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.

I want to see people live the lives they are capable of, not just the ones they think they are allowed to live.

That you didn’t simply work to live, but that it should be one of the most important things in your life.

“If work dominated your every moment, would life be worth living?” the philosopher Andrew Taggart offered a powerful question

The exercise has six steps. The first four are straightforward: Write down the change you are making. List the worst possible outcomes. Identify actions you could take to mitigate those outcomes. List some steps or actions you might take to get back to where you are today.

“We must let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for us.”80

The fact that the next steps are unknown to us is exactly the point.

“second chapter of success” in which you shift your mindset from what you lack to what you have to offer, from ambition to aspiration, and from hoping that joy will result from a specific outcome to experiencing it as a byproduct of your journey.

Embracing a new identity can be a useful way to enter the uncertain world of the pathless path.

The flip side of this is that if we can learn to coexist with our financial insecurities, we can turn them into a secondary concern. This opens you up to the real secret: the opportunities of the pathless path are infinite too.

One of the best ways to discover your conversation is to start asking questions driven by your curiosity. For me, some of my favorite questions include: What matters? Why do we work? What is the “good life”? What holds people back from change? How do we find work that brings us alive?

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 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.