Millions, if not billions, have thrived following this path. It worked so well, and for so long, that people stopped thinking about why they were doing it.

I want to argue that the meaningful lives that resulted from this were accidental rather than a result of following a certain path and that today, following this path might undermine one’s attempt to live a meaningful and happy life. Across the world, people are following this path and coming up short. They are doing what is expected of them and what they thought would make them happy. Yet their lives are filled with anxiety, stress, and a life lacking meaning. Why?

This is my accidental meaning hypothesis

Accidental Meaning Hypothesis: The meaning derived from a default path of doing what everyone else was doing was accidental and an outcome not of working in a certain way, owning a home, and so on. It was the result of strong economic tailwinds, strong community spirit, more two-parent households, and unique financial and social circumstances where far more people felt like they were doing better than the previous generations. Today people aim at these same external markers of success (home, family, stable full-time jobs) but are not finding their lives meaningful at the same rates that previous generations were.

We Want To Do Better Than Our Parents

The key part of the default path was not only that you succeeded by doing what everyone else was doing, but also that you did better than your parents. John Steinbeck captured this sentiment in his book America and Americans in 1966:

No longer was it even acceptable that the child should be like his parents and live as they did; he must be better, live better, know more, dress more richly, and if possible change from father’s trade to a profession. This dream became touchingly national.

For more than 50 years people have gone into adulthood with the idea that they should achieve more than their parents while still following the same general path.

When Steinbeck wrote that, a gold rush was underway. The US economy was still in the early days of a period called the “Great Boom” and anyone working in the US or other advanced economies was set to cash in on the enormous dividend of a global industrialization effort that would last well into the 2000s.

In addition to this, the baby boomers entered a workforce in the 1970s with little to no competition, as the biggest generation at every point throughout their entire careers and stayed in senior leadership positions at most companies longer than anyone expected. As the economy has slowed to 2-3% growth per year, it has meant that current generations can no longer simply show up to work and know that everything will work out.

A central “fixed-point” as Venkatesh Rao puts it in the American Dream is owning a home. In 1975 the median house was around 500 square feet per household member. Now, it’s closer to 1000, and this is with smaller families, which means that people are buying bigger houses than previous generations despite having fewer kids. The cost of homeownership has also gone up as regulations, increasing financialization, and delayed housing purchases have all put pressure on a purchase that many adults had achieved by their mid-twenties.

Women have also entered the workforce to a massive degree but what this means is that less of life is built around local communities and more are built around accelerating a career. Instead of relying on local energy to solve problems, people now rely on outsourced providers and services to meet their needs to keep their career dreams going.

So people are working hard at working their way towards success but not realizing that they are not developing the skills or mindset that might help them learn how to live a life worth living.

People Have Stopped Having Faith In This Story (But Don’t Have An Alternative)

People have stopped believing that if they “work hard” and do what their parents did that they will earn the same rewards. While economists will argue that the following chart should be adjusted for household size, many young people now generally agree with the takeaway from the following graph:

They don’t trust that they will get what they think they deserve. As Seth Goding says, “the educated, hardworking masses are still doing what they’re told, but they’re no longer getting what they deserve.”

Another reason people have stopped believing this story is that the story has split into three different paths.

Research from Pew (see below) has shown that the middle class has been shrinking since the 1970s while the lower and upper classes are increasing. This means that more people than ever have entered the upper tier of the economy, and many people are falling back into the lower-income tier of the economy

This has taken the “American Dream” and turned it into three unique stories, each with its own flaws.

The American Dream was historically a middle-class dream. One where the differences between people were not as pronounced and it seemed that if you were working hard along with everyone else, that it was a fair game. However, that changed. Morgan Housel argues that things started changing in the 1980s and since then,

The economy works better for some people than others. Success isn’t as meritocratic as it used to be and, when success is granted, is rewarded with higher gains than in previous eras.

In a sense, the “American Dream” split into three different stories, all with their own issues.

1. Upper Class (20% of people): People in superstar tech companies are building their lives around expensive convenience and trying to distance themselves from the rest of society and finding that they have achieved the traditional American dream on paper, but are having trouble finding the important things that enrich their life.
2. Middle Class (50% of people): People in the middle class who either envy the people in the new elite or are happy with the middle class but finding it increasingly hard to make ends meet let alone do better than their parents
3. Lower Class (30% of people): People in the lower class think that they don’t have a damn chance working in their service economy jobs of ever achieving the American dream and the data says they are right.

Shifting economic conditions have nudged people to build more of their life around work and put shift away from local communities. Everyone still wants to do better than their parents but it requires a lot more mental energy devoted to work. Derek Thompson called this new ethic Workism and observed that it was a perfect “blueprint for spiritual and physical exhaustion.”

Lack of meaning is channeled into an endless search for the dream job that doesn’t exist.

As people put more emphasis on finding meaning at work they move away from the things that seem to matter: relationships, community and connection. Social capital gets built but the playgrounds, once maintained by stay-at-home parents, people with time after work, and opting-in to a different kind of social ethic, remain empty.

Increasingly, much of the middle-class has moved away from the stable foundations that made up the middle class for long and are sensing that they too should orient more of their life around work so that they don’t too fall out of the middle class and at best they can get a taste of that upper-class luxury experience, if only for a little bit of time.

This leads to a vicious cycle.

Many of these people are still tied to the idea that if you work hard you’ll be taken care but are frustrated to find that unless you are working in the tech economy or in an elite city hard work isn’t all that helpful and that if you end up rich and working all the time, you might not find your life all that meaningful.

Accidental meaning doesn’t work anymore

We need new scripts for how we think about work. I’m not sure what this looks like but hard work and full-time work for the average person no longer delivers the goods. While new dreams are being hatched in the promise of the creator economy, the results might be even more polarized than the traditional economy.

Right now you own your own meaning and you’ll need to take steps to make sure that you are actively designing your life. This is the advantage anyone who has taken a break or dabbled with self-employment knows. Everyone is operating in the gig economy carving their own path but the knowledge of this is not widespread. The 2020s will be the decade we stop believing in the work hard and you’ll be taken care of script.

Meaning doesn’t happen by accident anymore. It only happens when we figure out what matters.

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 Accidental Meaning: How The Baby Boomers Misled Us About What Leads To A Happy Life appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

I’m writing this specifically for people that tell me they have a desire to “do their own thing” but don’t have the boldness of Elon Musk.  I write this for normal people like me that have the desire to take a chance on themselves but might be a bit scared or are terrified of going into debt. I write this as a reminder of the many good things the corporate world taught me and that if I had appreciated them and looked for them more actively, I might have been able to bet on myself a bit sooner.

A bit of caution before diving in.  This is not your grandfather’s guide to the working world.  Part of the reason people caution against entering the corporate world is that if you just float through the experience you won’t end up in a good spot.  I’m going to nudge you to take a bit more of an unconventional approach…

#1 Full-time employment enables you to develop skills you might not have the discipline to develop

People often say things to me like “don’t you think you are able to be successful in self-employment because you worked at X?”  To someone that has spent time in the corporate world, it seems as if this is the way things work. You often need certain titles or experience to get access to the next job. But working on your own the only thing that really matters are the underlying skills you learn at those jobs.

In my time in consulting, I spent thousands of hours doing research, conducting interviews, learning how to communicate clearly, and working in teams.  In the moment this often seemed pointless but looking back I’m glad I did a specific kind of work for a long stretch of time. The deliberate practice helped me develop a set of foundational skills that has given me the confidence to experiment in new areas like 1-on-1 coaching, online course creation, podcasts and writing online.

Almost every type of job will offer the opportunity to develop these kinds of foundational skills and it’s easier to find something that is enjoyable to do with a skill you already have than trying to develop a skill around an interest.  This is why finding your passion is misleading.  Once you find it you then need to do the hard work of learning a skill to activate it.

In full-time work, there are endless opportunities to learn new things. You just need to look for it. In a large organization, almost everyone will know about something that you don’t know about. It would be impossible not to have people in your organization that could teach you something about marketing, finance, accounting, communication, managing others, or resolving conflict.  Not to mention broader life skills like parenting, dealing with health challenges, or relationships.  You just need to stay curious and keep asking questions. 

Steph Smith, who is a prime example of someone who gets the best out of the corporate world, talks about this in a similar essay,

Working in my “day job” allows me to continuously learn from people who are smarter than me, and get paid for it. I’m also faced with challenges that I simply wouldn’t encounter with my side projects and I often need to learn how to solve these challenges alongside others.

The key to all of this is to make sure that you are in an environment that has a culture of learning and helping people out. If you aren’t in one of those environments you need to make a change as soon as possible.

#2 Figuring out what you like doing is hard but there are more opportunities in a company than you think

Figuring out what you like doing while also trying to build your own business is hard.  The uncertainty and fear of failure will steer you away from things you might enjoy doing over the long run and towards things that can make money or are in fashion. 

Yet people still advise this route because they have created a false comparison between a dull corporate path and a dynamic entrepreneurial path. There are downsides to both paths but with the right amount of ingenuity, you can use your full-time job as a way to explore all different types of work.

The first step to this is to quickly build trust with your core team.  Find out what kinds of behaviors cause everyone to worry and become good at those things.  Even better if you volunteer to become the go-to person for those tasks.  If you take away someone else’s pain and anxiety you will usually end up with a lot of freedom in how you are able to spend your time at the company.

Next make a list of all the things you might want to learn about and make a list of people who can teach you those things.  Curious about facilitating and public speaking? Get coffee with the training manager.  Ever wonder how marketers think?  Reach out to the marketing director.  To do this, literally just email them and ask.  I have given this advice to many young people and they were always surprised that you could just do this.  But think about it.  People that have been in their job for a long time often don’t have a lot of people who are curious to learn about their path or journey unless they are very senior.  Ask people that are senior enough to control workflow but not too senior that people are constantly asking them for favors already.

Next, if you are still curious and might want to try out some of the work make a small offer of help.  Most people in mid-level roles in organizations have too much work to do and can always use some help, especially if you do it without a need for a lot of direction.  While I was working in consulting, I volunteered to create training materials for the learning manager in my office.  This had nothing to do with my job but I had a passion for mentoring others and wanted to learn more about how her team thought about training.  After helping her do an hour of this busy work on top of my “regular” job, she saw I was serious.  This led to me being asked to join the learning faculty to help facilitate trainings around the globe.  The links between this work and some of the things I do with online learning now would be impossible to dismiss.  I just wish I had sought out more of these opportunities.

In some cases, this strategy can even lead to you discovering a job you want to be doing and the desire of doing you “own thing” might fade away.  This is the story of many of the people in full-time jobs that enjoy their lives.  They created their own path.  Its worth finding out if this might work for you too.

#3 You can get a good understanding of how things happen in modern institutions, including how power works

Young people seem to be a bit more clear-eyed than my generation was graduating in the mid-2000s. I naively thought that in a big organization, most people were focused on doing good work and wanted the best for each other.  On the surface, this seems true but as I spent more time in multiple organizations I started to realize that who succeeds in a company is often just as much tied to results as it is political abilities and an understanding of power.  I am terrible at those games but when I became aware that there were different games than just being good I became a bit less frustrated with what was happening around me.

In addition to understanding power, organizations are a great way of understanding how the world works or doesn’t.  People who have been watching the bungled pandemic responses of many countries are often outraged and react with their version of how things “should be.”  It’s great to have ideals and a vision but even better to pair that with an understanding of how things fail, why four-week projects can take years, and how incentives can create all sorts of unintended consequences.  

The key is to observe all of this with a healthy detachment.  This is easier said than done.  Many people end up distraught by unfairness and other shenanigans in the workplace.  Observe the dynamics and learn why people are doing what they are doing but don’t make it your own purpose.  As I’ve written before, learn the game, don’t become the game.

Another situation worth experiencing but escaping as fast as you can is working with a bad manager.  Use this for inspiration for what you hope to avoid.  Think about the incentives at play and try to understand why this person might behave a certain way (there often aren’t that many incentives for people to be better managers) and then make sure you don’t fall into the same traps when you have your own team.

It’s popular in the corporate world for senior people to praise these experiences as something worth seeking out.  “Everyone should find a job for two years where you can really struggle.”  This is terrible advice and has more to do with this leader’s own confirmation bias than a deep truth about the paths people should take.  Learn from it.  Try to understand it.  But get out of it as fast as possible.

#4 There are a lot of people that live fulfilling lives and have full-time jobs. You might be one of them.

There are many people that are living fulfilling lives and have full-time jobs.  It may be a surprise to some people but many of these people don’t have a secret monetizable side gig nor a dream to start one.  These people typically have a range of activities at work and out of work that bring them meaning.  They may spend some of their day job mentoring people or even acting as someone that others can vent to.  They may focus on things outside of work like spending time with their family, learning things for fun, volunteering in their community, or on a hobby once a week.

One of the best things I did throughout my career (though I wish I did more) was to go up to people that seemed to be thriving.  These are the people that everyone loves working with and that people admire.  They stand out from the others with a certain “aliveness” that is hard to deny. They may not be the actual leaders of your company.  In fact, they may be some of the lowest level people at the company.

Go talk to these people.  Tell them that you admire their positive energy and ask them where it comes from.  Without fail, there is always an interesting story.  These people always have an experience that changed their life, a mentor that helped them approach life with a new perspective or a deeper purpose that drives them in their life.  Try to spend time with these people.  Ask them for book recommendations.  Keep asking questions about their story and surround yourself with these people.  

They are the role models you need no matter which path you take.

#5 Building a life off the default path takes time.  Stable paychecks enable you to build savings so you can buy more time to figure it out

One of the biggest traps of entrepreneurship or self-employment is mistaking the whole purpose of the journey for making money.  Money can be a good motivator but when you are pursuing something on your own you need a lot more motivation than if you were doing the work as a job.  Most people want to do things that they actually like doing. Sometimes it takes entrepreneurs decades of work and eventual burnout to figure this out.  Having some savings from the corporate world can help you experiment for a couple of years without the pressure of needing to make money as soon as possible.

This is the path Kyle Kowalski took as he explored uncertainty and meaning through his writing after leaving the corporate world in 2018. He is grateful that he was able to build some “runway” that has enabled him to explore without the immediate pressure to monetize:

There is no question in my mind that I would not be doing what I’m doing right now if I hadn’t worked in the corporate world for a decade. Saving some money from that time is also buying me “solopreneurial runway” for a few years.

I always tried to be frugal no matter how much I made.  Perhaps this was me knowing deep down that I wanted the option to walk away down the road.  I’m glad I saved a lot of money and invested aggressively in all my jobs.  Many people suggest investing 5-10% of your income in your 401k.  I did 20-30% every year.  I used this as a way to artificially lower my salary so that I could learn to live on less.  

When I did quit my job I was able to commit to at least a year of self-employment because of the savings I had.   This enabled me to experiment with a variety of different types of work not to mention extended breaks of non work.  It sounds crazy but if I spent all my money and only wandered around for a year and read a bunch of books I still would have considered it a success.  To me there is more to life than work.

I’m always grateful for the money I was able to save in the corporate world because I’ve been able to take a slower and more interesting path than if I had to focus on making a lot of money immediately.  Some people think of it as “losing” their savings but I re-frame it as a gift from my past corporate self telling me, “go explore and see where you end up Paul!”

#6 A lot of jobs are not that hard and you can stay energized by limiting the amount of hours you work

There is a famous study run at a consulting firm that looked at the link between hours and promotions.  There were three groups. Those who worked the most, those who negotiated fewer hours, and a third group of people who worked less but never told anyone.

Who got promoted the most?  Predictably the first group but also at similar rates were the people that worked a lot less and didn’t raise attention to this fact.  The moral of this story?  Don’t ever accept that “this is the way things have to be.”  Many in the corporate world are good at conforming and look around for cues for what they are supposed to do.  Instead, you should always start with the question, “what is possible?”

This question drove Diania Merriam to negotiate a two month leave of absence to go on a pilgrimage across Spain instead of a pay raise.  She was a bit scared to ask but surprised when her boss said yes right away.  In 2020, many companies have finally woken up and even formerly stuffy companies like Citigroup are offering 4-weeks paid to work with a non-profit and 3-month sabbaticals after five years.

Working shorter workweeks are also much more possible than people realize, even at some of the most hard-working companies.  I spent long stretches at companies like McKinsey, BCG, and GE working 35-40 hours a week while still doing great work and not dropping the ball.  I was just obsessive about doing the things that mattered and doing them well.

Corporate norms can also drive perverse incentives such as keeping people glued to a desk surfing the web rather than reading a book they might be interested in.  You can make the case that many books will help you at work so never be afraid to pull out a book and read at your desk.  If anyone asks why you’re reading a book just respond, “aren’t we here to learn?”  In my final full-time job, I used to block off a private “freedom hour” meeting each morning to spend on writing before I started my “real” work.

The lesson? Don’t create prisons for yourself that may not exist. Look for ways to do the things you want to be doing. It may be easier than you think.

The Bottom Line: Defend Your Energy & Cultivate Possibility

Blindly following the norms of the corporate world and working long hours every week on something that you’re not excited about is one of the fastest ways to destroy your energy, numb your imagination, and convince yourself that you can not do anything other than stay in your current job or path. 

This is why some people advise against this path. However, with a little creativity on your part, I believe that you can get a lot of good out of your time in the corporate world. 

The key is making sure you stay focused on the right things.

The most useful metric I’ve found is not your title, your career progress, or compensation.  It’s your energy.  Defend your energy at all costs.  It’s good practice to have some regular reflection in which you can assess you energized you are about life.  I recommend setting a calendar reminder once a month and tracking it over time.  If it starts dropping it’s time to change things up.  It’s the only way you will be able to keep experimenting and staying open to the possibilities of life.

It may be hard to believe but the biggest barrier to carving a path that works for you is not access to opportunity or money, but your own imagination for what’s possible.

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 Don’t Follow Your Passion, Work In The Corporate World First appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

Modern work critics blame Frederick Taylor for the hyper-optimization of the modern workplace. The accepted narrative is that Taylor kicked off a movement that looked at work as something that could be optimized and managed and that his efforts kick-started a 100+ year movement of steadily increasing optimization.

Sounds good but its not true. Today’s hyper-optimized workplace would not exist except for the emergence of a new kind of worker: the career-driven knowledge worker.

Taylor was mostly concerned with the manufacturing world and he believed that an embrace of his principles would help not only managers, but production workers:

“The principal object of management should be to secure the maximum prosperity for the employer, coupled with the maximum prosperity for each employee.

Frederick Taylor, Principles of Scientific Management, 1911

He wrote in a time in which the kind of service and knowledge work that is common today barely existed. While his techniques did gain popularity in manufacturing, it would take another 30 to 40 years for analytical and measurement techniques to gain widespread adoption.

It took the emergence of a new kind of work.

The Career Path & The Need To Perform

After world-war II as the US repurposed its military workforce there was a boom in employment in the business world and for the first time. the goal of working for a big corporation became a common goal.

William Whyte famously called them “Organization Men” and wrote more than 400 pages making sense of this new type of worker that started to identify with a company above any other affiliation in their life:

The ones I am talking about belong to it as well. They are the ones of our middle class who have left home, spiritually as well as physically, to take the vows of organization life, and it is they who are the mind and soul of our great self-perpetuating institutions.

William Whyte, The Organization Man, 1956

This was a dramatic shift from the age-old conflict between labor and the owners of capital. Once that had existed from the earliest days of capitalism.

While the manufacturing workers of Taylor’s time had a strong “class consciousness,” these “white collar” workers in the 1950s were not sure who they were:

White-collar workers rarely knew where they were, whom they should identify with. It was an enduring dilemma, rooted in what might be called a class unconsciousness, that would characterize the world of the office worker until the present day.

– Cubed, A Secret History of the Workplace

Despite attempts throughout the 20th century for labor movements to include these workers, knowledge workers distanced themselves from organized blue-collar workers.  Instead of labor unions, they formed “associations” and increasingly saw themselves as aspiring business people who might one day become business owners.

Taylor wanted to close the divide between labor and capital. These workers had no interest in seeing that divide in the first place.

The knowledge worker was focused on managing a career, developing skills and acquiring achievements or as Merriam-Webster now defines it, “pursuit of consecutive progressive achievement.”

People saw themselves not as a part of an organization but as someone with a first-person account of achievements and contributions and over time, that narrative was something that could be (and eventually, needed to be) carried from employer to employer. 

And as the job morphed into a career, the worker shifted from someone merely doing their job to someone that needed to perform. 

Continuous Improvement & The “Theatre Of Work”

Before the 1960’s the idea of a “career path” was not a thing. Workers hoped to merely keep their jobs. Early uses of the term seem to have been aimed at two audiences: men joining the military and women joining the workforce.

Over time, the idea of a promising career path was connected to the end of a college education and over the 2nd half of the 20th century, it would become common knowledge that the whole point of going to college was to land a good job.

Whyte, writing in The Organization Man writes, “The union between the world of organization and the college has been so cemented that today’s seniors can see a continuity between the college and the life thereafter that we never did”

The idea that a young person was to orient around a good career became increasingly popular. It was not until the 1980s, however, that the analytical tools became central to such a career. This is when new “schools” of business thinking like Total Quality Management, Six Sigma and Lean entered the scene. 

These programs gave the career-driven person language and initiatives to “proof” they needed and guaranteed that career success and analytical measurement of that success would become inseparable.

Every aspirational leader attached their careers to these programs in the 1980’s, most notably Jack Welch.  In 1989, he gave an interview in which he detailed GE’s newly launched “work out” program:

We want 300,000 people with different career objectives, different family aspirations, different financial goals, to share directly in this company’s vision, the information, the decision-making process, and the rewards

For someone at GE, it was very clear that you would need to get involved in one of these programs if you hoped to progress at the company. By the end of the 1990’s every large company had similar programs and employees had figured out that to get ahead you needed to document your progress.

In today’s working world, the reality of work is that good work does not pay off. You also need to share that success in something consultant Tom Critchlow calls this the “theatre of work”:

Many people aspire to “silent success” at work – to do work that “speaks for itself”. Unfortunately this is the wrong move in the theatre of work. Instead we should aspire to the opposite – for knowledge work, the performance of the work is the work.

Continuous Improvement programs helped complete the shift of work into a performance and kept workers in a non-stop search for problems that need to be fixed.

A New Kind of Worker

The point of all of this is not really to decide whether or not Frederick Taylor is to blame for our hyper-analytical workplace.

It is to make you aware that a unique set of circumstances emerged in the second half of the 20th century that birthed a new type of worker: the knowledge worker.

Despite knowledge work still only being half of the workforce (estimates vary), these workers have a dominant hold on our current myths and stories about what it means to work and what is means to be a human in the modern age.

Consider the changes in our mindsets that resulted from this new type of worker:

• The point of college is to get a job
• One should always be growing and improving at work
• Finding deeper meaning and belonging at work is vital
• The most important battles of freedom are for increased labor right
• Doing good work is not enough, you also need to self-promote

There are many subtle shifts that have emerged in the last 50-70 years but what makes them remarkable is that we all seem to accept that this is the way things have always been. Modern criticism of capitalism often miss this point. They don’t realize that work and a career was not always so central to our existence. It is only when work is the center that blowing everything up seems logical.

The emergence of knowledge work and the wealth that is has enabled many to generate across the world has been a huge positive in terms of freeing many people from having to worry about putting food on the table each week.

Yet the shift in consciousness that arose around the emergence of this new kind of work has led us into many traps. We look for belonging and meaning at work but never seem to grasp it. We crave the deeper truths of life but our schools only teach practical skills to get you hired. We fight for freedom for more people to work but find ourselves lacking the deeper things that give our lives meaning like connection, community and relationships.

I don’t have a utopian vision of what new work beliefs should look like but I can sense that they are starting to emerge. The majority of knowledge workers around the world are now working from their homes. They are finding that our scripts about the role work is supposed to play in our lives are outdated but they don’t have a better answer.

Whyte was a keen observer of the dark side of this new side of work when he was writing in the 1950s. He saw that the draw of aligning oneself with an organization and a certain kind of work was appealing

In a world changing so fast, in a world in which he must forever be on the move, the individual desperately needs roots, and The Organization is a logical place to develop them.

We still need those roots but after 65 years its time to realize that work is not going to deliver them.

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 Knowledge Worker Mind & The Birth Of Careerism appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

However, in this article, Thompson still seems stuck in a systemic view of work and the symptoms of that system. By doing this, he fails to address the fundamental question of how to build a life around work. Perhaps his inability to get there comes from his own internal struggle:

This is the right time for a confession. I am the very thing that I am criticizing.

As someone who has spent the last two years of my life trying to solve this seemingly impossible puzzle and writing about it through the eyes of others, I know there are many ways to “hack a living” as the practical philosopher Andrew Taggart would put it.  Taggart has written one of the most powerful assessments of this crisis in his book “The Good Life and Sustaining Life: An Inquiry Into Our Great Vexation” where I believe he correctly frames the challenge:

There may be no greater vexation in our time than the question of how to make a living in a manner that accords with leading a good life.

As he identifies in his inquiry, “One cannot deny that the question of the good life must come before that of sustaining life.”

This is Aristotle’s good life, not the Kardashian good life.  

If we look at Thompson’s essay through this lens we start to see the problem. Many of the workers he details have the Kardashian good life, or at least the modern professional equivalent. They have solved many of the problems of sustaining life and but lack their own deeper definition of the Aristotelian good life.  It is choosing pour over coffee and luxurious vacations rather than the ability to do whatever you want on a Tuesday.

Anne Helen Peters actually gets closer to a possible question towards the end of her “Millennial Burnout” essay, which Thompson references, but never takes us any further.

It’s a way of thinking about life, and what joy and meaning we can derive not just from optimizing it, but living it. Which is another way of saying: It’s life’s actual work.

Thompson and Petersen’s articles were shared like crazy, but they never offered any ideas about what to do next.  

Our social media environment incentivizes this. It’s much safer to share something that shows vulnerability and gets a “me too!” reaction than something that might challenge the status quo.

I’ve read articles slamming co-living communities for being utopian, privileged, escapist and out of touch paradises. So last year when I went to visit one of these communities, I was shocked to find people from all over the world who were craving (and achieving) a deeper connection to others and aspiring to build a life-less centered around work.

This attitude of “well what the hell can we do?” most powerfully came through in a recent New York Times “work sucks” piece appropriately titled “America’s Professional Elite: Wealthy, Successful and Miserable” which shares stories of people making gobs of money, but left utterly miserable. Even people who see a potential short-term solution seem utterly unwilling to do anything about it:

“I feel like I’m wasting my life,” he told me. “When I die, is anyone going to care that I earned an extra percentage point of return? My work feels totally meaningless.” He recognized the incredible privilege of his pay and status, but his anguish seemed genuine. “If you spend 12 hours a day doing work you hate, at some point it doesn’t matter what your paycheck says,” he told me. There’s no magic salary at which a bad job becomes good. He had received an offer at a start-up, and he would have loved to take it, but it paid half as much, and he felt locked into a lifestyle that made this pay cut impossible. “My wife laughed when I told her about it,” he said.

Symptoms and stories but no deeper questions.

Based on the number of people that forwarded me these articles, they are still worthwhile.  They are hitting a nerve. The pain is real and people are not sure what to do.

However, they are missing the countless people across the world (and from all countries) who are reinventing their lives and living in new ways. I’d love to see more articles exploring and highlighting two things:

1. Stories of the countless people who are experimenting with new ways of living
2. What it takes to actually transform and reinvent yourself throughout different life stages

What can we learn from people that have carved their own paths?

Over the past two years, I’ve highlighted the stories of many unconventional humans:

• Jen Morilla traveled the world until she figured out a new career for herself;  
• Lydia Lee relocating to Bali to live a more balanced life;
• Jacqueline Jensen took a sabbatical to figure out if work should, in fact, be the center of her life;
• Candace Moore accidentally building a business by generously making yoga YouTube videos to help people across the globe;
• Chris Donohoe built his own consulting firm around a 40-day workweek and bringing his full self to the world every day;
• Andrew Taggart helping entrepreneurs with the “good life question” and operating in the gift economy;
• Laura Gallaher joining Remote Year with her co-worker and employee to shift her business from an in-person one to a digital one
• Ervin Ling quitting his job at 30 to work 15 hours a week as an English teacher;
• Bryan Victor skipped the traditional path of the university in Singapore to learn through life experiments.
• Khe Hy leaving Wall Street to be a sensemaker for the miserable elite
• Christine Bader “learning to quit” rather than missing out on seeing her children grow up because of work

Experimentation is not limited to personal transformation either.  Wade Foster finds that defaulting to a remote team at Zapier has helped his team live better lives.  Tash Walker thought “flextime” was BS and implemented a real 4-day workweek for her firm in London without compromising profits. Tyler Tringas investing in founders who want to build “calm companies.”

At the center of these stories is an uncomfortable truth.  One has to leave the traditional full-time paradigm to build a more reasonable life that makes sense.  

It’s just hard to dodge the judgment and guilt that comes from “stepping back” in the traditional full-time work context. This is why so many of these people I’ve talked to have left and carved their own paths.

If you’re willing to compromise on traditional metrics of success in the short term, you mine as well do it on your own terms.

How Does Change Actually Happen?

Stories of reinvention are great, but they are not sufficient. Most people can find enough difference with another person to explain away that person’s success. “Oh they could do that because they worked at X” or “sure they probably had a ton of savings.” The reason people do this is not because they don’t think they are capable, but because change is not fun and its quite hard. I think this is why it is important to demystify the process a bit. Here are three “steps” I have seen in many people’s journeys:

STEP 1 – A Crisis?: For many, there is a crisis or major life event.  This can be a health issue, a loss of a loved one, a job loss or even a positive event like getting married, having a baby or moving to a new city.

For me, dealing with a health crisis in my late twenties and taking several months leave from work forced me to come face to face the fact that I was too deeply tied to my identity as a “successful” worker.

Yet these crises rarely lead directly to a dramatic leap despite our belief in that narrative. A crisis often shatters our beliefs and then gradually as we start to pick up the pieces, the possibility of change appears as a result of profound conversations, books or other life events that linger in the brain until the person is ready to start taking action.

For Lydia Lee, she found herself literally and figuratively burned out in a Russian hotel room, but did not start to imagine a different way of life until she had a profound conversation on a boat visiting her home country of Malaysia with a German who was running a business remotely.  This piqued her interest and planted the seeds for her to start to think about her work and life in a new way.  When she returned to Canada, she re-visited Tim Ferriss’ 4-Hour Work Week with new eyes and started to apply some of the lessons to how she might work with more freedom.

STEP 2 – Friends: The next thing that seems to matter is that you need at least one or two friends that will support the new way of being.  This appears to help people get “permission” to move forward and have someone to confide in when they are uncomfortable or find themselves a bit lost. These people are typically friends or family that have lived life in an “unusual” way and see some value in experimenting or compromising on short term success.

Candace Moore, who now is an author and yoga entrepreneur, she has support and inspiration from her mother, who was always a natural entrepreneur starting businesses in her home and adapting to her circumstances. Tony Triumph didn’t realize his family was any different until later in life, but reflected that he grew up around people that were always working in different ways to make a living.

One thing I have my coaching clients do is find someone online they can have a “path perspective” conversation with. Whatever you feel pulled towards, there is probably doing something like that already. I have them send a short note asking for advice and see if they’d be willing to offer 15-30 minutes of their time to share insights on what to avoid, what to think about and how to be prepared. People are often surprised at how willing people are to help others that want to follow in their footsteps.

STEP 3 – ASPIRE: Finally, the person needs to have a long-term vision of who they want to become.

People often arrive at this point after first questioning something they have taken for granted, like how they think about “success” and have it be a gateway to a deeper contemplation of who they really might want to be.

Then it comes down to actually shifting energy towards those new possibilities. As much as life hacks and “how-to” guides would want us to believe that change is a straight line and can be planned, the philosopher Agnes Callard gives us a different model. She believes that when we aspire to be a different person, we often have a hard time explaining our motives.

This is often the case in people I talk to. They may not have a clear vision of a future self, but they are open to experimenting in new ways. Callard might say that these people have a vague sense of “something better” in the future but have trouble articulating it. Instead, transformation is a process of “trying on values”

we “aspire” to self-transformation by trying on the values that we hope one day to possess

This is also why from the outside it is so hard to differentiate the money-driven entrepreneur from the self-employed person trying to hack a life. The people I know who are most fulfilled carving a different path are also the ones that have no idea how to explain what they are doing to anyone.

But deep down, they have a pull towards a journey or a life that tells they, “yes this is the right way.”

The “Work Sucks” Perspective Is Still Valuable

A close friend e-mailed me Thompson’s article and said “this is me.” He probably sent it to me because we’ve talked countless times over the past few years about this persons predicament. We walso talked about his unwillingness to do anything about it.

Thompson has added tremendous depth to the discussion around work. He has been ahead of the curve in questioning why we are working so much despite becoming so much more productive in his amazing essay A World Without Work. 

However, I’d love to see the Atlantic, Buzzfeed, New York Times and others do a better job of highlighting the stories of amazing people globally already starting the hard work of reinventing themselves and looking beyond the traditional path that works remarkably well for some, but leaves many hoping for a deeper connection to life.

Want to take action? Paul is launching Reimagine Work a digital online learning x coaching x experiment that will deliver activities, community and connection to people that want to carve a new path. Explore now.

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 Beyond Work Sucks: What To Actually Do If You Are Miserable appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

Romy is an employee engagement consultant turned coach. She built her career consulting for and working in Fortune 100 companies on all challenges employee-related. Her mission is to drive meaningful and behavior-based change for mid-level leaders that helps them operate in a more productive and human way in the workplace. There are a lot of coaches out there, but what makes Romy stand out is that she has a lot of experience working with senior executives in her consulting career and she has deeply studied what works and what doesn’t. Hear more in our conversation…

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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

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The post Boundless Podcast: Romy Rost on leadership, freelancing & coaching as a skill (Episode 13) appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

Ben is the founder and COO of Omelas, a startup that is focused on using technology to fight propaganda. Ben’s journey, however, does not start there. His journey is a classic case of “do not try this at home” – as we walk through Ben’s story, I found myself impressed at the number of rejections and roadblocks he faced. Early in his career, he thought he landed his dream job, at the State Department, only to have the offer reneged. This led him to put his passion (which was diplomacy), to the side, while he pursued a “practical” career. A job from Google appeared just at the last minute, where he found himself in a role to help redirect terrorist search results. This helped re-awaken something he was passionate about and led to the founding of his current company.

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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 Boundless Podcast: Ben Dubow On State Department Rejection To Propaganda-Fighting Startup Founder (Episode 10) appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

She was probably right. I quit my first job at the gas station because I kept missing Patriots games. This was 2001. Looking back, it looks like a great decision — it was the start of the Brady-Belichick dynasty. But I was just being selfish.

However, that word — ambition — stuck with me. I knew deep down how much I was capable of and wanted to prove her wrong.

But I now realize the kind of ambition that drove me was not what my mother was talking about. She was talking about responsibility and ownership.

I was more worried about the kind of ambition that is seen as the path to success in today’s world — climbing the ladder, working at good companies, getting paid well.

In college, I spent a lot of time crafting myself to fit the mold of what I thought these companies wanted. At first, I wasn’t great at it, but I got better and better.

I was able to land jobs at top companies and then use those positions to land even better jobs. I was then accepted to one of the top grad schools in the country.

My resume made it look like I was crushing it, I was winning a game I like to call prestige bingo. But winning prestige bingo has nothing to do with doing what matters to you and deep down, I couldn’t shake that fact.

Losing It All

When I finished grad school I was on top of the world. I had earned two masters degrees from one of the top universities in the world.

Several months later I was waking up every day after 10 hours of sleep completely exhausted — I was muddling through each day. I spend my time trying to make it through work and the rest trying to figure out what was wrong with me. This was not how I envisioned my post business school career!

I eventually was diagnosed with a bad case of Lyme disease and began the road to recovery. As anyone who has dealt with health issues knows — there is a constant sense of uncertainty and I struggled to process it all. A supportive boss at work encouraged me to take a leave of absence just to get my head straight.

Without work I sat home for hours a day, focusing on my recovery. But I also experienced an overwhelming sense of loss. Not only the loss of my health but the loss of my career. I came to realize that my identity was tied up in my job, my career and my resume. Not only that, I realized that as my savings dwindled and my grad school loans still loomed, I was pretty much broke.

Yet, I had started to realize I had been deluding myself about what really matters. I didn’t have much money, but I had family that cared about me and cared more that I showed up rather than where I worked. I had achieved some modicum of career success but really hadn’t done much on my own. I was still scared to put my ideas into the world.

Deep down, I knew that the default formula of success was not going to work for me, but also started to realize that failure as we conceive it in the business world is mostly an illusion. Failure is impossible if you have your health, relationships and freedom to do things that matter.

The default path comes with certain assumptions — These are the jobs you should strive for, the promotions you should get, this is the salary you should expect, you should always try to do more!

The reality is, you can carve your own path. It just takes a bit of work. Over the next few years, I started to test out this belief, not without learning a few lessons along the way.

Crafting a new story

I continued to gain strength over several months and felt a renewed sense of energy. I may have had less energy than everyone else but my brain was moving a mile a minute.

I started to look around at some of my high-performing colleagues and ask are they truly happy? Is everyone just pretending? I asked myself — is there a better way? Is there a way to build a life instead of a career?

I started simple. I made a list of my priorities.

Number one was health. I had known what it felt like to lose my health and didn’t want to compromise on it ever again. My next inclination was to list career but then had the crazy idea that maybe my career should be last. I finished my list: second was relationships, third was fun & creativity and fourth was career. I still have a calendar alert that pops on my phone each morning with these priorities.

I use this simple list to make decisions. For example, I have said no to any type of job or opportunity that is going to force me to compromise my health. No amount of money is worth it. Second, I will never let work interfere with my relationships. I don’t cancel on the important people in my life.

This list makes people uncomfortable.

Shouldn’t you work as hard as possible early in your career? Isn’t that the path to success?

What if we already know a better way to define success?

In the 1970s, Edward Deci and Richard Ryan came up with what they called self-determination theory. They found three elements that helped maximize intrinsic motivation or doing work for its own sake. Those three elements are competence, relatedness, and autonomy.

The theory also helped explain why I felt so lost when I became sick. I was basing my success on a number of extrinsic rewards — the jobs, schools, degrees, prestige, and pay associated with my early career and when I had to leave my job — I had nothing deep down driving me. Deci and Ryan found that these types of rewards often backfire and undermine intrinsic motivation.

While recovering, I spent a lot of time reflecting on what was energizing me. I realized that I spent a lot of time mentoring people to make career changes and helping them make sense of the working world. I love helping people. I also would get so frustrated when people felt “stuck” in companies that treated them poorly. I realized a second big motivator for me was making the working world a better place. I started sharing this with people, saying yes to any opportunities that would enable me to learn more and taking some risks through a couple of side hustles.

Over the next three years, I pursued a number of experiments. Many freelancers tell me it often starts like this — years before they make a formal “leap.” My first side hustle was a career coaching business, after a career coach I met challenged me to put my dream into the world.

Taking this first step was terrifying, but it also taught me a vital lesson about the future of work. By stepping into uncertainty, creating new challenges and taking responsibility, you will naturally push yourself to learn and develop new skills at a rapid pace.

My second experiment was a group coaching event to help people tell their stories and try to find more meaning in their careers. The big lesson for me was realizing how much fun I had creating the content and tools and doing deep research on the topics I was most passionate about.

Over the next couple of years, I kept sharing my passion and looking for opportunities to build my skills. I volunteered to give a 45-minute talk on careers at my alma mater, I gave my first paid speech about careers in consulting and gave another speech at PwC as part of their coaching program for young professionals.

All of these experiments scared the crap out of me, but they were also exhilarating. It was the challenge and rapid skill-building that I wasn’t finding in the corporate world. Pieces of all these experiments have informed what I am currently focused on now — helping people navigate the future of work. Luckily as a freelancer, my life is now one experiment after another.

As I put my energy into the world — reading, writing and taking action (competence) I became more confident. As I connected with others with a shared mission, I felt part of something bigger (relatedness). As I started working on work I was excited by, I came alive (autonomy).

Deci and Ryan were geniuses.

Popping The Delusion

My eyes were on the verge of tears. I felt ashamed. I was sitting in my manager’s office and I knew what was coming. I had reflected on my own performance over the last six months and knew that while my work was great, I wasn’t being my best self at work. I was frustrated and wasn’t even close to being the positive influence on my peers I aspired to be.

Although I had started to tap into something deeper — something more aligned with my intrinsic motivation, that was happening mostly outside the confines of my day-to-day job.

My re-assessment of values and priorities was helping me figure out what mattered, but they left me an increasingly bad fit for the corporate world. When I talked about things that excited me — I found very few others that shared the same interests. When I came up with new ideas or experiments, I was told I was naive or that I needed to learn how things worked.

It wasn’t anyone’s fault…I was still trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.

Around the same time, I had also been trying to position myself for a raise or promotion. I kept getting the responses “you need to be patient” or “you should be happy with what you have.” I was pissed. I was doing great work.

I’m also thankful that I didn’t get that raise or promotion. 

If I had gotten either, I would have been in a worse position. Deeper into a system that did not align with my values of how I wanted to live, create, or work. There was no one to blame. The onus was on me to carve my own path and create the conditions where I could thrive.

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 change is taking place, he is gradually lulled into unconsciousness.

(William Reilly, from Brain Pickings)

“What does a good life cost?”

There is no right way to leave full-time employment. While some people have ways to earn money before becoming a freelancer, it is mostly a leap of faith. After talking to my employer about my plan, I was able to negotiate a three month transition period.

During this time, I did all of the technical things required to start a company (detailed here). In talking to several people who were full-time freelancers, the most important thing seemed to be commitment. This part was easy for me. I had no intention of returning to the corporate world if I could help it.

…but what about rent?

The most popular question I got when I told people about my plan was “what about rent?” or “aren’t you worried you won’t make money?”

My conclusion: people worry about money a lot.

My second conclusion — A full-time paycheck warps our thinking. It makes us think that money is supposed to come in at regular periods. For most of history, this was not the norm.

There are many good things people get from employers. However, it is often at the cost of doing the work we want to do. We look at someone with a job that they hate and say “good job.” But at what cost?

What I realized was that happiness really has nothing to do with the stuff we have. We buy things because that is what everyone else is doing. We stop buying “two buck chuck” from Trader Joe’s not because we dislike it but because that’s not what you are supposed to do past a certain age. When we make decisions like this for more expensive things like our apartment, clothes, and other possessions, it means we become trapped in a job we hate.

So as I started looking at my finances as a freelancer, I realized I wanted to question everything. I started with the question “what does a good life cost?”

I reflected back to early in my career when I was barely saving a couple of thousand dollars a year. I loved my life! I still loved my life, but the lifestyle creep was real! It was the same happiness for a higher cost.

So I sat down with a spreadsheet challenged myself to answer that question. I was able to lower my cost of living $20,000 a year by making some simple changes and moving cities. All that meant was more time to commit to freelancing, more time to make mistakes and more time to learn.

Stumbling into a future of work mindset

The second chapter of my career started five years before I quit my job and had nothing to do with work. It started with me becoming progressively sick over six months and then a year-long battle to regain my health.

In that time I was forced to question everything I believed and was forced to look at the world, my life, and my career with a different lens.

This was the start of a personal “awakening” that pushed me into high gear to discover a different path. It took four years from the health crisis I faced until I took the leap to become self-employed, but what I learned along the way was priceless.

In the near future, I believe many of us will face this type of transformation — forced into the “future of work” without a path to follow. It is up to you whether you want to start planning for it today or have it take you by surprise. The quicker you face that challenge, the better you will be prepared for the future

I was lucky that my health crisis forced me to discover a mindset shift that has enabled me to better navigate the massive shifts happening in today’s economy. While I am excited, most people I talk to are stressed, anxious and are terrified at the idea of making a change.

We blame companies, bad managers, and even ourselves for our misery. At the macro level, we distract ourselves with stories of how robots will replace our jobs or how politicians limit our ability to succeed. This tells us more about how scared and unprepared we are for the future than the reality that there is more opportunity than ever.

I was never a great fit for the corporate world. The corporate world still defaults to rewarding people who prioritize money, status and power — to the benefit of few and increasing disillusionment of many. Going through the process of identifying my priorities and questioning what success meant helped me make decisions and focus my time on building towards a more sustainable future for my career and life.

Ten years into my career, I had no choice but to take the leap.

The future we are shifting to will be closer to what the firm Vega Factor has uncovered — that when people are at their best work feels like play, it has purpose, and helps you realize your potential. It will likely also lead to an awakening about how we are meant to live, spend our time and support each other.

I am excited about the future. By many lucky coincidences, I ended up working at the types of companies and having the types of experiences that gave me both the confidence and skills to be able to compete in this new economy.

My mission now is to put those skills to use to help others unlock their creativity and curiosity to do things that matter to them.

I aspire to help build the world that Ralph Waldo Emerson talks about when he said:

The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.

So instead of asking someone “what do you do?” let’s ask each other “what are you meant to be doing?”

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 awakening: How I learned to harness my creativity, build the courage to quit my job, and start a new chapter of my life appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

I spend a lot of time mentoring and coaching college students. I was having a conversation with a student a couple months ago and he asked me “people that take this job don’t typically do X after, will this limit my options?”

I get some version of this question a lot and have come to realize that there is a deep seated “default path fallacy” that is holding back enormous amounts of human potential.

This only gets worse as people progress through their career. As they take multiple roles in a field — lets say accounting — they start to define themselves as that role regardless if they enjoy it or not.

They start to think about future career options in a very limited way: “I’m a senior accountant now and next I can look for jobs as a lead accountant”

I’ve talked to many of these accountants and many of them hate their jobs. They sit there and wait for recruiters to call with that next “step” in their career.

They are doing what others expect.

The onus does not solely fall on the individual. The default path fallacy is even deeper ingrained in recruiter’s minds. Assessing talent is hard. Consider the fact that only 21% of company performance (at most!) can be attributed to anythign the CEO has actually done. In lieu of trying to figure out if someone is a fit for a role, recruiters rely on simple patterns and heuristics. So when they recruit for a lead accountant, they narrow their search to only senior accountants.

With this behavior, the default path fallacy become a vicious cycle that only strengthens over time.

Part of the answer is having robust training and development — something I have seen many companies neglect. With a high quality training program, you can recruit a wider variety of people. How do you think McKinsey gets away with hiring doctors, accountants, art history majors and PhDs? They have done a good job of breaking the default path cycle, but more companies need to do more — we need more people in the jobs that get the best out of them.

The other part of the answer is to have people take a deeper look at who they are. What are you good at? What excites you? What holds you back from pursuing roles or jobs outside of your field?

Without people questioning conventional wisdom companies are going to keep hiring the same people on the same default paths.

Dream bigger!

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

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The post Beware of the Default Path appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

common question I hear is, “Should I go to Business School?” My answer is always the same, half cynical and half serious:

“You should go to business school if you want to go to business school”

Simple, but I really do believe this. Advice from other people can be valuable, but most people tend to tell you to do what they did. If you’re confident that business school is the next step for you, you will always have that thought lingering in the back of your mind. Go do it!

There are two questions I ask everyone who solicits my advice:

1. “What do you want to do after business school?”

2. “Why don’t you do that now?”

Even if you know what you want to do, there are still a number of benefits of going to business school (which I will get to). I was always impressed by my classmates who knew exactly what they wanted to do — they were able to take advantage of every resource, connection, class, and project to help them build their skills.

For people that are less sure, like I was, business school can be a confusing place. Many prestigious jobs instantly become more attainable. For those that have been crushing it in their life, it is incredibly hard to not pursue those paths, whether it is working at Google, McKinsey, Goldman, or the hottest startup.

I’ve been having a lot of conversations with classmates three years after graduation who are all facing the same issue: they are in a great job, but something is missing. I have a friend at Google who loved his job, but when a few things changed — a new manager and position, he realized he didn’t care where he worked — he just wanted to work on a great team.

That same friend recognizes now that business school may have delayed him coming to this realization. All the things that made the two year experience exceptional (exposure to diverse perspective and time to reflect) also made career planning more confusing.

Business school is an option multiplying machine. Of course, this is one thing I found attractive — it expands your pool of opportunities. Since I didn’t have a clear understanding of what I wanted to do when entering business school, expanding my options seemed like the best idea.

But expanding my options did not solve the age old question of “What do I want to do?”

My one caveat about business school is always:

Business school will not help you decide what you want to be when you grow up

You may figure it out during the two years of conversations, classes, and projects but I don’t think business school is well suited to answer this question — and it shouldn’t be! The burden is on you.

Like me, a lot of people go to business school because they want to go to business school — and I think that is fine! So for these people, I offer what I consider the six best things about going to business school:

1. The life-long friends: A lot of people talk about “the network.” This is definitely real. My classmates are doing incredible things in their career and every one of them will pick up the phone to have a conversation or help me in my career. That support system is invaluable. However, the real power comes from the friends you make from spending 12 hours a day together, struggling through the same assignments or choreographing a dance for an upcoming cultural event. I will guarantee that you leave school with at least one or two life-long friends. These are people that will be in your wedding party, take vacations with you or offer a place to crash when you visit a new city. This paid off for me when I faced some health challenges after graduation. The unexpected love and support of my classmates was amazing. I had life-long friends, not a network

2. Shrinking the world: It is very easy to expose yourself to different industries and perspectives during the two years you spend at business school. Whether through clubs, classes, speakers or just conversations with classmates, you will likely learn about industries you never knew anything about and jobs you never heard of. At MIT Sloan, almost half of my class was international. Beyond the obvious benefits of travel recommendations for life and inside food knowledge, working with diverse groups broadened my perspective. One of my groups composed peolpe from the US, Mexico, Israel, and Korea — which made the world seem a lot smaller and the world’s challenges a lot more solvable

3. The ability to take a step out from the “hustle”: Business school is certainly fast paced, but it’s also a step out of the increasingly complex and competitive working world. I am a big fan of taking breaks or walks during the day to increase my productivity and creativity: the benefits of this are well known. I haven’t found any research on the impact of a two year break during your career, but my hypothesis is the benefits are profound. I like to think of business school as a two year walk, where I had time to reflect, think, learn, dream and wonder

4. Eliminating stories of why you can’t do something: Being surrounded by such successful people can be a double edged sword. If you start comparing yourself to your classmates, you will always find someone more accomplished or impressive. However, the fact that you share a beer or lunch with them makes you realize they don’t have superpowers, they just don’t spend any time creating excuses. It made me realize that the only thing that will hold me back from what I want to accomplish is my own beliefs. Everyone, including me, is capable of greatness

5. Thinking like a leader: Being accepted into an amazing business school gave me a lot of pride. It also gave me the self-imposed pressure that I need to embrace this opportunity and do something with it. Prior to business school, my definition of a “leader” was something defined by a title or number of direct reports. During a leadership class I took, this idea was destroyed, as I realized these people haven’t cornered the market on leadership. I was filled with the anxiety and excitement that anyone could be a leader. I embraced this mindset and try to ask myself “How should I act in this situation, as a leader?” For me this comes out by having integrity and being authentic to who I am. I’m passionate about building positive and meaningful work environments where people can flourish — so I try to embrace this spirit in every interaction I have in and out of work. I’m grateful that I literally had a class to think about leadership and what it means to me

6. An experimental lab: I looked at everything as a new learning opportunity. The improvisational leadership class that made me dance around in front of my classmates taught me how to be more fearless. The healthcare project I did made me realize I didn’t want to go work in healthcare. The choreographed dances I did with my classmates for the New England Cultural Function (yes, really) made me realize I love making a fool of myself for the sake of having a good time. Finally, the many hours I spent helping others with their job searches and interviews made me realize I love helping others achieve their dreams

Going to business school was not a rational decision for me. I didn’t calculate two years of lost salary and factor in the ROI of tuition payments and future salaries. It was just something I had always wanted to do, a dream that I had.

I went to business school because I wanted to go to business school

Why do you want to go?

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

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“Pursue your passion and you will never work a day in your life”

— Many people

For me, this was always a very vague notion, albeit one worth pursuing.

I’ve always had a restless spirit. I remember being in school when I was younger and throwing myself into doing well. Doing well and getting good grades was rewarding, but I never really had an answer to “What do you want to do when you grow up?” question.

That restless spirit stayed with me as I got older and transitioned into a productive, taxpaying adult. During my first corporate internship during college, I worked at a desk for 40 hours a week. I was dumbfounded by how little everyone really accomplished — It was incredibly frustrating. I wanted to get rid of that feeling.

I had a few more internships in other major companies and kept finding the same thing: Inefficiency and personal frustration. I was NOT finding what I wanted to do. This put me in a bit of a desperate state and I started looking everywhere for inspiration. I picked up Freakonomics one summer and could not put it down. It unlocked a period of creativity for me that hasn’t stopped ten years later.

Discovering my first passion was easy: A restless hunger for learning

With senior year looming, I sunk my energy into obsessively researching careers that might be a better fit for me than a corporate job. I came across strategy consulting and was immediately energized. Consulting firms were a place where you could work on some of the most challenging business problems and be surrounded by people who also crave learning at a incredibly fast pace. Why had nobody told me about consulting? This became my new goal.

With little preparation, I threw myself full-steam ahead into trying to get a full-time offer at a strategy consulting firm. I quickly built a massive spreadsheets of over 100 firms and tried to find every possible connection through family, friends or alumni that I could.

I ended up getting a number of phone interviews and four or five final round in-person interviews.

Bottom line: I got rejected from 100+ consulting firms

The following rejection is my favorite:

October 2006

Dear Paul,

Thank you for your interest in McKinsey & Company and your patience in awaiting our reply.

Unfortunately, we regret that we are unable to extend an interview to you at this time. Our team’s decision was a difficult one given the strength of our applicant pool and the limited number of positions available. In the event that our hiring needs change, we will get in touch with you directly

On behalf of McKinsey & Company’s recruiting team, we wish you every success in your career.

All the best,

XXX

Recruiting Manager

McKinsey & Company

In the moment, the rejection hurt. But I didn’t let it impact my confidence. I knew I was capable and I had committed to this goal. So I kept applying. Two years two years later, I was sitting at my desk, working at that same firm, one of the top consulting firms in the world, McKinsey & Company.

I had made it, right?

In a sense, yes. I was proud to have achieved my goaI. However, I still had a certain bit of restlessness — I wanted to figure out what I wanted to do. I still had more learning to do.

It took me a few years after leaving McKinsey to understand how much the culture in my office had resonated with me. My peers were brilliant, kind and enthusiastic about learning. Team leaders were 100% supportive and mostly hands-off, letting me achieve the already high expectations that I had for myself. It was incredible. The problem? This culture was not the norm in the business world. I wanted to help create these environments elsewhere.

My second passion: Being a part of and building amazing communities and company cultures

The discovery of a third passion solidified for me only recently, but was accelerated by an experience I had in 2009. After I finally “broke into” consulting, others from UConn reached out to me for advice on how to do the same. One persistent and enthusiastic student stood out. He was determined to work in consulting. He was a bit late on application deadlines, but seemed undeterred. I was not as confident.

It was 2009 and the economy was in absolute shambles. This kid was a rock star and had enormous potential, but the opportunities were slim and all the jobs were going to students at the most prestigious schools. There was no sugar coating it. This was going to be hard.

I was impressed with his determination — he wanted to pursue consulting, even if that meant graduating without a job. Fortunately, his hard work paid off. With weeks to go prior to graduation, he received an offer at a consulting firm. Not only that, but it led to an impressive career in consulting and strategy. I’d now consider him a peer, at an equal level to the success I’ve achieved in my career. He may not have known it at the time, but he was inspiring to me — and still is. It gave me tremendous joy to play a part in helping someone so impressive achieve their goals. I had to do more.

Passion #3: Helping inspirational people achieve great things

I’ve only recently gained clarity on this. This has taken years of reflection and soul-searching, but it adds a lot of clarity in my future career choices. If I use these as a lens for my career choices, a lot of the decisions I made seem to make a lot more sense. Everything I’ve pursued checked at least one of the three boxes. For now, I’ll use these as a guiding force, but have no idea where it will take me. Here’s hoping I find new inspiration and passions down the road….

To summarize, the key learnings for me were:

1. Finding my passion really meant getting to know myself better. I did this through a combination of putting myself in different jobs and environments and combining that with reflection on my experiences, especially the most frustrating and exciting emotions

2. Passion does not equal a job title or company. Instead of defining my success based on a role or company I was working with, I focused on the behaviors and environments

3. Listen to your frustration or angst. I took notice of what frustrated me and what energized me. I tried to do less of the things that frustrated me and more of the things that excited me. Simple, but powerful.

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

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