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Paul Millerd
energized and motivated on this path. Instead of playing to not lose, I’m playing to win.
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?
Introspection means talking to yourself, and one of the best ways of talking to yourself is by talking to another person. One other person you can trust, one other person to whom you can unfold your soul. One other person you feel safe enough with to allow you to acknowledge things—to acknowledge things to yourself—that you otherwise can’t. Doubts you aren’t supposed to have, questions you aren’t supposed to ask. Feelings or opinions that would
get you laughed at by the group or reprimanded by the authorities.
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, working backward to build a life around being able to keep doing it.
If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what
is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.
Professor and author Brene Brown’s clarification of shame and
guilt helped me understand what’s really going on when we struggle to pay attention to our intuitions and desires.
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 ...
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She defines guilt as “holding something we’ve done or failed to do up against our values and feeling psychological discomfort.”
Author Sebastian Junger, in his book about soldiers who had returned from war, found a similar thing. Despite dealing with post‑traumatic stress disorder, many of the soldiers wanted to return to dangerous warzones. Why? Because at war, they felt part of something, deeply connected to the
men and women they were serving with. Junger reflected, “humans don’t mind hardship, in fact, they thrive on it; what they mind is not feeling necessary.”
The initial delight is in the surprise
of remembering something I didn’t know I knew. – Robert Frost
My friend Jonny Miller argues that “human existence is an infinitely unfolding process of remembering, forgetting, and remembering again.”
At first, however, most people run into a different challenge: not having
an audience at all. This can be a good thing because it enables you to experiment while building up your confidence slowly.
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.
As I’ve continued to create, share and connect people, I’ve tapped into a hidden form of motivation, one that is invisible to others. 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.
Creativity by nature is an act of boldness and rebellion. – Robert Greene
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.”
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. – Anna Quindlen
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.
This is what 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.”152 By working backward, I realized that the biggest risks for me are spending my time doing things that undermine my ability to stay optimistic and energized, and obviously, running out of money.
In the paycheck world, there used to be a saying: dress for the job you want, not the job you have. The analogous idea in the free agent world is: learn to exercise the freedoms you might acquire, not just the freedoms you have. – Venkatesh Rao
Fromm’s positive version of freedom was much more than the freedom to act. He described it as “the full realization of the individual’s potential, together with his ability to live actively and spontaneously.”
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.
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.”
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.
The sooner this happens the better because the era of living your entire life in a small, local, and familiar community is over.
Whereas money today embodies the principle, “More for me is less for you,” in a gift economy, more for you is also more for me because
those who have, give to those who need it. Gifts cement the mystical realization of participation in something greater than oneself which, yet, is not separate from oneself. The axioms of rational self-interest change because the self has expanded to include something of the other.
Professor Tim Wu made this point in a widely read essay titled “The Tyranny of Convenience,” where he argues that convenience, “with its promise of smooth, effortless efficiency…threatens to erase the sort
struggles and challenges that help give meaning to life.”166
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.
There are too many interesting things worth doing and too many places to visit. To prioritize, developing a set of principles to help you make decisions is essential.
