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Years ago, Ben wrote that his personal mission statement was “to help people reach their full potential” and our conversation touches on this theme in many different ways.  Ben is a former car rental pro turned consultant turned HR executive. His work in HR landed him on the cover of Human Resource Executive. It’s pretty cool, so I wanted to share it here:

He then decided to leave the corporate world and has been on an entrepreneurial journey for the last six years as an executive coach and startup founder.  In our conversation about coaching, Ben mentioned a fact from an HBR article on coaching that I thought was fascinating.

“It’s rare that companies hire business coaches to address non-work issues (only 3% of coaches said they were hired primarily to attend to such matters), yet more than three-quarters of coaches report having gotten into personal territory at some time.”

This disparity really gets to the core of what people like Ben are about – being more human at work.  Ben joked in our conversation that everyone’s real issue is with their parents. While certainly funny, this gets to a deeper point that many people are waking up that we can’t just show up as robots to work anymore.  There has been a wider embrace of being our full selves at work, led by people like Ben who started the first LGBT group at his consulting firm more than 10 years ago.

Our conversation touches on a number of issues including coaching, entrepreneurship, how his relationship with work has evolves, management versus leadership and what he wants written on his tombstone.  Some other topics we touch on:

• Ben’s motivation to work at Enterprise Rent-a-Car after college and what he learned
• His early entrepreneurial “ventures” starting at 12 years old
• How his mindset about work shifted as he became successful in the corporate world
• His experience hiring working with an executive coach in his late 20s
• His experience coaching and favorite exercises
• Why companies are scared of trusting their people
• Why being a manager is actually an incredible opportunity for people
• The learning and ownership upside of carving your own path
• The value of having advisors, friends of confidants to celebrate “wins”
• Balancing life & work and his personal sustainability
• Deciding to give himself a raise as an entrepreneur

Links Mentioned:

• What coaches can do for you (HBR)
• Pilot: Executive Coaching For Organizations
• Ben Brooks Coaching
• Connect with Ben: LinkedIn, Instagram & Twitter

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 Ben Brooks on coaching, trust, the art of management & entrepreneurship appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Symptoms and stories but no deeper questions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Does Change Actually Happen?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The “Work Sucks” Perspective Is Still Valuable

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I. Thinking About What Matters

Start Here  Tuesday’s With Morrie (Mitch Albom)

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

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

Last Lecture (Randy Pausch)

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

Survival In Auschwitz (Primo Levi)

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

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

II. Building “Human Skills” In The Workplace

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

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

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

Influence (Robert Cialdini)

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

The Art Of Learning (Joshua Waitzkin)

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

III. Know Thyself…In The Business World

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

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

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

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

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

Mastery (Robert Greene)

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

IV. Questioning The Modern State Of The Business World

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

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

Shareholder Value Myth (Lynn Stout)

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

Reinventing Organizations (Fredrik Laloux)

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

Skin In The Game (Nassim Taleb)

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

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

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

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

V. Finding Some Hope In The Business World

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

Start Here Drive (Dan Pink)

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

Work Rules! (Laszlo Bock)

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

VI. Mindfulness & New Emotional Mental Models

Start Here The Heart Aroused (David Whyte)

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

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

Nothing Special (Charlotte Joko Beck)

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

VII. Embracing The “Pathless Path”

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

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

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

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

Field Guide To Getting Lost (Rebecca Solnit)

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

That thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you is usually what you need to find, and finding it is a matter of getting lost.

Linchpin (Seth Godin)

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

Designing Your Life (Burnett & Evans)

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

Crossing The Unknown Sea (David Whyte)

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

The Good Life & Sustaining Life (Andrew Taggart)

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

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

VIII. New Models For Seeing The World

Start Here A Lesson On Worldly Wisdom (Charlie Munger)

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

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

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

Wanting (Luke Burgis)

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

Sacred Economics (Charles Eisenstein)

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

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

IX. Grappling With The Role Of Work In Our Lives

Start Here Bullshit Jobs (David Graeber)

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

Rest (Alex Pang)

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

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

Reclaiming Work (Andre Gorz)

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

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

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

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

Leisure: The Basis Of Culture (Josep Pieper)

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

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

X. Going Deep – The Hard Questions

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

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

The Great Work Of Your Life (Stephen Cope)

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

Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance (Robert Pirsig)

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

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

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

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

The Wisdom Of Insecurity (Alan Watts)

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

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

and on following the default path:

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

Meditations (Marcus Aurelius)

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

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

and

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

Essays (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

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

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

Nature:

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

…and Education:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Dumb Idea Project
• Shayne Spencer (LinkedIn)

Boundless Links:

• Subscribe to the newsletter
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• Freelance Consulting Playbook

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

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

Jacqueline Jensen has been a digital nomad for 3.5 years, living and working globally.  It might surprise you to find out then, that she’s written a book called “Travel Isn’t The Answer.”  While counterintuitive, she argues for a return to awe and wonder with what is already around us.  She talks about different moments of wonder she has experienced (including a breathtaking view in Montenegro) and different techniques for how people can “Live With a Sense of Curiosity, Passion, and Awe Anywhere and Everywhere” (the subtitle of the book).

Listen: Itunes • Google • Overcast • Spotify

Last year, in a planned sabbatical she came face-to-face with the fact that work was the center of her world.  While she almost “quit” the sabbatical, she pushed herself to redefine her day and time to claim back some of herself from a sole focus on work.   She provides many actionable tips and perspectives that can help people question the role of work in their lives, take steps to increase the amount of awe in their lives and connect with people that matter to them.

More About Jacqueline:

• TedX Talk
• Twitter: @JackieMJensen & LinkedIn: Jacqueline Jensen
• Book: Travel Isn’t The Answer (Amazon)

Recommendation on getting outside of your comfort zone:

• Check out local music: sofarsounds.com
• Go to an art museum
• Travel-as-a-service recommendations discussed: Hacker Paradise, Recess Labs, Roam, Outsite
• App for re-aligning your day: Today

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 Jacqueline Jensen on sabbaticals, rethinking work and building a “calm company” appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

Conversation #1: Macro Trends (consultancies, journalists, politicians)

This conversation is typified by looking at trends and then working backward to see what the implications are for people.  Terms like “fourth industrial revolution,” “the end of work,” “post-work,” “artificial intelligence,” and “robots” are used prolifically.  McKinsey writes in a report on the future of work:

Automation, digital platforms, and other innovations are changing the fundamental nature of work.

…and Quartz:

Automation, advanced manufacturing, AI, and the shift to e-commerce are dramatically changing the number and nature of work.

…and finally, The Brookings Institute:

Robots, artificial intelligence, and driverless cars are no longer things of the distant future.

These trends are positioned as irreversible and having an impact on people rather than something we should question at a fundamental level. This conversation tends to center not around individuals but “the workforce.”  Think tanks and consultancies produce charts showing the numbers of jobs that will be eliminated by AI or show the types of jobs and skills needed in the future.

For example, The World Economic Forum writes:

Creativity will become one of the top three skills workers will need. With the avalanche of new products, new technologies and new ways of working, workers are going to have to become more creative in order to benefit from these changes.

While it is fun to talk about the future, this conversation often falls short of the reality that many current jobs that require creativity and other “human skills” (teachers, social workers, retail workers) are still undervalued in our economy.

This conversation often lends itself to identifying policies to either reduce suffering or reduce inequality in the workforce or economy as a whole.  It often highlights long-term trends that do not appear to be shifting such as the decreasing labor share of income and increasing rent-seeking as a percentage of our economy.  Thought leaders propose work-related policies such as minimum wages, unemployment protection, health benefits, portable benefits, paid leave and other similar policies. For example, The Aspen Institute has proposed a $25 million innovation fund to experiment with new approaches for portable benefits.

While these are great in theory, they often only end up helping the types of people who already have good jobs and benefits in the economy.  When one digs deep into some of these issues and starts asking “why?”, especially in the US around why so many benefits are tied to employment, they are likely to end up in conversation #5 (see below) questioning some of the sacred cows of the modern workforce.

While many of the issues in this conversation are important, they are a bit distant from the reality on the ground.  The articles get a lot of clicks and are great for panels at conferences but hard for most people to understand what changes they should make when they show up to work the next day.

Examples:

• Politics: “The Future of Work” (US Senator Mark Werner)
• Consulting: McKinsey’s report on Technology, jobs and the future is probably one of the best reports on the subject; Jobs lost, jobs gained: What the future of work will mean for jobs, skills, and wages (McKinsey)
• The 10 Skills You Need to Thrive In The Fourth Industrial Revolution, World Economic Forum
• Journalists: “When Robots Take Our Jobs” (Washington Post)
• Think Tanks: Aspen Institute – $25 Million Portable Benefits Innovation Fund
• Books: Rise Of The Robots (Martin Ford); The Wealth Of Humans (Ryan Avent)
• Existential Questions on the Future of Work: 5 Part Series (Richard Arthur)

Conversation #2: The Gig Economy (Journalists, Companies, Consulting Firms, Talent Platforms)

Given media bias towards writing that gets clicks, this conversation tends to be geared towards the worst parts of the gig economy and perhaps misses some of the people who are benefiting from the increased freedom and flexibility of the gig economy.  McKinsey’s report mentioned previously highlighted this fact, showing that even independent workers “by necessity” into it were “as satisfied” or more satisfied than comparable traditional workers, with the exception of income security and level of income.  While I agree with the fact that lower incomes are not a great thing, it does appear that the gig economy is somewhat of a release valve for people to prioritize things that do matter to them like flexibility and independence.

Companies making money from the gig economy also tap into this conversation with mixed results.  Some of the material is transparent content with little usefulness, while others have been thoughtful additions to the conversation.  Talent platforms have added the most useful content to this discussion.  UpWork’s Freelancing In America report and Catalant’s Reimagining Work reports are a bit optimistic, but provide unique insight into the people using their platforms.

Nonetheless, the gig economy highlights a continued optimization of the productive class.  What makes it different in the context of the gig economy is that a movement from full-time work to gig work often means a lack of a sense of security, good health care coverage, and a consistent wage.  While this is great for someone with high earning potential, it is a disaster for people with lower wages.  These challenges are often framed within the context of the current economic system (pay higher wages, give more benefits), but I believe the true opportunity for transformation will come from looking backward and questioning our current employment paradigm as Marco Torregrossa, leader of the “freelance revolution” in Europe, has done, “We shouldn’t complain that Uber drivers don’t receive full-time benefits; we should reconsider why benefits and security come attached only to full-time jobs.”

This conversation also highlights a third way, if you will, showing the success that companies like Managed by Q and Hello Alfred are having by choosing not to use gig workers, investing in their people and culture instead and unlocking a value by using technology in all places except the optimization of their labor force.

Examples:

• Book: Gigged, Sarah Kessler
• Journalists: “Is The Gig Economy Working?” (New Yorker), “The Real Future Of Work” (Politico)
• The on-demand economy doesn’t have to imitate Uber to win (Sapone, Quartz@Work)
• “How the Platform Economy Gives Superpowers to Freelancers” (Medium)
• The Gig Economy And Alternative Work Arrangements (Gallup)
• “Managed by Q’s “good jobs strategy” is paying off for workers—and the company” (Quartz)
• “Uber, Lyft drivers actually earn less than minimum wage, MIT survey suggests” (USA Today) and Uber’s Response
• Content Marketing: “Future Workforce Report: Remote Work Is Set to Go Mainstream but Is Your Business Ready?” (Upwork) or “How To Invoice Clients Professionally (7 Steps)” (Bonsai)
• Talent Platforms: Catalant’s Report on The Future Of Work (disclaimer: I helped write the report) and Freelancing In America (UpWork)

Conversation #3: Evolving Organizational Ecosystem (Companies, Consulting Firms, Authors, Entrepreneurs)

Within the past ten years, the corporate world has stumbled upon the belief that “millennials” needed to be catered to.  While this makes sense as Millennials have become the largest percentage of our workforce, investing in people is not anything new.  Many companies have been screaming from the rooftop about how investing in people leads to higher returns for decades (see basecamp, Southwest, Atlassian, Trader Joe’s, Costco, Toyota).

I believe what has changed, however, is that social media has made it almost impossible to hide a bad culture and gives many an outlet to share the most egregious elements in public (LinkedIn, Facebook, Glassdoor, etc…).

While I was pretty optimistic at first, I am less optimistic now.  Companies are changing policies, launching new initiatives and creating new values, but are failing to take a deeper look at the underlying behaviors, beliefs, and assumptions of the organization.  What I have seen in my experience talking to leaders and working as a strategy consultant, was that many of these initiatives increase complexity and increase attention on bad elements of culture. It is often not much more than “Culture PR.”

One welcome addition to this conversation has been the tech industry’s willingness to invest in culture.  My cynical hypothesis of why this has happened is that software businesses lend themselves to high margins and high levels of automation.  This leaves many thoughtful educated people a lot of time to think about how to spend that cash to keep people motivated.  Google, basecamp, and Netflix have arguably done the most to advance this conversation, sharing their counterintuitive culture practices (self-nomination for promotions, maximum 32-hour work weeks, get rid of jobs that are not needed anymore.  Others like Gravity Payments have gained attention by raising minimum salaries to $70,000 a year.  Regardless of the impetus, all of these experiments are needed and a net benefit to workers.

There has also been an emerging conversation in the corporate world around corporate purpose.  This can get muddled very quickly if you start talking about individual purpose within the same context.  However, there has been a lot of evidence showing that purpose-driven organizations dramatically outperform other organizations.  However, outside of a few organizations with dramatic and clear long-term visions, it is often hard to find organizations that operate around a set of values beyond profitability.

Frederic Laloux wrote perhaps one of the most provocative elements of this discussion with his book Reinventing Organizations. In it he calls out this the hollowness of many corporate mission statements:

Executives, at least in my experience, don’t pause in a heated debate to turn to the company’s mission statement for guidance, asking, “What does our purpose require us to do?

He highlights organizations that have built companies around their people, rather than traditional ideas of how a company should be run.  In it, he talks about how these companies have something called an “evolutionary purpose”:

The evolutionary purpose is not the same as a vision statement. A vision statement usually reflects the ego-driven state of consciousness of the management team, who decide what they want the organization to be. The evolutionary purpose…reflects the deeper reason the organization exists

He gives examples of Buurtzorg (“Helping home-based patients become healthy and autonomous), Patagonia (“Use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis”), or FAVI (“Two fundamental purposes: the first is to provide meaningful work in the area of Hallencourt, a rural area in northern France where good work is rare; the second is to give and receive love from clients”)

His book, if read in the context of many of the current practices of the business world, is revolutionary.  Hopefully one day it is just seen as business as usual.

Examples:

• Crisis At Work: Why Organizations Undermine Human Potential (me, again)
• Company Examples: Netflix Culture, “Basecamp’s CEO Limits Himself to 40-Hour Workweeks–and He Thinks You Should Too” (Inc.), “Inside Atlassian: building a culture of innovation“
• Thought Leaders: Jacob Morgan’s Work at The Future Organization and his podcast The Future Of Work Podcast; John Hagel’s Center For The Edge
• “Here’s What Really Happened at That Company That Set a $70,000 Minimum Wage” (Inc.)
• Google’s re:work collection of practices, research, and ideas
• Books: Daniel Pink’s Drive, Laszlo Bock’s Work Rules!
• Consulting: Deloitte’s 2018 Human Capital Trends
• Conferences: Culture Amp’s Putting Culture First

Conversation #4: Personal Transformation (Freelancers, Entrepreneurs, Educators)

This conversation is about the individual.  Not just the person as “worker,” but the person as a person.  This conversation is founded on rebellion and the loudest voice in this space is probably Seth Godin, who urges people to “make a ruckus.”

Godin describes his life as a series of “projects” and has been carving his own path for decades.  He sees his role as helping to “shift the culture” and has helped people develop new mental models through his books, writing, podcasts, and courses.  In his book Linchpin, he boldly challenges our modern conception of work, “The educated, hardworking masses are still doing what they’re told, but they’re no longer getting what they deserve.“

It also includes people like Tiago Forte, who writes about the opportunities that highly-skilled freelancers have in this economy by diversifying their activity and depending on different revenue sources. He argues that “full-stack freelancers” often have the ability to capture a lot of the value previously captured by institutions:

Full-Stack Freelancers respond to technology as an opportunity, not a threat. They leverage software-as-a-service and online platforms to vertically integrate a “full stack” of capabilities, instead of focusing on one narrow function. This allows them to capture a much greater percentage of the value they create, instead of giving it away to gatekeepers and distribution bottlenecks.

This conversation also includes “The Future Of Learning,” which is a broad discussion ranging from MOOCs, alternative education institutions to boot camps and academies that are reacting to the needs of people that need to continually reinvent themselves in the world.  Godin’s altMBA is a prime example of this.  In a 30-day program, he helps people “level up” their skills and mindset through a hands-on action and intensive feedback and support from a committed community.  Future of work thought leader Heather McGowan captures the mindset shift that people taking advantage of Godin’s altMBA have already embraced: “we need to stop thinking of the professional you want to be (end state) and focus on the skills you want to acquire (continuous). Instead of focusing on learning as something that happens in the first 22 years of your life, it is instead something that never ends.

Forte also writes about the emergence of “Short Tiny Exclusive Virtual Experiences” (STEVEs) with he sees at the next (an improved) iteration of the MOOC and online course platforms.  Essentially “bootcamps as personality-driven brands.”  Or put more simply, on-demand learning from people you want to learn from.  Better tools such as Zoom and slack recently enabled me to pilot my first digital learning experience (Solopreneur Shift) and the future looks promising, especially with tools such as VR and AR that will continue to eliminate barriers and threaten the current learning establishment.

This conversation also includes people that are creating new ways of living, including digital nomads, remote workers, the FIRE (financially independent, retire early) community, vagabonds, and the work by professors at Stanford around “designing your life” with design principles. While people living alternative lifestyles have always existed, I would argue that social media has lowered the walls to seeing inside different ways of life.  Part of why I became a digital nomad myself was realizing that it seemed pretty achievable based on the many people I saw embracing the model online.

Digital nomads are perhaps the ultimate expression of the “personal transformation” conversation.  They often combine the opportunities of the gig economy and technology with the ability to learn and grow while traveling.  Companies like Remote Year have popped up to tap into this market (and countless similar companies such as Hacker Paradise, Wifi Tribe and more).  These companies are offering realistic alternatives to a “traditional path” through their networks of remote job opportunities and offering their own curriculums and communities.

Which leads us to conversation #5…

Examples

• Seth Godin’s Akimbo Podcast, Linchpin (book), altMBA & Bootstrapper’s Workshop
• Remote Year: Travel & Work Abroad
• Gig Economy, Diane Mulcahy
• Unbundling Work: Learning To Thrive In Disruptive Times (Gary Bolles)
• Preparing Students To Lose Their Jobs (McGowan)
• 10 Surprising Benefits Of Self-Employment (yours truly)
• Financially Independent, Retire Early (FIRE): Mr. Money Mustache Blog
• Designing Your Life: Book and TED Talks
• Podcasts: Life Skills That Matter & Boundless: The Human Side Of Work
• The Rise Of The Full-Stack Freelancer (Tiago Forte); The Future of Online Learning: STEVEs (Short Tiny Exclusive Virtual Experiences) by (Tiago Forte)
• The creator of WordPress shares his secret to running the ultimate remote workplace (Quartz)
• A Field Guide For Independent Strategy Consultants (Tom Critchlow)

Conversation #5: Fundamental Questions (Philosophers, Academics, Freelancers)

In contrast to conversation #1, this conversation looks deeper and questions our fundamental assumptions about work and life and challenges our belief that we need to have a “future of work” that is more or less similar to what we have now.  This conversation can be framed beautifully by a set of questions offered by long-time self-employed entrepreneur Nita Baum:

1. Why do we work today?
2. Given that the goods and utilities we need to survive and thrive are abundant, what is the purpose of work?
3. What does this say about how our resources are and could be distributed more equitably?
4. Could the purpose of work be to make us more individually and collectively whole- in material ways, in well-being and in a way that is conscious of the individual and the collective to the exclusion of neither?
5. If so, how would this shift our patterns of consumption and production?

These are tough questions, but luckily ones philosophers have been grappling with for a long time.

One of the best examples of this conversation is the one Andrew Taggart has brought to life.  He is a Practical Philosopher who argues that “There may be no greater vexation in our time than the question of how to make a living in a manner that accords with leading a good life”   He has brought back to life a discussion “Total Work,” an idea first proposed by Josef Pieper in 1948 in his work, “Leisure: The Basis Of Culture.”  Taggart argues that total work is stronger than ever and “eradicates the forms of playful contemplation concerned with our asking, pondering and answering the most basic questions of existence.“ He pushes us further and argues that we make a dangerous mistake when we put “making a living” ahead of the question of “what is a life worth living” (see podcast for full discussion).

When Pieper published Leisure he argued that work was consuming life and threatened philosophical traditions of contemplation and a certain type of leisure.  He argues that because work is becoming central in our lives, we fail to imagine any type of leisure beyond anything that is beyond a break from work.

In 1951, Alan Watts argued in The Wisdom Of Insecurity that our working world turns us into cogs in a machine:

Thus the working inhabitants of a modern city are people who live inside a machine to be batted around by its wheels. They spend their days in activities which largely boil down to counting and measuring, living in a world of rationalized abstraction which has little relation to or harmony with the great biological rhythms and processes.

More recently there are philosophers like Andre Gorz, who in Reclaiming Work (written in 1999), challenges us with the line “real work is no longer what we do when at work”  by showing that when a parent decides to stay at home with children, they are deciding “not to work,” yet what is taking care of children, if not work?  He says this comes from a limiting mindset around how we define work:

it has to be a job, a profession: that is to say, the deployment of institutionally certified skills according to approved procedures.

There is a long tradition of questioning the fundamental questions around work, labor and how to live.  It may be a mistake to think this time is different.  In 1964, a report on the “Triple Revolution” was put forward to President Johnson as a way to figure out what to do when all the jobs disappeared.  More than fifty years later, the jobs are still here and we still have an economy that fundamentally assumes that one should work to earn a living.  However, given the transparency of how bad this situation is for most people (see the fact that only 37% of Americans are employed in full-time jobs), we may in fact, be ready for a new conversation.

Professor David Graeber has said that those jobs should have disappeared and that a range of different political, cultural and historical factors have meant that we have created scores of “Bullshit Jobs” to make the economy look like it is still operating as designed.  He first proposed this idea in a viral essay in 2013 that turned into a recerntly published book.  He defines a “bullshit job” as:

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

Graeber estimates that almost 50% of our economy is “bullshit” and explores how this came to be from a systemic lens, looking at things such as how time became something that could be transacted (“the idea that one person’s time can belong to someone else is actually quite peculiar”), how we value some labor over others (“typically involve work that needs to be done and is clearly of benefit to society; its just that the workers who do them are paid and treated badly”), and how the labor theory of value once ascribed to by Lincoln (“labor is prior to and independent of capital”) was demolished by Carnegie’s “gospel of wealth” and the shareholder value movement of the 1970’s.

We may be in a situation where many people, as Jean-Paul Sartre would say, are operating in “bad faith.”  That is, they have adopted a set of values they don’t really believe in as a way to deny their own freedom.  When I was in business school, there was a general belief that the system was rigged and that shareholder value probably wasn’t the best idea.  “But what are you going to do about it?” people would say.  Philosophers would urge us to reconcile this gap in our beliefs and our actions and to find pursuits that are more in consonance with who we are.

Some of these ideas are being talked about, but they are often dismissed as “the way things are.”  Some people are putting skin in the game, such as Scott Santens, who has crowdsourced his own basic income while also being an ardent supporter of the idea.  He advances this conversation by using his own experience and research to bring alive some of the fundamental flaws of how we think about work, money and survival and how we think our connection to each other and place in the world.

Examples:

• Andrew Taggart: If work dominated your every moment would life be worth living? (Aeon), Total Work Newsletter, The 70-hour and four-day work weeks are both rooted in Christian philosophy (Quartz @ Work), “I’m An Anticareerist And You Should Be One Too” (Medium)
• What is Anti-Careerism? (Anti-Careerist)
• Leisure, The Basis Of Culture (Brain Pickings)
• Universal Basic Income: Scott Santens, Andrew Yang (Presidential Candidate) and Chris Hughes
• Post-work: the radical idea of a world without jobs (The Guardian)
• “What if you got $1,000 just for being alive?” (Vox)
• Bullshit Jobs, David Graeber / Longform Article (Strike, 2013)
• Reclaiming Work: Beyond The Wage-Based Society (Gorz)
• Wisdom Of Insecurity, Alan Watts

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 Future Of Work Is Five Different Conversations appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

In March, I launched a 27-question assessment that asked people various questions across three main categories:

 

Respondents were given 27 statements (full report here) and noted how strongly they agreed on a scale from 1 to 5 with 1 being completely disagree to 5 being completely agree. With almost 100 responses, the data has been somewhat surprising and also has confirmed some other hypothesis I have had about the shift towards the future of work.

Alternative workers finding more satisfaction in work and life

I asked people to categorize themselves in four categories and found that “alternative workers” — solopreneurs and entrepreneurs — are finding the most satisfaction in life and work. Full-time workers averaged a score slightly over 5 out of 10 in this question.

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Alternative workers place more importance on questioning the norm and autonomy

Both full-time workers and alternative workers consider themselves open to new ideas and experiences and also think about their career in terms of a set of skills and projects, rather than specific roles or a path.

However, three things stood out relative to full-time workers. Alternative workers:

• Have more autonomy
• Are actively designing the life they want
• Are looking to build skills from areas outside traditional academia

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What makes alternative workers different than full-time workers?

When comparing the answers with the gaps between full-time workers and alternative workers, the biggest gaps were from the following five questions:

Alternative workers have more freedom and autonomy

• “I have the freedom and autonomy to work on things that matter to me” (+37%)

Alternative workers do more “deep work”

• “I get into a flow state to do deep, meaningful work at least once per week” (+32%)

Alternative workers are more energized

• “I am highly energized through my work and how I spend my time” (+29%)

Alternative workers design the lives they want

• “I make decisions to design the life I want, even if it goes against the norm” (+28%)

Alternative workers do more remote work

• “I am experienced working in global, remote teams” (+25%)

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Full-time workers that have side gigs tend to prioritize skill building and mastery

One surprising finding was the differing priorities of full-time workers and full-time workers with side gigs. Within the top five mindsets, full-time workers with side gigs focus deeply on skill building, looking for ways to improve and evolve and looking for projects that will push them beyond their current capabilities.

Pushing yourself beyond your current capabilities is another way of defining “mastery” and element that has been proved to drive human motivation. So it is no surprise that full-time workers with side gigs are finding more satisfaction in both their life and work.

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What are the biggest differences between full-time workers with side gigs and full-time workers?

 

Compared to their gig-less peers, full-time workers with a side gig are more active in creating their own future, building skills and cultivating meaningful connections. In addition, the biggest difference was the answer to the question:

“I am okay not knowing what work I will be doing in two years”

Side-giggers rated the question very close to alternative workers, acknowledging that there is not a well-known or established path they may be pursuing. In addition, the biggest difference between their gig-less colleagues:

• Okay with uncertainty: “I make decisions to design the life I want, even if it goes against the norm” (+17%)
• Focused on skill-building: “I am increasingly looking for alternative ways to develop skills outside of traditional educational institutions” (+15%)
• Mastery-minded: “I seek out projects that are slightly beyond my current capabilities” (+13%)
• Building relationships: “I cultivate deep, meaningful connections where we help each other grow” (+13%)

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Bottom 5 Mindsets: The Challenges In The Future Of Work

 

The lowest scores among alternative workers were focused on action, experimentation and focus, finding community and purpose — challenges for most people. The nature of being “on your own” often forces attention on these deeper and more fundamental questions.

Data from the survey shows that people are struggling with these five areas:

• Testing Ideas: I test ideas or take an 80/20 approach to projects to quickly assess whether or not to invest more time in something
• Defining Success: I have a personal definition of success that I regularly reflect on
• Taking Breaks: I know how to balance deep work and breaks (e.g. health, fun, mindfulness)
• Community: I feel part of in-person or virtual communities that have shared values
• Purpose: I have a long-term mission or sense of purpose that I am committed to

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Interested in taking the survey?

Take Survey: You can access it here.

Partner? If you are an organization interested in experimenting within your organization, more information on the approach is here.

Why it matters: My essay on why the “future of work mindset” 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

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The post Future of work mindsets: comparing full-timers, side-giggers and alternative workers appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

“I allowed myself to dream, if money were no object and you could just do anything without worrying about logistics…I would regain that independence that I once had as a 16 year old going to Costa Rica, totally fearless…I would regain that independence of travel.”

 Subscribe: Itunes • Stitcher • Google Play • Overcast • Spotify

Candace was first inspired by her mother who always looked for solutions to problems rather than admitting defeat so always had an entrepreneurial spirit.  She had also been practicing yoga for several years (also with her mother) before deciding to invest more time and signing up for a Yoga workshop in Thailand while recovering from a challenging case of Lyme disease.  This leap of faith led to her thinking about yoga more seriously and starting to experiment with different projects such as a DVD and online videos.  Over the past few years, this has taken off and YogaByCandace has evolved into a community, a company with a team and has enabled her to teach workshops all over the world (including to 1,000+ people in the middle east), write a book called Namaslay and have a chance to personally impact many people.  Check out this episode to hear lessons learned, challenges and her perspective on gratitude, setting intentions and generosity.

Connect With Candace:

• Instagram: YogaByCandace
• Youtube: YBC Channel
• Buy The Book: Namaslay
• Learn About Workshops & More: Website
• Monthly “Mantra Box“
• Teacher Training Classes & Workshops: Learn More

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 Candace Cabrera Moore, fearless yoga entrepreneur on building a global business, brand & community appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

 Listen Now: Itunes • Stitcher • Google Play • Overcast • Spotify

Connor’s path as an entrepreneur began when he was in college via an AIM chat with a classmate in one of his classes.  What started as a textbook e-commerce business led him to build a sizeable business selling things on Amazon.com.  Through his work on that, he ended up working with many freelancers across the globe on a variety of different projects.  Realizing that he had developed skills in recruiting and working effectively with freelancers led him to start FreeUp.com. where he vets the best freelancers in the world and helps companies tap into this global talent pool.

Connor Gillivan is currently a Founder and Owner of OutsourceSchool.com. He was an Owner of FreeUp.net, which he helped scale and was acquired in 2019. Connor is an expert in hiring and scaling with virtual assistants and shares his business insights on his own blog, ConnorGillivan.com. He currently lives in Denver, Colorado.

Podcast Recommendation: Marketing School with Neil Patel and Eric Siu

Connect With Connor: Contact Connor

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

The post Boundless Podcast – Connor Gillivan on entrepreneurship, selling on Amazon and working with freelancers (Episode 15) appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

Tanya Alvarez is the Co-Founder, and CEO of OwnersUP is a platform which advances solopreneurs business through accountability, goal setting, and community. Over the past fifteen years, Tanya has accumulated marketing experience with international & US companies such as Nike and US Olympics. She started her first company at the age of 25 and grew it to be a profitable company from credit card debt to over $1mm in gross revenue the first year. Since then, she has founded, bootstrapped, sold and invested in several companies.

OwnersUp – Website & Twitter

Tanya’s Recent Book Recs

• How To Fail At Anything and Still Win Big
• How To Raise A Perfect Dog
• Super Better
• Built to Sell

My Book Recommendations: Boundless Top Reads on Amazon

Podcast Information: #BoundlessPod

Support: Support The Podcast For $1 a Month

Join the conversation: #boundless VIP facebook group

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

The post Boundless Podcast: Tanya Alvarez on resilience, entrepreneurship & community (Episode 12) appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.