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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Paul Millerd
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September 17 - September 22, 2024
work worth doing. I didn’t want to escape work; I just craved work I cared about.
But when you stop doing it, good work seduces you back. It is something you must do. Once you discover your good work, take it seriously and protect it, as it can be one of the most powerful ways to show up in the world, contribute, and feel useful.
I’ve had to mourn the loss of parts of myself that once served me, while also reconnecting with other parts of myself that I had suppressed.
Golf?
“Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you. Before you tell your life what truths and values you have decided to live up to, let your life tell you what truths you embody, what values you represent.”1 PARKER PALMER
"I don't know where I'm going, but I know exactly how to get there."2 BOYD VARTY
“Finding good work and doing good work is one of the ultimate ways of making a break for freedom.”3 DAVID WHYTE
Nine months into self-employment, I had landed four different projects and proved to myself that I could “make it” working on my own. But I had a problem: those projects were the same kind I had done in my consulting career, and as my financial anxiety diminished, I discovered that I didn’t actually want to build a life around this kind of work.
Same
I realized how much my previous, highly planned approach undermined opportunities for serendipity and adventure.
Work gets in the way of passion. Can both coexist?
I was leaving behind my home and my identity as an achiever, a safe refuge which had gotten me to this point but was no longer serving me.
Angie and I joked that in just a few months, we had already spent more time together than career-focused couples do in a whole year. This felt important: she took quality time seriously and was willing to sacrifice things like money in return for connection, adventure, and love.
Same
And even though it would have been a clear “no” if I had gone through Derek Sivers’ decision prompt of “hell yeah or no” (which I later adopted), I didn’t have the guts to turn the gig down.
Bold prompt
Although my podcast and writing were starting to feel much more important, they still had to coexist with the consulting project. So I came up with a mantra for future decisions: “Coming alive over getting ahead.” It was a reminder to choose work that lit me up, rather than work that merely serves to earn more money.
Brave
This is a common phase for those who embark on new paths, and it can be difficult to balance the confusing feelings of excitement about an uncertain journey with the fear-driven impulse to make money right now!
This is why freelancing is often a useful, but temporary, first stop for people on unconventional paths. It involves work you are good at and perhaps even enjoy somewhat, but if you try to turn this work into a business or your new identity, you end up creating a job for yourself that includes everything you wanted to escape in the first place.
True
I was starting to see that my real journey had never been about escaping work; instead, it was about searching for a deeper kind of work that I could commit to.
As Cécile said, “I used to be scared to lose my job. I was worried I would not find anything else. I am not worried anymore. This experience has helped me shift from a scarcity mindset to an abundance mindset.”
Once you've hit the bottom nothing can touch you
“This journey isn't about never working again; it's about working in a way that honors who we have become. So, while Michelle and I may still engage in work, we will not be stepping into the same river because we have changed, and so has the world around us.”
So the only reasonable answer I can give to the question of “How can I do what you are doing?” is this: fully commit to the journey, challenges and all. Once you do, don’t give up. Keep going. Take the search for good work seriously.
“It doesn’t matter. I didn’t write a book for the money. I wrote it because it was hard and it was a way to do something that mattered to me. You always claim you want to find something to commit to, but you always give up. A book is a long journey. Maybe writing a book will help you finally understand how to commit to something.”
Hustle bros love the phrase, “chips on shoulders put chips in pockets,” as if feeling deficient is the best motivation to succeed in the world. Perhaps this approach can work for a time, as it did for me, and maybe it’s even a necessary phase in life. But for most people, this way of orienting your life eventually demands a reckoning.
I do miss telling people about my impressive achievements and watching their eyes light up with instant respect. It was so simple and the lack of that kind of reaction is still clearly noticeable on my current path. Now, instead of igniting admiration, I often trigger people’s deepest fears.
Eventually, I admitted to myself that I did desire appreciation and that it was okay to want this.
We internalize the message of what Byung-Chul Han has called the “achievement society” where the primary goal of a life is to constantly improve, nudged to become “entrepreneurs of [our]selves.”1 But constantly trying to be “better” can push us toward goals that are not ours, robbing us of our connection to ourselves.
“I’ll just give up two years of my life, then I’ll do what I really want” people tell themselves. This is incredibly risky because if you stay too long, you get lulled into accepting that the low-grade dissatisfaction associated with doing a job is not worth questioning; it's just proof that you’re human.
For a long time, the word "ambition" has been connected with the pursuit of external success, starting from its derivation from the Latin ambitio, which described the act of Roman politicians soliciting votes, or seeking external approval.
“Good work and good education are achieved by visitation and then absence, appearance and disappearance. Most people who exhibit a mastery in a work or a subject have often left it completely for a long period in their lives only to return for another look. Constant busyness has no absence in it, no openness to the arrival of any new season, no birdsong at the start of its day. Constant learning is counterproductive and makes both ourselves and the subject stale and uninteresting.”2 DAVID WHYTE
Good work: activities that give me energy and fuel my journey “Good enough” work: tasks I enjoy to some degree, which often help pay the bills, but are not my core good work Supporting activities: complementary work that supports my good work, but is sometimes a distraction “Bad” work: work I seek to avoid. Anything that drains my energy, but sometimes necessary to pay the bills.
“People view me as a writer and I am a writer, I'm a productive writer, but I don't start writing until the afternoon. The whole morning is devoted to listening to music and reading and mostly reading books.” What jumped out to me was a comment that signaled how seriously he took this good work: "I did not do this as a career strategy. I didn't do this to make money or anything."
After that, I implemented several “gating” criteria to determine if the work I am considering is right for me. One of my favorite filters is “How much would I pay to work on this?” It flips the frame from working for money to paying for the right to work. When I ask this question, very little work other than writing passes the test.
My friend, author Noah Huisman, has a unique take on this disconnect, pointing out that this busyness could actually be considered “sloth” because “sloth isn’t the opposite of industry; it is the opposite of enthusiasm… it is an indifference toward the True, Good, and Beautiful.”
Self 1, the “Teller,” and Self 2, the “Doer." The relationship between the Teller and Doer determines a player's level of improvement.1 The Teller is the inner voice that says, “You can’t do that,” or “That was not good enough,” or "You should be doing this instead.” This voice compares us to others and holds us up to ever higher standards. The Doer, on the other hand, is our natural intuitive self. But it can only take the lead when we quiet the Teller.
Eventually I developed a strategy for “talking back” to the Teller's concerns. When my inner voice tried to sabotage me, I would say: Of course living in the present with things as they are feels like failure. I have no idea what my future looks like and I’m going against what everyone in the world thinks is safe, smart, and reasonable!
If you look for problems, you will find them. Philosopher Andrew Taggart calls this tendency “the problematization of the world.”4 As he argues, “The world writ large is not a problem to be solved.” Despite this, we diagnose endless problems in our lives and the world at large and are presented with books, ideas, playbooks, influencers, and products that are happy to offer solutions. We become convinced that once we solve all of our problems, all will be okay.
You just need to sit down and write. If you struggle, just notice what is coming up. Don’t tell yourself you should be better at this. Ask yourself questions instead. Get curious about it. Try again the next day. Don’t take it so seriously.
“You can measure your worth by your dedication to your path, not by your successes or failures.”1 ELIZABETH GILBERT
They said, “why not consider the savings a gift from your former self?” Hmm. That was interesting. I could be grateful to “achiever Paul” for making this money and giving me the chance to reinvent myself. I loved the idea and I’m not sure why it worked, but in that moment, I gave myself permission to enjoy my life much more. While employed, my savings was for retirement, something I wasn’t supposed to enjoy until I was 65 years old. But now I asked myself, “Why wait?!”
This is one of the challenges of being self-employed: you can literally work on anything you want at any time.
For me, it has been disorienting to spend most of my time writing without any promise of monetary rewards after a decade of getting paid for every single hour I worked.
Don’t “should” yourself. Become skeptical of your inner “Teller” and develop a stronger relationship with your inner “Doer.” This will strengthen your intuition about following the work that feels right. Trusting your intuition is all about seeing your work as it is. If you enjoy something, pay attention, that’s important. But similarly, if you are grinding your way through something, that’s important to recognize too. Don’t “should” yourself into doing work that drains you.
“Vocation does not come from willfulness. It comes from listening. I must listen to my life and try to understand what it is truly about — quite apart from what I would like it to be about — or my life will never represent anything real in the world, no matter how earnest my intentions"1 PARKER PALMER
“A third way of attaining union lies in creative activity, be it that of the artist, or of the artisan. In any kind of creative work, the creating person unites himself with his material, which represents the world outside of himself. Whether a carpenter makes a table, or a goldsmith a piece of jewelry, whether the peasant grows his corn or the painter paints a picture, in all types of creative work the worker and his object become one, man unites himself with the world in the process of creation. This, however, holds true only for productive work, for work in which I plan, produce, see the
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“The important thing is how much you can come to understand, which of your abilities you can develop, how far you can grow. The priorities of our culture, however, are completely different.
Given cultural expectations, it is all too easy to equate personal and professional worth. Once the two are disentangled, work becomes less symbolic and therefore less problematic.”5 VIRGINIA VALIAN
“In an age of speed, I began to think, nothing could be more invigorating than going slow. In an age of distraction, nothing can feel more luxurious than paying attention. And in an age of constant movement, nothing is more urgent than sitting still.”9 PICO IYER
“There is almost no life a human being can construct for themselves where they are not wrestling with something difficult, something that takes a modicum of work. The only possibility seems to be the ability of human beings to choose good work. At its simplest, good work, is work that makes sense, and that grants sense and meaning to the one who is doing it and to those affected by it.”11 DAVID WHYTE
“For there is a perennial nobleness, and even sacredness, in Work. Were he never so benighted, forgetful of his high calling, there is always hope in a man that actually and earnestly works: in Idleness alone is there perpetual despair.”14 THOMAS CARLYLE
“Our society frowns on people who set out to do really good work. You're not supposed to; luck is supposed to descend on you and you do great things by chance. Well, that's a kind of dumb thing to say.”15 RICHARD HAMMING
“It’s far better when doing good work is sufficient. In other words, the less attached we are to outcomes the better. When fulfilling our own standards is what fills us with pride and self-respect. When the effort—not the results, good or bad—is enough.”16 RYAN HOLIDAY
Inputs over outputs
“That is partly why ambition has become something of a dirty word. We assume that being ambitious means following a pre-written script and climbing a never-ending ladder, sometimes at the expense of other people… But ambition isn’t broken. It is still what it has always been: the innate human desire for growth, a desire that is both universal and highly personal.”18 ANNE-LAURE LE CUNFF
And while, as I said, it is of tremendous use for us to be able to look ahead in this way and to plan. There is no use in planning for a future, which when you get to it and it becomes the present you won’t be there. You’ll be living in some other future which hasn’t yet arrived. And so in this way, one is never able actually to inherit and enjoy the fruits of one’s actions. You can’t live it all unless you can live fully now. ALAN WATTS
