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.

One of my favorite books of his is Consolations, which is a book of everyday words. In it, he describes what those words mean to him. Here is a selection from the book, on the word Ambition:

AMBITION…

is a word that lacks any real ambition, ambition is frozen desire, the current of a vocational life immobilized and over-concretized to set, unforgiving goals. Ambition abstracts us from the underlying elemental nature of the creative conversation while providing us the cover of a target that has become false through over-description, overfamiliarity or too much understanding.

The ease of having an ambition is that it can be explained to others; the very disease of ambition is that it can be so easily explained to others. What is worthy of a life’s dedication does not want to be known by us in ways that diminish its actual sense of presence. Everything true to itself has its own secret language and an internal intentionality with a secret surprising flow, even to the person who supposedly puts it all in motion. Ambition ultimately withers all secrets in its glare before those secrets have had time to come to life from within and then thwarts the generosity and maturity that ripens the discourse of a lifetime’s dedication to a work.

We may direct the beam of ambition to illuminate a certain corner of the future world but ultimately it can reveal to us only those dreams with which we have already become familiar. Ambition left to itself, like a Rupert Murdoch, always becomes tedious, its only object the creation of larger and larger empires of control; but a true vocation calls us out beyond ourselves; breaks our heart in the process and then humbles, simplifies and enlightens us about the hidden, core nature of the work that enticed us in the first place. We find that all along, we had what we needed from the beginning and that in the end we have returned to its essence, an essence we could not understand until we had undertaken the journey.

No matter the self-conceited importance of our labors we are all compost for worlds we cannot yet imagine. Ambition takes us toward that horizon, but not over it – that line will always recede before our controlling hands. But a calling is a conversation between our physical bodies, our work, our intellects and imaginations, and a new world that is itself the territory we seek. A vocation always includes the specific, heartrending way we will fail at our attempt to live fully. A true vocation always metamorphoses both ambition and failure into compassion and understanding for others.

Ambition takes willpower and constant applications of energy to stay on a perceived bearing; but a serious vocational calling demands a constant attention to the unknown gravitational field that surrounds us and from which we recharge ourselves, as if breathing from the atmosphere of possibility itself. A life’s work is not a series of stepping-stones, onto which we calmly place our feet, but more like an ocean crossing where there is no path, only a heading, a direction, in conversation with the elements. Looking back we see the wake we have left as only a brief glimmering trace on the waters.

Ambition is natural to the first steps of youth who must experience its essential falsity to know the larger reality that stands behind it, but held onto too long, and especially in eldership, it always comes to lack surprise, turns the last years of the ambitious into a second childhood, and makes the once successful into an object of pity.


The authentic watermark running through the background of a life’s work is an arrival at generosity, and as a mark of that generosity, delight in the hopes of the young: and the giving away to them, not only of rewards that may have been earned but the reward in the secret itself, the core artistry that made the journey a journey. Perhaps the greatest legacy we can leave from our work is not to instill ambition in others, though this may be the first way we describe its arrival in our life, but the passing on of a sense of sheer privilege, of having found a road, a way to follow, and then having been allowed to walk it, often with others, with all its difficulties and minor triumphs; the underlying primary gift, of having been a full participant in the conversation.

For more on ambition you might enjoy:

• The Second Chapter Of Success
• Build Your Own Prestige Economy

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 “Ambition Is Frozen Desire” – Excerpt From David Whyte’s Consolations appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

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

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

This is my accidental meaning hypothesis

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

We Want To Do Better Than Our Parents

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This leads to a vicious cycle.

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

Accidental meaning doesn’t work anymore

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The job I have now didn’t exist then and nor did the previous one. How do you plan landing your dream job if it might not exist yet?

Predicting the future is hard, so I’d like to offer a better approach:

#1 MANAGING YOUR ENERGY

When you are energized, you have energy throughout the day and even when you get home from work. People feed off this at work and come to you with interesting ideas, problems and opportunities. At home, you’ll have energy to read and explore other interests — not to mention having the energy to invest in relationships.

For me, I used this lens to slowly (really, it took years) figure out what excited me. I came to the realization that I didn’t like working for jerks or managers who did not invest in creating high-performing teams. Early in my career I took extra steps to avoid them and said to myself during business school that I would not compromise on this — life is too short.

So in one of my first jobs after business school, they replaced the President and installed a jerk. It was not a healthy atmosphere. Micromanagement, low team morale etc… This led me to quickly jump at an opportunity that was offered to me. Once I had some space from it — I realized I want to contribute to positive work environments.

#2 TELL YOUR STORY

Once I had figured this out, it really helped me channel my positive energy towards the workplace in and out. I started reading more about the workplace, organizational behavior etc… I realized I was really passionate about people, talent & culture.

At my next job, we were writing a report on organizational change. Part of that included content on leadership and talent. I threw myself at that area of research with my entire energy. I went out of my way to call the Senior Partner and share my passion (he was pumped to connect with a like-minded person despite my tenure). I volunteered to get involved in projects for several partners in the talent and culture space in addition to my own work. This helped me stand out and win some friends along the way.

#3 EMBRACE THE JOURNEY

One thing I’ve learned is that there really isn’t a dream job. There are 840 specific job categories in the BLS. What are the odds I am going to find the perfect “dream job”? Not likely at all.

I’ve learned to embrace the journey. One book that made me appreciate this was Mastery. I learned that Stephen King wrote every single day for NINE YEARS before selling a single book and that Leonardo da Vinci didn’t have his big break until he was 46. For me — the takeaway was that it was a little selfish to expect to land my dream job at 30 years old.

#4 BEGINNER’S MIND

In business school, we had to write down a list of leadership principles. I tried to think about this a little more broadly. I came up with a list of nine principles that would help me guide how I thought about my career. #6 was this:

6. Don’t settle for a comfortable job, always be learning

For me, learning is core to who I am. If I am not learning — and learning fast, I am not optimizing my energy.

Because of this, I’ve always tried to push myself to constantly be moving — whether this means getting a new job, experimenting on the side or even just reading something completely outside my comfort zone.

This symbol above is pronounced shoshin and represents the concept of Beginner’s Mind. This was introduced to me in the The Art of Learning another great book. The magic of this is that putting yourself at the start allows you to put yourself in a humble position where you don’t know what you are doing, you don’t have full confidence and you need to rely on others.

Through making a number of moves in my career, it has actually made me more confident and more adaptable, not to mention emotionally calm when reacting to new situations

#5 EXPERIMENT

In some of the career coaching work I do, I often see people get overwhelmed by the idea of a “dream job.” If it does exist (I hope, one day?) it seems like a massive undertaking. If you define success by landing that dream job, you are setting yourself up for failure by essentially creating 734 failure points and one potential successful outcome (not good!).

For me, I actually realized I wanted to get my feet wet with career coaching. One way was for me to quit my job and do it 100% from the start. Thank god I didn’t because I learned so much about what aspects of it I liked and didn’t like (I mostly learned I would never want to do this 100% of my time).

The approach I did take was to experiment on my free time, take a minimum number of clients and then to adjust my approach and focus as I go. As I’ve done this, I’ve shifted away from career transitions towards helping startup founders and also shifted more towards writing and speaking to college student than spending a ton of time coaching.

#6 DEFINE SUCCESS

Last of all, this picture sums up my thoughts:

I’ll let you cheat and steal my definition of success. No surprise that it has to do with energy.

This is pretty much what it looks like. Here are a couple scenarios:

My health goes downhill and everything else suffers:

My Career is struggling and everything else suffers:

You get the point. The takeaway here is to define success and then manager it.

To summarize:

1. Manage your energy
2. When you find what excites you, share it
3. Embrace the journey
4. Stay hungry, keep learning
5. Experiment
6. Define Success

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 Planning a Career is Insane — Here is a better approach appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

I just graduated from MIT, with a masters in engineering and MBA — something I had secretly been working toward for years. I was about to embark on the most transformational period in my life — but not in the way I thought.

I. Getting Sick

It started with a cold while traveling for work. I was sitting in a hotel room in New York with the normal dread that anyone gets when they first realize they are getting a cold.

Nooooooooo, not me!!

Okay. maybe I am a little dramatic when I get sick.

10 days in I has a funny feeling, something wasn’t right. I wasn’t getting better. 20 days in, I was legitimately scared.

What is wrong with me?

Nothing, according to several doctors. This dragged on for a couple more months. Fatigue evolved into a mess of other symptoms. Doctors kept running all sorts of tests and assuring me “you are perfectly healthy!”

Here is me taking a sleep test in the fall of 2012:

One doctor tried to convince me it was just depression:

Doctor: You should consider that it could be depression. Depression can cause a range of symptoms in patients including fatigue.

Me: Ok, I mean I am open to anything, I just don’t really believe that I am depressed. I have this irrational positive mentality and honestly think everything in my life is excellent. No wait, perfect. Seriously, I am really freaking happy. Let me ask you a question, can I be depressed and not THINK I am depressed?

Doctor: Well depression can present itself in many different ways.

Me: Do you think I am depressed then?

Doctor: Well no, but fill out this survey, it will help us see for sure and understand your issues.

Me (looking at survey skeptically): Now wait, look at this. This survey isn’t going to be helpful. It asks me if I do less now than I used to. I HAVE to mark this because its true. However I WANT to do more, I just feel like shit. It’s not because I am depressed. (Fills sheet out and hands back to Doctor).

Doctor: OK This score says you are mildly depressed, but I agree with you now. I don’t think you are depressed from what you are saying. However, antidepressants might be an option that could help you sleep and give you energy.

Every time a doctor told me all was well I experienced a sense of relief. As soon as I left the building a sense of dream would re-emerge. I always fought off the urge to run back into the doctor’s office and beg them to continue to look.

Around January of 2013 I finally landed in a doctor’s office where she agreed with me that something was off and wanted to be my “partner-in-crime” to help figure it out.

A sidebar: Some of you are probably guessing where this is going if you’ve lived in the northeast United States: I had Lyme disease. Well not just Lyme disease, but some other nasty tick-borne ailments as well. I’ll spare you the medical details, but it was a confusing disease to untangle. There is a major political battle about this disease. To this day, I’m still not 100% sure if I really had Lyme disease. All I knew was that my body was not working correctly and I found a doctor that wanted to help me get better.

That January I started treatment with a doctor that convinced me it was Lyme. The standard protocol of treatment called for three antibiotics that would rotate on and off over a period of three months. At first I was ecstatic at getting a diagnosis. However, the second day I started taking the medications my body was rocked with so much pain that I didn’t know what to do.

II. Diagnosis and Treatment

Throughout this time, I had been working part-time for my company and the head of our US business was incredibly supportive of me. I was feeling a bit bold and had been staffed on an on-site consulting project in Princeton, NJ. I didn’t know when I was going to feel better so I just thought I could power through. The first week on site was when I got diagnosed. I started taking medication the next day. During the second week, I experienced my first “herx” reaction to the meds:

A die-off reaction, also called a Herxheimer reaction, can occur when treating the Lyme germ, some co-infections, and yeast. It occurs as bacteria or yeast die during antibiotic treatment. It is common to have Herxheimer die-off reactions when starting herbal anti-microbials or antibiotics when treating Lyme (source: Herxheimer Die-Off Reaction)

Sitting in my hotel room in Princeton, NJ I had no idea what to do. I was scared and I was feeling worthless. If I couldn’t work, what good was I?

Returning home that weekend, I had a call with my manager to share with him my frustration. He could likely sense that I was scared and didn’t know what to do. Despite the obvious business and financial repurcussions of me bailing on a consulting project, he treated me like a human and just told me to take some time off and not worry about it. I’m still so grateful that my manager was a true leader when I needed it most.

I ended up taking an indefinite leave of absence from work. Though I didn’t realize it at the time, the time away from work was needed to devote all of my energy not only to getting physically better, but also on my mental health. I was in no shape to be a valuable member of my team at work.

III. Struggling with Treatment (IN CHART FORM!)

When I first started to make sense of all of this in 2012, I started blogging as a way to be open about my struggle. Being open about my journey, despite the bad news a lot of the time, helped me become a lot more comfortable with uncertainty and vulnerability. There were a lot of emotions shared, but coming from a consulting background, I’ve always been fascinated with how to quickly and simply communicate information via charts.

As you’ll see, the beginning of treatment was brutal in terms of my energy level:

I then started playing with what I came to call the “shittiness index” which was a combination of my fatigue, muscle discomfort and pain. It went over really well with my loving blog followers.

As you can see, I started to feel better in March, felt crappy at the beginning of April and started feeling better in May, but had a rough finish to the month:

Around that time, I had a scary feeling that something was still “off.” I trusted my gut and got a second opinion from another great doctor in the area. She discovered that I also had babesia, another common and emerging tick-borne illness in the northeast. They had missed it in the initial screen because they had tested for the wrong strand. I started treatment for that in June and had a terrible initial herx reaction, but started to feel better:

By August I was starting to feel like the end was in sight and that I should go off the medications cold turkey. However, my doctors thought I had more work to do and I followed their instructions.

By mid-summer, I decided to retired version 1 of the shittiness index. I realized that I wanted to focus on the positive. So I gave people a guide of how I was feeling.

This was also intended to help me start thinking more positively. I had been trying to be positive on the blog and to people I would see, but really I wasn’t being honest. I was still wrecked with anxiety, worry, uncertainty and fear.

I still wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to recover.

But before I could take the step towards recovery I had to get my mental health in check.

IV. A Conversation That Helped me Re-Gain Sanity

Over the summer is when I started to regroup mentally. The months of treatment and not working were hell for my mental health. I felt worthless and depressed. Looking back now it is easy to spot, but in that moment it was hard to make sense of everything I was feeling.

A conversation with a friend helped me begin to flip the script.

I was sitting on my back porch telling this friend how fun I was before I was sick and that I couldn’t wait to be that guy again. He quickly responded:

Paul you are one of the most fun people I’ve ever met and I met you after you were already sick

Wow.

I was overcome with shock. I had been stuck in the past, obsessing over trying to be my “old” self instead of just living life. My mindset began to shift from a focus on being sick to one of recovery. The difference may seem subtle, but it was a dramatic transformation.

Identifying as a sick person implied I was stuck in a fixed state. Recovering implied I was moving forward, which I desperately wanted and needed.

I started to make plans again, setting up coffee or dinner with friends. Each day was a victory — I was in control of my reaction to my illness and I was choosing to be in recovery. As I started to feel the momentum, I shifted away from sadness. I stopped looking at my physical challenges as limitations. Instead, I danced at the bar even if I would feel like crap the next day.

V. The End of Treatment

That fall, I continued to feel better and my hunch that I should stop taking medication was getting stronger. However, there were still a lot of lingering issues. The medication itself had taken a toll on my body and it was hard to differentiate Lyme symptoms from side effects from the drugs. Looking back, it was definitely time to stop treatment, but I was still wrestling with the unknown.

What if I’m not fully recovered?

I don’t want to have to go through this again.

I listened to my gut. It was time to move on — I just felt that any additional treatment was going to do more harm than good at this point. My original symptoms of pain, sleep dysfunction and fatigue had disappeared or were a lot better.

VI. Recovery

Starting 2014, I was optimistic, but still overcome with anxiety and uncertainty about my future. This quote from my blog sums up my mindset:

Moving into 2014, I am anxiously awaiting what this year brings for my health. I’ve completely embraced the vulnerable state I am in and fully expect to go through some crappy times. The difference now is that I know how to handle these periods and have the confidence to get through them.

Looking back I was definitely prepared, but still did not realize how much stress and anxiety I was carrying. At this point, the majority of my days were good day, but that meant sometimes I would spend 3 and sometime 4 days a week feeling less than ideal. The antibiotics had done a number on my stomach and I was trying to recover from that. I experimented with many different supplements which had marginal impact, but I now know that what I needed was time.

For someone that was so determined and action-oriented at the time, this was frustrating.

VII. Re-thinking “healthy” / experimentation

Throughout that year I experimented with different diets and exercise. I was eating what I thought was healthy — for example, turkey sandwiches at lunch on bread. Exercise-wise, I was also doing what I thought was best — running. Neither of these things turned out to be true — for me at least.

Historically, I was a fussy eater and scared to try new things. However, towards the end of the year, increasingly frustrated, I told myself that I needed to be willing to try anything and everything. I finally read The Omnivore’s Dilemma, which had been recommended to me several times. This helped shift my thinking from what I saw as healthy and I started thinking about food quality versus my conventional beliefs about food.. As I started reading more and more I was shocked by how terrible my knowledge was around food (Great books like The 4-Hour Body, The Bulletproof Diet and Why We Get Fat helped re-shape my thinking). I experimented with a modified keotogenic diet, paleo and intermittent fasting. The impact from these were considerable. I now had knowledge and approaches with my diet that I could use to accelerate my full recovery.

The next step was getting into strength training, which I started doing regularly in 2015. This is the step that really took me from doing pretty good to feeling amazing. At first, I experimented with the 7 minute workout. I had read the impressive research behind high intensity interval training and was excited to try something that did not drain me the day after exercise (as long cardio sessions had been doing). Similar to opening my mind to a new way of thinking about food, I started learning more about the benefits of strength training (which are considerable) and started doing more. I moved on from the 7 minute workout to the “Big Five” workout. This was a 15 minute strength training workout that I started doing at the gym a couple times a week.

On top of starting to feel a lot better, I opened my mind to question my beliefs about health and fitness. I had believed for years that the key to exercise was long, vigorous workouts. I was forced to look for an alternative because for me, this did not seem to be true. Working smarter, not harder was my only option. As I was seeing gains from my simple, but impactful workouts, I kept experimenting and moved on to dead lifts, squats and kettle bells (a really amazing podcast on strength training that inspired me is here) which continued to improve my energy, mood and strength to this day.

I had to question a lot of my beliefs in this experimentation phase. It helped me be more open minded in all aspects of my life.

If I was wrong about health, nutrition and exercise, what else was I wrong about?

I’m now trying to take what I’ve learned and make it sustainable. One way I think about doing this, I’ve borrowed from Scott Adam’s book: How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big which he talks about having systems, not goals. If my goal is to gain 15 pounds of muscle, that’s going to be hard to accomplish and may seem overwhelming. So instead, my fitness “system” became very, very simple:

Go to the gym every other day

That is it. It doesn’t matter how many minutes I work out. If I decide once I get there that today is not the day, I go home — and I have, trust me.

This simple system helped me get in the best shape of my life and also help continue my momentum to be feeling the best I had in a long time.

VIII. Lessons

Like I said at the beginning, this is one of the toughest things I have ever gone through, yet it taught me about life.

I also have to reflect that this experience, though bad, makes me realize just how lucky I am. Most people are dealing with something and when you are dealing with something it is easy to assume nobody has it as bad as you. I recently read a powerful holocaust survivor’s experience A Man’s Search for Meaning which made me realize how lucky I am.

I took away found main lessons and continue to reflect on these in all aspects of my life:

1. Real confidence comes from embracing vulnerability: Life was pretty good for me growing up. I didn’t really face any monumental challenges. When I was experienced pain, I saw myself as somewhat of a failure. After all, “Real men don’t cry” or so the logic goes. Through this, I learned that was bullshit. I didn’t realize anything close to real confidence and courage until I embraced vulnerability.
2. Real relationships are built on sharing when things aren’t so great: Being in a state of suffering gave me two choices: share or hold it inside. At first, I chose the latter but eventually had no choice but to learn how to open up and share to people “I feel like crap.” The blog really helped with this and gave people an avenue to ask me how it was going. It was shocking to find that this didn’t bother people and that they stood by my side. Before being sick I spent too much time protecting other people from my feelings. Though, I am a relatively positive person, I made the mistake of thinking people only wanted positivist from me. I realized that great friends and relationships are about standing by people in good times and bad and I realized how many I had once I showed them my pain.
3. Living in the present is the only option: As anyone who has battled a chronic health issue will tell you — this is the biggest challenge. There are many challenges in life where you just know deep down you will get over it (breakups, anyone). With a health challenge, there is always the looming uncertainty of “I may never get better.” It is easy to spend time thinking about this, dwelling on that uncertainty. Trust me, I spent a lot of time doing that — but it only lead to more anxiety. You spend more time in your head than living life. Similarly, you always lose when comparing yourself to a healthier time in the past. It is so easy to idealize the past. When I learned to embrace a recovery mindset, I could finally forward into a new and better future by staying in the present and taking it one day at a time.
4. Losing it all is not that bad: We spend so much time worrying about “failure” that we lose sight of the things that matter. Whether it is a job, a relationship or material things, losing things is ultimately, not that bad. I had lost my health temporarily and had to slow my career trajectory a bit. At the time this really stressed me out. However, the process of experiencing this loss also made me realize it was survivable. It also helped shift how I think about risk. For example, at work I can take risks, try new things and pursue things I am passionate about instead of trying to fit in and being scared of being fired.  Worst case is always losing my health, not my job. In relationships, I can invest in others without worrying about protecting their feelings or losing the relationship. I can live authentically and honestly, which actually helps pull people closer. By thinking I lost it all, I know its not that bad. At the end of the day I still have great people in my life, which is really all that matters.

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

The post Conquering Chronic Illness & Learning How to Live appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.