But if you want a more fun PowerPoint-based story (only something a former strategy consultant would ever say(, you can check out the deck I put together below.

41k+ Sold! (Top 1% Book) The Pathless Path is Paul's book about walking away from a "perfect" job with a promising future and starting over again. Through painstaking experiments, living in different countries, and a deep dive into the history of our work beliefs, Paul pieces together a set of ideas and principles that guide him from unfulfilled and burned out to what he calls "the pathless path" - a new story for thinking about work in our lives. Learn More & Buy The Book Here

The post My Self-Publishing Journey & Lessons Learned (71 Page Slide Deck) appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

Even if all you care about is having a good time during all-too-short time on this earth, you will struggle to anticipate what it is that will bring delight, pleasure, contentment. And most of us care about more than just having a good time. We would like to find purpose and meaning.

One of the best things about the internet is that you can access mentors without needing to use any of their time. One of my “digital mentors” for more than fourteen years has been Russ Roberts.  Through his weekly podcast, Econtalk, I learned more about a wide range of topics while also getting to see inside the mind of an older and wiser man committed to personal growth and evolution.

This is what made reading Wild Problems, his latest book, so delightful. It wasn’t just a book about making better decisions in life. It was the book of someone I had gotten to know over the years, and more specifically, someone that went through an evolution in how he saw the world.  

When I first started listening to the podcast, I found Russ’ perspective intoxicating. He challenged guests with the intense rationality you would expect of an economics professor. When guests made weak or speculative claims he would push back. He pushed the conversation toward what he thought was the truth, calling out instances of confirmation bias and motivated reasoning.  At the time, I was at the start of a promising consulting career, and turning facts and information into powerful and persuasive stories seemed to be the formula to make the world a better place. 

Over the years, however, Russ started to soften his attachment to this stance and his evolution is probably what kept me interested.  He started to talk more about his connection to religion and reflect on how he wasn’t as sure about things as when he was younger. And this was at the same time as many people were shifting into a state of perma-outrage, amplified by the election of Trump and the growing efforts of media platforms to remain relative.  While most of the world seemed to pair moral goodness with the ability to maintain outrages, Russ’ reflective natured offered a welcome alternative, as he seemed to lean more into other virtues like curiosity and humility on his podcast.

That deeper, reflective Russ fills the pages of Wild Problems which is what made reading it so enjoyable. It was less a how-to guide for decision-making and more of a poetic contemplation of what matters in life (also my favorite kind of book).

Wild Problems are About Who We Might Become

Early in the book, Russ defines what he means by “wild problem,”: 

a fork in the road of life where knowing which path is the right one isn’t obvious, where the pleasure and pain from choosing one path over another are ultimately hidden from us, where the path we choose defines who we are and who we might become. Wild problems are the big decisions all of us have to deal with as we go through life.

In 2016, I faced a wild problem just like this and it seemed as if there were two paths:

• Path #1: Continue on my current path in management consulting, one that I had less and less desire to stay on by the day. Yet if I continued on the path, I would never face any financial difficulty and I would continue to have broad approval of my life decisions from everyone in my life
• Path #2: Quit my job and try to make it work as a freelance consultant (read: I really just wanted to escape and didn’t have much of a plan)

This was my old wild problem but it’s only upon reflection that I realize I didn’t really look at it the right way. If you’ve read my writing you know that I chose path #2. But it was not because as Russ suggests, that I had a sense that the decision was about “who we are and who we might become.”

I had no conception of the upsides of taking my path. I only knew that on my previous path, the odds seemed far too high that I was becoming a person I didn’t want to be.  That was enough for me. I walked away despite people reminding me of all the downsides.  They would ask me: “Aren’t you worried about XXX….” Insert your favorite worry: money, healthcare, employment status, approval.  I worried about all these things but I sensed there was more to life and I had to find out what I had been missing.

The interesting thing about my shift is that I had almost no model of the potential upsides of taking this leap Almost all the people around me and society at large had conceived of what I was doing as a very risky thing.  I had very little support and the first couple of years were quite hard. Yet five years later it’s clear that not only were there upsides, they are far beyond what I could imagine.  A sense of aliveness, a re-awakened creative impulse, and a more optimistic stance are all things that make my current path “worth it” and it’s hard to imagine giving these up anymore. 

This is what makes these kinds of decisions wild problems.  No matter how hard we try we can never rationally determine a “correct” decision.  Nor can we ever imagine the future potential good things that might emerge, especially those that we lack in our current state. As Russ puts it, “You can’t anticipate what you’re going to enjoy, and you certainly can’t imagine some of the deeper pleasures that define us beyond the narrow day-to-day experiences of life.”  

Why are these upsides so hard to imagine? Russ makes an interesting observation about marriage that may apply to other hard decisions: 

the willingness of married people to share the experience of marriage is quite rare. First, it’s intensely personal. Intimate. Second, much of the time, we who are married may have little self-awareness of how marriage changes us.

While I have written a lot about being self-employed and the positive things I have experienced, I have the sense that words can never quite convey what this really feels like.  I have thought about life paths more than most people and many people have messaged me to tell me how much my book has helped them.  Yet there is no replacement for going through things yourself and this is ultimately the challenge of living a human life. We can trick ourselves into thinking we can plan and prepare for everything but when it comes to the biggest decisions in life, we are the ones that need to take that first step.  In that sense, Wild Problems is one of the most helpful companions.

A Conversation With the World

Since 2006, Roberts has had more than 850 conversations with various guests on his podcast. If you add this up, it amounts to more than a month of his life spent in deep conversation with others. This means having conversations is something he’s thought a lot about. To him, a great conversation is, “…an emergent experience that goes in unexpected, unplanned directions.”  It is easy to see how this doubles as a powerful metaphor for life.

For me, having hundreds of literal conversations with people from all around the world through “curiosity conversations” my podcast has inspired all sorts of rabbit holes and ideas that have kept my curiosity and writing alive with energy.  I initially decided to open my calendar and let anyone book a conversation with me in 2017 as an attempt to lean against the popular productivity advice at the time that you should protect your time and monetize access.  It felt wrong and I’m glad I ignored it.  Through hundreds of conversations, I learned not only how diverse and interesting people are from all around the world but I learned to release my own expectations of myself. As I learned to go with the flow of the conversation, I was learning how to “go with the flow” in my own life as well. 

David Whyte has been a big inspiration in this regard. He also leans on the “conversation” metaphor when talking about life, talking about the “conversational nature of reality.” In his view, we are all in a dance with the universe, and only by pushing ourselves to our “frontier” can we discover what we are meant to find out about the world and our own confusing paths.

I sense Russ is channeling a similar sentiment in his discussions on conversations, whether he intends to or not. His nudge to see conversations as “an improvisation, which is an organic art, than a scripted, prefab conversation” can easily be seen as good advice for thinking about navigating life as well. 

Learning To Say Yes

It would be one thing if Russ was your run-of-the-mill professor giving a lot of this advice. But he is not. In the professor world, he is the “weirdo” in the best sense of that word. He was a podcast before it was cool, has a rap video on famous economists, works at George Mason a school famous for being a home for some of the most contrarian thinkers, and most recently, at an age when most people are happily settling into retirement, he decided to move across the world with his wife to become President of a small liberal arts school in Israel.

As he reflects in the book, “most of my proudest accomplishments came from saying yes to things that at first glance didn’t seem to fit into who I was or my pre-existing plan.” This is what has made Russ so inspiring to me. As someone that left a predetermined path at age 32, I will likely be operating without a script for the rest of my life and books like Wild Problems are a good reminder that not only am I not alone, most people are on uncertain paths.  It’s just that some people like Russ lean into it and remain curious, while others harden and become rigid as they age. 

In addition to knowing when to say yes, Russ reflects on quitting, something I think is underappreciated in today’s world.  We have a meme of “hard work” which can be incredibly valuable for people who have found the things they are excited to work on but can lead people astray when applied to the wrong things.  As he reflects, 

to know when to fold ’em and when to hold ’em is an art that is quantifiable in poker but not in life. Better to learn who you are-your strengths and limitations-and make each decision as best you can. Here is a case where having a rule-“always persevere,” or “quit when it gets too hard”-will lead you astray. In life, knowing when to persevere and when to quit is a craft to cultivate.

This is also the core theme of the book: that life is a “craft to cultivate.”  While Russ doesn’t take a stand that there is a “right” way to live, the book does suggest that by remaining curious about our life and our path, we can increase the odds that we might learn a little more than if we did not pay attention at all. 

This is hard of course. On my previous path, I existed in a state of tension where I had the urge to become a better version of myself but felt stuck within the constraints of the path I had committed to.  Only by walking away and risking blowing up my life did I realize that there were unimaginably positive opportunities that I had not imagined.  This humbled me deeply but it also made me more curious about my path and see the art of living as a meta-practice worth cultivating. 

This book is a powerful reflection on navigating life and I sense that it would be powerful for anyone who has a hunch that there is more to life. We live in a time where many people see their life through the lens of a neatly ordered path. Yet upon reflection people quickly realize that beneath the surface we have all faced ups and downs.

Wild Problems is great because Russ doesn’t give any prescriptions or answers. He merely shares his own reflections and contemplations of his own life.  At 68, Russ could have easily retired and stopped working. I imagine everyone in his life would have praised him for this.  Yet he sensed there was something more than following the default scripts that so many people are eager to follow.  He decided to move to a new country and embrace a new challenge.  He also knows he might be wrong about it being the right move. But he’s curious and wants to see where he ends up.

I think that’s pretty badass and I’m glad there are people like Russ out there.  

If you do end up reading this Russ, I just want to thank you for your silent encouragement and modeling over the years. It has been meaningful in helping me embrace my own wild problems.

+Thanks to John Hampson and Nathan Baschez for the helpful feedback on this essay!

41k+ Sold! (Top 1% Book) The Pathless Path is Paul's book about walking away from a "perfect" job with a promising future and starting over again. Through painstaking experiments, living in different countries, and a deep dive into the history of our work beliefs, Paul pieces together a set of ideas and principles that guide him from unfulfilled and burned out to what he calls "the pathless path" - a new story for thinking about work in our lives. Learn More & Buy The Book Here

The post The “Wild Problem” Of A Life Well Lived: A Book Review of Russ Roberts’ Wild Problems appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

My Short Summary

Alex Pang makes sense of the idea of “rest” through his own journey taking a sabbatical after leaving Academia and the corporate world. What he discovers is that we have lost connection with an ancient idea and broader conception of Leisure as one of a mix of contemplation and action. He explores how our modern work beliefs have crowded out rest – both the active kind (like exercise) and passive kind (contemplation) – in favor of the 40+ hour work week and being “productive.” An antidote to our empty work beliefs. Recommend.

Key Themes & Quotes

When our identity as a person becomes too wrapped up in being a worker we become lost

How taking an identity as a “worker” undermines your existence

If your work is your self, when you cease to work, you cease to exist.

The business world has been overtaken by a cult of “busyness” where we have lost the connection between “hard work” and “good work.” Americans are uniquely obsessed with work and have some of the worst problems with overwork in the world, dating back hundreds of years.

William James diagnosis on Americans

Consider William James’s diagnosis of overwork in his 1899 essay “Gospel of Relaxation.” He argued that Americans had become accustomed to overwork, to living with an “inner panting and expectancy” and bringing “breathlessness and tension” to work.
…
In 1899 William James noted that that many Americans had gotten “into a wretched trick” of overwork and overextension, which increased “the frequency and severity of our breakdowns.” An anonymous writer in Singapore’s Straits Times observed in 1913, “The tendency of the present age is to mental overwork and the exhaustion of the brain force.” Two years later, Bertie Charles Forbes noted that the modern industrialist “works harder than any of his workmen,” and the banker “gets early to his office and performs more work—and brainier work—than any other three men in his nerve-wrecking profession.” Such men had made America the envy of the world, he said, but they were “committing suicide by overwork.”

And the modern cult of busyness and “performing busyness”:

As a result, service workers and professionals are rewarded not just for performing work but also for “performing” busyness at work.

Today’s workplace respects overwork, even though it’s counterproductive, and treats four-hour days as “contemptibly slack,” even though they produce superior results.

On how companies are manipulating people based on our broken ideas of leisure to get people to stay in the office:

As sociologist William Davies argues, today’s workers are told that passion is their greatest asset and that they should do what they love (or at least love what they do); employers, meanwhile, have come to see happiness as a strategic resource that boosts employee productivity, decreases absenteeism and turnover, and increases customer satisfaction. In a few very privileged companies, where competition for talent is ferocious, this translates into free food, entertainment, on-site dry-cleaning, and other perks; elsewhere, it’s deployed as a kind of weaponized positive psychology, in which automated systems watch for signs of discontent, negative voice tone during customer phone calls, and indicators that happiness is at suboptimal levels. In environments like these, the ability to detach from a workplace that wants to commoditize your emotional life, and to cultivate a private life rather than succumb to easy alternatives that keep you in the office, is more valuable than ever.

Leisure once had a deeper meaning – it used to be an active engagement with life through contemplation or engagement in things that brought you alive. Our modern conception of it is as a passive pursuit and often merely in the aim of “recharging” for work.

The Roman and Greek conceptions of leisure and rest:

Of course, I can’t claim any special insight here. The ancient Greeks saw rest as a great gift, as the pinnacle of civilized life. The Roman Stoics argued that you cannot have a good life without good work. Indeed, virtually every ancient society, recognized that both work and rest were necessary for a good life: one provided the means to live, the other gave meaning to life. Today, we’ve lost touch with that wisdom, and our lives are poorer and less fulfilling as a result. It’s time we rediscovered the good that rest can do.

Referencing Josef Pieper and his discussion of work in Germany after World War II, he references Piepers idea of leisure that seemed to be lsot in the culture

Pieper described as not just a “result of spare time” but “an attitude of non-activity, of inward calm.”

This idea of leisure – one of “inward calm” was slowly eroded and then looked at skeptically and ow dramatic this shifted our culture:

Anything created through contemplation (or religious revelation, or intuition) was, by definition, less impressive and trustworthy.
…
These philosophical arguments might seem arcane, but the assumptions that knowledge is produced rather than discovered or revealed, that the amount of work that goes into an idea determines its importance, and that the creation of ideas can be organized and institutionalized, all guide our thinking about work today. When we treat workaholics as heroes, we express a belief that labor rather than contemplation is the wellspring of great ideas and that the success of individuals and companies is a measure of their long hours.

Pieper shares the idea of the ratio and the intellectus, which is that ideas can be formulated through work (ratio) or intellectus (spiritual means):

Devoting yourself only to the first (to ratio, in other words) and neglecting the second (intellectus) might make you more productive in the short run but will make your work less profound in the long run.

Another example from history, he cites Sun Tzu

Chinese general Sun Tzu wrote in The Art of War, “It is the unemotional, reserved, calm, detached warrior who wins, not the hothead seeking vengeance and not the ambitious seeker of fortune.” In The Book of Five Rings, written around 1645, Japanese swordsman Miyamoto Musashi advised, “Both in fighting and in everyday life you should be determined though calm.”

Breaks can be vitally important, but a vacation within the context of full-time work probably will only give you 3-4 weeks of relief

At this rate you’d need to take a week vacation every month to really “recharge”

Psychologists have since discovered that a similar effect holds for even relaxing vacations: the benefits don’t last very long. When they measure mood, energy levels, engagement, and happiness levels among workers before and immediately after a vacation, then weeks or months later, psychologists find that the emotional boost that a vacation provides lasts about three or four weeks. After that, your happiness and job satisfaction levels return to their prevacation levels: it’s “lots of fun, quickly gone,” as one article puts it. (And for perfectionists and workaholics, the fade-out effects happen even faster.)

Looking back in history, you find many prolific creators did not work as the people we glorify today. There is a consistent convergence around 4-hours of deep work. Our modern work culture has lost connection to good work because we orient around a 40-hour work week instead of looking at the worth of the output.

Here is how Darwin spent his day”

After his morning walk and breakfast, Darwin was in his study by eight and worked a steady hour and a half.

At nine thirty he would read the morning mail and write letters. Downe was far away enough from London to discourage casual visitors, yet close enough to allow the morning mail to reach correspondents and colleagues in the city in just a few hours.

At ten thirty, Darwin returned to more serious work, sometimes moving to his aviary, greenhouse, or one of several other buildings where he conducted his experiments.

By noon, he would declare, “I’ve done a good day’s work,” and set out on a long walk on the Sandwalk, a path he had laid out not long after buying Down House. (Part of the Sandwalk ran through land leased to Darwin by the Lubbock family.) When he returned after an hour or more, Darwin had lunch and answered more letters.

At three he would retire for a nap; an hour later he would arise, take another walk around the Sandwalk, then return to his study until five thirty, when he would join his wife, Emma, and their family for dinner. On this schedule he wrote nineteen books, including technical volumes on climbing plants, barnacles, and other subjects; the controversial Descent of Man; and The Origin of Species, probably the single most famous book in the history of science, and a book that still affects the way we think about nature and ourselves.

Anyone who reviews his schedule cannot help but notice the creator’s paradox.

Henri Poincaré

Toulouse noted that Poincaré kept very regular hours. He did his hardest thinking between 10 a.m. and noon, and again between five and seven in the afternoon. The nineteenth century’s most towering mathematical genius worked just enough to get his mind around a problem—about four hours a day.

A study of scientists in the 1950s:

A survey of scientists’ working lives conducted in the early 1950s yielded results in a similar range. Illinois Institute of Technology psychology professors Raymond Van Zelst and Willard Kerr surveyed their colleagues about their work habits and schedules, then graphed the number of hours faculty spent in the office against the number of articles they produced. You might expect that the result would be a straight line showing that the more hours scientists worked, the more articles they published. But it wasn’t.
…
The data revealed an M-shaped curve. The curve rose steeply at first and peaked at between ten to twenty hours per week. The curve then turned downward. Scientists who spent twenty-five hours in the workplace were no more productive than those who spent five. Scientists working thirty-five hours a week were half as productive as their twenty-hours-a-week colleagues.

It looked something like this:

Companies and people find tremendous value in taking extended leave – sabbaticals – and they are probably underutilized in modern society – both for individuals and within companies

He is a big fan of sabbaticals, having discovered the idea for his first book during his own sabbatical. Here is an example from Korea he mentions:

Organizations can also benefit from sabbaticals, as the experience of Samsung Electronics shows. In 1990, when it was still struggling to expand outside Korea, Samsung started an overseas sabbatical program for its most promising executives. Every year, two hundred people attended a three-month boot camp heavy on language immersion, meditation, and education in local customs; they then headed off for six months to one of eighty countries, where they learned the local culture, made friends, and essentially played amateur anthropologist; they then spent another six months working on a business-related project of their own design. Within a decade, the experiences of these graduates were contributing to Samsung’s dizzying rise as a global brand. Today, graduates of the sabbatical program are among the company’s most senior executives, both in Seoul and around the world.

He cites the example of Stefan Sagmeister who gave a TED talk about he takes a year off from work every seven years.

“EVERYONE WHOSE JOB description includes ‘thinking’ or coming up with ideas will benefit from” taking a sabbatical, Stefan Sagmeister says. His

41k+ Sold! (Top 1% Book) The Pathless Path is Paul's book about walking away from a "perfect" job with a promising future and starting over again. Through painstaking experiments, living in different countries, and a deep dive into the history of our work beliefs, Paul pieces together a set of ideas and principles that guide him from unfulfilled and burned out to what he calls "the pathless path" - a new story for thinking about work in our lives. Learn More & Buy The Book Here

The post Rest By Alex Pang: Summary & Key Quotes appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

As I started my career, I began my own sort of philosophical and liberal arts education.  But given my limited background, I had to lay the groundwork to get to some of the deeper questions and mental models that helped me eventually take a leap to carve my own path beyond the corporate world.

I often see people suggesting deep philosophical books that question the meaning of life but realize given my own past mental models, that this approach doesn’t make sense for many people.

It is easy to dismiss books such as Dale Carnegie’s “How To Win Friends And Influence People” or David Schwartz’s “The Magic Of Thinking Big” but to someone indoctrinated in business, those may be the most reasonable books to start with.  Alas, it was these kind of books that made me hungry to go deeper.

What follows are ten types of books that you can use as a roadmap to dream of a life beyond the corporate world.  I’ve offered a “starting point” for each category which is probably the most accessible of the options:

1. Thinking About What Matters
2. Building “Human Skills” In The Workplace
3. Know Thyself…In The Business World
4. Questioning The Modern State Of The Business World
5. Finding Some Hope In The Business World
6. Mindfulness & New Emotional Mental Models
7. Carving New Paths & Wandering Into The Unknown
8. New Models For Seeing The World
9. Grappling With The Role OF Work In Our Lives
10. Going Deep – The Hard Questions

I. Thinking About What Matters

Start Here  Tuesday’s With Morrie (Mitch Albom)

Helped me to think about life from the perspective of the end of one’s life. In this story, Morrie has lived a full life and has deep relationships as evidenced by the number of people who are constantly visiting him.

So many people walk around with a meaningless life. They seem half-asleep, even when they’re busy doing things they think are important. This is because they’re chasing the wrong things. The way you get meaning into your life is to devote yourself to loving others, devote yourself to your community around you, and devote yourself to creating something that gives you purpose and meaning.

Last Lecture (Randy Pausch)

Randy Pausch is a dying professor who decides to devote his energy into a literal last lecture.  What transpires is a talk focused on never ignoring your inner child and a story that will likely deeply resonate with many.

Survival In Auschwitz (Primo Levi)

This book is a deep contemplation into what is means to live and survive in the darkest of places.

Sooner or later in life everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealizable, but there are few who pause to consider the antithesis: that perfect unhappiness is equally unattainable. The obstacles preventing the realization of both these extreme states are of the same nature: they derive from our human condition which is opposed to everything infinite.

II. Building “Human Skills” In The Workplace

Start Here  How To Win Friends And Influence People (Dale Carnegie)

I know, I know!  Cliche.  So What? The simplicity of the book makes it powerful.  It doesn’t need the latest and greatest psychology studies.  It just offers principles about how to treat people and is a reminder that the norms and assumptions about behavior in the modern business world lead people astray.  For example, if you want to change someone’s mind, focus more on getting that person to like you instead of attacking them with facts and to focus on simple things like listening:

Talk to someone about themselves and they’ll listen for hours.

Influence (Robert Cialdini)

This book was a bit mind-blowing, making me realize we are more susceptible to influence than we realize.  Cialdini has written extensively about how things such as social proof, reciprocity, commitment, authority, liking and scarcity drive our behavior.  Becoming aware of our behavioral biases will help you identify the decisions you really want to make as opposed to the ones you are just falling into

The Art Of Learning (Joshua Waitzkin)

This book is terrific. Waitzkin walks through how he became a chess champion at age 8 and brought Gary Kasparov to a draw at 11 years old. After quitting chess, he applied the same approach to Taiwanese push hands and became world champion. He introduces the concepts of “beginner’s mind” as well as his own framing of “numbers to leave numbers” which is a great way to show that to go fast, you first need to go slow.

III. Know Thyself…In The Business World

Start Here  How Will You Measure Your Life (Clayton Christensen)

This book is a fascinating perspective on how to define success from within the corporate world.  Christensen made me gain hope about leading with principles in the corporate world, positioning “management” as a way to have a positive impact on other people:

“If you want to help people, be a manager”

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking (Susan Cain)

I thought I had a good understanding of introversion and extroversion until I read this book. This book also made me realize I was a lot more introverted than I realized. This is where I first heard of the term “ambivert” and realized I am energized by a mix of alone time and activity with others. I was fascinated by the history of how extroversion became such an ideal in modern society and the mistakes that can lead us to make.

Mastery (Robert Greene)

Mastery is an incredible book for anyone with a creative bone in their body.  Greene talks about the different phases one must undertake if they want to become a master at their craft or develop a wide range of skills.  He helps people understand the hard decisions that need to be made, such as leaving a teacher (see: manager, leader) once you have learned enough so that you can go out on your own.

IV. Questioning The Modern State Of The Business World

Start Here The Halo Effect . . . and the Eight Other Business Delusions That Deceive Managers (Phil Rosenzweig)

A clear and convincing case that most explanation of who is “successful” and a failure in the business world is highly subject to market dynamics and the firms that happen to have the most profitable business model of the time.  This book will make you highly skeptical of modern business “research” and stories praising or criticizing leaders.

Shareholder Value Myth (Lynn Stout)

This book is a must-read for anyone who has a suspicion that there may be other and better ways to measure success in the world than money and especially, “shareholder value.”  This book helps show that our current state of affairs is a recent innovation.

Reinventing Organizations (Fredrik Laloux)

This book highlights organizations that are typically led by truly transformational leaders that have questioned the status quo and built organizations (sometimes very large ones) that start with deep trust in people and their ability to solve problems.  This book shows that self-organization can work and that it is likely the only path forward if we want to build a better business world.

Skin In The Game (Nassim Taleb)

Taleb looks at the concept of “skin in the game” in terms of people, employees, and organizations.  His perspective on the modern state of the employee/employer relationship:

So employees exist because they have significant skin in the game –and the risk is shared with them, enough risk for it to be a deterrent and a penalty for acts of undependability, such as failing to show up on time. You are buying dependability.

He argues that the modern employee is no longer a “company man” but rather a “companies man”:

A companies person is someone who feels that he has something huge to lose if he loses his employ-ability

V. Finding Some Hope In The Business World

A big part of my career in the business world was an obsession with trying to understand first why organizations seemed to drive so much stress and anxiety in people and then second, what we could do about it if anything.  This led me to discover a number of books that not only helped me discover new ideas for business, organizations, and leadership but also develop my own perspective on what’s happening in the modern workplace.

Start Here Drive (Dan Pink)

Pink’s introduction of the concepts of autonomy, mastery, and purpose through research and company examples is a great way to discover self-determination theory, which is a foundational theory of what motivates people.  If you look at modern organizations through the lens of motivation, you would assume that everyone had lost their mind.

Work Rules! (Laszlo Bock)

The key takeaway from this book was the fact that many things you can do to improve the employee experience are free.  Too many organizations think that transformation comes at a major cost.  But as Bock shows in many examples in his experience at Chief People Officer, the hardest things to do are to trust people and give them freedom to make mistakes.

VI. Mindfulness & New Emotional Mental Models

Start Here The Heart Aroused (David Whyte)

I wish I read this book at the beginning of my business life, but I wonder if it would have been too soon.  Whyte speaks poetically about the experience of the business world in a way that well, arouses your heart. Whyte’s summary of the book:

(it) will look at the link between soul and belonging, creativity and failure, success and stasis, efficiency and malaise at work, but it sets as its benchmark not the fiscal success of the work or the corporation (though this certainly can be good for the soul) but the journey and experience of the human spirit and its repressed but unflagging desire to find a home in the world.

Nothing Special (Charlotte Joko Beck)

This was the first book I read about Zen Buddhism and mindfulness. The story is a conversation between Beck and her students and will resonate with anyone who is curious about mindfulness, meditation, and spirituality.

VII. Embracing The “Pathless Path”

Start Here: My Book! The Pathless Path (Paul Millerd)

My book, The Pathless Path, was published five years after quitting my job and carving my own path. It’s sold over 25k+ copies with minimal marketing so people seem to like it. It’s not a how-to guide but an inspirational account of my journey combined with “recipes” on how to embrace an unconventional path.

Anything You Want: 40 Lessons For a New Kind Of Entrepreneur (Derek Sivers)

Sivers build a company selling CDs of independent artists in the early internet era.  He ignored most of the advice about how to build a company.  He also ignored the advice on how to write a book.  This short book shows that “best practice” doesn’t always lead to happiness.

Field Guide To Getting Lost (Rebecca Solnit)

Rebecca Solnit puts words to the journey of “getting lost” and wandering into the unknown. If this quote resonates with you, you are ready for this book:

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.

Linchpin (Seth Godin)

Godin has been a self-employed solopreneur and freelancer for decades.  He helps people re-frame their thinking away from needing to be “chosen” for a job towards a world where the world depends on you expressing your creativity and daring to “make a ruckus.”

Designing Your Life (Burnett & Evans)

This book by two Stanford professors was designed to help undergraduate students figure out what they want to do with their lives.  Based on design thinking, they have a number of useful question prompts and exercises that push you to expand the number of ideas and options you can come up with, rather than picking from default options.  If you want to imagine new possibilities, this is the book for you.

Crossing The Unknown Sea (David Whyte)

Whyte is my favorite writer and this book is a beautiful reflection of his own journey from naturalist to non-profit worker to poet. He talks about the inner game of doing the thing which is scary (people thought he was crazy to quit his day-job) and living full out.

The Good Life & Sustaining Life (Andrew Taggart)

A practical philosophical reflection on what it means to live the “good life” in the modern world and the many approaches one might take to sustain such a life.

There may be no greater vexation in our time than the question of how to make a living in a way that accords with leading a good life. Yet if nearly every thinking person has faced this vexation at one time or another and doubtless throughout most of his adult life, virtually no one has ventured to think it through in a well-considered, systematic fashion.

VIII. New Models For Seeing The World

Start Here A Lesson On Worldly Wisdom (Charlie Munger)

This fantastic graduation speech from Munger highlights the need for many different “mental models” for seeing the world and how to move between them.  Worth reading in full.

The Righteous Mind, Why Good People Disagree On Politics & Religion (Jonathan Haidt)

This book made me rethink how people arrive at their beliefs.  Haidt shows that morality is something that is highly influenced by your environment and biology.  This book made me much more understanding of a wider range of ideas beyond politics and religion.

Wanting (Luke Burgis)

The self-employed path is filled with hustle traps and the most powerful one is “mimetic desire.” Luke walks through his own personal journey of awakening and helps steer people toward finding their “thick desires” – things they can sustain over the long term.

Sacred Economics (Charles Eisenstein)

A bold re-imagination of our world to one based on generosity, connection, and embrace of the environment.  This book is a beautiful mix of technical economic analysis with a spiritual questioning of the status quo:

I think ultimately what is happening is that our deep ideologies and belief systems, and their unconscious shadows, generate a matrix of synchronicities that looks very much like a conspiracy. It is in fact a conspiracy with no conspirators. Everyone is a puppet, but there are no puppet-masters.

IX. Grappling With The Role Of Work In Our Lives

Start Here Bullshit Jobs (David Graeber)

Graeber looks at the modern workplace through his definition of a “bullshit job” which is when employees define their job as pointless and without meaning.  He looks at the history of work and shows that our current relationship with employment, time and money was not always the way it was and challenges readers to think beyond the status quo.

Rest (Alex Pang)

Pang’s incredible book on rest covers sabbaticals, unplanned breaks, naps, and sleep while challenging our modern understanding and definition of things like time, leisure, idleness and rest.  He boldly challIf your work is your self, when you cease to work, you cease to exist,” shares counterintuitive results from people who worked 2-5 hours a day and shows the benefits of not following the conventional wisdom that more = better.

As a result, service workers and professionals are rewarded not just for performing work but also for “performing” busyness at work.

Reclaiming Work (Andre Gorz)

Gorz argues that “real work is no longer what we do when at work” and that a lot of what we are doing in the workplace is performing a social ritual we have decided is necessary to “earn a living.”  This book imagines a world “beyond the wage-based society.”

The Normal Chaos Of Love (Beck & Beck-Gernsheim)

While this book is very much about love and relationship, it also frames those relationships and our modern ideal of a family in contrast to the workplace.  The authors (a married couple) argue that the modern reality of having everyone be workers is great for the workplace and freedom, but creates chaos and complexity at home – complexity that we have yet to fully grapple with:

Everybody – including parts of the women’s movement – has the right to expect that offers once made to men should now be extended to women, and assert that women are as useful as members of the job world as men are. They should however realize that this road does not lead to a happy world of co-operative equals but to separateness and diverging interests.

Leisure: The Basis Of Culture (Josep Pieper)

In the late 1940s, Pieper wrote of a crisis of “overwork” and a disconnect from the classical sense of leisure.  He wrote that we “mistake leisure for idleness, and work for creativity” and was skeptical of Max Weber’s assertion that “One does not only work in order to live, but one lives for the sake of one’s work.”  In today’s world, “leisure” often just means a break from work.  Pieper argued instead that leisure was:

the disposition of receptive understanding, of contemplative, beholding, and immersion – in the real. In leisure, there is, furthermore, something of the serenity of ”not-being–able–to–grasp,” of the recognition of the mysterious character of the world, and the confidence of blind faith, which can let things go as they will; there is in it something of the ”trust in the fragmentary, that forms the very life and essence of history.

X. Going Deep – The Hard Questions

Start Here: Not a book, but perhaps better than a book? Brain Pickings is perhaps the best source for wisdom on the web.  A voracious reader and learner, Maria Popova pulls the most powerful parts of great writers in history on topics such as love, creativity, art, poetry, philosophy, life and work into compelling synthesized posts.  Start with one post and you’ll end up opening up a ton of tabs in no time.

• Recommended posts: 10 lessons from 10 years of BrainPickings, Ursula K. Le Guin on Busyness, Reclaiming Our Human Dignity in a Culture of Workaholism, or David Whyte on Work/Life Balance

The Great Work Of Your Life (Stephen Cope)

Stephen Cope’s The Great Work of Your Life is a spiritual guide to finding your life’s purpose. The book uses the ancient text of the Bhagavad Gita to frame stories of famous people who have followed their dharma, including Tubman, Whiteman, Frost, Keats, and Susan B. Anthony.

Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance (Robert Pirsig)

This book has been around since the 1970s and its central argument still rings true (perhaps more so?) that in our continued acceleration towards the future, we are losing touch with a deeper, spiritual side of ourselves.  Pirsig contemplates what got us to this point:

The range of human knowledge today is so great that We’re all specialists. And the distance between specialization has become so great that anyone who seeks to wander freely among them almost has to forgo closeness with the people around him.

At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails (Sarah Bakewell)

What does it mean to be free?  How should one act in accordance with that belief.  Bakewell tackles these tough questions through the lens of the existentialist philosophers that emerged in the early and mid 1900’s featuring the philosophies of Kierkegaard, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Heidegger and more.

The Wisdom Of Insecurity (Alan Watts)

Watts contemplates our desire to continue to put life into neat little boxes:

The more one studies attempted solutions to problems in politics and economics, in art, philosophy,and religion, the more one has the impression of extremely gifted people wearing out their ingenuity at the impossible and futile task of trying to get the water of life into neat and permanent packages.

and on following the default path:

To keep up this “standard” most of us are willing to put up with lives that consist largely in doing jobs that are a bore, earning the means to seek relief from the tedium by intervals of hectic and expensive pleasure. These intervals are supposed to be the real living, the real purpose served by the necessary evil of work. Or we imagine that the justification of such work is the rearing of a family to go on doing the same kind of thing, in order to rear another family . . . and so ad infinitum.

Meditations (Marcus Aurelius)

While it was written over 2,000 years ago, we get a peek into the Empreror of Rome’s private journal and his meditations on life:

When you arise in the morning think of what a privilege it is to be alive, to think, to enjoy, to love …

and

Leisure lives on affirmation. It is not the same as the absence of activity; it is not the same thing as quiet, or even as an inner quiet. It is rather like the stillness in the conversation of lovers, which is fed by their oneness.

Essays (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

Emerson’s collection of essays are a great read and accessible for being written in the 1800’s.  Emerson on self-reliance:

There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. (Self-Reliance)

Nature:

The incommunicable trees begin to persuade us to live with them, and quit our life of solemn trifles.

…and Education:

The book, the college, the school of art, the institution of any kind, stop with some past utterance of genius. This is good, say they,—let us hold by this. They pin me down. They look backward and not forward. But genius always looks forward. The eyes of man are set in his forehead, not in his hindhead

41k+ Sold! (Top 1% Book) The Pathless Path is Paul's book about walking away from a "perfect" job with a promising future and starting over again. Through painstaking experiments, living in different countries, and a deep dive into the history of our work beliefs, Paul pieces together a set of ideas and principles that guide him from unfulfilled and burned out to what he calls "the pathless path" - a new story for thinking about work in our lives. Learn More & Buy The Book Here

The post 35+ Books Recommendations To Help You Quit Your Job appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

A bullshit job is a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged that this is not the case

Graeber raises important questions about the “psychological, social, and political effects” of this pernicious state of affairs and gives a compelling recap of the history of time, labor and work in a way that puts everything into perspective.

This book discussion guide was created to focus on ten key issues from the book:

• #1 Bullshit jobs definition – have you ever had a bullshit job?
• #2 Five types of BS jobs 
• #3 “Shit” Jobs & Equal Pay Argument 
• #4 From fried locusts to the “time famine” 
• #5 Three types of unpaid labor 
• #6 Public Sector vs. Private Sector 
• #7 Service Economy? Or Not? 
• #8 Politics: Obsessed with Jobs? 
• #9 Brief History of Labor & Economics 
• #10 The Answer: Oprah gives everyone UBI?

41k+ Sold! (Top 1% Book) The Pathless Path is Paul's book about walking away from a "perfect" job with a promising future and starting over again. Through painstaking experiments, living in different countries, and a deep dive into the history of our work beliefs, Paul pieces together a set of ideas and principles that guide him from unfulfilled and burned out to what he calls "the pathless path" - a new story for thinking about work in our lives. Learn More & Buy The Book Here

[contact-form-7]

The post Bullshit Jobs Virtual Book Club Discussion (Book By David Graeber) appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

The magic of this book is that it can be read through many lenses. Creativity is at the center of almost all work in today’s world. After reading this, it is now probably in the top 3 “must read” books for anyone serious about being a great leader/manager in an organization (Drive and Work Rules! are the other two).

1. Creative People Produce a Lot of Crap

Grant talks about the sheer volume of content that some of the most innovative people create such as Edison’s 1,093 patents, Mozart’s 600 pieces and Beethoven’s 37 plays. He notes:

“…when it comes to ideas generation, quantity is the most predictable path to quality. “Original Thinkers,” Stanford professor Robert Sutton notes, “will come up with many ideas that are strange mutations, dead ends and utter failures. The cost is worthwhile because they also generate a larger pool of ideas — especially novel ideas”

2. Expertise Can Lead to Better Intuition But Hold Back Your Ability to Adapt

If you have deep expertise in an area, you likely have developed an intuition for identifying patterns in that domain. A study with people who owned many designer handbags found that when asked to determine if bags were real or fake:

“Experienced handbag owners were 22 percent more accurate when they had just five seconds than when they had thirty seconds”

If you are an expert in your field save some time and trust your gut.

Expertise turns out to be domain-specific, which is limiting when it comes to identifying new ideas. People are limited by the models which carried them to success. He talks about how experts deal with change:

“…expert bridge players struggled more than novices to adapt when the rules were changed and that expert accountants were worse than novices at applying a new tax law.”

Given the speed of change in today’s world, it is no wonder that we have seen failures of experts across many domains.

3. Voicing New Ideas and Concerns Without Status Will Cost you $$

As many people have encountered in organizations, voicing constructive ideas to improve things may be counter-productive:

“In one study across manufacturing, service, retail and nonprofit settings, the more frequently employees voiced ideas and concerns upward, the less likely they were to receive raises and promotions over a two year period”

4. Focusing on Negatives Can Strengthen Your Message

If you are pitching an idea, consider highlighting the flaws or downsides of your opportunity. It will help disarm the audience and get them on your side. If you present something too positively, people naturally look to poke holes in the idea.

Sharing the negatives can also make the audience think more highly of the person delivering the message. In a study comparing book reviews with identical content but positive or negative adjectives:

“…people rated the critical reviewer 14% more intelligent”

Grant details this message more in the following TED talk

5. The More We Are Exposed to Something The More We Like It

Grant has a nifty little trick of introducing a fake word in his book and referencing it five times over a number of pages. He then asks the reader to choose between that word and another made up word for which one you like better. I found myself inevitably drawn to the word I had been exposed to.

He backs this up by pointing to studies that show we prefer photos of ourselves when they are inverted (like in a mirror) as opposed to normal photos of our friends (as we typically see them).

6. The “Middle” Is Risk Averse and Will Try to Kill Your Ideas

Grant discussed a concept calls “middle-status conservatism” which accounts for the anxiety that people in the “middle” feel about the risk of falling to the bottom. Think middle managers that are more worried about being fired or demoted than taking risks.

He points to the research of two MIT professors:

…security analysts were significantly less likely to issue negative stock ratings when they or the banks that employed them had middle status. Making a recommendation to sell a stock can anger corporate executives and investors who value the stock. Analysts with poor track records at minor banks have nowhere to fall by taking this risk, and star analysts at elite banks have a safety net.”

This is not very promising for innovation, creativity and new ideas in modern organizations as they get more complex and larger — with most people falling into the “middle status” category.

Grant notes a practical step to counter this is to look to junior colleagues who may be more open to supporting a new or novel idea. Building a following at the lowest levels can be more important over the long run.

7. Delaying tasks can increase creativity

Grant details the Zeigarnik Effect, which shows that unfinished tasks “stay active in our minds.” He talked about how Martin Luther King delayed writing and finishing his famous “I had a dream speech” until the day before the march.

To make this practical — you can take a break in the middle of a task and go for a walk or even “sleep on it.” It may help you generate better ideas.

8. First movers are not as successful

It is conventional wisdom that the “First mover” is often the one that captures success, but this happens not to be true. Grant details a study from Peter Golder and Gerard Tellis comparing the success of “pioneers” (first movers) and “settlers” (followers):

…they found a staggering different in the failure rates: 47 percent for pioneers, compared with just 8 percent for settlers. Even when the pioneers did survive, they only captured an average of 10 percent of the market, compared with 28 percent for the settlers”

A reason he offers for this is that the first mover often has to define what to offer, whereas the followers just have to decide how to do that better. Hence, the first movers are prone to making mistakes — either offering too much or the wrong things altogether.

9. Groups are judged externally by the most extreme views

Looking at the women’s suffrage movement, Grant highlights research by Blake Ashforth and Peter Reingen showing that internally groups identify with the people who are “most central and connected in the group.” At the same time, outsiders judge groups through the person with “the most extreme views.”

For any group trying to drive change, balancing these two competing identities can be a challenge. If the group associates with views that are deemed too extreme by the public or broader audience, the group may not accomplish what it sets out to.

This has played out in politics over and over. As the Republicans emerged from the primary to the general election and to Trumps victory, many politicians tried to distance themselves the “alt-right” as those views are not widely embraced by the broader public.

10. “The Oldest” in your family is less likely to be creative or a rule-breaker

Grant found that prior to Darwin publishing his theory of evolution, first born scientists were much less likely to support evolution and “laterborns” were more open to supporting the idea — even though it did not have broad consensus.

He showed that this trend is more important than age. He quotes historian Frank Sulloway:

“An 80 year old laterborn was as open to evolutionary theory as a 25 year old firstborn,” Sulloway writes, arguing that evolutionary theory “only became a hitorical reality because laterborns outnumbered firstborns 2.6 to 1”

He also looked at major league baseball and found a similar patter with regards to stealing bases:

“Younger brothers were 10.6 times more likely than their older siblings to attempt to steal a base”

11. “Commitment-driven cultures” become more homogenous, resistant to dissenting views and less able to adapt over time

Grant profiles the famous research around organizational cultures from James Baron and Michael Hannen

Grant highlights these “commitment cultures” in Originals or as Baron and Hannan put it, ones “which strong emotional bonds are the basis of employee attachment.” These companies will often prioritize “culture fit” over everything else.

While these cultures can be great to be part of during the startup stage,the challenge with these types of companies is two-fold:

First, they have a harder time cultivating a diverse workforce.

Second, they become homogeneous over time and less able to adapt and evolve, especially in more dynamic industries.

The danger of this is the fact that minority viewpoints disappear. Grant highlights Charlan Nemeth’s research showing that minority opinions are valuable even if they are incorrect. She conducted a study where participants had to choose between three candidates. Most candidates start out choosing an inferior candidate but only are willing to change their pick when they are challenged with an argument for a clearly wrong choice.

One of the most successful companies, McKinsey & Company, incidentally has a value that holds people accountable for “uphold the obligation to dissent.”

Looking for dissenting view can be tough. Research by Michael McDonald and James Westphal showed that in companies that were facing challenges, “CEOs sought advice from friends and colleagues who shared their perspective.”

12. The messages needed to change behaviors depend on how risky the new behavior is perceived

Grant highlights Peter Salovey’s research on how people perceive change:

If they think the behavior is safe we should emphasize all the good things that will happen if they do it…But when people believe a behavior is risky, that approach doesn’t work…Instead, we need to destabilize the status quo and accentuate the bad things that will happen if they don’t change. Taking a risk is more appealing when they’re faced with a guaranteed loss if they don’t

41k+ Sold! (Top 1% Book) The Pathless Path is Paul's book about walking away from a "perfect" job with a promising future and starting over again. Through painstaking experiments, living in different countries, and a deep dive into the history of our work beliefs, Paul pieces together a set of ideas and principles that guide him from unfulfilled and burned out to what he calls "the pathless path" - a new story for thinking about work in our lives. Learn More & Buy The Book Here

The post A Dozen Things I Learned From Originals (by Adam Grant) appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.