Mediocre man is one who learns to trust the journey because he is fully aware that one cannot quite know what will result from any specific effort. Society tells him he is lazy and that he is a fool and that he should have goals, big goals! But he has stumbled upon a secret: mediocre effort beats extreme effort for most people, most of the time.

A little bit of effort into something you like doing can have shockingly good results over a long period of time. It took me 14 months to write my book, and the entire process felt leisurely, light, and enjoyable. When I finished, I was shocked by the quality of my creation. It delighted me. I decided I wanted to share it with the world immediately. I skipped any sort of book launch and started selling it. I sold a couple of hundred books in the first month and declared it a success. To someone aiming at great results, this would have been a disaster.

But I was playing a different game than most other people. Writing was something I thoroughly enjoyed and planned to do for the rest of my life. The topic of my book is something I continue to be passionate and I didn’t expect my curiosity to die with the release of my book. I was playing a game I wanted to keep playing, and more importantly, knew I could keep playing.

We are flooded with ideas about how we should work that tells us we need to inject extreme effort and “do our best” in everything we do.  We need to cash in. Get our money’s worth. Don’t get taken advantage of. Those things are useful to be mindful of but lead too many astray. People have a hard time believing that an attitude of lightness and ease can be compatible with work because they have so deeply internalized the idea that doing anything good must involve extreme effort. 

The Gospel Of Effort

The gospel of effort is so pervasive that even if something might feel easy, people tell a story about how hard it is. This widespread tendency undermines any hope of self-awareness about one’s relationship with work. Someone might have found something they can do over the long term, but the need to “sell” a narrative of struggle nudges them toward eventually living out that struggle and pushing them to burnout. As the poet David Whyte says, “You cannot enter a world for which you do not have the language.” 

I have met many people that are deeply connected to what they are doing. They are playing an infinite game not dependent on hustle but on ensuring that they protect that special relationship with their work. They have something that enriches their soul, and when you poke around a bit with the right questions, their eyes light up with the glow of a thousand fireflies. But the fabric of reality in which they exist short-circuits their own understanding.  

This is further complicated by the fact that most people alive today don’t have the privilege of experiencing this deeper connected state with their work. Most people are spending their time pretending to care about work that they acknowledge is meaningless. When I worked in consulting, at least once a week, someone would say, “I know this is ultimately pointless, but you gotta work, right?” When you are doing this kind of work, it demands constant effort because you are moving directly against your own natural interests and curiosity.  They have outsourced space on their must-do list to the leaders of a faceless organization. 

Mediocre man rejects this. 

There is a lot of talk about writing as a grind. A struggle. A metaphorical “war” every time you sit down. This could describe the kinds of copywriting that people do to promote products or the writing that people think they should do. But it has not been my experience that writing involves anything close to the flavor of effort that I expended debating the titles of PowerPoint slides on my previous path. But I’m not saying writing is easy, either! Mediocrity and challenge can coexist. What I am saying is that the challenge of working your way through a piece of writing does not require extreme effort.  More important is having an ongoing relationship with writing that you want to nourish and sustain. 

This is the secret of mediocre man: liking what you do. For years, I have had a mantra, write most days.  I probably write four or five days a week on average but sometimes zero days per week. To the person living in the world of grind, this would be terrifying. How do you measure, track, and keep yourself accountable?  Don’t you have goals? But my method has worked. How? By liking what you do, you will inevitably form a positive relationship with your work and want to do more of it. Then the only challenge is creating space in your life to let it happen. 

Great Men and Women Do Exist, But You Are Not One

It is worth acknowledging that great men and great women do exist. But we are tricked by their proximity. We see them 18 inches away on our screens and assume we are like them. Or that we should be like them. This is a mistake. I have also met many people who are wired to operate at higher levels of energy and total commitment to work, combined with the self-confidence that they are meant to be doing such things.  But here’s the thing about these people: they have never had to force themselves to be this way. They have been wired like this their whole lives. They aren’t reading this essay.  They are going hard on their thing. 

The central feature of writing and the many other kinds of work that lend themselves to mediocrity is that there is no arrival. Visceral opposition to the idea of mediocrity almost always arises from people with clear goals, ones that suggest arrival. And that works remarkably well for some people. This essay isn’t for those people. 

Part of why this is so hard to talk about and see is that the modern career thrusts people into effort mode. Steady employment is no longer guaranteed. It requires a base level of anxiety about employability, an effort to maintain prosocial connections, awareness of the latest business trends, and an ability to “power through” rough stretches at work. 

If you are intrigued by this idea, you are probably like me. You don’t dedicate your life to work above all else. When a friend in need calls, you drop things and help them. You don’t see the point of your life as one that should achieve and succeed above all else, and every time you’ve tried, you’ve ended up a little bit burned out.

Don’t Waste Effort On Trying

I came across a phrase from coach Joe Hudson that perfectly encapsulates the secret of mediocrity that I haven’t been able to get out of my head: 

“Don’t waste effort on trying.”

Most of us likely have a fixed amount of effort that we can use up in a day or week. If we waste most of that effort on things we don’t want to do, we might end up wasting years of our lives. I spent ten years working in the strategy consulting industry. At first, I loved the work. It was challenging and pushed me to be better in many ways. But toward the tail end of that decade-long chapter, I had to use up far too much energy for the tiniest of tasks.  Even on light weeks, I’d have nothing left after getting home from work. 

The best way to use our effort is to “spend it” on daily, weekly, or monthly practices, which we can sustain longer than most others. This is the secret of mediocrity. It only appears mediocre from another person’s perspective. Over long enough time horizons, you can actually become one of the best in the world at your craft because of a simple truth: most people quit.

If you are trying to be great man or woman, there is a playbook. If there isn’t a playbook, there’s at least a legible goal. Let’s say you want to be a billionaire. If that is true, it’s pretty simple. Just prioritize that above everything else in your life and be relentless about it.  Simple but damn hard. 

Mediocrity does not come with a playbook and requires a stance toward life that is fundamentally different from what it takes to succeed on a traditional path. It requires emotional sophistication and a tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty. It requires enough self-awareness to know what you might be deluding yourself about your own desires. And it requires time and patience to develop these capacities. Sometimes even an extended break from work.

A younger me would have a hard time believing any of this is possible. I once thought that life was a series of incremental sacrifices. Play by the rules, and everything will be okay. But this is not true and it certainly wasn’t for me. Building my life around a path that required extreme effort was risky. Because it enabled me to hide behind the veneer of a successful career. By staying on a path that required increasing levels of effort to maintain, I lost track of what I cared about and was chipping away at a fundamental enthusiasm for life.  

Extreme effort can only be maintained, not sustained. In most cases, it is fueled by drugs, alcohol, nice stuff, and fancy vacations. You relieve stress but never escape low-grade anxiety that becomes your daily companion. Do this long enough, and you accept that a life filled with a constant stream of busyness is your birthright. You tell yourself that you are not special. You find something good enough, often a job, and try to maximize the income you can earn from such things. You get by.

We have convinced far too many people to chase things that are not aligned with their ideal states of being, and it has robbed them of their own belief in their potential. For years, I mistakenly paired my inability to grind with a lack of competence and ability. I existed in a world of extreme effort and had consistently mediocre results. I didn’t think I was capable of doing great work. But now I have tasted the sweet fruits of mediocrity and know that it can be a path to thriving. I know that mediocre effort only means mediocre output if you are stuck doing things that you don’t care about.  The truth is that great work does not always require extreme effort.

In today’s world, almost everyone blindly embraces an ethic of “hard work.” But what they are really doing is embracing an ethic of extreme effort.  This is not ideal. Today’s problems that we struggle with are increasingly not effort problems but imagination and ingenuity problems. They don’t require more bodies and hustle but steady mediocre work that involves rest, contemplation, and ease. 

If hard work were really what it took to flood our reality with great things, we would live in a golden age of impressive works of consequence. Alas, we are not. 

So I urge you to consider injecting your life with a little bit of mediocrity. Or better yet, don’t do much at all. You might end up somewhere interesting. 

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 Way of Mediocre Man appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

This is something I call a hustle trap – trying to play someone else’s game as a way to avoid figuring out what really makes you tick.

While I don’t have great advice other than finding something you want to do and do it consistently, I have thought a lot about my “creative process” and it might be worth sharing what’s enabled me to consistently show up, keep writing, and continue to have fun along the way.

The secret is really something I call my “creative engine.”

The “Creative Engine”

At the time of writing, I’ve published more than 170 issues 200+ issues in my newsletter. Some people have asked me, “how did you keep going to write that many issues?”

At a high level, I’ve found work I like doing and have focused more on the conditions that enable me to keep doing it rather than embracing any writing tip or productivity hack. Let’s dive in:

Step 1: Filter Content Input for High-Quality Content

Here’s a high-level belief: if you are serious about generating interesting ideas, you will not be able to generate them if you are mostly following what other people are following. You will need to block default sources of information and start curating your own. By blocking, I don’t mean “I try to avoid watching too much CNN” or “I check out Fox News to balance my viewpoint” but a total blockade.

One easy way to do this is with Feed blockers. Here are what my Twitter and Facebook feed looks like:

I installed the Facebook newsfeed eradicator several years ago and now barely check Facebook. Part of this is because it’s not all that interesting and I’ve shifted to Twitter where I can control the information a lot better. Regardless, I also run a feed blocker on Twitter and actively add words to a “mute list” (see privacy settings) of anything that is generating high levels of outrage (most political names and divisive issues are a good starting point). In addition, I highly recommend unfollowing large media company sites like CNN, Fox, MSNBC, and so on. They are not in the business of informing people – they are in the business of turning your attention into dollars.

If you need to check the news I recommend Ground News. It’s a good place that shows you the range of sources of the stories and isn’t geared toward hacking your brain.

Once you’ve blocked the main sources of outrage, you can start actively seeking out people, sources, and ideas that interest you. Subscribe to interesting newsletters, follow interesting people, and keep adjusting over time.

Suggestions: Here is list of 28 interesting people I like following (Dec 2021)

Another source of interesting ideas and writing for me is the conversations I have with people. We’ll get to this part in a little but it’s hard to understate how valuable it is to be known as someone interested in a certain topic. Given that I’ve written so much about our relationship to work, each week I get 3-4 “have you seen this?” e-mails, DMs, or messages and I appreciate every single one of them.

Another thing I’ve found is that the more I read, the better my ability to put ideas into context among a vast web of information that I’ve been exposed to. I like what Tyler Cowen says about how he reads so much:

The best way to read quickly is to read lots.  And lots.  And to have started a long time ago.  Then maybe you know what is coming in the current book.  Reading quickly is often, in a margin-relevant way, close to not reading much at all. 

Unfortunately, I didn’t reach much beyond school until the age of 21 but ever since I’ve been reading probably 20-50 books per year for almost 15 years and every year I get more value from books.

At a high level my information diet looks like this:

• 35% books: I am typically reading a few books at once and read about 3-4 books a month. I get most of my book recommendations from friends, podcasts, and sources in many of the things I read. If I don’t like the book I stop reading and move on.
• 25% longform: There is a lot of good writing on the internet, you just need to have a good eye for it and know where to look. I generally get great recommendations from newsletters like The Browser, Longform, Sunday Long Reads, Rad Reads, and many others writing great newsletters. Anytime I stumble upon something worth reading, I tag it to Instapaper or matter and then end up reading it at some later point. I love reading so there is no planned reading time in my life. It just happens.
• 20% Zeitgeist / Shortform / Twitter: I tend to scan a lot of stuff and try to get a feel for things happening in the digital / creator/internet world. I shifted my life in this direction a few years ago and its been fascinating to see the world shift in my direction. It still seems like the digital worlds are a few years ahead of the rest of the “mainstream” world but I expect that gap to more or less close over the next decade. I’ll keep watching until it stops being interesting.
• 20% Conversations: This is my personal secret sauce. Not because there is anything special about conversations but because I get so inspired by other people. When I’m sharing ideas, answering questions, engaged in e-mail replies or doing podcasts, I always tend to come up with new ways of thinking about things I write about and come up with new ways of talking about something.

Step 2: Filter Ideas Through a “Second Brain”

Until 2018, I didn’t take notes or store anything I was thinking about. I had always managed everything in my head and that seemed to work just fine for most of my jobs. However, this changed when my friend Jonny shared Tiago Forte’s initial essays about using a “second brain” approach to take notes in Evernote. I hacked together an 80/20 approach in a couple of hours and it seems to be the missing piece to my process.

From the beginning, I’ve never had a complicated system. I more or less only created some structure (and then was able to abandon that when I shifted to roam) and just synced up highlights from various reading apps which I was already using.

Here are some apps I use:

• I pay for Instapaper premium at about $30 per year which lets me save all my highlights and search all the articles I save.
• I use Matter, which is an amazing app for finding, sharing, taking notes, and even listening to articles. It also syncs to Readwise.
• I use Readwise which collects notes from kindle, e-books, Instapaper, and Matter and then sends them directly to Roam. This app is magic.

Then each week when I go to write my newsletter, I check:

• Articles I read or bookmarked in Matter
• Articles I read, marked or highlighted in Instapaper
• Any notes I automatically synced to Roam
• Bookmarks I marked on Twitter
• Notes from conversations about topics to write about I keep in Roam

At a high level, I don’t spend any time structuring most of my notes, especially around my writing around work. I have a belief that “nothing good gets away” and I’ve tried to embrace this spirit in my work.

The ideas that I get excited by, I keep coming back to, and this means I’ll search past things I’ve marked. Do I lose track of stuff? Sure. But over time, most of the ideas I’m excited about gets written.

I think this is probably true for most people and spending more time on creating and output would probably be a better use of time than improving a note-taking system.

Step 3: The Doing Mode – Where The Magic Happens

The doing mode is simply having time to think and create. Sounds simple but is harder than you might think.

People underestimate how much time creative work takes. Not just the time to actually work through ideas and then turn them into something but also the time to contemplate, ponder, and think about the ideas. Dave Perell does a good job of highlighting these two modes:

Beer mode is often ignored by people especially those who have spent most of their time in a structured work environment. It took me a while to realize that the best way to be “productive” is often to spend extended periods of time not working. Instead, I’m taking long walks, biking around the city where I live, or just leaving open space to live in the moment.

Creating the space in your life for ideas to blossom is a non-obvious thing to do and is often only learned through experience. Some people need more of “beer mode” and other people need less.

I tend to work in bursts followed by indefinite rest. I will write intensively for a few days and then literally do nothing “productive” for the next few days. When I was writing my book, I was feeling really stuck after working on it for a few weeks. I knew that the only way forward was to stop writing entirely until the next steps became obvious.

The way to notice if you have a good balance is to pay attention to your energy. When I am energized and can maintain a good level of energy over a long period of time but when I am going too hard without rest, I lose energy and the ideas stop flowing. This might undermine the whole system.

Another underappreciated thing about creating in written or visual form is that you need a bottom-up process for researching and working through details AND a top-down “sensemaking algorithm” for how you structure, combine, remix, and synthesize those details.

Most knowledge economy jobs will help you learn this skill (or you can take something like Building a Second Brain). Some of the best training grounds for research, analysis, and sensemaking are Banking, Consulting, Advertising, or other client service jobs. Those jobs are underrated as launchpads for more creative or entrepreneurial paths in the future. A great example of this is John Legend. Where did he start his career? Boston Consulting Group.

For me, the brute force of 1000s of iterations in consulting gave me a mode I can drop into to dissect, understand and explain most topics. At the most basic level, it involves shifting back and forth between two modes of thinking – bottom-up and top-down.

In top-down mode, I’m structuring and thinking about the flow of ideas, outlines, and the overall message. In bottom-up mode, I’m not worried about the overall flow of ideas and I’m just letting myself wander into curiosity rabbit holes.

From consulting, I gained a lot of comfort from hundreds of iterations through this kind of process and it’s helped me see the inherent uncertainty of creation as part of the process rather than a problem to be solved.

Short Aside: Tiago Forte’s Building A Second Brain Approach

I recorded a short reflection on what I learned from Tiago Forte’s book, Building A Second Brain

Step 4: Output – It’s Very Hard To Sustain Creation Without Completion

I think there are two phases of creation:

• Phase 1: Developing a basic creation muscle and overcoming resistance
• Phase 2: Playing an “infinite game” – tweaking your environment to enable sustainable creation

The whole point of phase 1 is just to get to phase two. This is also why advice like “find your niche” is not always helpful for newbies. More important is overcoming resistance and finding a way of creating and sharing that is enjoyable and allows you to continue to explore, grow, and evolve.

Our schools and workplaces tell us that we need credentials or a level in a company to have permission to speak. Phase 1 is about questioning that assumption and finding ways to force ourselves through the insecurity, self-sabotage, and impostor syndrome that conspire to keep us from doing things we want to do.

My secret to breaking beyond phase one started with challenging myself to post daily on Quora for three months every day before work in 2016. Every day, I would come into work and answer questions about things I knew about like getting an MBA, breaking into consulting, how consultants think, how to deal with health challenges, UConn basketball, and so on. There was no goal and it was easy to keep going because no one I knew in real life used Quora and I was finding it increasingly fun. It was exciting to see some of my responses get a lot of positive feedback.

Dickie Bush’s #ship30for30 is something I’ve seen people use to break phase 1 – it’s a similar thing to my Quora experiment – a 30-day challenge where you have to write a mini-essay each day..

Despite feeling more comfortable sharing in public, I didn’t graduate to phase two until 2018. This was when I arrived in Taipei with time and space to let my mind wander and the thing I kept coming back to was writing. I decided I wanted to commit to writing, indefinitely. So I started committing to a weekly newsletter and to “write, most days.” As a priority in my life, I’ve spent a lot of time creating the conditions such that I could keep this creative spark alive.

Step 5: Results & Feedback

The real thing that guaranteed I was going to keep writing and sharing my ideas publicly was building an audience. As more people started replying my newsletters, scheduling curiosity conversations, and sharing my ideas I was motivated to keep going.

People are often ashamed to admit that they like attention. I don’t think all attention is bad. We tend to have negative reactions towards people that blindly pursue wealth, status, or fame. It’s good to be skeptical, but when thinking about our own lives, its important not to undermine our desires. If you desire status, just make sure you’re doing it in a way that aligns with how you want to live.

For me, I was ashamed to share at first and also afraid to admit to myself that I liked the attention. After some reflection, I realized that I desired appreciation from others. This is normal – anyone on a creative path is often doing something that others don’t understand. I realized that if I could seek out appreciation from people I liked, respected and doing similar things, it could unlock a virtuous cycle in my life.

The important thing is not to be ashamed of what we really want – this typically only leads to self-sabotage in the creative process. We all have different motivators. Here are some of mine:

• Friends: I love the people I end up connecting with here and the conversations that emerge from what I put out into the world
• Money: With subscribers and patrons, I am making about $300-400 per month from small donations and while this isn’t going to change my life, it is a huge boost of confidence that 60 people are like “hell yeah, I’ll support this!”
• Likes: I do like when people share my stuff and get a kick when something I write gets shared and read by a lot of people.
• Opportunities: It’s pretty exciting that writing publicly is one of the best paths to career stability. My current path has a very uncertain salary but by writing about topics I care about I have a proof-of-work that gives me access to opportunities in the future if I might want them

For me, this is the loop you see at the bottom here and it’s what’s transformed creative action from a linear process into something that sort of happens as a product of my life.

Finding an “audience” for your writing can be a tricky thing, especially at first. I highly recommend starting out in places like Quora, LinkedIn, or Medium where there is a built-in distribution. It’s also smart just to learn about the different algorithms. You don’t want to create for the algorithms, but it’s also not smart to be naive either. If you can tweak something 10% without losing the spirit of what you’re creating then do it!

The biggest mistake people I see people make is that they pay far too much attention to what “works” on social media platforms. This might help you build followers but it will not lead to an engaged group of supporters. Over the long term too, it’s just much harder to sustain interest in topics that aren’t aligned with your natural curiosity.

If you really care about building an audience around something you care about there is one thing you can do that will help you more than anything else: write or create something longform that is interesting, thought-provoking, and original. It’s surprising how few people take this approach but when I think about the pieces, ideas, or things people connected with most, it’s almost always the longest thing I’ve written.

Far fewer people may read the longer posts, but the people that do are likely very excited about your topics.

Another thing to do once you’ve written high-quality stuff is to share it with people writing and exploring similar ideas.

The Iron Law of The Internet: Nerdy people who go deep on topic X want to befriend other nerdy people going deep on topic X.

The easiest way to get me excited is to write deeply and thoughtfully about something I’m curious about. I was surprised to find after sharing my own work how willing many writers, thought leaders, and authors were willing to talk to me to talk about their writing. I was blown away when Alex Pang gave me a quick yes to talk about his book Rest on my podcast. Yet during the conversation, I realized: he loves this too!

Protecting My Creativity & Non-Attachment

When I look back on my life, I see evidence everywhere of my interest in writing. Yet it only became apparent about a year and a half after quitting my job that it was something I wanted to commit to.

When I came to this realization, I had a deep sense that this was a gift. One that I needed to protect. This is why for most of the past few years I’ve ruthlessly protected my time and energy such that I could continue to write. Over time, I stumbled into a set of conditions that not only enabled me to keep writing but started to make my life better. Unlocking my “creative engine” enable me to flourish and led to to the most meaningful project of my life, writing a book.

Yet you may be surprised that even with some success, I don’t have any goals or aims with my writing. I like creating for the sake of itself and this is something you can only understand if you’ve experienced it yourself. As Seth Godin says, I’ve embraced my inner artist:

The last element that makes it art is that it’s a gift. You cannot create a piece of art merely for money. Doing it as part of commerce so denudes art of wonder that it ceases to be art. There’s always a gift intent on the part of the artist.

I’ve tried to embrace this more and more over time. So while I do get some value from the appreciation, I don’t do it for any specific outcome. When I hit publish, it’s as if the work I’ve created disappears. I’m much more interested in diving into the next piece.

So with that, I shall hit publish here 🙂

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 “Creative Engine”: A Curiosity-First Second Brain Approach For Creating Online appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

It had been a thought lingering in my mind for quite a while.  It wasn’t that I desired to be an author or someone that had written a book but really just something that I assumed would happen if my love of writing did not dwindle away.  

The first time I took the idea of writing a book seriously was after reading Amy McMillen’s Reclaiming Control in the summer of 2020.  Her book was powerful.  I finished it in less than 24 hours and while her story was unique and different it gave me the feeling that I had a beautiful conversation with a friend who saw the world in a similar way.  I told her in a conversation that I wished there were 100 more books just like it.  When I told her that, I knew that I would have to walk the walk.

My Writing Journey Started Ten Years Ago

The first time someone told me I should write a book was in 2012 when I was sharing my struggles with Lyme disease.  I had decided to write because I was in a bad place and was really struggling to understand what was happening to me or how to explain it to others.  I tried to inject humor and playfulness into otherwise depressing posts about me not knowing if I’d ever get better.  When people told me they loved my writing, I didn’t really think anything of it.  All I cared about at the time was resuming my career.  

Looking back, however, that moment is just one of many throughout my life where writing seems to appear.  In high school, I had a ton of fun writing an article about five of my friends and me who drove minivans.  I argued that we were victims of our mothers, all of whom had decided to upgrade to cooler crossover SUV vehicles that were emerging.  In college, I wrote a satirical essay about my friend Martha and her time as a safety patrol officer in her high school.  There was no point to the article other than I thought it would be a ton of fun to write.  It was.

After college, I dabbled blogging on Tumblr, writing reflections on leaving New England for the first time and starting my career in Cincinnati.  I wrote all sorts of stuff which if I looked back now would likely be embarrassing and childish but I was writing. Consistently.  In business school, I kept a student blog about the experience, and after school is when I started writing about my health challenges.  After I recovered I wrote increasingly in public – first on Quora, and then on Medium, LinkedIn, and then on my own sites Careers With Paul, Boundless, and StrategyU.

@pmillerd From blogger to book. Just a casual 12 year journey #books #writing #blogger #blogs #writing ♬ original sound – pmillerd

Steady writing for almost twenty years yet I never saw it as an important part of my life until the past few years

Committing To Writing As Something That Mattered

I never noticed writing as something important in my life until after I stepped away from my full-time career path.  While I wrote more than I had in the past during my first year of self-employment, something was unleashed when I moved to Taiwan in the fall of 2018.

I would make coffee in the morning and wait for the inevitable call to write. This period was absolutely delightful. Through writing, I continued to make sense of my shift from an impressive career towards the pathless path as well as the noticeable gap between this new culture and mine back home.

In those months something was unleashed – unstoppable creative energy that had been bubbling beneath the surface but never quite had the space to emerge.  That energy told me: keep writing.  I decided to commit.  I didn’t know where writing would lead me but I had a deep sense that it was going to become an important part of my life.  I came up with a rule: “write, most days.”  It was enough.  I prioritized it and notice that when I have the time and space to think and write, I’m quite content and happy with life.  When writing starts to drift out of my weekly rhythm, I know I need to make changes.  

So I wrote, most days, and for the past three years, writing has become one of the most vital parts of my life.  I also tapped into a virtuous cycle: sharing continuing to write and sharing it publicly, it made my life better.  Putting writing first helped me realize it was work I liked doing and wanted to keep doing, led to making friends and having meaningful conversations with people from all over the world, and helped cure a residual cynicism that remained from my time in the corporate world.  Eventually, it also led to the most meaningful project of my life: writing The Pathless Path.

Finding My “Conversation” – Letting Ideas Emerge

My book emerged organically from hundreds of conversations, hundreds of posts, and hundreds of days of contemplation.  There was never a goal to publish a book until the day I realized it was time.

That time was somewhere in November of 2020 and it was a result of three key things happening.

First, in 2020, millions of people suddenly had existential crises about work at the same time. Having been writing about this kind of experience for several years, this led to a sharp uptick in my interest in my writing.  I had been casually doing no-agenda “curiosity conversations” with people from around the world for a few years at that point.  I typically had zero or one call each week.  By May of 2020, I was talking to seven or eight people a week and having many more conversations through Twitter, via my newsletter, and with friends and family.  My writing is fueled in large part by this “creative engine.”

The second was reading Amy McMillen’s book Reclaiming Control in August 2020.  I shared with her in a conversation: “wow I wish there were so many more of these kinds of books – of these sort of transitions in life.”  

That feeling was reinforced visiting Barnes & Noble that same week and seeing the highlighted autobiographies of several older white dudes:

• Ray Dalio: Age 72 Billionaire
• Richard Branson: Aged 71, Billionaire
• Bill Gates, Aged 66, Billionaire
• Steve Schwartzman, Aged 75, Billionaire

While I may have been pulled toward this kind of book when I was younger, I knew that Amy’s was likely much more useful than the stories I would find in those books.  We think we should learn from people who have “made it” but often we can learn a lot more from people dealing with the same things as us right now.   “People like us do things like this” as Seth Godin says.  I realized that I needed to turn my beliefs into action and decided that I needed to share my own story.  

The final trigger that pushed me over the hump of committing to the book was a series of three or four “curiosity conversations” I had with people from around the world in November and December of 2020.  Each of them said something to the effect of “I wish you had a book about all of this stuff and I would read it.”

In December 2020, I decided to commit to a book

I started slow, compiling many of my past blog posts into Word and trying to organize them around key themes.  I didn’t actually announce it publicly until the beginning of January when I buried it at the bottom of 10 reflections on 2020.  Here is what I said at the time:

In terms of work goals, when I reflected on 2021, StrategyU kept emerging as something to focus on but I couldn’t find a reason other than “make more money.” Given that I have enough right now, that really isn’t a good reason and generally, I’ve found that when I go against the default options, interesting things happen.

The thing that does keeps emerging is writing, so my intention for 2021 is simple:

Try to write, most days.

That’s it. And to raise the stakes, I’m announcing a scary goal, a book.

This was a scary commitment.  While being self-employed I had never spent more than a couple of months creating anything.  

My first stated deadline to publish my book was March 2021.  Looking back it’s clear that I didn’t know what I was getting into.  It’s also funny to look back and see how scared I was of just calling it a “boook”  Here’s my conception of the project from when I finally built up the courage to announce it boldly on my newsletter in January of January 2021:

This e-book will be a collection of essays from Paul, perspectives on the modern state of work, and some potential ways to think about navigating the new world of work, designing your life, and managing uncertainty while on a “pathless path.”

Here is what the initial outline looked like in January 2021

If you look at the titles and have read my book you’ll notice that many of the themes made it into the final form.  However, what you can’t see is how poorly all these pieces fit together.  One challenge with going from blog to book is that blogs are much more interconnected with other materials than a book.  A book needs to stand on its own but a blog can backlink to previous mentions of things and other references.  

It took me about a month to realize this project would be a bit more challenging than polishing a number of past essays and newsletters.

Leaning Into My Emotions & Letting It Rip

About a month into the project, I had a call with Sasha Chapin.  I was inspired to reach out after reading his Twitter bio: “I am fucking good at writing coaching.”  (Short aside here: it’s taboo to say stuff like that but as someone who really did want help with writing, this was exactly what I wanted to hear!) 

Sasha went through my initial writing and had a number of helpful suggestions but one big thing changed my conception of what the book was about.  I’ll paraphrase his advice:

“when you leaned into sharing your emotions it was powerful.  You are a really good analytical writer, which tells me you’re never going to fall into the trap of sharing too much.  Lean into that as hard as possible.  Let it rip”

I don’t know if he said let it rip exactly, but I like to think he did.  It connected with something I had read a few years earlier from the famous writer William Zinnser:

Sell yourself, and your subject will exert its own appeal. Believe in your own identity and your own opinions. Writing is an act of ego, and you might as well admit it. Use its energy to keep yourself going.

I had embraced that in 2019 but only was now starting to understand what this meant.  I knew I had to go much deeper.  Deeper into myself.  

So that’s what I did.  I gave myself time and space and tried to dig deep into how it really felt along the way: going from good student to enthusiastic prestige chase, landing my dream job at 23, losing my grandfather, and having everything I thought I wanted taken from me, as I was forced to stop working and take time to recover due to a health crisis. 

As I leaned into these experiences, I learned more about myself and my writing became better.  I have always been a good technical writer but this opened me up to new ways of sharing what I was trying to say.  It also helped me understand what people mean by “show, don’t tell.”

I realized that the book I was writing was much more of a personal story than one where I had any clear answers, how-to’s, or best practices.  I wasn’t going to tell people what the future of work was going to look like, I was simply going to share how I was thinking about it in my own life based on where I came from and where I want to go.

Seeking a Publisher To Save Me (May to July)

Around May and June, I was feeling pretty good about the shape of the book.  It had two clear parts: my personal story (in much more depth by then), and my take on an alternative to our default scripts: the “pathless path.”

Despite feeling good about it, I wasn’t sure how I’d get it to something I’d call a “book.”  The path from there to the finish line felt extremely uncertain.  This is when I started looking for someone to save me.  

I reached out to a few indie publishers to see if they would work with me.  In my head, I wanted to believe that these people using the word “publisher” would be able to give me a magical formula that would erase my uncertainty about how to finish the book.  What I heard from them instead was that I was on the right path and the decisions they might help with were ones I would need to make anyway.  

This didn’t stop me from searching for a savior.  Based on a recommendation from another friend, I checked out a company called New Degree Press.  They allow you to submit your manuscript for admittance into their “Creators Program.”  This is a five-month program for people that have a written manuscript.  

I used their requirement of a manuscript as a chance to push hard for two weeks towards my first official “draft” and then submitted it.  When I submitted it, I thought that it was going to be a very hard thing to get into and that if I was approved, it was likely a really good opportunity for me.

In the four weeks, it took them to respond, however, I realized from reviews that they were not what I was hoping for.  They seemed to accept most of the books that were submitted and many people found their sales tactics and later support less than impressive.  As my interest was fading, I received an email that I was accepted.

In a call with Here’s a preview of the costs of their program.  For comparison, my total costs (I’ll break this down later) were about $5,000 to publish a paperback and hardcover and I did it on my own timeline and own terms.

A call with the CEO confirmed that this was not the program for me.  In what I later realized was likely one of many back-to-back sales calls, he was much more focused on getting me to commit to the program than talking about why I was writing the book.  On top of this, their approach to book sales stressed me out – it focused on breaking even by charging $39 in the pre-sale and trying to sell several hundred before launch.  

While their service is likely a good fit for people that don’t like figuring things out on their own, the experience was a reminder that was exactly what I like doing.  

Thus, there was only one path forward – to do it on my own, on my terms.

Going On My Own & Beta Readers (Aug – Sep)

I kept writing and editing for another month and when I was feeling good about another “draft” version.  The thing about taking your own path with self-publishing is that at least the first time you do it, you have no idea what you are doing.  I was telling people that I was about 90% done at this point.  The reality was that in terms of total time editing and writing I was likely closer to 60-70% done.

This is when I decided to ask friends for help.  I transferred my book from Microsoft Word to google docs and asked several people for feedback.  The majority of the feedback came from four incredibly generous people:

• Ranjit – someone who has taken a similar “leap” out of law
• Oshan – a fellow history of work ned
• Valerie – an overall curious human who loves reading
• Maria – a former consultant who has been following my journey

I asked them to follow a simple system as they read my book in google docs:

• If they liked a certain part, highlight it and put +1
• If they were confused, tell me
• If they wanted more, tell me that too

This really helped me understand which parts were resonating with people.  It also was the first time I started to get real feedback from this project – they were all really excited about the book and encouraged me to keep going.

Editing, Round 1 & More Magic From Sasha (Sep – Oct)

After I decided to finish the book on my own, it helped me level up my own seriousness about the project.  I had shifted away from thinking about it as a “collection of essays” and an “ebook” towards a real book, one I would be proud to ship.  

I also realized that outside feedback would be helpful.  I started looking for editors.

With some initial searching, I landed upon John Adamus, who runs a site called The Writer Next door.  After an initial conversation, he seemed exciting about my book and I ended up hiring him to do what is called a “developmental edit.”  This meant he would go through the text and call out things that don’t make sense, make obvious tweaks to mistakes, and try to make broad suggestions about the overall book flow.

I gave him access to the same google doc I had sent to my beta readers and told him the only thing I wanted him to pay attention to was where anyone put “+1.”  I wanted to keep all those parts.  

He went through the book pretty quickly and gave me a lot of good feedback.  He charged me per chapter – I think I paid him about $100 for each chapter, so about $1000.  After the beta-reader feedback and his, I realized a few things:

• Someone else who had read a lot of books was telling me it was good enough to publish
• I had done a better job of structuring the content than I expected (something I’ll get to in a second)

Despite this, something still felt off.  I knew the book was good but I still wanted to push it that extra distance to attempt to make it great – I wanted to pour my heart and soul into this thing.  

This is when I called Sasha again.  

He skimmed the book again and somehow conjured up the five things I needed to hear.

First, the best reason to find someone like Sasha in your corner is that they’ll tell you something like this: “The book is in really good shape, you should be proud of it.”  I think most of us underestimate how powerful someone else believing in us can be.  This comment from Sasha made me feel good and it made me motivated to keep pushing. 

He also gave me four powerful suggestions:

1. Trim personal history 10%: “Your personal history is really great, but I think it could be compressed a little bit…in terms of the proportion of the book, it could be shortened.”
2. Telling people what the book was about: He thought it would be good to say something like “This story is not a how-to guide but instead urging people towards a place of individual experimentation.”  This was really powerful and a lot of the feedback from the book mentioned that they LOVED how it wasn’t a “how-to” book
3. Adding an intro to the work chapter: “Your chapter three about work was good, but it was a bit abrupt.”  In chapter three I take a detour from the story into a deep dive into the history of work.  With his advice, I added a short intro to the chapter and then tied the content a little more into my own story to make it feel natural.
4. A better closing! He said, “Although you aren’t giving a “how-to guide” the end of the book is an opportunity to “ham it up” and give a rousing speech about what to do next.”  My ending was very light when I talked with him and with his support, I added a little rah-rah and built out a deeper list of ten things people could do.

I’ve always been the type of person that is hungry for feedback, especially from people that know what they are talking about.  As soon as I listened to his voice memo with these ideas, I had the sense that Sasha had magic powers.  He was able to turn my vague discontent with the book into four specific things that I knew I needed to address right away..

After this, I worked non-stop for a week or two, editing and rewriting almost eight hours a day.  This is also why I think if I were to do this again I would be a lot more intentional about finding professional writing coaching and/or editing help sooner in the process.  If you can find the people that can identify areas that you can improve that are also aligned with where you see the book going, it is priceless.  

Inspired by Sasha’s confidence in my book, I was also starting to feel better about finishing the book.  

Yet deep down I still knew I hadn’t written the best book possible.  So I started searching for another editor.

Getting To The Finish Line With Paula (October – Jan)

The downside of doing things on your own the first time is that you basically learn by trying things out and muddling through things you don’t know how to do.  For me, I see this as vital to my journey.  If I can figure out how to do things, I become a lot more confident about doing those things in the future as well as being able to help others (which is fun for me!).  

John’s initial edits were great but after working with him I felt like I needed someone that wanted to be a little more hands-on and work with me in a more dynamic way.  Someone that could give me advice on the overall structure and flow of the document but also someone that saw my vision believed in it and was comfortable pushing me outside of my comfort zone.  

This is when I found Paula Trucks-Pape and I am so grateful that I did.

When I say I “found her” – I really mean I started searching through my email.  I had remembered that a couple of newsletter readers had offered editing support throughout the year as I was talking about writing the book.  One of those was Paula.  I quickly shot her a note, we jumped on a video call, and I knew she was exactly what I had been looking for.

I hired her on the spot and she started diving into my book.  Lucky for me, Paula has been on her own pathless path, working as a freelancer for many years and living abroad in Germany.  My vision and story resonated with her and she even emailed me at one point and said she wanted to go “all-in” on the book and didn’t care about keeping track of her time.  

This, of course, was a bit of good luck on my side.  Looking back, I realize I should have put a lot more thought (and budgeting more money) into finding an editor sooner in the process.  I don’t think it was necessary for the first few months but I could have used an editor as soon as I had that first draft version (about 45k words when I submitted it to New Degree Press.)

Paula helped me with a number of things:

• Making sure the timeline of events was easy to follow throughout the book
• Helping me simplify some of my writing and ideas
• Simplifying several of the mini-chapters from 2-3 ideas to one clear idea 

I worked closely with Paula for all of November and December and by the beginning of January she had handed off her final edit.

Designing The Cover

Designing a cover for a book is another thing that comes without a roadmap.  Pretty much everything with a book starts out the same.  You ask “how do I do this?”  You google around and get 10-15 ideas and a bunch of marketing trying to convince you to do a certain thing.  Then you ask people who have done the thing and they each give you a slightly different response.  Eventually, you realize you have to just try stuff and figure it out.

I had helped run a 99designs contest for a logo for a company as a consultant a few years back and decided it might be fun to do a contest for my book cover.  At a minimum, it would help generate a lot of ideas.

This more or less ended in disappointment.  There were a lot of interesting submissions, but almost all of them were not quite right.  Here is one hilarious submission that is too good not to share:

Here is a sample of some of the better covers that I selected as “finalists.”

While they were the best of the bunch and some people really liked them, I toiled for a week or so not happy with the outcome of the contest.  Eventually, I trusted my gut and decided to consider the contest a failure.

One thing I didn’t realize when doing a contest is that you have to pay a lot more for the “top-level” designers to participate.  I mostly only got submissions from “entry-level” designers – meaning they likely didn’t have much background in design.  

On someone’s suggestion, I decided to hire a specific designer on 99 designs.  I went straight to top-level designers and ended up stumbling upon this guy: tintodeverano – I really liked his cover designs, hired him for about $450, and got started.  

I sent him my pitch and after a couple of days, he sent me several suggestions.  I was immediately relieved.  I liked almost all of them!

After some advice from good friend Nate Kadlac on how to think about design, colors, fonts, and book covers in general, I decided that #4 and #5 were my favorites.  They gave me a feeling that resonated with what I was trying to convey.  I asked the designer: “can I get both of those covers?”

He was happy to do that and that’s how I ended up with two covers – one for the paperback and one for the hardcover.  Why two different covers?  There is no deeper motive here – it’s just something I thought that might be fun to do.  Why not?

After some additional feedback on how to pick colors from Nate (his general advice is just to try all sorts of color shades and see how they make you feel – I used https://coolors.co/ which was very helpful), I landed on color #127EA2.  This is the final cover design:

Where I Got All The Ideas For The Book – My “Second Brain”

In the summer of 2018, I discovered Tiago Forte’s writing on building a “second brain.” I read a couple of his articles and realized that I could dramatically improve my writing by implementing his approach.

The simplest way to describe it is that it’s a note-taking step between input and output where you collect ideas. I’ve since thought a lot about my creative process and you can see what it looks like (second brain and all!) here:

If you dive into Tiago’s world you will find many hyper-productive people with incredibly detailed and advanced note-taking systems. I am not one of those people.

I embrace something you might call a “curiosity-first” approach to building a second brain. I trust my curiosity to send me in an interesting direction and depend on consistent creation to help me come back to interesting ideas and naturally connect the dots over time.

Instead of having a detailed system, all I do is automatically sync notes from many sources into a central note system (I use Roam but also had success with Evernote). I don’t spend time summarizing or organizing those notes at all. Instead, I use the search function, often triggered by a gut instinct or an impulse that a certain book or idea I’ve read in the past has something to add to what I’m already writing.

The key to all this is finding an idea worth exploring and then consuming a lot of information. For me, that topic has been working and I’ve probably read hundreds of articles and essays, 50+ books, listened to hundreds of podcasts, and talked to hundreds of people. Paired with consistent creation, this led to the natural emergence of many original and creative ideas. For example, I coined the terms Boomer Blockade, Hustle Trap, Accidental Meaning, and many more.

If you create consistently AND consume large amounts of information around a narrow set of themes, you will inevitably write yourself into your own original ideas.

Through talking to people about these ideas, and writing about them in my newsletter I became more confident about them and I started to develop a better understanding of my own personal philosophy on the modern relationship to work.

As I wrote the book, many of the blog posts and ideas were the core building blocks and starting points for going back and reviewing notes on many books, ideas, and articles that inspired me.

The process of writing a book is its magnetic force as well. Throughout the year almost everything I consumed seemed to have something relevant to the book. I was constantly taking notes and leaving comments to myself in Apple notes to look at later while writing.

Balancing Structuring & Research – Shifting Between Bottom-Up and Top-Down thinking

The approach I used in writing a book was very similar to how I worked on projects while I was working in the consulting industry.  I thought this would be worth sharing because part of what made this so enjoyable as a year-long project was that it felt very similar to working on an ambiguous business problem – one where you don’t know the answer until diving into the process.

In consulting, you are usually focused on solving a problem.  You often spend weeks defining the problem and fine-tuning this over and over again with the client.  After that, you develop a set of hypotheses and start testing out all sorts of different questions.  This kickstarts a process between high-level questions and bottom-up research and analysis.  This back and forth is something that is incredibly uncomfortable when you first learn it and if you don’t find some joy in this way of working, you end up leaving consulting pretty quickly.  

The more projects you work on, the more comfortable you become with this back and forth.  You learn to see the uncertainty about where the project is headed as a normal thing and start to trust the process – mostly iteration, getting loads of feedback, and then shifting between research rabbit holes and stepping back to restructure the deck.  Here’s how I think about this kind of process in consulting:

Writing a book is essentially the same thing and being able to shift between these two modes is vital.  If I had to alter this, here’s what it might look like for writing a book:

And if I mapped it to my own experience, here are some of the key moments in my own book-writing process:

From a top-down standpoint, here is how the overall storyline and structure evolved throughout the process:

I’m leaving out a lot of detail of course, but if I were giving advice to someone thinking about writing a book I’d suggest the following:

1. Think about the structuring of the book as an independent activity from the writing.  These are two different ways of thinking and it’s not easy to shift between them.
2. Extended breaks from writing can be useful in thinking about the book in the top-down mode.  This is because it will help you brain shift into “diffuse mode” type thinking where you can start making connections between ideas.  Often when I was stuck, I would stop writing for a week or two and the answer would emerge.
3. The whole process is supposed to feel frustrating.  You need to have the sense that despite making 5 rounds of edits, making an addition 15 more edits to the same section is something worth doing.  Without this, you will struggle.

From my consulting experience, I had a deep belief that more iterations, especially if you can get feedback from great people, is almost always better.  With this idea, you really can think about the process of writing a book as a process of continuous editing, tweaking, and improving.  The biggest challenge is that if you don’t have experience working in this kind of environment, the process will be really stressful and annoying the first time you are lost in the weeds without a good sense of where you will end up. 

Formatting The Text In Reedsy

Formatting the text was something I assumed would be easy that was a bit more complicated than I imagined.  It turns out that you have almost unlimited options for colors, spacing, formatting, fonts, and so on.   Luckily, a friend had recommended Reedsy, which has very limited options (only three fonts).  I like to keep things easy so I decided to go with Reedsy.  They have a very easy-to-use editor which can turn Word docs into a book-ready form.  Here is what their interface looks like:

As well as some of the formatting options they give you.

One weird thing I didn’t know about books was that most books use no spacing between paragraphs and indent each line.  If you go open a book on your shelf, it almost undoubtedly looks like this:

When I uploaded my book into Reedsy, I hated how the indents looked.  Yet when I looked around for the reasons it was that way, I couldn’t find any good explanation.  It’s just the way it is.  The spirit of my book was all about questioning defaults so naturally, I was questioning this as well.  I then polled people on Twitter:

By a margin of almost 10 to 1, people seemed to love the blocks.  Since half my audience was on Twitter, I went with blocks.  On Reedsy this meant manually going through the entire book and hitting enter before every paragraph, but I like how it came out.  Here is a comparison from my book.

Formatting the book is also something that doesn’t come with instructions.  I mostly figured this out by using a free book formatting editor (Reedsy) and looking at other books.

I’m always a fan of keeping things simple and Reedsy was perfect for helping to add constraints to the process.  

How To Figure Out A Cover Size

Walk over to your bookshelf again – start to notice how many different sizes of books there are.  If you are like me, this will be the first time you’ve noticed this.  It turns out in addition to writing a book you have to make judgments about how a book should feel, look, and be sized.

Here are the options Amazon offers for book sizes:

What the!?

Luckily, Reedsy only gives you four options:

The best way to figure out what size book you want likely depends on what you want the book to feel like.  When I did 6” x 9,” the book came out to 172 pages.  I printed a book copy on Amazon and didn’t really like how it felt.  When I did 5.5” x 8.5” it came out to 220 pages.  Holding that version felt better and it also looked more like what I thought a book should look like.

I really don’t know any way of figuring this out other than trial and error, finding books you like the feel of, and playing with your editor (like Reedsy) to see how many pages you end up with.

Rights & Ownership: Getting The ISBNs

I wanted to fully own the rights to my book and that meant buying ISBNs.  Each country has a different place to buy this but for the US, you have to go through a company called Bowker.  One thing I didn’t realize is that you need to have an ISBN for each format you produce.  This means at least five if you want EPUB, Kindle, PDF, iBook, Paperback, and Hardcover.  Then another one if you want to publish your own audiobook.

So I bought the package of 10 ISBNs for $295.

The book publishers will give you an ISBN if you don’t want to purchase your own, but they also make you sign one of those massive legal forms that never feels good.  My feeling is that the future of content still has a lot of unknown upsides and I want to own all the rights to my material for the indefinite future, not Amazon.

You will need these for the covers so that Amazon (or your designer) can add an ISBN and barcode to the final version.

Formatting The Cover

You can’t design your cover for submission until you have the ISBNs and figure out how many pages the book is and the options you are using for various publishers.  I initially launched my book with two print publishers: Amazon KDP and Ingram Spark.  They each have different requirements for covers but both have template generators you can give to a designer.

For example, here is the cover generator from Amazon

You’d think that switching from cream paper to white paper would be the same book dimension, but apparently, that is not the case!

After formatting, covers will look like this for Amazon

And like this for Ingram Spark (their cover templates are a little more complicated!)

Naming Myself Publisher!

This is a trivial thing but something that may stress you out, especially if you are insecure about not going through a formal gatekeeper or publisher.

No worries!  It turns out you can declare yourself the publisher!  

Simple, and cool.

Pre-Sales: Gumroad & Then Amazon

Where you sell your book, for how much, and when are all decisions you’ll need to make when self-publishing your book.  I’m certain that I did not take the optimal approach but I’m also not sure what the optimal approach is, there are so many options!

I pre-sold my book on Gumroad.  This let me put up a page and allowed people to support me as I shared progress throughout the year.  It was also a way to hold myself accountable.  The more people that bought it, the more excited I became.  When I launched, I had 103 people that had bought the book on Gumroad.  

One unique thing about gumroad is that it allows people to offer a give above and beyond the price.  Several people paid much more than $10 for the book (one person even paid $100!)  I reached out to all these people asking them for ideas along the way and also gifted these people multiple printed versions of the book.

I finished the book in the final week of January and had everything ready to upload.  At the time, I thought that I’d set a release date of February 1st and try to build some hype before the launch and sell more copies on Amazon.

To start this process, I uploaded the versions for the physical book on Amazon on January 13th. The next morning I woke up to the following e-mail:

Oh shit.

I had noticed there was no pre-sale option when I uploaded the book but assumed I might be able to fix it later.  I was wrong.  It turns out if you are self-publishing, you cannot pre-sell print copies, only the kindle version.

So I decided to just go ahead and leave it.

I had been planning to do some research on optimizing launches and figuring out how to hack the Amazon algorithm to boost sales but when I realized it was already live, I was too excited to wait.

I don’t like marketing, and I don’t like pushing towards extrinsic goals, so I just had not spent much time thinking about my launch anyway.  However, I wasn’t completely naive either.  I had lots of proof (100 pre-sales, thousands of newsletter subscribers) that people were going to be interested in the topic. 

Part of the spirit of the book is about learning to trust that if you align your actions with things you actually want to do (and care about) it might lead you in an interesting direction.  I had a sense when writing this book that it was either going to resonate with people or not and if it resonated it was going to be the kind of book that spread slowly and consistently over a long period of time.  The challenge with this belief is just being patient and trusting the process.  Trusting the process can feel like ineptitude.  Luckily, with the launch anyway, my own ineptitude forced me to move forward.

I did pre-sell the kindle book for a few days and ended up pre-selling about 53 copies of the Kindle edition.  I officially launched all the versions on Amazon, IngramSpark, and Gumroad on July 16th.

It took a while longer for me to get everything set up on Ingram Spark and my first sales on those platforms did not happen until the second week. 

After the first week, counting pre-sales, I sold about 200 books which was pretty exciting! 

“People are buying my book, wow!”

Amazon has been the biggest sales channel and I’ve sold at least one book each day for the first month and a half which has been way better than I expected!  This article from 2004 seems to suggest that only 4% of books each year sell more than 1,000 copies. I’m guessing that number is a little higher with the explosion of self-publishing, but still seems to be a pretty cool accomplishment.

Here is what the sales look like in early March

Based on some shoutouts from people with big audiences, several podcasts, and other ways people found out about my book, I did pretty well on Amazon.  The kindle was the top release for multiple weeks in a few categories and at a time was close to Tim Ferriss’ 4-Hour Workweek at one point which was pretty cool.

Uploading to Apple, Google & AppSumo Later

One limit of printing books with Amazon or IngramSpark is that they don’t have coverage for lower-income countries.  What this means for people in India (which I have a decent audience) is that you can only ship printed books from the US which makes them absurdly expensive.  Luckily, I recently stumbled upon Pothi where I should be able to set my book to sell for as little as 249 rupees which is about $3.50.  This is great news!

In my rush to get set up on IngramSpark and Amazon, I forgot that since I owned the publishing rights, I could publish the ebook on any platform.  

I’ve since added my e-book version to Apple iBooks (this was hard to find but the site is http://authors.apple.com/) where I earn about $7 on every copy, and then recently to Google books (the link to do that is here: https://play.google.com/books/publish/u/0/).  I also put my book on AppSumo because Noah Kagan sent me a nice DM halfway through writing my book (link here).

Self-Publishing In India

One challenge to self-publishing is getting the books in countries people want them for prices that are reasonable in those local markets. This is likely something that publishers are good at. I received a DM from someone in India that was trying to get a printed copy of my book but only could find copies shipping from the US. The price plus shipping was more than $25. The person told me that typical prices tend to be about $5-6 max in India.

After some searching, I found a company, Pothi, that offers self-publishing in India. They sell the book on their own platform and also on Amazon.in and Flipkart. The only challenge with this was that I needed to re-format the cover (they didn’t have a good template maker) and then use another ISBN (it can’t be the same as the US version. So I did that, downloaded a new barcode from here, and uploaded the new version. By mid-march, my book should be available via Amazon for only 334 rupees (the minimum I was allowed to offer, about $4.35 USD).

How I Priced The Book

I’ll answer this one pretty quickly: I more or less looked at what other books were selling at and picked prices.  I decided on the following:

• E-Book: $9.99
• Paperbnack: $17.99
• Hardcover: $24.99

The biggest challenge in pricing is the kindle version on Amazon.  If you want a higher royalty rate of 70% you have to price within 3.99 to 9.99 (hence why I picked $9.99).  You can also opt your book in for expanded distribution but you cannot sell an ebook on other platforms.  Maybe this is leaving money on the table?  To me, I’d rather have more convenience and reach more people than optimize for sales.

One nice thing about Amazon and IngramSpark is that they automatically estimate prices for different regions.  Here is what it looks like on IngramSpark and the royalties for each region:

One final pricing thing: apparently you can set library pricing on IngramSpark too – they recommend anywhere from 2-3x the ebook price, so I chose 2x the price.

It looks like my book is in a few libraries already too!

How Much Did This All Cost?

The costs of the process were pretty straightforward:

Direct Book Costs: $5,142

• Cover: $742 ($270 for cover contest and $472 for designer)
• Editing & Coaching: $3,900
• IngramSpark Costs ($250)
• ISBNs: $250

Additional Spend: Promotion & Marketing: $2,425

• Self-purchases of about 152 books: $994
• Sending ~200 gift copies of books around the world: $1,170
• Advertising Experiments on Amazon: $125
• Promotion in the Joy List Newsletter: $100
• Instagram Ad Experiment: $36

Total spend: ~$7,567

Will I Get Rich Off This Book?

Short answer: probably not.  However, I have already broken even which means that every book I sell for the rest of my life will be profitable. This is probably one of the biggest upsides to self-publishing.  While you may get a big advance with a publisher, typically they sell your books at a discount and then only give you $2-3 per book.  

This is compared to the pricing and structure I’ve taken, where I’m getting about $8 per book.

Here’s the breakdown of my sales, royalties, and total earnings as of March 2022. 

As you can see there is a wide range of royalty rates, with IngramSpark being the lower.  Those should actually get higher because I switched the discount from 55% to 30-35%.  They suggest you have a higher discount for book stores that may want to purchase your book.  But after reading some people talking about this on Reddit, I realized that most of my existing sales are just readers buying the book on sites like Barnes & Noble and the equivalent in Australia and the UK and that I was giving money away to the company selling it rather than driving any incremental sales.  So those should jump to about $8-10 for the paperback and hardcover going forward

How I am promoting the book

While I’m not doing much traditional marketing, I am talking about the book and sharing my progress with sales – that seems to be something that has been exciting for people.  In addition, I’ve been sharing testimonials from people.  This seems to be the best way to “sell” a book.

One of the hardest things about writing a book is writing a summary of the book. I literally wrote a book because I couldn’t figure out a shorter way to say this!

Luckily, readers have shared their thoughts!

I’ve been blown away by the responses from readers and I am not lying when I say that the reception has been much more positive than I expected.

Here’s some of my favorite reader feedback:

“I could easily see this book having the cultural impact of Rolf Pott’s Vagabonding.”

“Like the 4-hour workweek but attainable”

“It’s a rare book in that it is tangentially about careers and being more focused and productive, but unlike almost every other book I have read about these topics, I finished this one and felt better about myself and my career.”

“The themes are timeless. The content is expertly written. The advice is refreshingly non-prescriptive.”

“If you have questioned your own path or a nagging lack of intention in your choices you need this book. If you have felt a gradual loss of agency in your direction you need this book. You are in the grip of an invisible script that was not written for you.” 

“The writing is fantastic – Paul’s writing is approachably poetic; a quick read that weaves together his own experience moving from a ‘default path’ overachiever to a ‘pathless path’ seeker of passion and curiosity, deep research into the history of work and collections of perspectives from years of podcasting, friendship, conferences, and meetings with other ‘alternative path’ life-livers.”

In addition to sharing on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram, I’ve also been doing a few things proactively:

• Going on different podcasts: (used this as an excuse to reach out to some bigger name podcasts – may be some news on this soon!)
• Gifting books to friends: Many people are excited about these ideas and/or are doing similar things. I’ve been gifting the books with

More Questions (Will update this as more come in!)

What were some fo the unexpected challenges you faced?

One interesting challenge was that I got a lot better at writing as I went on.  What this meant was that if I was working through the book in the flow of the book, the ending would be better than the beginning.  In the first few months of committing to writing, I noticed that I hated most of my previous drafts.  It was also fun to keep going back and knowing that I had improved.

Writing a book was probably the best thing I’ve ever done to improve my writing.  Highly recommend if you like writing!

How Does It Feel To Publish A Book?

I didn’t have an expectation of how I was supposed to feel when I launched my book. When people asked, I said things like “it feels good!” but to be honest it really doesn’t feel like a big deal to me. All the most exciting parts were during the writing. Small moments like tweaking a paragraph over and over again for a couple of hours and then magically finding the right words to make it work.

This book feels like a natural summary of a lot of what I’ve written about over the last five years. Instead of pointing people to a collection of blog posts, I now have something I can give to people that might be a little more helpful or inspiring.

The biggest thing I felt was free. Throughout the entire last year, I was always thinking about the book. Whether it was spotting ideas in things I read, noticing things in everyday life, doing the writing, or rounds of editing, I finally shipped the biggest creative project I’ve undertaken.

This week I’m going to be spending a ton of time reflecting on 2021 and starting to think about what comes next.

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 From Blog to Book: How To Self-Publish On Your Own Terms appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

This week Twitter announced that it was going to enable monetization through “super followers” on its platform. It appears to be taking some of the features of Substack, Patreon, and others and bringing them within the Twitter umbrella.

Here’s a preview of the screenshot they teased:

I’m both worried and intrigued.

Worried because the potential to make a ton of money is going to attract all kinds of people who are not invested in the health of this new emerging ecosystem.

I’m also intrigued because many of the people that do seem to already be succeeding in this world do seem to care deeply about how they engage with the people closest to them.

However it seems as though all of these new opportunities risk blinding people as they get drunk on potential monetization opportunities.

This is a natural result of the narrative around the creator economy which mostly focuses on how to make money, how to scale, how to build audiences and how to invest in the space.

This is all great but to me its a little too much economy, not enough creator.

A lot of the creators I look up to seem to know a deeper secret. That the goal is not to monetize but to find the things they want to do and then build a life around continuing to do those things. If monetization helps with the life design, then its worth doing.

All this is to say that almost no one is talking about the soul of the creator economy.

If the creator economy is to last and offer a meaningful path for people to do the creative work they want to be doing it will have to offer a different environment than the current culture of work. It will have to be about more than enabling high-paid Big Tech employees to quit their jobs and make even more than when they were employed.

For the creator economy to be something more than creating a new uber-elite of rich independent creatives, it needs to ground itself in a culture of creativity, generosity, and mentorship. It will require current creators (including myself) to contemplate important questions:

• Are we going to reward people based on their existing social capital and connections or actively search for people creating things in interesting ways?
• Are we going to optimize over making the most money as possible or are we going to use money to fuel a long-term creative journey?
• Are we going to scale our own operations infinitely or hit pause along the way to bring others along with us, regardless of their background?
• How can we gift money to other creators without expecting a “return on investment”?

Unless people start getting serious about developing a different kind of culture that goes beyond the default competitiveness and more is better ethic of the rest of the working world the creator economy risks becoming seen as a money grab for the credentialed elite.

I want to highlight two major risks. First the risk of thinking that the solo creator employment identity is one that will universally be seen as something noble, and two, the risk of people tearing each other apart from within the creator economy. I want to explore these issues and also brainstorm what we might do about it. I hope you see this as the start of an ongoing conversation and can add to it and help me move it forward.

First a quick rehash of how I became an accidental creator making money from selling things online over the past five years.

My Journey To Accidental Creator

I had been writing publicly since I started a business school blog in 2010 and before that had always messed around with blogging. I had even made some friends through my writing. It was pretty cool. Yet when I quit my job in 2017 writing never seemed more than something I might use to land potential leads for consulting work. After six months of consulting I earned enough to cover a year’s worth of expenses so I decided to hit pause. If I was more aware of the creative energy inside of me I could have predicted what happened next but I didn’t. Without anything to work on I launched a blog, podcast, and a bunch of other small experiments. I had no intention to monetize any of it. I didn’t think it was even possible.

In the summer of 2018 I ran my first cohort-based course experiment in inspired by Seth Godin’s altMBA. “Solopreneur shift” brought together two things I loved, learning and connection. I loved it and mostly did it because I thought it might help with my long-term goal of potentially teaching at a University. I never thought doing online courses directly could be an aim in itself.

In November 2018 after moving to Taiwan I decided to spend some of my free time (read: I couldn’t find any freelance work) building a strategy consulting skills course. My desire to build this was based on the reactions from several people I had shared a mini workshop version with over the past year: “Wow you need to share this.” So I built it….and they didn’t come. I sold five copies in four months netting about $389. Online learning was a fun hobby where I could create stuff to give away to friends that I would fund through paid work.

When I was in Bali in January 2019 two friends changed my perspective. Jonny Miller told me about Tiago Forte and his STEVEs framework and Jay Dike told me I didn’t know a damn thing about online marketing (he was right).

Tiago’s framework was that the future of online education was going to be made up of Short, Tiny, Exclusive, Virtual Experiences (though he seems to have replaced tiny with massive). This shifted my mindset away from bringing traditional education online and instead creating something completely different.

In 2019 it still seemed early. Tiago and others had bold ambition but were still pricing courses at around $400 and that was after several years of hard work. The paths for outsiders to quickly opt-in to a “creator economy” were not fully legible.

This changed towards the end of 2019 when Li Jin published her article on the Passion Economy. She started:

The top-earning writer on the paid newsletter platform Substack earns more than $500,000 a year from reader subscriptions. The top content creator on Podia, a platform for video courses and digital memberships, makes more than $100,000 a month

This article spread like wildfire through the hustle-centric investor and tech crowds. Immediately I noticed people reaching out to me, especially full-time employees, who were asking for advice for how to leave their BigTech jobs and make a living creating stuff online. After making $16k online in 2019 I told them I had no idea.

In 2020 the internet changed because work changed but even in January before the pandemic it seemed that the creator economy was happening. In January my StrategyU YouTube subscribers exploded from 500 to thousands and I began monetizing my channel. I don’t care about being rich but I have a hard time ignoring money that seems to just show up just like anyone else.

All of these trends were supercharged with the stay-at-home orders and many seemed to use their savings to take online courses. My sales tripled in April and they stayed there for the rest of the year.

For the last year I’ve been making a living from the creator economy. Wild.

In January of 2019 I made money online from five sources with the highest being $60 from Amazon affiliate links. In January of 2021 I made money from 11 online sources, including eight of them over $50 (Gumroad, Teachable, Patreon, Substack, Teachable, Stripe, YouTube, Medium).

The Creator Economy Is Great But Problems Have Emerged

I am optimistic about the internet and its power to let people create. I am the one saying we need 100x more creators. I am a believer in what Erich Fromm said about creativity, that it was a way to find a connection with the world and something bigger than yourself and that this might be a path out to meaning and even love.

The way I think about the potential of creating online starts with two beliefs:

1. Everyone has an urge to create but a lot of this is hidden because most of our economy still depends on people knowing how to follow rules, maintain order and control others.
2. The power to create and share online is essentially free and there are no gatekeepers on a majority of the internet. Most people have not adapted to this and people that have made money in traditional ways with the right credential won’t be comfortable with it for a long time. This will be laughable by the time Gen Z is their prime working years

The desire to create and share things has existed as long as humans have existed but in the past five years the technological hurdles and friction to create online have slowly eroded.

With the proliferation of people coming online and experimenting in new ways to make money online I have seen two things that could potentially undermine the acceptance of the creator economy as a positive type of employment.

Problem #1: Being a solo creator does not yet come with the positive halo effect that full-time employment offers. This means the creator economy needs to position itself as a better alternative to traditional employment in order to thrive

As more people have come to the internet to make money it has attracted bad actors who put their stink on anyone trying to sell online. Spend some time on Instagram and YouTube and you will likely be hit with a video ad from a hustlepreneur promising to show you how to make $100k from the beach.

Besides the fact that reasonable people don’t work from beaches, this leads to a negative halo around the whole ecosystem. It’s also why it feels smart for the full-time employee making a good salary to deride almost anyone making a living by selling things online.

Where does this sentiment come from?

Full-time employment is righteous and noble. This is just the way it is, for now. Work a full-time job, even at a place like Wells Fargo where defrauding customers seems to be part of the strategy, and most people will see you as a good, upstanding citizen.

This is not the same with being a digital creator. What do you mean you sell things online? You don’t have to work every day? What are you talking about?

I think part of this discomfort comes from the relative lack of constraints compared to normal jobs. In a normal job your compensation, hours and schedule are constrained. For the self-employed creator you can work 10 hours or you can work 90. You can try to earn $10k or you can shoot for $1 million.

This is amplified by making the private motivations of people public. The greedy and ambitious creator cannot negotiate their bonus in private and instead must share prices publicly and share their vision to an audience.

There are likely many more manipulative, aggressive, and psychopaths among the ranks of respectable companies than people who are trying to make money in the creator economy. However a few bad apples will hurt the creator ecosystem much worse than Jeff Skilling ever hurt the reputations of corporate executives.

Problem #2: The “wrong reasons” trap threatens to poison trust within the creator ecosystem and turn it into another type of employment we hope to escape

As people have started to make real money in the creator economy I have seen some competitiveness, driven by envy and jealousy, creep into the culture. If the creator economy is going to thrive it will be because people both hold each other accountable and support each other.

This is one of the best defenses against distrust from the outside. If we can build a culture centered around support and creativity, it will help to shift the narrative of the good kinds of work worth pursuing in society. Envy and jealous are normal human impulses but are likely just going to undermine your own energy. Helping ten people get started creating or mentoring others is a better use of time than dunking on bad actors.

This needs to be a vital part of the culture of the creator ecosystem. Without it, it will just devolve into the competitiveness and tribal politics that many of us sought to escape when we went indie in the first place.

I’ve seen many offhand comments in private discussions of other’s bad motivations. This is simply the Bachelor “in it for the wrong reasons” fallacy. Everyone assumes they are in it for the right reasons and others are all in it for the wrong reasons.

The reality is that humans are complex and that we are all pursuing various things for a mix of motivations. What separates people is often not their motivations but their ability to disguise their most aggressive and socially unacceptable motivations. I used to consult to c-suite executives, masters at hiding their desires for power and wealth.

To pretend you are not trying to make money is disingenuous but to assume others are only in it for the money or some other less acceptable aim ignores the reality of how most people are wired.

Five Ideas For A Healthy Creator Economy

The early stages of the creator economy have been amazing for people that have been creating online for many years. You have people that have been writing online for ten years that are now able to fund for their writing via an enthusiastic and supportive audience. You have others who have valuable knowledge to share that don’t need to have their dreams shattered by a five-year PhD process before being able to develop their own courses. You have others building interest-based communities that might be better than the network effects of a grad school at only $5 or $10 a month.

I want this ecosystem to thrive and I want it to become an acceptable way to make money while living a respectable life. We live in societies where there is broad political consensus around full-time jobs as the main way to distribute wealth to people. I think tremendous harm is done by this current arrangement mostly because the current labor economy only seems to still work for highly-educated knowledge workers. If we are just trying to save ourselves from moving from high-paid corporate jobs to high-paid creator jobs we are missing the point.

I don’t have a Marshall plan for creators (that’s completely the wrong idea) but I do have some ideas for how we should think about the health of the ecosystem

1. More creation: The path to getting rid of bad actors is not to spend time trying to chase them out of the ecosystem but to encourage more positive voices. This includes all people. Teach your aunt how to self-publish the book they always wanted to write. Show your uncle that he can learn how to play an instrument on YouTube. Teach your kids how to launch a podcast to explore their curiosity. Reminder: isn’t about making money. The key is to make it about showing people how easy it is to create. My bolder call for creation can be found in my call for 100x more creators
2. Develop principles: Develop your own set of principles and criteria for how you think about making money and how you decide which platforms to engage in. Don’t just chase every new way to make money because its the latest hot thing. Try to figure out what you are trying to create and cultivate beyond making money for the sake of it. Most people will burn out if they don’t have these deeper principles anyway.
3. Charity principle: Don’t fall into the “wrong reasons” trap. Default to the charity principle when seeing other creators and fight the urge to dunk on others creating or sharing in public. Most people have healthy motivations but may need coaching or a friend rather than discouragement.
4. Find others to help as early as possible: Avoid the mistake of thinking you’ll help people once you’ve “made it.” The easiest people to help are the ones right behind you on your path. This ecosystem will thrive if prestige is earned through mentorship rather than money-making.
5. Embrace “gift economy” approaches: Money is great but you know what is better? Meeting people who are not able to afford expensive things online but will blow you away with their curiosity and determination to learn. Here is how I’ve integrated a gift economy approach into my course. Please steal and copy.
6. Experiment beyond default economics: There is a large push by silicon valley to invest in the creator ecosystem through traditional venture capital and also framing the conversation around thinking about creators as businesses. ISA’s sound great but we know there is something icky about it all. These default models of investment optimize for unlimited growth and they will crush souls to create profits if they have to.We need to make the hard decisions to say no to shiny offers of money and take the slower but more interesting path of cooperatives, one-off apprenticeships, fellowships, and models that haven’t been invented yet.

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 Battle For The Soul Of The Creator Economy appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

Here are five big ideas I took away from the episode:

#1 People rarely set truly bold goals

While building Alinea, Grant decided he wanted to be “the best restaurant in the country.”  Anything else would be a failure.  This seems like a hard goal, but has two benefits:

1. Few people (if any) set such lofty goals, meaning you have less competition
2. It self-selects for the type of people that crave such challenges and brings a level of excitement to work every day

If you are creating something, ask yourself, “what is the most incredible, awe-inspiring version of this I could create?”

#2 Willingness to blow it up and “fix something that’s not broken”

When people reach a certain level of “success,” few have a desire to start over.  Yet, Grant craved this continuous reinvention throughout his career.  After being named “best restaurant in the world” he feared the complacency that came with success.  Although such accolades likely guaranteed he would never have to worry about his restaurant failing, it was about a deeper curiosity and energy that comes from creation.

This spirit was part of the original name of the restaurant, Alinea, which means “the beginning of a new train of thought”:

We are ripping apart a restaurant that is working incredibly well. It’s the busiest its ever been. Why fix something that is not broken? Well because if we wholeheartedly gonna uphold that philosophy that we started ten years ago “The beginning of a new train of thought. I feel like that’s our obligation. We have to just make it a clean slate.

Alinea now re-creates an entirely new restaurant every four months.  How could you embrace this spirit of re-invention in your own life?

#3 Courage to leave the path that made sense

In culinary school, Grant read chef Charlie Trotter’s book and was inspired by such an accomplished chef.  He ended up going to work for Trotter but was discouraged when his personal vision didn’t align with how Trotter led his kitchen.  Trotter has been described by the New York Times as a “control freak” and someone who is known for the “radical extent to which he takes his quest for excellence.”  While this approach has resulted in personal success for Trotter, it was a stifling environment for Achatz.

When Achatz was contemplating leaving, Trotter told him there would be no record of him working at the restaurant.  He left anyway.

Robert Greene has written about mastery and creativity and found that there is always a point when people must go out to carve their own path.  Greene finds that most people wait too long to start experimenting: “you must force yourself to initiate such actions or experiments before you think you are ready.”

Achatz left Trotter without any plan and ended up joining the French Laundry before it became famous.  There, he found the right environment to experiment and push his limits under Chef Thomas Keller.  The French Laundry was named best restaurant in the country in 2003.  Achatz could have stayed.  But again, he left a path that seemed to make sense.

When you talk to successful creative people, it is easy to simplify their path in a way that makes it seem logical or planned.  That is rarely the truth.

What path have you been on that doesn’t make sense anymore?

#4 You are never an “expert”: “Taste to leave taste”

While Achatz was building Alinea, he was diagnosed with cancer and the treatment made him lose his sense of taste.  For a chef, nothing could be more frustrating.  Yet as his taste slowly started to reappear, he looked at the experience with wonder and realized that his sense of taste was literally being reborn as if he were an infant.

…when you’re first born, newborns can only perceive sweet. They’re not, their palates haven’t developed yet. They can’t taste salt. They can’t taste bitter. They can’t taste acid. And obviously, the reason for that is so that they’re drawn to eat, tasting the natural sweetness in the milk. So the same thing happened to me. I started from zero and the first thing back was sweet. So my palate developed just as a newborn, but I was 32 years old. So I could understand how flavors were coming back and how they synergized together…

As he said, “I think it made me a better chef, because now I really, really understand how flavor works.”  In the book Art Of Learning, Joshua Waitzkin describes the challenge of learning as a continuous process of mastering the details to move to the next level, or “numbers to leave numbers”:

It is important to understand that by numbers to leave numbers, or form to leave form I am describing a process in which technical information is integrated into what feels like natural intelligence. Sometimes there will literally be numbers. Other times there will be principles, patterns, variations, techniques, ideas.

As Achatz notes in the show, “All chefs want to be known for using a knife.  Yet Achatz’s experience with cancer and his loss of taste forced him to think about how to convey his vision to others.  While sitting in the chair receiving chemotherapy, he drew out new dishes on a sketch pad and experimented with new types of language to communicate his vision with his team.  During this period he realized that he “can be a chef without being able to taste.”

Taste to leave taste.

Cancer is a terrible way to learn, but Achatz’s experience offers a lens into the limits of our thinking.  We are often too confident in our understanding of how the world works or get too comfortable with our own perceived competence. How can we question even the most fundamental realities of the way we perceive the world to open up new ways of looking at the world?

#5 Question everything: “Why can’t food float?”

When Achatz started his journey in food, he wanted to question everything.

We would go to art galleries and you would see these giant-scale pieces of art. And I would always say, “Why can’t we plate on that?” It frustrated me that, as chefs, we were limited to scale that was determined by plate manufacturers. Why not a tablecloth that we can eat off of? Why do you have to eat with a fork or a spoon? And why does it have to be served on a plate or in a bowl?

In his evolution to creating on his own to inspiring others to create, Achatz found that true success for him was “maybe the most important thing is taking that idea, that little nugget and handing it to someone else. And then next thing you know, someone is holding a ballon.”

In contrast to Trotter, Achatz asked bold questions and challenged his team to create.  The balloon he referenced is one of Alinea’s most famous creations that all started when he asked the question “how can we make food that floats?”  His executive chef Mike Bagale, likely knowing that Achatz would give him the space to experiment jumped at the challenge and simply said “I’ll do that.”

To question the fundamentals of your work or life is to invite criticism.  Yet the people that ask these questions are often the people we look to for inspiration or the ones that give us hope that we can unleash our own creativity and carve our own paths.  Achatz not only questioned the fundamentals in his own life, path, and pursuit of creativity but also created an environment where others leaped at the challenge of doing the impossible.

Here’s to finding a piece of Grant Achatz inside us all.

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 Five Lessons From Grant Achatz on Unleashing Creative Potential appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

While Shayne has built a successful marketing consulting firm, there was no “plan” to do this.  His first exposure to marketing was out of necessity – his professor let students boost their low economics grades by joining the marketing group he ran.  Shayne quickly applied the lessons to his DJ gigs on the side in college and became more interested in how to build real relationships with people through incredible experiences.  He brings this same passion to his work today.

Shayne has had many “dumb” ideas, but he would argue that most ideas (good and bad) start out as dumb ideas.  The difference is the people with the courage to keep moving and respond to feedback. He has called the entrepreneurship journey “one of the most humbling things he has done in his life.”  From this humility and willingness to stay vulnerable, Shayne has been able to build a successful digital marketing firm.  So what’s his secret?  He shares four key steps to turn your own “dumb idea” into something that might work:

1. Write down the ideas, make it real
2. Share your dumb idea as widely as possible (don’t worry if people steal it)
3. Get as much feedback as possible (even the negative!)
4. Continue to tweak and re-work the dumb idea (don’t get too tied to the original idea)

Shayne wants more people to follow their silly ideas and see what they can make of it.  In 2010, he decided to start his own business during a recession and with no money to his name.  Eight years later, he has no regrets and couldn’t imagine taking a different path. It may not have made sense at the time – but its the decisions that don’t make sense that often turn into something meaningful.  If it made sense, people would already be doing it!

• Dumb Idea Project
• Shayne Spencer (LinkedIn)

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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 Shayne Spencer on the “dumb idea project” and how failing econ helped him start his firm appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

YuTing Chiu is a sound designer and multimedia artist based in Taipei and is someone filled with creative energy.

When we first met for coffee, she said to me, “do you want to see the instrument I created?”  I’ve never had someone ask this question before and plus, who says no to that question?  What she pulled out was an incredible handmade triangle instrument that was her re-invention of an African rainstick, except here was the “infinite” version.  She wanted to improve on having to flip over a rainstick every time it stopped making a sound.

Her instrument-making curiosity started when for a project for art school in Chicago, she decided to build a Bacon-themed instrument.  We talk about how that got started and how it led to other creative projects such as her Cultural Sound project, where she is trying to map people’s sounds or reactions they used to common occurrences in life.  For example, when people see a cute puppy they say “awww” in America, but “ahhhhh” in Taiwan.

Getting grossed out:

In the US, you might say “eww” when you see something gross, but in Taiwan, you’d say:

In addition to her sound projects, we talk a bit about how she expresses her creativity in other ways, through fun and perhaps projects that just don’t make sense.  For someone like YuTing, it is hard to imagine her ever using the word “bored.”

Check Out The Video Version:

Check Out Her Projects:

• Soundcloud: @UtingLing
• Cultural Sound Project

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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 YuTing Chiu on cultural sound differences, building instruments & creative expression appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

My first memory of greed was waiting in the line at a local crafts store called The Hoot. My blood was pumping as I looked at the clock and counted down the minutes until 9am when the store would open and a group of 10 of us, an odd collection of fathers, mothers and children, would walk calmly but with some urgency towards the back of the store. The goal was always the same — to acquire at least one plush, hopefully soon “retired” and artificially scarce PVC pellet-filled creation.

My first collection was of basketball cards, but it never turned into a full-blown obsession. Okay, I’m lying. I had a monthly price guide and organized my cards by team and by year. I had a dedicated box of Michael Jordan cards, which eventually held (and still holds) over 100 of his cards.

However, basketball cards were something I would pull out when I was old, sharing stories about sports with the next generation.

Beanie babies were my ticket to teenage retirement

The early internet was a wild playground. As a 13 year old, the banks had no interest in my services, so I got creative. I would buy basketball cards, beanie babies and beanie baby accessories on eBay. Instead of paying immediately, I would send the seller a self-addressed-stamped-envelope stuffed with cash. I was operating as an amateur drug dealer and beanie babies were my drug.

At one point, I orchestrated a complicated trade over a forum with a random person on the internet to acquire a rare “retired” seal that went by the name Seamore. This specific beanie baby I acquired came without the famous TY “hang tag” — probably ripped off by some child who had no idea what kind of treasure they were playing with. It was still a coup for me — price guides told me it was still worth $50 without the tag.

Seamore (pictured here without that valuable “hang tag”)

There were many of these price guides on the web which gave optimistic predictions. While there were some differences, most confirmed my conclusion that beanie babies would rise in value forever. I was mentally doing the math and it was quite clear that I would not have to worry about college. I was starting to imagine a future in which I was some sort of beanie baby lord, just swimming in my riches.

Preparing for my leap to the upper echelons of society, I started curating and obsessing over my collection like a collector of wine or fine art.

To protect my collection, I spent money on the finest cases and tag protectors that my self-addressed-stamped-envelopes could buy. There was an abbreviation MWMT that meant “mint with mint tags” — all was lost of the tags were not perfect.

Tag Protectors!!

Fueling The Fire

As I collected more PVC-filled bears, ghosts and animals, I would go to homepage of the maker of beanie babies TY.com.

As anyone with a dial-up connection remembers, you did not simply go to a website in the late 90s. You first typed in the address, hit enter and then slowly stared at the screen as the website loaded, line by line from the top to the bottom.

Like the drug fueled addict that I have already admitted to being, I would refresh the page several times per day. After a couple of minutes the latest news section of the website would finally load and I could read the latest product announcements.

TY was strategically introducing new beanie babies while simultaneously “retiring” the current collection — meaning you could no longer buy those sacred beanie babies in a store. Online price guides would adjust to reflect the scarcity everyone would lose their mind calculating their riches.

As I built my collection, I had no real strategic plan other than acquire beanie babies and to put them in cases

• Step 1: Obtain as many beanie babies as possible
• Step 2: Protect the good via tag protectors and cases
• Step 3: ?
• Step 4: Retire

MWMT!

Bitcoin Mania

This past year, the internet lost its collective mind acquiring cryptocurrencies. I was not immune from this contagion. At one point I was up a good chunk of change on a small amount of money I threw into the mix. Did I ever think about selling? No. Just like beanie babies, I got caught up in the story of the future potential payoff.

However, unlike beanie babies, the crypto-craze seemed solely about money. With beanie babies, there was something deeper — something playful and silly. Perhaps it was because I was a child or the absurdity of so many people hoarding $5 plush filled animals and other mythical creatures.

I still own several Princess Diana bears and over 100 other creations and store them MWMT in cases at my parent’s house. Within my family, there is an inside joke that my beanie babies will one day be worth millions once everyone else has thrown them away. Keeping them is more of an investment in humor than an actual investment.

Sure, it is fun to play with that dream and wonder “well, what if…” and to think that my PVC-filled creations could be one day still be worth a fortune. But even if they were, I’m not sure I’d sell. There is something about holding on to something from your childhood.

Peace & Travel

As I write this, I am looking at a tie-died PVC-filled bear and one of the most famous Beanie Babies named “Peace” staring at me with its small black circular black eyes. Every time I look at it, I crack up a little.

Imagining myself in front of the computer loading the ty.com website hoping for updates, convincing my mother to drive us to The Hoot, orchestrating trades with strangers on the internet, filling envelopes with cash, and protecting my goods in fine glass cases awakens my inner child.

Over the last few years, I have been getting rid of most of my possessions. Every time I throw or give something away, it is a bit painful, but every time it sharpens the mind towards which things are worth keeping.

Through each move, the tie-dyed bear has survived the purge. I wasn’t really sure why I kept it, but I now realize that it captures a moment in my life in which I was dreaming big and filled with life.

While it was likely one of my first tastes of greed, it was also a first taste of putting a lot of energy into something that didn’t make sense. Something that was filled with silliness and fun rather than payback.

Next month, I’m doing something on a larger scale that doesn’t make much sense — moving across the world and starting a journey of living nomadically. The first ten years after college, I followed a path that made too much sense. I pursued prestige, status, and success and by all accounts was good at it. However, I lost connection to who I was.

Taking the leap to self-employment and exploring my creative side over the past few years, I have unlocked that silly side of myself I didn’t realize was locked away. Creating things that don’t seem to make sense. Writing to see what comes out (like this piece). Creating things on the internet without any intent to “scale.” Helping people without any expectation of payback.

As I travel and continue to learn as an adult, I hope to never abandon the playful and silly mindset to do things I am drawn to and sometimes without reason. Creation for the joy of creation. Silliness for the sake of being silly.

As I set forth across the world, I will be accompanied by my friend Peace.

---

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 Beanie Babies, Silliness & Things That Don’t Make Sense appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

“Work as you know it is currently changing in fundamental ways that we have not seen since the industrial revolution”

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Stephen has been self-employed for more than 18 years.  At first, it was by accident.  He referred to himself as a “reluctant freelancer.”  We talk about how that mindset evolved into one where he now sees self-employment as THE option for today’s world.  He is the founder of Life Skills That Matter, a platform, and community to help people to build the real skills they need to build a life they are proud of.

There are many future of work “thought leaders” but that title would sell Stephen too short. He has been in the weeds experimenting in his own life and has helped hundreds of people carve their own paths in the world that I would instead call him the wise elder statesman of the freelance economy. If you have ever thought about working for yourself, I recommend Stephen’s work over my own.

Stephen puts the emerging trends bluntly: “The only work left is managing yourself.  If your going to manage yourself, you mine as well work for yourself.”

To get started, he pushes people to “work on creating…you’re not just going to get paid right off the bat, just enjoy the freedom of creation of whatever it is that you want to do, whatever form that is, however you want to do it without judgement…just start doing that.”  Because that’s what really gets people interested when you can share your creations and there’s nothing more human than that.

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 – Stephen Warley on the biggest shift since the industrial revolution (Episode 19) appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

The question “what do you do?” increasingly does not make sense. Five years ago, I would have said “I’m a consultant.” People really just want to know “how do you make money?”

Increasingly, that question is coming to mean “what do you work on?” For me the answer is complicated — I create a podcast, I interview people, I write, I read extensively, I coach people in their careers, I volunteer. Some of those things help me make money and some don’t.

In organizations and in the emerging freelance economy, I have seen a steady, but dramatic shift. The people that are able to thrive are the people that are able to create. The people that are energized and excited are the ones that are doing what matters to them.

Yet, we pretend that the old markers of success — climbing the ladder, getting a promotion, having a “good” job — are what matter.

They don’t.

The Nature Of Work Has Fundamentally Changed, Yet We Operate As If It Is Still 1995

Consider the following:

The decline of full-time work: There was no net increase in full-time employment from 2005 to 2015 — all employment growth was in “alternative work arrangements” such as on-call and temporary as well as contractors and freelancers.

Work continues to increase in complexity: BCG has measured “complicatedness” of work showing that it has steadily increased 6.7% a year for 50 years. This has dramatically outpaced productivity improvements.

Limited connection between traditional education and our work: Less than three out of ten people work in fields tied to their major.

Dream jobs don’t exist: In 1997, Amy Wrzesniewski found that work that is a “calling” is a result of a mindset, not our underlying skills.

People prefer autonomy over control: Researchers found that when power is framed as autonomy versus power over people, people were much more inclined to seek power positions. Autonomy is also highly linked to job satisfaction and performance.

Money is not a motivator: In 1949, Professor Harry Harlow introduced incentives to reward monkeys and ended up destroying their intrinsic motivation. We then found the same result in humans. Yet, almost 70 years later, in organizations, we still use the language of “carrots” and and “sticks”

People are meaner at work: McKinsey found that people experiencing rudeness at work increased from 49% to 62%from 1998 to 2015. YIKES!

Failure to understand these shifts means one thing:

People are stressed, miserable and fed up, playing a game with rules that no longer exist.

In my own career journey, I made multiple career changes and eventually carved my own path as a freelancer. At every step of the road, I encountered endless amounts of bad advice, pseudo-science and buckets of hogwash about the choices I was making. Despite this, I was quite happy and engaged.

That made me wonder, why do ignore science and reality when talking about careers? In the last year as I’ve been carving my own path as a freelancer and in my work as a career coach, I’ve become obsessed with one question:

How should someone think about navigating their life and career in a way that enables them to have freedom to do the things that matter to them?

The deeper I looked, the more good ideas I found. From Pryor and Bright’s “Chaos Theory of Careers” to Adam Grant’s work on original thinking to Ryan and Deci’s self-determination theory to the fascinating research on curiosity, creativity, and solitude.

Our Deep Attachment To Work

How did we get here?

We place so much emphasis on work, yet the labor force participation rate is still less than 65%. We live in a time where we have a belief that much of meaning, dignity and identity can be unlocked through work. This cultural meme runs so deep that we tend to value any work for work’s sake and leave unquestioned the deeper questions of what it means to live a good life. It also results in bizarre phrases like “working poor” being a commonly understood and accepted phenomenon.

We need a radical mindset shift in terms of how we think about work and how we are meant to do things that matter

At the core, we need to stop praising someone for merely being employed or dutifully going into an office every day and we need to embrace the ambiguity and reality of the world.

Let’s ask people instead:

• Does your work bring you alive?
• Are you creating value for other people?
• Are you doing things that matter to you?
• What can I do to support your life?

The Framework

Foundation: Perspective, Motivation & Compass

Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier. — Colin Powell

Perspective:

We are operating under the assumption that the default path is the only path. The reality is that the default path is mostly an illusion. Most people that end up doing something that energizes them end up there through serendipity. We need to shift our thinking to embrace optimism and think about work as a life-long journey that will be reinforced by continuous learning and a flexible and open mind to new experiences, ideas and opportunities. Too often, organizations stifle motivation they tell people what not to do — numbing them into a state of learned helplessness. The reality is, for organizations to thrive and for people to thrive, we will need to push people to think on their own, question the status quo and become “original thinkers.”

We are operating under the assumption that career paths still exist and that successful people are the ones with the most money or highest rank. There are jobs and industries with great paths, but these are increasingly reserved for people who know how to acquire the right degrees and credentials. The truth is, we need to destroy the idea that a “job hopper” is somehow a lesser qualified person. We need to encourage people to try more types of work and embrace planned happenstance theory putting emphasis on optimism, open-mindedness and flexibility rather than specialization or the illusion of career paths.

Motivation:

We are operating under the assumption that having a job is enough. Unfortunately, most jobs are not set up to enable you to thrive and at worst, they may also destroy you. You are also more at the whim of the success of your industry, the pace of change in your job, and the “strategic” moves of large companies than you realize. The truth is you will need to continually self-reflect on the work that motivates you intrinsically, prioritizing mastery, autonomy, and relatedness, and continually re-assess your values, definition of success, and a connection to doing work that matters to you.

Compass:

We are operating under the assumption that companies will take care of us. Deep down, many know this is not true — just google the word “layoff” and see who was axed today. Here, I’ll do it for you…and this is only in the last 24 hours:

The truth is, we need to shift instead to approaches like Stanford Professors Bill Burnett and Dave Evans “Designing Your Life” that starts with a focus on living a good life and then helps you find work to do that fits into that. This does not mean living paycheck to paycheck— it means being thoughtful about mitigating risk through lowering expenses and eliminating debt such that you can have the freedom and flexibility to spend time how you want across all aspects of your life.

#2 How You Create: Environment, Connection & Action

It’s the way I study — to understand something by trying to work it out or, in other words, to understand something by creating it. Not creating it one hundred percent, of course; but taking a hint as to which direction to go but not remembering the details. These you work out for yourself.

Professor Richard Feynman

Environment:

We are operating under the assumption that work means going to an office 260 days a year, 5 days a week, working from 9–5 (at least). The reality is, more and more people are not working this fixed schedule and that it is often impossible to do 40+ hours of the types of creative work we will need to do in the future. We need people who are more comfortable in diverse global, virtual and remote teams and understand how to optimize their environments to maximize flow and creativity.

Connection:

We are operating under the assumption that investing more in corporate culture will make us happier. The confusing reality of this is that many of these efforts backfire since they are not built on a foundation of meaningful work. We need to instead align our work and lives around communities that share our passions and values (which can be done in companies sometimes!). We also need to shift beyond the “transaction mindset” which pervades our world and look for ways to be generous and support each other in their work so more people do the work that matters to them.

Action:

We are operating under the assumption that work is easily understood and can be documented in a process. Not to mention that it should be done full-time! The reality is, work is increasingly happening in projects and the companies that thrive are the ones that think in this context instead of keeping employees from quitting. Workers and companies will need to think about experiments — especially ones that will fail. As Adam Grant showed, original thinkers often run enormous numbers of experiments (for example Edison has 1093 patents, but most of them likely had little impact).

#3 How You Adapt: Knowledge, Progress & Vitality

Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement, achievement, and success have no meaning. — Benjamin Franklin

Knowledge:

We are operating under the assumption that our employers and universities will train us and give us the skills we need. The data shows that most of the $150 billion spent on learning & development every year is wasted. Universities are failing to give people the skills to compete in the economy. The truth is, we need to embrace the mindset of learning through doing, thinking about learning as a lifelong project instead of something that happens from ages 5 to 22, and creating opportunities for apprenticing or projects as a way to continuously develop skills. Finally, we need to more quickly shift to and give more credibility and support to alternatives to on-campus learning.

Progress:

We are operating under the assumption that employers and managers should tell us what to do and that the hierarchy determines our value. The truth is, permission is increasingly an illusion and those who seek it are going to be left behind. Hierarchies are outdated and more concerned with power than helping us develop the skills and experience that will help us build a career and a life. This leads to unnecessary suffering, the lack of growth and people in the wrong jobs. We need to shift from external markers of success to internal ones — are we energized?, are we learning? — and think about our careers as a portfolio of different projects, connections and skills. As Marc Andreessen offers: “The first rule of career planning: Do not plan your career.”

“ Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Vitality:

We are operating under the assumption that two weeks of vacation a year is adequate and that “work-life balance” is a worthy goal. This mindset starts with the assumption that work is the most important thing and you need to be some sort of productivity ninja that carves out meaningful time for health, love, relationships and fun. We instead need to start with our work and time and think about how we can invest in other people and communities to get the best out of each other. Finally, we operate under the assumption that workplaces are the source of all dignity, meaning and energy. However, with this mindset, we avoid the solitude and reflection that will unleash our naturally creative spirits. We need to flip our thinking to ask ourselves what the conditions are for us to thrive!

Are You Ready For The Future Of Work? Take The Assessment Here

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 Nine Future Of Work Mindsets You Need For The Weird New World of Work appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.