out ways entrepreneurs can improve their quality of life.

Hello Morgwn, pleasure to meet you. For the benefit of our viewers and Pioneers, I want

you to define for us, explain to us what The School of Life is all about.

Sure, well in the simplest terms The School of Life is a business that's devoted to good

ideas for everyday living. We are primarily concerned with how to help people live the

most fulfilling lives possible. And how long has The School of Life been running? Three

years, so we've had about 40,000 people participate in our public programs. What are the goals

and plans for The School of Life? When the school was originally founded, the initial

vision was to create an alternative form of education for adults that was sort of non-traditional,

so a way of bringing ideas out of the ivory tower and onto the high street, and to make

it more accessible, learning more accessible and relevant to everyday lives. So we started

out by launching a range of classes, workshops and other weekend events, and now we've moved

into publishing, so we'll be launching a series of books next May, we've started to design

our own sort of knowledge led, very thoughtful gifts, games and stationary, and we will be

running events around the world. You seem very very passionate about being able to run

The School of Life, why is this? Ah because it's an amazing idea and it's just wonderful

to see people come together in the community that's based around good thinking and good

ideas, it's also an incredibly inspiring place to work because you get to meet so many interesting

people from all walks of life. So which are your most popular classes? Ah this is an easy

one actually, we have three, well four, we have a lot of popular classes actually, but

there are four in particular, one is how to find a job you love, I think for obvious reasons,

how to realise your potential, again this idea of re-appraising ones values and trying

to work out what's really important, people thinking more about their relationships, their

creative lives, the things that they're really passionate about and maybe they're not getting

that from their career, and trying to find a way to reconcile that through past-times,

volunteer work, side projects, starting businesses, and kind of taking the leap from salaried

work into a completely new venture that's self supporting.

What types of people attend the classes? Ah, you never know who you're gonna get! And that

is the beauty of The School of Life, I think if you kind of like had to pick a primary

group, I'd say people probably from their mid 20's to their mid-forties who are obviously

kind of dealing with the big issues in life. So, sorting out their career, working through

their first serious relationships or marriages, starting families, like some of the really

big pressing issues in life. How do you think the old wisdom that you have here in the school

matches up with the modern entrepreneurial mindset. We're actually really good in the

sense that we draw in the old and the new, so it's very much everything from ancient

philosophy through to the latest neuro scientific research, as far as we're concerned, it doesn't

really matter if the idea is 2000 years old or like two weeks old, both have merit and

the beauty is in finding the underlying principles and the universal truths that underpin every

age and every epic in history. I want you to give me at least three entrepreneurs or

business people who are role models or influencers for you?

That's difficult, okay, so, why don't we choose, we'll go large scale, small scale and sort

of creative, so I think on a large scale it would be Jamie Oliver, and that's purely because

he has created a business that is devoted in large part obviously to his own benefit,

but to the good, for social good, but it's come from a place of passion, like he loves

food and he wants other people to love food and to consider their health. Another person

that I really admire is one of our faculty members, Richard Reynolds, who in a former

life was a marketing executive, and worked in the ad industry, and now is known as the

father of the guerrilla gardening movement and this all sort of came about because he

lived in Elephant and Castle, he had no garden, and it was quite depressing, this urban jungle,

no greenery, and so he started to transform derelict spaces around his neighbourhood,

seed-bombing, planting beautiful wildflowers at the roundabout, and this became a movement.

One more! Okay, so one more, well actually, this one is very close to the mission of The

School of Life, and that would be Dave Eggars, and his 826 National movement. Dave Eggars

is a writer whose based in San Francisco and he founded a series of quite extraordinary

workshop spaces which are fronted by unusual shops in the States, so there's the superhero

supply store where you walk in in Brooklyn, you can try on a cape, you can buy like, invisibility

powder an all this sort of thing and the idea is that kids can go into this shop that is

essentially completely surreal and sort of fantasy space, and there's a little secret

door, that just they go through and in the back of this space is a workshop area where

they are taught writing skills and they are free workshops run by volunteers in the community

and the whole business is geared toward getting kids to write. What key areas do you think

that entrepreneurs should focus on to have a more balanced and healthier and happier

life. I think first it's the idea that work is not the kind of be all end all, especially

when you're working on your own venture and running your own business, it's very easy

to sort of get tunnel vision and nothing else matters, but as important as it is to devote

yourself completely to your mission and to your work, it's equally important to take

time away and to make the time off work a very productive and fruitful time for thinking.

I know I'm so guilty of this, it's really difficult to turn off and put the blackberry

down at the end of the day and to go home and do something different but it's so important

to give your mind a rest. Entrepreneurs are obviously focussed on the bottom line or making

profit, how important is it to you that entrepreneurs also focus on their personal development.

It's incredibly important to develop your financial resources but developing your emotional

resources is equally as important because as the leader of a business and as somebody

whose an owner of a business, you're also responsible for other people and for managing

a number of different relationships whether those are within your organisation or with

external parties, and particularly in environments where it is very stressful and there's a fast

pace of change, so much happening, it's about developing that internal ability to kind of

manage and check your own emotions but to respond appropriately to the emotions and

concerns of the people around you. It's been fantastic meeting you Morgwn, thank you very

much and look forward to seeing you again. It's been a pleasure.