that lose little from surprises but gain massively from rare, unexpected events, what he called black swans. The approach made him a fortune (He wrote a very popular series of books based on the premise)

But the deeper point is this: philosophy can be more than abstract curiosity. It can change how we assess risk, design systems, and make decisions.

You do not have to trade derivatives to use it. A manager who has led five projects cannot assume the sixth will go the same way. A founder who has raised two rounds cannot assume the third will close. A leader who has solved many people problems cannot assume the next will behave. Induction fails where reality doesn’t really care about your point of view

Philosophical thinking keeps us from mistaking momentum for truth. It gives us the discipline to question our own assumptions before the world does it for us.

We often talk about technology as if it is neutral, as if algorithms, platforms, and policies are just tools. They are not. They shape how people behave, what they value, and even how they see themselves.

If the goal of technology is to help humans, then the questions must be human too. What does this design do to our attention? What does this incentive do to our dignity? What kind of people are we building these systems for, and what kind are we becoming in the process? ( I recent saw Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein, and the line that stood out to me, spoken by Viktor “I didn’t think past creation”)

When we neglect those questions, we build fast and regret faster. We look up from a glowing dashboard and find that trust has vanished, that the metrics have devoured the meaning.

Philosophy is not there to slow us down; it is there to point us in the right direction. It gives us language for what matters and courage to defend it.

Art and science need each other. The arts remind us why. The sciences show us how. The contemplative life refines purpose; the useful life applies it.

The line between reflection and action is thinner than it looks. Reading widely stretches the mind; making your thinking visible grounds it. A good idea only becomes useful when it enters the world, written, drawn, spoken, tested.

Thinking matters only when it changes how we see or what we do. That is the bridge between the contemplative and the practical, not noise, not productivity, but in the doing

Thales understood this. He did not renounce philosophy to make money. He used philosophy to show what usefulness could be. He questioned the shape of work in his time. We need the same move in ours.

We live surrounded by dashboards, systems, and incentives. Progress is often measured in what ships, what scales, and what sells. Those are fine measures, just incomplete ones.

The quality of our choices depends on the quality of our attention. We can move fast and still look closely. We can be ambitious and still be human.

A philosopher can be rich, not only in wealth but in outcomes that matter. A manager can be contemplative, not only in private, but in how she leads.

So pause. Wonder at the world. Then wonder at yourself. Notice what your work is doing to you, and what you are doing to it.

Read something outside your lane. Share one thought before it is ready. Ask a question that unsettles you.

This is how we make thinking useful. It is also how we make work mean something.

This month on Finding Meaning in Work, Cam shares how a decade in banking gave way to a vocation he’d been circling since childhood: dog behaviour training.

Raised around a family boarding kennel, he never saw dogs as a career until corporate hierarchy and box-ticking became impossible to ignore. At forty, he sat down and wrote a list of what he genuinely liked. Dogs kept winning.

Cam signed up for a training accreditation, joined a mentor circle, learnt quickly inside a busy shelter, and launched Act of Dog with a simple website and a few Google ads. Today he specialises in fear, anxiety and aggression in dogs, starting not with commands but with safety and self-regulation.

You’ll hear the real turning points in Cam’s story: moving to London with no plan, the mentors who nudged him forward, and the partner who quietly believed in him.

What stands out isn’t the leap from banking to dog behaviour work but the way he did it, by following curiosity rather than certainty. His approach applies far beyond dogs: build trust first, then teach.

If you’ve ever thought about changing direction, or you lead people who feel stretched or stuck, this conversation is a reminder that progress doesn’t always come from pushing harder. Sometimes it starts by slowing down long enough to build trust with others.. and with yourself.

Listen now by searching for Finding Meaning in Work on your favourite podcast app, or click the button below