The Pathless Path Quotes

“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.”
― Paul Millerd, The Pathless Path: Imagining a New Story For Work and Life

“The philosopher Andrew Taggart believes that crisis moments lead to “existential openings” that force us to grapple with the deepest questions about life.16 He argues there are two typical ways this happens. One is the “way of loss,” when things that matter are taken from us, such as loved ones, our health, or a job. The other path is the “way of wonderment,” when we are faced with moments of undeniable awe and inspiration.”
― Paul Millerd, The Pathless Path: Imagining a New Story For Work and Life

“The word burnout was coined in the 1970s by Herbert Freudenberger, an American psychologist who studied workers in free health clinics. He found that the prime candidates for burnout were those who were “dedicated and committed,” trying to balance their need to give, to please others, and to work hard. He noticed that when there was added pressure from superiors, people often hit a breaking point.52”
― Paul Millerd, The Pathless Path: Imagining a New Story For Work and Life

“Your life is too short and too valuable to fritter away in work. If you don’t get out now, you may end up like the frog that is placed in a pot of fresh water on the stove. As the temperature is gradually increased, the frog feels restless and uncomfortable, but not uncomfortable enough to jump out. Without being aware that a chance is taking place, he is gradually lulled into unconsciousness. Much the same thing happens when you take a person and put him in a job which he does not like. He gets irritable in his groove. His duties soon become a monotonous routine that slowly dulls his senses. As I walk into offices, through factories and stores, I often find myself looking into the expressionless faces of people going through mechanical motions. They are people whose minds are stunned and slowly dying.”
― Paul Millerd, The Pathless Path: Imagining a New Story For Work and Life

“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. 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.”
― Paul Millerd, The Pathless Path: Imagining a New Story For Work and Life

“woke up each morning and did what I felt like doing.”
― Paul Millerd, The Pathless Path: Imagining a New Story For Work and Life

“Writing is an act of ego, and you might as well admit it. Use its energy to keep yourself going.”
― Paul Millerd, The Pathless Path: Imagining a New Story For Work and Life

“Remember: nothing good gets away, as long as you create the space to let it emerge.”
― Paul Millerd, The Pathless Path: Imagining a New Story For Work and Life

“getting lost was simply the understanding that “the world has become larger than your knowledge of it.”
― Paul Millerd, The Pathless Path: Imagining a New Story For Work and Life

“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.”
― Paul Millerd, The Pathless Path: Imagining a New Story For Work and Life

“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 of struggles and challenges that help give meaning to life.”
― Paul Millerd, The Pathless Path: Imagining a New Story For Work and Life

“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.”
― Paul Millerd, The Pathless Path: Imagining a New Story For Work and Life

“from Dolly Parton: “Find out who you are and do it on purpose.”⁠10”
― Paul Millerd, The Pathless Path: Imagining a New Story For Work and Life

“We are convinced that the only way forward is the path we’ve been on or what we’ve seen people like us do. This is a silent conspiracy that constrains the possibilities of our lives.”
― Paul Millerd, The Pathless Path: Imagining a New Story For Work and Life

“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.”
― Paul Millerd, The Pathless Path: Imagining a New Story For Work and Life

“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.”
― Paul Millerd, The Pathless Path: Imagining a New Story For Work and Life

“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”
― Paul Millerd, The Pathless Path: Imagining a New Story For Work and Life

“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.”
― Paul Millerd, The Pathless Path: Imagining a New Story For Work and Life

“There’s so much more to who you are than you know right now. You are, indeed, something mysterious and someone magnificent. You hold within you – secreted for safekeeping in your heart – a great gift for this world. Although you might sometimes feel like a cog in a huge machine, that you don’t really matter in the great scheme of things, the truth is that you are fully eligible for a meaningful life, a mystical life, a life of the greatest fulfillment and service.”
― Paul Millerd, The Pathless Path: Imagining a New Story For Work and Life

“As Thoreau once wrote at Walden Pond, “Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.”⁠24”
― Paul Millerd, The Pathless Path: Imagining a New Story For Work and Life

“This is what Harvard professor Dr. Ben‑Shahar calls the arrival fallacy, the idea that when we reach a certain milestone we will reach a state of lasting happiness.⁠5”
― Paul Millerd, The Pathless Path: Imagining a New Story For Work and Life

“Having faith is admitting that you don’t have all the answers for what comes next. Another phrase I’ve found useful to describe this state of mind is what the spiritual teacher Tara Brach calls “radical acceptance,” which she says “is the willingness to experience ourselves and our lives as it is.”
― Paul Millerd, The Pathless Path: Imagining a New Story For Work and Life

“once you are on the pathless path, defining your own constraints and fixed points is not a choice, it’s essential to thriving on your journey.”
― Paul Millerd, The Pathless Path: Imagining a New Story For Work and Life

“On the pathless path, retirement is neither a destination nor a financial calculation, but a continuation of a life well-lived.”
― Paul Millerd, The Pathless Path: Imagining a New Story For Work and Life

“That thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you is usually what you need to find, and finding it is a matter of getting lost.”
― Paul Millerd, The Pathless Path: Imagining a New Story For Work and Life

“While ambition does not preclude aspiration, Callard argues that ambition “consumes much of an agent’s efforts and does not expand his value horizons.”⁠8”
― Paul Millerd, The Pathless Path: Imagining a New Story For Work and Life

“I have a suspicion that a whole bunch of energy will get unlocked. I’ll just start doing things, and creating things and talking to people, and going to places…that I cannot fundamentally imagine right now, and it will be that stuff that shapes my life going forward…I am curious what else will show up.”⁠3 He was able to take the leap because he had tapped into the power of wonder, enabling him to be excited about an uncertain future.”
― Paul Millerd, The Pathless Path: Imagining a New Story For Work and Life

“The word burnout was coined in the 1970s by Herbert Freudenberger, an American psychologist who studied workers in free health clinics. He found that the prime candidates for burnout were those who were “dedicated and committed,” trying to balance their need to give, to please others, and to work hard. He noticed that when there was added pressure from superiors, people often hit a breaking point.”
― Paul Millerd, The Pathless Path: Imagining a New Story For Work and Life

“It definitely wasn’t a sudden realization. It’s a little bit like having a pebble in your shoe, where you’re walking and something is off, and it’s mildly uncomfortable.”⁠1 When he got raises or promotions the discomfort would subside but never disappear. Slowly, he became more curious about that feeling and realized that despite his external success, he had become a “passive participant” in his life.”
― Paul Millerd, The Pathless Path: Imagining a New Story For Work and Life

“It definitely wasn’t a sudden realization. It’s a little bit like having a pebble in your shoe, where you’re walking and something is off, and it’s mildly uncomfortable.”⁠1”
― Paul Millerd, The Pathless Path: Imagining a New Story For Work and Life