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.

Who Is David Perell?

David Perell (@david_perell) is a writer, teacher, and podcaster. David’s online course, Write of Passage, has been taken by more than 500 students from more than 40 countries and from companies like Intel, Google, and Twitter. The five-week course draws on David’s experience writing online, building an audience, and his interviews with more than 100 people on his North Star Podcast. Each interview explores the methods and principles of successful creators, artists, and entrepreneurs. His podcast guests include astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, author Seth Godin, and economist Tyler Cowen.

Podcast Summary

Paul Millerd and David Perell discuss childhood obsessions, growing as a person, challenging cultural norms, earning a living as an online creator, writing online, the act of creation and much more.

Key Takeaways

• The education system does not reward curiosity. The education system optimizes for obedience and turning things in on time
• We can’t change the fact that we are going to die, but we can transcend it by becoming the hero of our own story
• The ultimate act of rebellion is to care in a world that doesn’t want you to care
• If you don’t have God, everything in your life is a public relations campaign
• With a lack of heroes, the act of creating is the ultimate heroic act
• David told his parents “I’ve got the worst plan for two years, but the best plan for ten“
• One of the biggest secrets of the world – people are disproportionally willing to help young people who are curious, have agency, and are willing to learn
• The fundamental script of our education system is that you will do well if you become good at doing things you don’t want to do. Why do we spend so much time doing things we don’t want to do?
• Successful people are not nearly as busy as people would expect
• We shouldn’t run away from wealth and go back in time, but we need to ask hard questions about the modern world that is so soul-crushing
• Money is only as useful as the things you do with it

Challenging Society’s Stories & Scripts

• David’s internalized scripts for himself were that he was destined for failure, and would grow up with lots of anxiety
• David grew up in Silicon Valley. One morning, his best friend came to school in a limousine. He turned to his father and said “Dad, are we poor?”
• This experience created a script of needing money
• As a teenager and young college student, David wasn’t a great student, nor was he dedicated to improving himself. After college, he changed how he viewed himself
• James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits, articulated the importance of changing one’s perception of themselves in order to become who they want to be
• However, one thing that David had going for him was a desire to learn, and an innate curiosity
• Unfortunately, the education system does not reward curiosity. The education system optimizes for obedience and turning things in on time.
• As kids, both David and Paul would get very curious at very niche subjects. Both are highly interested in sports, among other topics
• However, Paul’s curiosities were more “acceptable” because he was a better student at the time
• David’s physics teacher told David that in twenty years of teaching, they never had parents that were more concerned about their child’s future than with David
• Ultimately, David’s parents were supportive of his interests and were very pleasantly surprised with David’s ability to leverage his passions to create his own pathless path

Pursuing Knowledge & Personal Growth

• Paul didn’t start reading until his senior year of college. He was inspired by storytelling that used data
• During the first week of a New York City college summer internship, David had the sudden realization “This week I realized I know nothing“.
• David realized his college professors were not helping him to learn. He began to pursue alternative methods to learn (blogs, podcasts, etc.)
• David felt like he was sleepwalking for the first twenty years of his life. Ultimately, he realized that he had agency over his decisions and outcomes
• Jocko Willink recently discussed this topic on the Huberman Lab Podcast “developing our sense of self is partially the realization that we can have some form of impact on the world”
• David read Denial of Death and realized he needed to take himself and his life seriously
• “We can’t change the fact that we are going to die, but we can transcend it by becoming the hero of our own story“
• The ultimate act of rebellion is to care in a world that doesn’t want you to care

Caring in a world that doesn’t want you to care

• Once you start to care, there is no turning back
• Why are people so afraid to say that they care?
• Religion: Having a God is like having something stable in your life
• If you don’t have God, everything in your life is a public relations campaign
• SBF leaked texts: ESG and morality is all a performance for others

• In the world of social media, critique of others has increased
• People who are cynical know the cost of everything and the value of nothing
• Peter Thiel: there is a decline of heroes
• We used to have heroes to look up to. Our heroes today are people like Elon Musk, who are very polarizing
• It is interesting to note that superhero movies from Marvel and DC have become so popular amid these trends
• The act of creation is the ultimate heroic act

Write of Passage Helps People Become Citizens Of The Internet

• Many people start writing to improve their resume for their traditional career path
• Many times, people end of pursuing a pathless path by writing online
• What is happening is that the things that we think we care about are not the things that we truly care about
• Writing is torturous when moving against the instinctual brain, but blissful when moving with it

David’s Pathless Path Started With Getting Laid Off and Ended up With Him Telling His Dad, “I have the worst plan for two years, best plan for ten”

• David previously worked in Sales, where he was laid off
• David’s boss told him “I need you to stop thinking about Jeff Bezos and start focusing on your job“
• David cared about the evolving level trends of communications and how to reinvent how we communicate in the digital age
• David sulked the first two weeks after being laid off. But then he found the famous Youtuber Casey Neistat
• David began to make a 4-6 minute YouTube video every single day for 114 days straight
• By day 70, David realized that all the time he spent editing videos he should spend reading so that he could learn more. Ultimately, David realized he wanted to be a writer versus a YouTuber
• David told his parents “I’ve got the worst plan for two years, but the best plan for ten“

David Aimed High With His Podcast, The North Star

• David aimed high from the inception of his podcast – hoping to get the best guests
• One of the biggest secrets of the world – people are disproportionally willing to help young people who are curious, have agency, and are willing to learn
• If you are young, hungry, curious, and willing to learn people will help you
• Robert Greene in The Art of Seduction – people want to be part of a great story
• Part of the reason that David loved golf was so that he could spend more time with established and successful people – it was a shortcut to wisdom
• Half of success in life is who you know
• David would ask people to go out for coffee or lunch and was told no. But when he invited people onto his podcast, he was successful
• Once he got Neil DeGrasse Tyson on his podcast, he was able to get other famous guests
• After every interview, ask for an introduction to other people

Handling Finances on a Pathless Path

• Paul did not expect to be so afraid of money and expenses when he left the corporate world
• David started doing consulting work and had some financial help from his family
• David knew he had a good plan, it would just take some time

Building momentum (Speed vs Force)

• If you have a penny, it needs to go incredibly fast to impact anything
• But if you have something large like a train, it can move slowly and still have a large impact
• Through acceleration and continuous work, David created mass. It takes time to build up momentum
• Paul found it difficult to communicate his progress to his friends and family “I’m broke, I’m not making money, I can’t prove anything, but I think I’m onto something“
• Having faith and intuition is so important. Yet, many people don’t lean into their intuition
• You may be wrong about the details, but correct about the long-term vision
• From the beginning, Steve Jobs always wanted to remove fans from inside computers so that they would run quietly and look sleek and simplistic
• Early on, these intuitions hurt him. Later on, the sleek view became popular

Role Models

• Seth Godin
• Ryan Holiday has a relentless pursuit of doing the work
• Ryan Holiday’s book, Discipline is Destiny, was a number two bestseller. He immediately got back to work on his new book
• Tyler Cowen is very aligned with his career and interests – he truly cares about what he is doing
• When you start making progress in something you truly care about, further progress becomes effortless and fluid
• The Cultural Tutor is an anonymous Twitter account. It turns out, the owner of the account was working sweeping the floors of Mcdonald’s and as a part-time security guard
• The account has been growing incredibly quickly. David told the owner to continue to work diligently “The winds of the stream will not always be at your back“

Doing things you are good at

• The fundamental script of our education system is that you will do well if you become good at doing things you don’t want to do
• The fundamental script of The Pathless Path is that you will do well by pursuing things that interest you
• Why do we spend so much time doing things that we don’t like doing?
• Liking things at different levels:
• This work is easy to me and makes me come alive
• This work brings me meaning and satisfaction
• I am on a quest to make this happen – it is my destiny
• We must identify the things that truly bring us alive

David’s Priorities

• Marketing: Podcasting, YouTube Videos, Content Creation, Writing
• By writing, David is expanding the frontier of his company and actively creating new ideas
• Recruiting: Given recent layoffs, this is one of the best times to recruit new people
• David stays extremely close to his direct reports in order to learn and stay close to the daily operations
• With the help of a Chief of Staff, David wants to get very good at communicating with his company
• The point of running a company is to do the things that you care about and delegate the rest

Talent Organization Passion (TOP)

• David looks for competency in all three components: Talent, Organization, and Passion
• Without passion, people get burnt out and leave
• The more narrowly you can define talent and passion, the better off everyone is
• It is surprising that many people get excited about things that they may not care about
• For example, some people get excited about budget and financing. Others might be more interested in marketing and SEO

Work of the Future

• Remote work is a return to intentional communication and culture
• David constantly thinks in 3-5 years in the future
• From there, David has his team break the vision into actionable plans
• Running a company brings lots of imposter syndrome
• Founders are both underrated and overrated
• Many times, successful people are not nearly as busy as people would expect
• Paul is obsessive about protecting his time
• It is impossible to generate ideas while you are constantly busy
• Every morning, David has strict writing time
• David has a profile for his computer that only gives access to writing tools – no notifications. It is essentially a digital typewriter
• People behave how you train them – David wants to be removed from decision making
• Jeff Bezos type 1/type 2 decisions
• The vast majority of decisions are reversible
• David prefers a bias for action

Society as a company

• People are constantly looking for approval
• We are moving to a world that is run by bureaucrats
• Humans go crazy when they don’t feel valued or needed
• Society is inundated with bullshit jobs
• There is something about large companies with all the perks that is entirely soul crushing
• We shouldn’t run away from wealth and go back in time, but we need to ask hard questions about the modern world that is so soul-crushing

Thoughts on Money

• Money is both the most and least real thing
• It is the baseline of how we survive; as well as totally meaningless after a certain point
• The most greedy thing is to make a bunch of money and do nothing with it
• Money is only as useful as the things you do with it
• David doesn’t understand multi-company entrepreneurs. Building more won’t make them happy
• David wants to build one entity that is both the means and the end
• David wants Write of Passage to make a lot of money so that he can invest it back into the company
• In order to make Write of Passage the best it can be, it needs to make money
• Money, if used properly, can create and impact the real world
• Paul didn’t realize that he had shame around money
• The person making 6 figures at a big bank defrauding consumers is seen as a success
• Meanwhile, someone who is working on their own project on the internet is met with skepticism
• After seeing an old overweight corporate executive in New York City, David made the conscious decision to never be that way
• Marvin Bower – if we charge the most, we will have the most and best clients
• Steve Jobs “We can’t just be a great product organization. We have to become a great marketing organization”.

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 David Perell on The Scripts of School and Becoming an Internet Citizen | The Pathless Path Podcast appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

This episode is with Sky King, the founder of Modern Stoa, a podcast advertising company for podcasters. His path is fascinating – he grew up in Hawaii, rarely wore shoes, was heavily influenced by Asian culture, had a father who was retired, and somehow ended up in a massive corporation right after college.  In 2016. he became fascinated by how the media was shaping the 2016 US election and decided it was time to act.  From a cold email to Ryan Holiday to helping build Aubrey Marcus’ podcast, Sky was on his way.  His long-term vision is to build an alternative to traditional advertising in audio.

We talk about this and a lot more including:

• Why he quit a good job to work at a smoothie bar
• How a cold email to Ryan Holiday changed his life
• Working for Aubrey Marcus
• Buckminster Fuller
• Growing up in Hawaii
• Serendipitous events that lend to him moving to Austin
• The future of Audio

Links Mentions

• Modern Stoa
• Sky’s Podcast (Paid) or RMRK.app
• The Gray Lady Winked
• The Brass Check
• @consumersky (twitter)

Listen & Watch

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 Sky King on Growing up in Hawaii, Quitting to Work At a Smoothie Bar & Building The Future of Podcasts (The Pathless Path Podcast) appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

Being an undeclared major till his senior year of college, Lawrence didn’t really know what he wanted to do. After looking up which jobs make the most money, he decided to declare as an economics major, leading him to explore Investment Banking. While he didn’t end up working in investment banking, he was still pulled by the power of prestige, something he says “is a drug, and is most potent” when you are young and looking at schools.

Over a number of years and experiments with music and creating and writing, he slowly started to figure out a better path forward for him. After leaving the corporate world for a second time, Lawrence finally found a calling – writing on his blog: More To That where he uses visual storytelling to express his ideas of pursuing alternative paths, sharing ideas, and creating online. 

Some of the topics we explore in this conversation include: 

• The influence of money and prestige 
• Burnout and reflection
• The importance of the right partner 
• Finding the right medium 
• The Arc of the Practical Creator

YouTube Video

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 Lawrence Yeo On The Arc of The Practical Creator, Creativity & Finding Work That Matters (The Pathless Path Podcast) appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

The promise of “finding a niche” online is one of arrival.  You start dabbling on the internet in some mode of digital creation and feel frustrated.  You don’t know what you’re doing and no one seems to be paying attention.  If you can just figure out a better way to describe yourself, pick better topics, or narrow your focus everything will get better.

I think this fails but not for obvious reasons.  The biggest reason “find a niche” fails is that the people are applying it too early in their journeys.  On top of that, it ignores the reality that most people who do arrive at a state of niche-ness usually have one thing in common: they didn’t give up.

This is why a better strategy than finding a niche, especially early, is “find a mode.”  Find a mode where you can continue to be excited about what you are doing.  Find a mode where the friction to getting started declines over time.  Find a mode where you are excited to keep going despite being ignored.  Find a mode where you want to do something despite not having anything to show for it or in the worst case, despite criticism.

This is really shifting from getting out of your head and into your body and thinking like a psychologist, not an engineer:

“Why am I getting physically upset at the lack of interest from other people?”

“Why do I struggle to get started on something despite claiming to care about it?”

“When do I find myself most filled with energy?”

“Why do I get so excited when I talk about certain topics?”

I think the reason this type of inquiry has become harder is that there are far more examples of people that have reached some easy-to-understand metric like money or fame by creating things online. We see other people achieving outsized success that have some elements of niche-ness and because it’s harder to know what really helped them arrive at that point, it’s easy to convince yourself that only thing holding you back is your own angle, unique set of topics, or brand that might help you distinguish yourself from the pack.

The Best Niche: Population of One

The problem with this I’ve realized is that the most niche-y people often inhabit a territory with a maximum population size of one.  In other words, they are just being who they are.  They are combining their unique psychology, interests, motivators, and evolving curiosity and know-how to drop into a mode of being that enables them to keep going. 

Niches can’t be aimed at.  They only reveal themselves over time.  This is why the most practical thing you can do is to “find a mode” that enables you to stay in the game.

Ali Abdaal is a creator “superstar” who seems to understand this.  If you don’t know, Ali is a now former-doctor and creator with millions of followers on YouTube (and also who dabbles as a part-time marketer of my book) that seems to launch new things once a month.  He’s killing it by all traditional metrics. 

On the surface it seems that the reason he is successful is that he is unique: he is a former doctor, Pakistani, living in London, and interested in entrepreneurship and technology.

Yet this is the error of niche thinking – the idea that the descriptors and outcomes are what matters most.

I’ve been lucky to get to know Ali a little bit and I don’t think any of those things matter as much as others or even he may think.  I think what makes Ali stand out is that he has found a mode of showing up in his life such that he enthusiastically enjoys the things he is doing. 

The first time I realized this, I was part of his first cohort of Part-Time YouTuber Academy.  As I sat through one of the lectures, I realized that Ali had essentially absorbed, understood, and synthesized a comprehensive business school education, all by himself.  As someone who had gone to one of the top business schools in the world, I realized that Ali would have ranked as both one of the best teachers and students at that school.

This made me excited for him.  Why? I knew he was on a path that was uniquely his and that his competition was essentially zero.  And this is the real magic of aiming at a mode: by aiming at a state where you can keep showing up with your unique strengths, you can stumble into your own personal niche. 

Said another way, I think Ali has succeeded because he could find the niche of being Ali Abdaal  – someone who literally gets joy out of learning new things, testing and implementing them, and then synthesizing them so he can explain them to others.  He did not “find” a niche because a niche of Ali is not a place where you can ever arrive– it is constantly shifting, driven by his evolving interests and curiosities.

This is what might be what makes the idea of finding a niche so seductive – it’s the idea that we don’t have to be anybody.  We can just be our weird selves.

Too Many How-To Guide For Future Creators and I am guilty of creating

The challenge of exploring the creator’s path these days is that there is too much damn information on how to succeed.  Don’t get me wrong.  I write and share a lot of this too and I think most of this is a net positive.  But for most people early in their creation journey, the advice and information are not even wrong.  It’s just not relevant yet.

The only thing that matters at the beginning is to stay in the game and find your mode.

This is why I’m sort of grateful that I started doing internet stuff before there was an explosion of success stories and how-to guides.  From 2014 to 2018 I was writing online, creating digital products, and experimenting with running cohort-based courses almost entirely because I enjoyed it and I found it interesting.  I didn’t have a destination in mind.  It was in these years I stumbled into a mode of being where I could keep doing these things indefinitely.

I wonder how my approach would have changed if I had started five years later.  The landscape of doing things online and making a living from it has changed dramatically.  People once “working online” are now grouped into a cooler-sounding “creator economy” that venture capitalists have somehow turned into a thing.

Would I have felt bad about taking so long to find my thing?

Would I have felt like a failure seeing so many other people succeed?

Would I have double-downed on topics that now seem like passing interests?

I have no idea but I’m glad that I didn’t know what I was doing and that for some reason, I had a deep sense that finding things that I liked doing and wanted to keep doing was something worth pursuing.

The Tale Of Two Niches

I have an interesting perspective on niches because out of those early years of writing and creating regularly, two niches revealed themselves in my work. 

One is the writing I’ve done under the banner of “Boundless” – about work, the creator economy, unconventional paths, and whatever I’m curious about.  I’ve launched multiple courses, written for thousands of hours, posted tens of thousands of tweets, and even wrote a book.  Yet until 2020, I didn’t really have any strong positive signal that my ideas were all that interesting, and even now, I’ve probably made less than $25,000 from everything I’ve done over a period of seven years of experimenting in this space.

The second is my “StrategyU” brand where I run a course and write about strategy and consulting skills.  This business has made more than 10 times what I’ve made from my Boundless activities but in terms of the total amount spent it would be flipped.  Despite clear economic incentives and a massive audience (large SEO traffic on the blog, 20k YouTube subscribers), I find myself repeatedly struggling to create stuff for that niche.

This is all to say that I sort of found two niches and one of them isn’t really something I’ve ever been all-in on.  StrategyU is a niche defined by topics and Boundless is a niche defined by “Paul Millerd’s evolving interests.”

This was not always the case.  While I’ve lost my connection to writing about strategy and consulting skills, the early writing I did on those topics was highly enjoyable and exciting.  I was able to create a lot of the ideas that are still resonating.  Yet I haven’t been able to get into that mode as reliably and I feel stuck whenever I think about needing to create more content. This is the biggest risk of a narrow niche – losing interest in the topics. 

The way I’ve been dealing with this is by coming back to the most important thing: finding a mode.  For the past few years, I was stuck, likely by some combination of my own lack of imagination and some real limits of my audience’s expectations.  But I think I now have a path forward.  In doing virtual training workshops with companies, I’ve been able to tap back into a mode that brings me alive helps me be excited about creating again.  But leaning in this direction will inevitably mean that some of my income streams that are downstream of content creation may dwindle over time. 

This is fine, because after being in this weird creator world and fully supporting myself doing this kind of work for the last four years, I realize that the only thing that matters is having the energy, excitement, and motivation to keep going.

Finding a niche is great but the game never changes.  You need to be able to continue to find a mode where you can keep showing up.

The Promise Of A Niche

The financial incentives of creating and sharing online have become obvious but I think many people that are reading this article probably desire something more. The real promise of creating and sharing things online is that it gives you the opportunity to support yourself while doing work you care about.  It’s also the chance to experience the magic of the art of creation which provides a portal to connect deeply to yourself, others, and the world around you. 

This is what I experienced writing this article.  Many of the words flowed out of me in a magical transmission that I don’t really understand but occurs reliably enough that I am sure I want to keep writing indefinitely.

If you take away one thing from what I am trying to convey its that niches are not an end state.  They are not something you arrive at.  They are simply a byproduct of a state where you continue to create and share things.  I think this is also why Visa Veerasamy’s “Do 100” prompt is so powerful.  It eliminates every single goal except one: just doing stuff.

If you do 100 of something, you will simply have a lot of experiences to reflect on.  You will see how your curiosity shifts.  You will see how others react.  You will see if you give up.  If you make it to 100?  You get to know the real secret: that there is no arrival.

The whole game is to keep playing the game and the secret to that is probably not finding a niche but finding the mode which enables you to play.

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

The post Don’t Find A Niche, Find A Mode appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

This is a question that holds a lot of people back from leaving their jobs. They rightly fear the existential dread that comes with an excess of time and lack of things to do.

This often convinces many that taking a leap into the unknown is not worth it. Others who decide to take a leap fall prey to hustle traps. They get excited about someone else’s goals and don’t realize that all they are doing is trying to calm their own fears.

When I left my job I was so afraid of creating another job for myself that I rejected almost any idea that was structured in a way to trade off time in the present for a payoff in the future. Yet I still had the problem: what do I do with my time?

The good news is that most humans, given enough time, will be naturally drawn to things. For me, it was writing, creating online courses, and podcasting. The issue was that there was not much advice on how to do these things without aiming at traditional goals.

If you’re going to write you should try to get published.

If you’re going to podcast, you should try to perfectly execute your launch.

If you’re going to create an online course, you should run a cohort-based-course.

People pick these goals because they are legible. They are the “smart” thing to do. In other words, most people see these are the things you should aim towards, and thus, why not aim for them?

Because I didn’t want to create a job for myself, however, I’ve had better luck embracing what I’m now calling “ship, quit, and learn.”

Instead of orienting towards specific goals far in the future, I design micro-experiments with only one goal: try stuff and then figure out what to do next.

My approach is probably a bit too risk-averse for some but can be powerful, especially for those who are early on an uncertain path and feel stressed about committing in one direction too early. It’s also more powerful if you are able to do many experiments throughout the year.

Let’s break down the three parts:

#1 Ship – Minimize The Friction To Getting Started

You have something you want to do but have been scared. What’s the minimum action you can take that would still feel like you are pushing yourself out of your comfort zone? Do that.

For example, if you want to launch a podcast, open up your recording app, and record a monologue of why you are launching a podcast.

I’ve helped many people get started on creative projects via a one-week “action challenge” in my reinvent course. You can check out some ideas for inspiration here.

#2 Quit – Design For Walking Away

Design your experiment for quitting. When I started my podcast, I decided that if I didn’t like it that much, I would just stop doing it.

Many of us were raised with the idea that you should never quit anything. This is useful for some things but absolutely terrible advice for creative pursuits. Quitting lots of things is probably the best way to find the things you want to commit to. When you design for quitting, you also put less pressure on yourself because it doesn’t make sense to overinvest in time or money.

When I launched my podcast, I had a crappy cover I threw together in PowerPoint in 5 minutes and didn’t spend any money on anything else.

I was terrified when I launched my podcast but by lowering the stakes I was able to power through that first phase of discomfort and discover the magic of hosting a podcast and having deep conversations with people I admired.

#3 Learn – What Does The Experience Tell You?

This may sound too obvious or too simple, but the goal of any experiment should really be to figure out what to do next. If this sounds like some sort of infinite game, you’d be right. Almost everything I do is oriented toward finding things worth doing, indefinitely. The spirit of “ship, quit & learn” is openness to experience and being willing to see what emerges when we lean into creativity and spontaneity. Often there are three routes people take: scale up, continue going, or quit.

After I launched my podcast, I decided that “keep going” was what I wanted to do. I liked being able to keep the show small and not having the pressure to grow or use it to make money. Over time I’ve made incremental improvements and have gotten better at interviewing but the spirit of the podcast is still the same.

Check out my podcast! (Still going five years later!)

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 Ship, Quit & Learn – A Framework for Finding Work Worth Doing appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

That may be the right path for you but I want to convince you that there might be another path.

I want to share my version of how I’m playing something Packy McCormick calls the “great online game.” A version that focuses on building a life where I can work in different ways to pay the bills, have plenty of time for creative pursuits, and don’t have to be tied to a full-time job.

What follows are five principles that have emerged that have guided my path. They have emerged slowly and organically. Only now do some of them seem obvious. I fully expect that they may morph over time. These principles serve as a compass for me as I navigate the infinite possibilities of the internet.

I think that nearly everyone, including people on the default path, should develop their own principles. This is because the stories of how we think about our work and lives are outdated, one based on a 1950s reality. This story worked in a time in which people worked for one company in their life when growth rates of 5% were normal, and most women didn’t work.

The trap of this story is that it actually works in the first few years of anyone’s career. Many companies still believe in this story and this is why the first five years of your career are still filled with promotions and a clear career path. Anyone that’s made it past that point, however, knows the truth. That there aren’t many clear career paths left and because of slowing growth rates, competition and politics are more central to getting ahead than some may think.

Developing your own principles and strategy is the only choice left if you don’t want to play those games. For the self-employed, developing your own game and set of principles is not a choice but a necessity. It is the only way to survive over the long term.

Here are five principles that help guide my path.

Principle #1: Coming Alive Over Getting Ahead

In April of 2020, my strategy consulting skills course started taking off. This was a weird moment because it took off at the same time I started dealing with extreme fatigue following complications from a tooth extraction. My course was selling like hotcakes and I was either wandering around the Canary Islands talking to doctors or sleeping in bed. This is one of the weird things about being a self-employed creator. Your financial reality can shift dramatically in a short period of time and often due to things outside of your control.

I had spent hundreds of hours to get it to that point but it was never my intention to hit a monthly revenue goal. I genuinely thought it would be fun to figure out how to create an online course (If you want to go much deeper, the full story is here). If you had talked to me in January of 2019 you might have thought my principles of keep doing stuff I like, give generously, and don’t work too much were pretty stupid because I had made less than $3,000 doing so in a year. Two years later I’ve somehow made a decent American salary for two straight years.

After a strong year of sales, I reflected on my success with StrategyU. My inner consultant knew that the obvious solution was to double down, add more courses, level up the marketing, create more content, and see where it goes. I was even invited to an accelerator program for proven course creators to make this happen. I could see the path and had a reasonable level of confidence that I could 4-5x my course sales if I wanted to.

But then I challenged myself, “what would you do once you had that money?” I realized I would write. I then reflected upon the fact that I could simply do that now. I was already making enough to support myself and still save a little money each year.

With this in mind, I decided to make a commitment. In 2021 I would write a book. This would be a way to commit to what I claimed to care about and also be a way of testing out this principle of “coming alive over getting ahead.”

My course has remained steady but has not grown much more than the previous year. However, the act of committing to writing a book has been one of the most thrilling commitments of my life. I’ve never felt so alive, challenged, and excited about anything I’ve worked on.

If a choice emerges between spending more time on making money but means I’ll have to cut back on some of the things I like doing like learning, writing, and connecting with people, I plan to walk away from that choice.

Principle #2: Don’t Be Attached

While my online course continued to succeed, I realized that I had come to expect that income.

With a few hours of maintenance per week, I was able to keep a profitable business running while writing my book and studying Chinese full-time for a three-month stretch. In one of those months, I even worked with a client to run a four-week consulting skills bootcamp which led to my best month since being self-employed. Then in May, the sales of my course tanked, likely driven by a change in the google search algorithm, people returning to the office after covid restrictions, and travel for the summer.

These kinds of ups and downs would be terrifying if I had a high fixed-cost lifestyle or if I had not experienced them before. To anyone that’s been self-employed for a long period of time, they learn to deal with these shifts. Here is an example of some various swings in different income sources I’ve experienced over the past five years.

With this in mind, I try to make sure that I’m not assuming that any of these income sources are permanent. I’ve embraced a visualization exercise where I go through an exercise of visualizing all my digital properties and revenue streams evaporating and then asking “am I okay?”

When my consulting course struggled for a couple of months after doing so well for more than a year, I was able to reflect on the fact that I’ve started from scratch in the past and I could do it again.

Principle #3: Build An Income Floor & Optimize For Income Streams

About a year into self-employment I realized I really want to stay on my path longer than my initial plans for a one-year experiment. I realized that if I wanted to commit to this path, I needed a better strategy for earning money than only freelancing.

Freelancing is one of the best ways to get started with self-employment. It enables you to leverage your existing skills while giving you more flexibility with time to spend on other things you want to work on or to simply work less. This worked well for me. I had much more time to work on creative projects but realized that following that path was a lower-income and precarious version of my previous path.

I wanted to embrace an antifragile approach, one in which I would not be as susceptible to stretches without income or to shocks in the broader economy. Freelancing is one of the best ways to make money in a strong economy, but it’s also one of the quickest things to disappear when companies are cutting costs.

With that in mind I set out to focus on two goals:

• Earn money in as many different ways as possible
• Build a portolio of income streams that act as a high probability “floor” of income

This lowered my income in the short term but boosted my confidence and resilience. Knowing how to make money in a number of different ways gave me practical skills and an expanded imagination about what I could do to make money.

While I had a hard time realizing it at the time, my overall income also steadily increased over time with this approach. I now have had at least three sources of income generate over $200 for more than a year and have had at least six income sources for longer than that.

In my first year of self-employment, I had high earnings but it was inconsistent. I had six months with less than $2,000 income and three months with more than $10,000 per month. The second year I shifted away from consulting and had seven months with less than $2k income. The last two years? I’ve made at least $2k every month.

This is much more valuable for the game I’m playing as it dramatically lowers the odds that I will run out of money and gives me more freedom to walk away from any type of work I don’t want to do without feeling like I might go broke

Principle #4: Start Slow & Keep Trying Things

I like trying a bunch of different things for a few reasons. First, I genuinely like creating new things and experimenting. I find the process of turning ideas into my head into things that can be helpful for others to be fun. This is a unique advantage in the world that is emerging and I’m fully aware of this.

Second, it keeps things interesting and also exposes me to a number of different ways of engaging in the world such that I can help others do the same.

Finally, it helps me build a portfolio of “small bets” as Dan Vassallo shared in this conversation with me – any one of which could have unexpected payoffs.

With my newsletter and podcast, both started as ways of sharing what I was up to and without any intentions of turning them into businesses. I didn’t promote them or share them widely because I wanted to be able to quit without people noticing. Tim Ferriss took this strategy with his podcast. He told himself that he would do six-episode and if he was having fun and didn’t hate it, he would keep going.

Conventional wisdom says to grow fast, to take advantage of every launch. However, that increases the odds that you end up doing something you don’t want to do. My approach has been to take a slower path. Five years into this journey, almost everything I’m doing I want to be doing and this has been from a series of incremental “yeses.”

I recently launched a freelance consulting skills course. This course was the result of helping a couple of freelancers that were doing work for me level up my skills. I realized I was having a lot of fun helping them be better and they were finding the information and feedback useful. I had validated both the idea and the feeling. That second part is often ignored. Too many people don’t think about the fact that once they build something that makes money, they have to spend a lot of time doing that thing. I only built the course because I enjoyed helping people become freelancers. Right now it’s still a small bet but when the opportunity emerges to take it somewhere else, I will consider it and if it feels right, I’ll say “yes.”

Principle #5 Make Friends. Be Helpful

This is the most important principle and the one that makes everything else more fun. Yet, it is also the one where I struggle the most.

I’ve always been the person that likes helping other people. In college, I proactively volunteered to help fix people’s computers and help with resumes, job searches, and interviewing. After I graduated I helped people make career changes and write essays for grad school. At my jobs I always took on extra roles to help with training and coaching.

It was fun. But the world tells you that these are silly things. People tell you, don’t get taken advantage of. Adam Grant writes books showing how to avoid being a pathological altruist and to make sure you balance yours gives with your takes. Others ask “why you don’t charge?” You spend your time at work helping your struggling colleague while you watch the skilled politician land another raise.

I was cynical about this for a while. I wanted the working world to change. I wished there were paths for people to progress and get raises while remaining a front-line manager. My first blog was called “better working world project.” Eventually, I realized it was better to create my own game rather than try to swim upstream.

So I experimented. I started a career coaching business on the side. I started writing. I eventually went out on my own and was able to be the kind of freelancer I wanted to be. I had more time to spend helping people for fun without feeling like an idiot (though sometimes it still feels silly to do things for free).

As I continued to do this and built an audience through my writing, people starting sending me thank you notes. I received one note from someone that I had a conversation with a few years earlier. She told me that her conversation with me completely changed her mind on what she wanted to do. Now she was doing something she loved and wanted to thank me for the inspiration. I’d be lying if I said that these moments are fucking awesome.

I did an exercise in which I had to rank my “yearnings” or the things we really crave. My top two were appreciation and freedom. Appreciation was something that surprised me but it felt true. Leaning into that and realizing that it is something I need but can also be fuel is a powerful thing to know.

A couple of years ago I did another exercise in which I had to write down my “purpose.” The person that created it said to keep writing versions until you cry. I thought it was silly but I’m always open to trying new things. It worked and this is what I landed on.

Connect as a real friend to people to give them the courage to create, help simplify the world to enable people to imagine new possibilities, and continuously be more brave in discovering the people and things that matter in my own life

I know that my desire to help others might be a little pathological and after reading Adam Grant’s Give and Take it seems that I’ll probably succeed financially a little less. But I don’t buy his argument that this is something to fix. I have realized that I want to design a life around making this weird quirk a great part of my life. I know that it undermines my ability to be financially successful sometimes and that’s okay.

I’ve just decided that it matters.

The Bottom Line

I don’t know what will be paying the bills next year but the longer I play this game the more confident I become. It could all blow up at any second, but the whole point of the game is to enjoy the journey.

I spent ten years on a path where I was always focused on the next project or the next step.

This is way more fun and I hope I’ve convinced you to find your own game worth playing.

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 Designing Your Own Infinite Game In The Creator Economy 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.

In the last 12 months I had a channel on YouTube go from about 500 subscribers to almost 9,000 subscribers. In that time I became eligible to monetize my channel and made about $2,000 from YouTube ads in 2020.

This captured my attention and I became a bit more fascinated with what was happening over in YouTube land. Maybe you’ve seen stories that young people want to be YouTube stars when they grow up. You laugh it off and go about your day but I think you are missing a major transformation in how we learn and share ideas.

YouTube is one of the most transformation educational channels we have right now. Across the world people are now teaching themselves Chinese, learning strategy consulting skills, figuring out how to repair a car, learning how to use new online tools and using videos to help explain what their teacher failed to during the day.

Go to any college campus and ask them how they learn the hardest material from their classes. Almost every student will tell you, “YouTube.”

The course revolution shifted in 2020 from a half-baked attempt from existing institutions to a bottoms-up explosion in creativity, options and possibility. Wile there were early examples like altMBA showing that cohort-based classes were possible, many people likely made the mistake of thinking, “oh well that’s Seth Godin, he can do that!”

However, in 2020 we saw people like Tiago Forte, who had already been bullish on online learning, started to take action on his ambitious vision for the space. He took his Building a Second Brain Course from something he was selling for $500 for something that cost as much as $5,000.

I was a bit skeptical when I saw these price hike but became quite optimistic when I saw how many more people seemed to be enthusiastic about joining. There was clearly a latent demand within the student he was already teaching that were saying “we want more, we want to be challenged more and we want more coaching.” 2020 also saw similar energy emerge around the Write of Passage course from David Perell (which inspired countless courses itself) and it seemed that finally the formula for making a cohort-based course work had been found.

(Side note: It will be funny to see mainstream institutions stumble upon these ideas in five years and publish reports about it!)

I think part of this is because 2020 helped break a lot of the common knowledge that said you have to go to an educational institution to “learn.” What people realized instead is that these universities are more in the credentialing and networking business than teaching people practical skills. With the explosion of the “new economy” people are rightly realizing that learning by doing is going to be both a meta-skill and a practical skill that will help them experiment faster than spending years at a formal school.

I think the evolution of these is going to dramatically disrupt the full-time MBA, but more on that another time.

Joining Ali Abdaal’s “Part-Time YouTube Academy”

If you’d like to take the course, you can learn more here: Part-Time Youtuber Academy (affiliate link).

Based on my accidental YouTube success I decided to enroll in another online course myself this fall. This was driven by a curiosity to see what I might learn from taking someone else’s course (I have been running two of my own for years but always good to learn by being a student).

It was also driven by my curiosity into Ali Abdaal’s path who I randomly met when him and his brother interviewed me for their Not Overthinking podcast (one of my favorites I’ve done) about our relationship with work.

Until some googling before the interview, I had no idea who Ali was and had only been having a conversation with his brother over a couple of months. An hour before we kicked off the podcast I saw he had almost a million followers on YouTube (what the ?!). He’s a doctor who started sharing his studying methods on YouTube and unexpectedly blew up in a huge way as he expanded his topics to the broader themes of productivity, learning and creating online.

The fascinating thing about this is how open and connected these spaces are right now. For a long time we needed access to institutions to learn and we needed to have the right credentials to even get accepted into such a place. Meaning most people never had a shot to learn the things they might want to learn.

With online courses the only thing you need is a passion and curiosity for something (and despite the high price tags, these can end up being a bigger bang for the buck for people that might go to grad school instead as well as the fact that many offer reduced rates for people from lower-income countries).

This isn’t an essay about Ali or online learning but I wanted to offer a few reflections from the first iteration of Ali’s Part-Time YouTube Academy as someone with a monetized YouTube channel but doesn’t exactly know what they are doing.

Course Overview: I know they are changing the course a bit for the next cohort and making it a bit longer but I think the general curriculum with remain the same. I thought the schedule of ideas and structure made a ton of sense and I was able to pay attention to the things I needed the most help with.

Seven Takeaways From The Course

#1 Financial commitment: It’s always great to have the desire to learn something, better to put some money on the line and force yourself to do what you say. The best online courses are the ones that nudge you into active creation and create an atmosphere that hels that happen though a positive spirit of generosity and enthusiasm. I’ve wanted to improve my abilities at video editing and get more help on YouTube but its not the thing I’m ever drawn to do in a structured way. Paying for a course helped me focus on it appropriately for a month without having to make a much larger commitment.

#2 New friends: My metric for committing to anything these days is a simple question, “can I make a great friend?” This course had a number of people with a spirit of curiosity, generosity and connection. which are exactly the people I want to meet. I met a ton of people and made a couple new connections that may turn into friends. However, I had a hard time trying to navigate the many lectures and announcements and engage in the Circle community in a way to really invest in them.

One recommendation I’d have for Ali is to pair people up directly with similar backgrounds or levels of experience as buddies or force people to make them in the first week of the course.

#3 Meeting other creators & finding inspiration: One of the hardest things about running an online business is that there are increasing ways to monetize or build a business. However, it can be easy to focus on the 3 or 4 which are most popular at the moment. While YouTube is “hot” right now it was also good to see how varied the interests were across all the different students and to see the businesses they are running outside of YouTube. I love being inspired to think in new ways based on what others are doing.

#4 Tech Skills: Many of the lectures provided some very practical tips on improving editing skills and also just basic techniques for how to connect more effectively with people on YouTube. I learned valuable new ideas about cover images, background audio or music, strategic use of b-roll, lighting techniques, blurred backgrounds, and other small tweaks that combined enabled me to start to understand the technical editing process at a deeper level.

#5 Feedback: One of the secret gems of this course which I did not expect was feedback from two of Ali’s current team members, Angus and Elizabeth. Both were able to provide helpful positive and critical feedback in a way that it seemed they really wanted to help people improve. I feel like getting feedback from someone like Angus, who is doing the work behind the scenes for Ali right now is just as valuable from someone like Ali or another top creator. In addition, the course also attracted many people with successful channels who offered feedback, praise and welcome encouragement.

#6 Actionable next steps: I didn’t attend most of the live lectures but skimmed through most of the videos and read most of the decks. The overall curriculum was very well-designed, and logical and every lecture has at least 1-2 nuggets which I was able to directly apply to my homework for the week.

#7 Ali, Himself: I’ve been lucky to get to know Ali a bit over the last year and am excited to get to know him more. He could easily market his courses as “How to get 1 Million YouTube Subscribers” but he didn’t take that path. He really cares about giving people an honest and nuanced perspective on what it takes to be successful on YouTube and how other skills you have from other domains are just as important as pure video skills.

His ability to remain calm, approachable and curious throughout the course seemed to give a lot of people confidence and created a positive community vibe. Despite his humility, Ali is clearly some sort of super-learner that operates at very high levels (this became clear to me when he had internalized and was teaching effectively half of what I learned in my high-priced MBA). The way he combines his deep expertise with an approachable humility makes this course feel like you are getting a steady dose of encouragement from your grandmother (and I mean this in the best way possible).

Based on my own priorities and learning objectives here is how I would rate the course:

• Ideas for future online courses I run: 6/10 (I’m probably a bit more experienced than most but still picked up a ton of subtle best practices)
• A space for feedback & technical improvement: 10/10 (crazy how 7-8 pieces of feedback from experts can make a huge difference)
• Making meaningful connections with others: 4/10 (this is mostly my own fault but probably the biggest opportunity in their next cohort)
• Confidence boost for future video ideas & projects: 10/10
• Ideas for future videos and new uses of video: 7/10

Note: I took the first cohort of the course and I

This course was a great experience but it made me more confident that focusing on YouTube was not something I wanted to prioritize for 2021

A lot of what I do online is centered around building connections and making friends while building a life doing the things I want to be doing.

Right now I find that if I were to orient more towards YouTube it would be purely very focused on getting a wider reach and/or making more money in a way that feels a bit too instrumental for me. Additionally, I found the process of making a video a bit draining compared to something I love a lot more, writing. I love writing because of how easily it inspires people to reach out and start a conversation. I found that on YouTube there hasn’t been much depth to the conversations if any at all.

Despite this, I was able to dramatically level up my confidence and skills in video editing and I gained a new perspective on how to tell stories in different forms. I’m excited to put these skills to use in making the occasional videos for fun as well as helping others get started on their own creative journeys.

Ideal Student: If I were to describe an ideal person to take this course it would be someone who has already started creating online in some way (either writing, YouTube, newsletters, instagram, TikTok), has some idea of their interests and has some evidence that others want this information. Overall Ali really cares about helping people understand what success on YouTube looks like and gave a very accurate perspective on the different levels of success one can aim for. In order to get the most out of the course I recommend you have about 10-15 hours a week to focus on shooting, editing and publishing to get the most out of the course.

If you’d like to take the course, you can learn more here: Part-Time Youtuber Academy (affiliate link).

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 What I learned in Ali Abdaal’s YouTube Course appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.