The Pathless Path: Imagining a New Story For Work and Life (The Pathless Path Collection Book 1)

by Paul Millerd

The pathless path is an alternative to the default path. It is an embrace of uncertainty and discomfort. It’s a call to adventure in a world that tells us to conform. For me, it’s also a gentle reminder to laugh when things feel out of control and trusting that an uncertain future is not a problem to be solved.

The ease of having an ambition is that it can be explained to others; the very disease of ambition is that it can be so easily explained to others. – David Whyte

The term “hoop‑jumper” was coined by writer and former professor William Deresiewicz to describe the behavior of his students at Yale, who seemed more concerned about getting A’s and adding bullet points to their resumes than using their time at one of the world’s best universities to follow their curiosity.

This is the trap of prestigious career paths. Instead of thinking about what you want to do with your life, you default to the options most admired by your peers.

In describing the power of the inner ring, C.S. Lewis warns that, ”unless you take measures to prevent it, this desire is going to be one of the chief motives of your life, from the first day on which you enter your profession until the day when you are too old to care.” He believed “any other kind of life, if you lead it, will be the result of conscious and continuous effort.”

In Weber’s view, a “traditionalist” view of work is one where people work as much as they need to maintain their current lifestyle, and once that aim is achieved, they stop working.

The ultimate way you and I get lucky is if you have some success early in life, you get to find out early it doesn’t mean anything. – David Foster Wallace

Some people inherit values and practices as a house they inhabit; some of us have to burn down that house, find our own ground, build from scratch, even as a psychological metamorphosis. – Rebecca Solnit

This kind of approach, focused not on being brave, but instead on eliminating risk, is common for people who take unconventional paths.

Callard defines aspiration as the slow process of “trying on the values that we hope one day to possess.”69 This is in contrast to an ambitious journey where we already know what we value.

nothing good gets away, as long as you create the space to let it emerge.

The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours. — Amos Tversky

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. – C.S. Lewis

On the pathless path, the goal is not to find a job, make money, build a business, or achieve any other metric. It’s to actively and consciously search for the work that you want to keep doing.

This is one of the most important secrets of the pathless path.

With this approach, it doesn’t make sense to chase any financial opportunity if you can’t be sure that you will like the work. What does make sense is experimenting with different kinds of work, and once you find something worth doing, work...

Real heroes are ordinary people who had to face extraordinary problems but never gave up and survived.

Being able to get to a state of being where I can spend almost all my time helping, supporting, and inspiring others to do great things with their lives.

“Dying,” Morrie suddenly said, “is only one thing to be sad over,

Living unhappily is something else.

This is what the pathless path is all about. It’s having the courage to walk away from an identity that seems to make sense in the context of the default path in order to aspire towards things you don’t understand.

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.