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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Paul Millerd
Read between
February 19 - March 5, 2023
Another reason we struggle to see the potential for channeling creativity is that until very recently if you wanted to share your work with the world, you needed permission. You needed access to audiences or distribution channels via gatekeepers, whose sole job was to limit access.
Seth Godin puts it bluntly: “The world just gave you control over the means of production. Not to master them is a sin.”142
deeper fear that’s harder to grapple with is the shadow of the gatekeeper system itself, which paired access to an audience with a subtle hostility towards those without the right taste, credentials, or status.
The message is loud and clear. Podcasts are for serious professionals with the right credentials, and if you don’t have them, please don’t think of starting one. We should reject this stance.
While the article makes a valid point about the challenges of making money, it ignores that someone might create something for the sake of it or as a way to learn, connect and feel alive rather than trying to get ahead or get paid.
Thinking we have to serve a mass audience is default path thinking. An industrial, “bigger is better” mindset assumes that everyone is competing in a mass market.
Figuring out who you want to serve is an important element of the pathless path.
Tyler Cowen has argued that one of “the most valuable things you can do with your time and with your life” is to believe in people.
myself: any time I consume something from an individual that inspires me, I have to send them a note to let them know.
What’s your honest reaction to both people? If you’re like I was before I started working on my own, you’d probably be slightly judgmental of the Instagram influencer. Now, I’ve softened my stance. I’ve realized the yoga influencer puts their entire reputation at risk and succeeds or fails based on their decisions.
My public writing journey started on an app called Quora, where I answered users’ questions across a wide range of topics. For years I answered the occasional question, mostly on topics I knew a lot about. As I started to enjoy writing more, I created a challenge for myself, answering at least one question at the start of every workday.
So maybe I’ve convinced you that it’s worth sharing, but you don’t want to launch a social media brand, start writing online, or publish a book. That’s fine too. You can start small or do something in your local community.
It doesn’t matter how you start but that you start. Once people enter this new, creative mode, they realize that they’ve been holding back a part of themselves for most of their lives.
She argued, “critical thinking without hope is cynicism. But hope without critical thinking is naïveté.”
In the early 1900s, professor and writer Bertrand Russell noted that “any person who visits the Universities of the Western world is liable to be struck by the fact that the intelligent young of the present day are cynical to a far greater extent than was the case formerly.”149 He argued that developing a cynical stance was necessary in a world in which much of what authorities and leaders claim directly contrasts with what is true. The cure for such cynicism, he said, would “only come when intellectuals can find a career that embodies their creative impulses.”150
The biggest challenge to creating your virtuous cycle and one of the most dangerous failure modes of the pathless path is cynicism.
But escaping is only the first step of leaving a certain path behind.
My writing was cynical because I couldn’t express why I cared about those ideas. I was depending more on facts than the songs singing in my soul. When I was brave enough to open my heart, I got more support and that led not only to a better path but a more exciting future.
On the default path, the kinds of work you can do and the resulting kinds of lives that are possible are limited, helping to simplify this issue.
Embracing the pathless path enabled me to see the possibilities for my life.
Instead of thinking about what I want to do and how I want to live, I start instead with what I don’t want to be doing and what failure looks like.
We can also apply this principle to our lives. For example, instead of asking what makes up an amazing life, we first define the worst‑case scenario and then work backward.
could become “negative me” by doing the following: spending time with negative and cynical people, not finding supportive friends, not staying open to all kinds of paid work (including full‑time employment), obsessing over divisive media and politics, working on things I resent, and not being honest about my own motivations. Inverting helps you identify traps that could derail your efforts to keep your journey alive.
I encourage everyone to write a description of the person you don’t want to be, then brainstorm actions that might create that outcome.
Like a city with many industries, I want to be resilient to changes in income, shifts in the economy, and rule changes from various platforms that I use. For this reason, in addition to freelancing work, I’ve built things that allow me to generate income without selling my time and that target different audiences.
This is why I’ve spent so much time focusing on creating the conditions for success and lowering my risk of failure, rather than aiming at success itself.
Beyond money, the second most common concern people have about working less or building a life less centered around work is what they will do with their time.
The problem of what to do once you have freedom is something that fascinated writer Erich Fromm. In his book Escape from Freedom, he explores how millions across the world struggled to adapt to the newfound freedom they had in their lives in the 1930s. At this time, people were experiencing greater freedom as the control of religious authorities diminished, workweeks became shorter, and increased prosperity provided new options for living. Many believed that the end of World War
Well‑educated elites and business owners liberated from the rules of rigid institutions were thrilled, but many others were frustrated. Fromm noticed that many people felt “isolated, powerless, and an instrument of purposes outside of [themselves], alienated from [themselves] and others.”153 To political leaders like Hitler and Stalin, this was great news. They could increase their own power by manipulating the masses with stories that helped them make sense of their lives.
Why would so many people trade some of their newfound freedom to join these authoritarian movements? Fromm argued that the reason lied behind two different types of freedom. First was negative freedom or “freedom from” outside control. Second was positive freedom or the “freedom to” engage with the world in a way that is true to yourself.
Fromm argued that those freed from oppression but unable to develop a positive version of freedom were destined to be filled with feelings of separateness and anxiety.154 People are willing to compromise a lot to suppress these feelings.
Over the last 100 years, the number of ways you can engage with life has exploded beyond imagination. Now, not only political leaders offer narratives for interacting with the world, but also employers, companies, media outlets, and other institutions. Everyone gives you roadmaps for living life and becoming free. You just have to buy their products, embrace their story, or join their company, and instead of having to develop your own agency, the respective institution will make you part of their special group. In his post-World War II writing, Fromm demonstrated that, surprisingly, the urge
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David Foster Wallace once argued that this is the whole point of a liberal arts education in perhaps the best defense of this tradition: I submit that this is what the real, no‑bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out.156
I’ve already made a case for you to find a way to create, either publicly or privately. However, Fromm presents another deeper reason. In addition to doing something challenging, “finding the others,” or discovering a different kind of work you enjoy, you might also find a mode of being that opens you up to a deeper relationship with the world and yourself. In this way, the creative act is one of the most sacred things in the world and should be taken seriously in itself and not with any expected outcome.
The default path has given us the freedom to earn money and spend it as we please, work in different fields, and have some control over our lives, but keeps many trapped in a pseudo‑freedom where one is free from absolute oppression but
not free enough to act with a high degree of agency.
When we think about the future, we tend to underestimate how much things will change, especially for ourselves. Researchers call this the “end of history illusion.”
This is an alternative to how many people deal with change: by denying, delaying, or rejecting it. As we age we do become more mentally rigid and minor challenges to our routines can be landmines threatening to blow up our weeks, and suggestions that we live in new ways are treated as acts of war.
Moving abroad, running my own business, and living in more than 20 places in only a few years have made me much more resilient to change and more aware of my own default to become rigid in my thinking.
Professor and author Yuval Harari argued that “in order to keep up with the world of 2050, you will need not merely to invent new ideas and products, but above all to reinvent yourself again and again.”162
but it does raise a question: if coping with these challenges increased my confidence, is comfort overrated?
the era of living your entire life in a small, local, and familiar community is over.
Until the 1600s when clocks became ubiquitous, people rarely thought about time. English historian E.P. Thompson noted that instead, people thought in terms of activities.
Based on Eisenstein’s book, I embraced three guiding principles: Find ways to give without expectation of anything in return. Be willing to receive gifts in any form and on any timeline. Be open to being wrong about all of this and adjust my approach as necessary.
Seth Godin reminds us that the internet has “lowered the marginal cost of generosity” and I’m not sure most people realize the potential of this development. In the near future, people will have public digital wallets, and transmitting cash to someone we know or just met will be an ordinary event. This is why thinking about generosity as a skill and looking for opportunities to practice is important.
Eisenstein also realized the significance of relationships within the gift economy: One thing that gifts do is that they create ties among people — which is different from a financial transaction. If I buy something from you, I give you the money and you give me the thing, and we have no more relationship after that. I don’t owe you anything, you don’t owe me anything. The transaction is finished. But if you give me something, that’s different because now I kind of feel like I owe you one.
On the pathless path, once you open yourself up to possibilities and start experimenting with different ways of working and living, the biggest problem is the paradox of choice. There are too many interesting things worth doing and too many places to visit.
One of my most important is the mantra “coming alive over getting ahead.”
Now I’m on a path where that is one option of many, and as I’ve experienced the beauty and aliveness of opening myself up to different modes of life such as creating, non-doing, and connecting with others, I now understand clearly the value of doing things outside of work. This is one thing I think people get wrong about keeping options open.
On the pathless path, however, optionality can pay consistent dividends because you are not holding out for another job but leaving space for a little more life.
