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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Paul Millerd
Read between
June 25 - June 25, 2024
While the pathless path is a solo journey, it is important that you have at least one close friend with whom you can have these kinds of intimate conversations. They will help you remain aware of your own emerging conversation with the world.
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.
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, working backward to build a life around being able to keep doing it.
they all faced challenges, rejection, and criticism. Yet at every key point in their lives, they either kept looking for what brought them alive or protected their time so that they could work on what mattered. In the words of Thoreau, the game they played and that we should play is to “be resolutely and faithfully what you are.”
The assumption is that making money or finding a way to turn a passion into a job is one of the most important things. 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. More important is the realization that finding something worth doing indefinitely is more powerful and exciting than any type of security, comfort, stability, or respect a job might offer. Fighting for the opportunity to do this work is what matters,
One of the hardest questions people face when they think of their own story, however, is “what should I do?” A significant barrier to figuring out what we really want to do is the voice in our head that warns us to stop when we consider or start doing things that are not broadly seen as “normal.”
She defines shame as “the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging.” She believes that most people give too much power to this emotion when making life choices.”
She doesn’t think we can “solve” shame and suggest that people pay attention to a slightly different emotion, guilt. She defines guilt as “holding something we’ve done or failed to do up against our values and feeling psychological discomfort.”
Guilt drives many people to work, and this is a normal reaction to this uncomfortable emotion. Most people want to contribute, help, and engage with the world. However, sometimes this impulse gets hacked by our shame and we follow paths that aren’t ours because we feel like the world’s love depends on us doing a certain thing. We are afraid that if we step away or make a change, we might be cast out of our family or community. This is one of life’s most terrifying feelings and keeps many from making changes. Yet if we learn to recognize this reaction, we can quiet the voice of shame and use
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Junger reflected, “humans don’t mind hardship, in fact, they thrive on it; what they mind is not feeling necessary.”140 Junger argues that “modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary.”
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.
Jonny Miller argues that “human existence is an infinitely unfolding process of remembering, forgetting, and remembering again.”
To thrive on the pathless path, we must ignore the shiny objects and distractions and strip away the stories that are not our own to remember who we are. One of the biggest concerns people have when they talk to me about quitting their job is how to make money. That is certainly important, but a more interesting path is possible if you start with what brought you alive in the past. Injecting the energy from these pursuits can lead you in a different direction and can help you figure out what to work on while taking the first steps toward creating a life you truly enjoy.
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.
Modes of creative expression that used to require the approval of gatekeepers include publishing books or songs, selling your artwork, starting a radio show, and selling crafts to a mass market, among many others. If you still want permission, though, I’m granting it. Go for
Figuring out who you want to serve is an important element of the pathless path. On the default path, your job often provides recognition and praise. When you are on your own, without a specific job or colleagues, you may miss that kind of support. This is why it’s so important to know what kind of people you want to work with and who you want to serve. Finding the right people, those who might offer support and encouragement along the way can have an outsized effect on your confidence and courage to keep going.
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.
On the default path, promotions, job changes, and raises serve as visible markers of success. However, my proof of success is hidden, coming in the form of messages I receive in my email or conversations with people who are inspired by my work. Lacking a way to “prove” that you are successful can be hard. However, the people that reach out have become my friends, my supporters, and my inspiration, and the reward is far greater than any visible metric of success from my previous path.
And this is why I want to urge you to consider sharing with the world. You care. You want to do things in good faith. You want to help people, to listen, and connect with others who share your passions. This doesn’t mean you need to build an audience or a business, but what might emerge if you dare to share your writing, painting, dancing, crafts, or other acts of creativity with others? What friends might you meet? What opportunities could you pursue? What communities could you join?
these conventional, full‑time paths are no longer industrially necessary, but simply industrially preferable. If we continue to anchor our imagination to default path stories about work, we will continue to ignore the possible paths for our lives.
Even if you do decide that sharing your real work with the world is worthwhile, it’s nearly impossible to overcome the sense that you may embarrass yourself. Here it’s helpful to remember the “spirit of the fool” and also consider that many people around the world might be waiting for what you have to share.
Real heroes are ordinary people who had to face extraordinary problems but never gave up and survived.
As increasing numbers of people all around the world are tapping into the opportunities created by the internet, they are also looking for people like them. There has never been a better and easier time to find and connect with people in a positive way.
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.
She argued, “critical thinking without hope is cynicism. But hope without critical thinking is naïveté.”
William Zinsser. He urged me to “believe in your own identity and your own opinions. Writing is an act of ego, and you might as well admit it. Use its energy to keep yourself going.”
on the pathless path. You can experiment with your work and your life until you stumble into a virtuous cycle that helps you continue to move in a positive direction. By a virtuous cycle, I mean being able to do work that you enjoy that naturally leads to opportunities and people that help make your life better.
The biggest challenge to creating your virtuous cycle and one of the most dangerous failure modes of the pathless path is cynicism. Many people who leave the default path do so because they’ve become cynical and are driven by a desire to escape. But escaping is only the first step of leaving a certain path behind. In order to create a sustainable journey and path, it requires finding ways of orienting to the world that leave space for hope.
Instead of embarking on an endless search, I’ve taken a different approach: working backward. 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. By looking at what might go wrong with our lives, we can avoid obvious traps, creating more space for things to go right.
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.
Antifragility is a well‑documented natural phenomenon in which things gain strength through disorder. For example, cities are antifragile. While individual businesses in a city may fail in an individual year, the city thrives over the long‑term, fueled by new residents, buildings, and businesses.
author James Carse calls the “infinite game”: “A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.”
People come to realize that the challenge is not to find work to pay the bills but instead to have time to keep taking chances and exploring opportunities to find the things worth committing to over the long-term.
“because we have freed ourselves of the older overt forms of authority, we do not see that we have become the prey of a new kind of authority.”155 Abdicating our responsibility to live our own lives can have dire consequences.
The problem with conformity, Fromm argued, is that it leads to an existence that is too rigid, routine, and predictable. This undermines the space for spontaneity and active engagement that might help one discover what matters at a deeper level.
“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.”
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 advantage of the freedom that the pathless path offers. We are ultimately the ones that determine our fate, and without expressing agency, we struggle to be free.
the freedom to explore the possibilities of our lives is a relatively recent phenomenon. For the amount of attention that the idea of freedom receives, there is still relatively little expression of it at the individual level. 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.
from Dolly Parton: “Find out who you are and do it on purpose.”
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. 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.
Thompson noted that “time is now currency, it is not passed but spent.”163 Today we think about how we “spend” time, if we are getting “our money’s worth,” if we are getting or giving value, and the “cost” of our actions. By equating time with money, we can make trade‑offs, calculations, and coordinate global meetings, but we also decrease any sense of abundance.
Wu argues that many see convenience as a form of liberation. People aim for “financial independence” only to realize when they achieve it that they’re only independent in the narrow sense of being able to pay for everything.
Godin claims that this work is about more than getting paid: “You cannot create a piece of art merely for money. Doing it as part of commerce so denudes art of wonder that it ceases to be art.”
In sum, the goal of being on this path is: 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.
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. It’s to experiment in new ways, to remix your own path, to develop your own personal definition of freedom, and to dare to have faith that it will be okay, no matter how much skepticism, insecurity, or fear you face.
While often misunderstood in the business world, the concept of culture is pretty straightforward. It consists of an evolving set of assumptions that people use to make decisions. And the result of those actions is what shapes the culture.
But the pathless path is not about being right. It’s about finding ideas and principles worth committing to and seeing where you end up. Without doing this, you are accepting the logic of the default path.
The pathless path is about opening yourself up to this emergence. It’s about growing up and letting go. It’s about realizing that if I claim to care about something, I need to be willing to act, and also be willing to be wrong. I must let go of my ego and my need to be seen as a “successful” person.
