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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Paul Millerd
Read between
June 14 - June 18, 2025
We are always falling in love or quarreling, looking for jobs or fearing to lose them, getting ill and recovering, following public affairs. If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. Favorable conditions never come.
It’s a shift from the mindset that work sucks towards the idea that you can design a life around liking work. I didn’t realize how profound this shift is until I sat down to write this book.
While money is important on the pathless path, using it as a filter for finding the work worth doing, especially at first, is a mistake.
I was slow to realize this, but I know it now. The work I get paid for may shift over time, and it may or may not involve the things that I want to keep doing. But what I want to keep doing, such as mentoring young people, writing, teaching, sharing ideas, connecting people, and having meaningful conversations, is worth fighting for.
Usefulness, whatever form it may take, is the price we should pay for the air we breathe and the food we eat and the privilege of being alive. And it is its own reward, as well, for it is the beginning of happiness, just as self-pity and withdrawal from the battle are the beginning of misery.
According to Robert Kegan, a psychologist at Harvard, we are shifting away from a world where we need to fit in towards one where we must develop the skill of “self‑authoring.”8 Instead of looking to external cues to learn how to live, we need to have a coherent internal narrative about why we are living a certain way. This is the ethos of the pathless path and if you don’t know or understand your own story, you will struggle.
In my travels around the world, meeting a diverse range of people that have left the default path, nothing has been more consistent than the reality that most people want to engage with the world and to be useful. Despite many people thinking that their ideal life would be living out the rest of their life on a beach, when given the option of following that path, few people take it.
The need to feel useful is a powerful one. This is the hidden upside of the pathless path and a reason why finding work that aligns with what matters to you and makes you feel useful is so important. When you find the conversations you want to take part in and the work you want to keep doing, you start to feel necessary and the whole world opens up.
We tend to think of creativity as a predetermined ability, like someone who might have a genetic advantage to run faster. Instead, I think creativity is more of an active choice and the removal of gatekeepers means that for the first time it might take more energy to deny your own creative expression than exploring it.
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. In the digital world, it’s easy to envision that this mass market is the only competition for the same audiences and attention. However, even if my podcast might sit right next to NPR’s This American Life in the podcast app, what I am doing is completely different. I am a solo interviewer, editor, graphic designer, and distributor and spend less than $100 per year. NPR has more than 25 people working on that show alone. We have
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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.15 Being a recipient of this encouragement has inspired me to create a rule for myself: any time I consume something from an individual that inspires me, I have to send them a note to let them know. Creating and sharing in public takes an incredible amount of courage and I remember how awkward and scared I was at the beginning of my journey. It’s easy to tell people what they got wrong but much harder to say “I love what you are doing. I hope you keep going and
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Consider two different people: a mid‑level financial analyst at Wells Fargo and someone building a yoga business through Instagram. 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. As this kind of work becomes more prevalent, our norms will shift and we will question why we are more skeptical of an entrepreneur than the employee
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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. Deep inside, we all have a desire to engage with the world in creative ways and don’t worry, I’m here to cheer you on.
When I quit the New York Times to be a full-time mother, the voices of the world said that I was nuts. When I quit it again to be a full-time novelist, they said I was nuts again. But I am not nuts. I am happy. I am successful on my own terms. Because if your success is not on your own terms, if it looks good to the world but does not feel good in your heart, it is not success at all.
I never realized how much I was constraining my imagination when I was only considering paths or jobs that already existed.
I encourage everyone to write a description of the person you don’t want to be, then brainstorm actions that might create that outcome. This exercise may be uncomfortable because undoubtedly you will see traces of the person you imagine in your present life. These traces are clues about what to change in your life right now.
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.
Ultimately, figuring out what to do with freedom once we have it is one of the biggest challenges of the pathless path. Writer Simon Sarris argues that we can only do this by increasing our capacity for agency, or our ability to take deliberate action in the world. He argues, “the secret of the world is that it is a very malleable place, we must be sure that people learn this, and never forget the order: Learning is naturally the consequence of doing.”8 In other words, only by taking action do we learn and only by learning do we discover what we want. Without this, we will struggle to take
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The pathless path is the deliberate pursuit of a positive version of freedom. Revisiting Fromm’s definition, “the full realization of the individual’s potential, together with his ability to live actively and spontaneously,” we see that developing our own sense of agency is vital.9 Thus, figuring out what to do with your time is a real concern.
For this, I’ve found no better advice than the following from Dolly Parton: “Find out who you are and do it on purpose.”
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.” Across all age groups, people indicate that they have experienced profound change in the past but when they forecast their future, they don’t see the trend continuing. People believe that “the pace of personal change has slowed to a crawl and that they have recently become the people they will remain.”
What can we do with this knowledge? For me, it’s made me more enthusiastic about embracing the pathless path because if I’m going to change more than I can expect, I might as well attempt to shape those changes. This is an alternative to how many people deal with change: by denying, delaying, or rejecting it.
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.”
if coping with these challenges increased my confidence, is comfort overrated?
One of my most important is the mantra “coming alive over getting ahead.” I embraced this fundamental shift when I left my previous path, and the mantra reminds me that I don’t want to create another job for myself.
This is one thing I think people get wrong about keeping options open. On the default path, optionality can be a trap. This is because you are trapped within your own career narrative. 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.
Many people are capable of more than they believe. Creativity is a real path to optimism, meaning, and connection. We don’t need permission to engage with the world and people around us. We are all creative, and it takes some people longer to figure that out. Leisure, or active contemplation, is one of the most important things in life, There are many ways to make money, and when an obvious path emerges, there is often a more interesting path not showing itself. Finding the work that matters to us is the real work of our lives.
We are living in a time when it’s possible for more and more people to design a life in which they can thrive. Yet many look at that possibility and say, “no thanks,” because it means discomfort, uncertainty, and a higher risk of failure.
And it might be the only sensible option left.
The only thing left to do? Go and see what might happen if you dare to seek out, as the Poet Mary Oliver has called your “one wild and precious life.”
