Lauren and I first talked when I was locked down in Taiwan in 2021.  It was amazing to connect with another nomad and writer after weeks of not seeing people.  I was also a bit stuck in my book writing process and she gave me a ton of helpful hints to take my book to the next level.

I was excited to interview Lauren because she just finished her own book, Global Natives about her own experience as a nomad (since 2013!) and also the past, present, and future of the movement.  I think she is one of the most thoughtful perspectives on the future of work and global mobility.

Currently, Lauren is Executive Director of Plumia, the mission to build an internet country for digital nomads at SafetyWing, a Y Combinator company that raised a $35 million Series B in 2022. She is also the author of the book Global Natives and writes the Counterflows newsletter) about borderless living. She tweets @LaurenRazavi.

Video & Podcast

Podcasts Episode: Choose Your Player

Conversation Topics:

1. Global Natives: Lauren discusses her book, “Global Natives,” which explores the history of nomadism and how the current digital nomad movement fits into these historical trends. She also discusses the future of this lifestyle and how we can be pragmatic about it at the policy and human levels.
2. Transition to Digital Nomadism: Lauren started as a travel writer after university, funding her way through grad school. She discovered co-working retreats in 2015 and went to Bali to profile a startup called Hacker Paradise, which organized trips for digital nomads to travel in the community.
3. Work and Productivity: The shift from time-based work to output-based work and how traditional companies need to adapt to stay competitive in a remote work environment.
4. Nomad Visas and Borderless Living: The trend of countries offering nomad visas, allows digital nomads to live and work in their countries. Lauren also talks about the concept of “subscription living,” where instead of paying rent to one landlord, you pay a global brand for access to flexible living spaces worldwide.
5. Real Estate and Nomad Living: The impact of real estate trends on nomad living, including the rise of nomad hotels and the potential for companies to invest in real estate in off-site locations.
6. Future Predictions: Lauren predicts that in a decade’s time, global natives might be subscribing to Plumia to get their nomad passport.

Links Mentioned

• Path Role Model: Pia Mancini
• Minimum viable state
• Book Recommendation: Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion

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 Lauren Razavi on Digital Nomads and The Future of Global Mobility & Digital Citizenship (The Pathless Path Podcast) appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

And he’s also my podcast guest in this episode.

His writing has been an inspiration to me as I try to carve my own path after leaving what he calls “Team Elite.” Let’s take a journey through some of his ideas…

“Make, Protect Teach”

Ben made my list of people that inspire me when in the early months of the pandemic he leaped to action.  While most of the country was gearing up for political debates, he launched a non-profit to work behind the scenes to acquire and distribute masks to healthcare professionals across the country.  He was embracing his self-described ethos of “make, protect, teach”:

What does it mean to Make?

It means you are an investor. A manufacturer. An artist. A craftsman. A kid at a Maker Fair. A farmer. An engineer. A home builder. A coder. It’s the creation of some THING through the application of some creative IDEA.

What does it mean to Protect?

It means you are a soldier. A policeman. A fireman. An EMT. A nurse. A doctor. It’s a Neighborhood Watch. It’s a mechanic fixing a car. It’s also a unionization drive. It’s also a fiduciary managing a portfolio.

What does it mean to Teach?

It means you are a teacher, of course. Or a writer. Or a researcher. Or a priest. Or a homeschooling mom. It means you’ve got something to say to your Pack, and you’ve got the guts to say it.

In our conversation, we talked about why this matters to him.  At the simplest level, it’s about enabling people to “connect with the real.”  He shared that all around the world he sees good people doing great things, helping their neighbors, and contributing where they can.  But those same people, “have been told that it doesn’t matter.”

This resonates with my own story.  At I rose in the ranks of the strategy consulting world it amazed me as almost everyone was obsessed with the broad idea of “impact.”  It didn’t seem to have a connection to anything except what could be quantified on a spreadsheet.  It was not, as Ben says, connected to the “real.”

Ben’s interest is in, “creating bottoms-up social movements that embrace make, protect, teach.” While many people dismiss such notions as too simple, preferring large-scale political ideas, he feels that a local focus on what matters – helping your neighbors and giving where you can, is what matters.

He says that his writing revolves around a simple question, “how do we reconnect with the real?” or put another way, “how do we reconnect with our own human lives?”

These questions attract hundreds of thousands each month to his site, Epsilon Theory, which he runs with his partner Rusty Guinn. 

He’s been writing for years but the real journey started at the age of 32.

When Time Flipped

Everything became real for Ben at the age of 32, when he lost his father.  The news came a few weeks after declining an offer from his parents to pay for a flight to visit them on a trip to London. When he heard the news of the loss, he felt his future was stolen from him, “There’s something about the dynamic of your father dying suddenly that changes your relationship with the future and with time.”

This shifted his perspective to living in the present instead of focusing on the future. However, as he embraced this philosophy, he found himself at odds with the direction of broader society and culture.

He started to notice that political, economic, and business leaders were increasingly focused on investing in the present and replacing the optimism of the future with a permanent state of political fear. We all know what he’s talking about. We need to do something NOW because the future will be worse. Or another spin, we need to go BACK to how things were because now is not so great.

He calls this state of affairs the “Long Now“

The Long Now is everything we pull into the present from our future selves and our children.

The Long Now is the constant stimulus that Management applies to our economy and the constant fear that Management applies to our politics.

The Long Now is the Fiat World of reality by declaration, where we are TOLD that inflation does not exist, where we are TOLD that wealth inequality and meager productivity and negative savings rates just “happen”, where we are TOLD we must vote for ridiculous candidates to be a good Republican or a good Democrat, where we are TOLD that we must buy ridiculous securities to be a good investor, where we are TOLD we must borrow ridiculous sums to be a good parent or a good spouse or a good child.

“I think it’s a mistake to romanticize the past or demonize the present,”  he argues. Instead “The threat of the future INSPIRES me. The threat of the future DRIVES me.” It keeps him in the now.

Narrative World & Industrially Necessary Work

Ben and his partner Rusty look at this broad shift through the lens of narratives.  Their research has found that institutions are increasingly embracing “missionary statements.”  These are statements or sets of ideas that are presented as facts but are really opinions. 

The goal is not to inform anyone, it is to flood the information ecosystem with a preferred narrative so effectively that it shifts common knowledge. Everyone knows that everyone knows it is true.

One of the areas we have both explored is the common knowledge of work. Our scripts are so deeply embedded around work that we have a hard time understanding that they emerged hundreds of years ago. Our current remixes of these work beliefs are so deeply intertwined with the success of our current institutions, we have a hard time knowing what is real anymore. As we discussed on the podcast, people have a hard time seeing me as a “real” worker because I spent my time outside the default path.

Ben calls these scripts the “industrially necessary” stories that keep the whole thing going. Except now these scripts might not be so necessary. They are shifting from necessary to preferable. Which means politics and narratives are what matter.

I reached out after he and Rusty published “Working Narrative” talking about the emerging remote versus in-office “debate.” We both felt this was inning 1 of a baseball game that may go into extra innings. It’s not that we think that work is headed in a definite direction, its that it feels more up for grabs than ever. Both political parties still center their narratives around jobs than the kind of work that is emerging in the new economy.

As I like to say, the only career path left is “go tech, go finance or SOL“

In writing about work we have both found that the topic elicits and strange and outsized response relative to the facts conveyed.  What people are reacting to is often not the information itself but the sense that things they knew to be true are under attack. 

The sense that the common knowledge that had seemed like the settled fact is shakier than ever.

I’ve experienced this in my own path.  I don’t work a typical but I still spend time working, I support myself and spend a lot more time helping other people than I did in a previous life.  It’s much more meaningful and feels like it matters. Nonetheless, people get upset at how I’ve organized my life. They think I am cheating, or that it’s not possible, or that I’m abdicating a sacred duty.

The reality is that I’m living in the now. Investing in the future. I believe in the future and I’m excited that I have people like Ben to follow.

Still Carving His Path

The most impressive people I know are the ones that are committed to a long-term path. Ben is living what he claims to care about and I hope to be doing the same at his age. As he says:

“I’m still trying to find my path in the world”

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 Hunt on Industrially Necessary Paths & How To Live In The Now appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

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

Here’s a preview of the screenshot they teased:

I’m both worried and intrigued.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My Journey To Accidental Creator

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Creator Economy Is Great But Problems Have Emerged

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where does this sentiment come from?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Five Ideas For A Healthy Creator Economy

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

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

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

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

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

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

The problem is the question itself. A better question would be to start with trying to understand if Millennials are really all that different and if so, what that means for how we think about the modern workplace.

I’ve spent a lot of time trying to make sense of what we really know about generations and here are the three things I’ve found:

1. Most “Millennials Are Different” Storylines Are Myths (but there are some differences)
2. The work context has changed, everyone’s expectations have shifted (Millennials want purpose, but so doesn’t every other generation)
3. Principles of motivation & building culture remain the same (people still ignore what works just more brazenly)

Theme #1: Most Millennial Headlines Are Myths, But What Is Different?

Invariably ask anyone above the age of 50 will tell you that young people just don’t understand how the world works.

These ungrateful bastards are ruining work, expecting everything and have no idea how to behave.

The problem many people make is that they are not comparing current millennials to previous generations at the same age. When you do so you find things like:

“young people are actually less professionally itinerant than previous generations.”

and while google will try to convince you that millennials are different:

…the research finds that Millennial’s have similar consumption habits to previous generations.

The differences are not as much how they behave at work, but broader economic and demographics trends. Millennials are more “racially diverse, more educated, and more likely to have deferred marriage” while having lower earnings, fewer assets, and less wealth than previous generations. Finally, since most of the people in journalism now have college degrees and work in cities, you rarely ever hear about how millennials without college degrees are unable to find solid jobs and don’t end up moving to cities.

Theme #2: Millennials Want Purpose, But So Doesn’t Everyone

Those ungrateful millennials also want to be inspired at work…how selfish of them!

Unfortunately, this is bunk too.

A meta-review of all of the generational research had a damning finding:

The findings suggest that meaningful differences among generations probably do not exist on the work-related variables we examined and that the differences that appear to exist are likely attributable to factors other than generational membership. Given these results, targeted organizational interventions addressing generational differences may not be effective.

We want to believe that generational differences exist, so when we hear surveys that “30% of millennials are purpose oriented” we assume that they are asking for too damn much.

But when LinkedIn looked at all the generations, they found that the boomers were the greedy bastards:

48% of them want their work to be purpose-oriented. Haven’t they gotten enough already?!

Theme #3: So How Do You “Manage Millennials”?

The framing of managing different types of people and generations forces most of the working world to waste enormous amount of energy ignoring the basic research on human motivation that has existed for decades.

While research can have its flaws, basing your actions at work on things like “self-determination theory” is going to be a lot more effective than running your organization by myths and google search advice.

This theory is based on three simple concepts and your motivation increases when these things align:

• Competence: We want to work on things slightly beyond, but not too far, out of our current level of competence. We want to grow
• Relatedness: We want to work on things that connect us to other people and relate to the values we care about most
• Autonomy: We want to feel that we have some level of control over the decisions and actions we make in our life and work.

While it is not easy to get this right in an organizational context, HR and business leaders might arrive at a better starting point if they started with better questions. “How do you motivate someone at work?” or “How do people learn?” seems like a better way to start than “how do you manage a millennial?”

Deck Diving Into This Deeper

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 Managing Millennials & Other Misinformation On Generations at Work appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

I’ve written quite a bit about the fragile labor economy and believe the gaps I’ve written about have become more visible than ever.

Here are the questions I’m thinking about for the next year.

#1 What happens when work doesn’t seem a necessary part of our lives?

In Max Weber’s famous treatise on Capitalism published in the 1800’s, he argued that a central element that enabled capitalism to emerge and succeed starting in the 1500s was the fact that so many people eventually developed a “spirit” for capitalism.

Many people incorrectly equate this spirit as greed, but as Weber points out, greed is timeless and universal not a product of capitalism.  It has been seen at all times in history and in all types of economic systems.  Instead Weber suggests that capitalism might have become so effective because of its ability to restrain greed:

Capitalism may even be identical with the restraint, or at least a rational tempering, of this irrational impulse. 

By channeling this natural human urge into work, it can theoretically benefit not only the greedy person, but society at large.  

What then motivates work?

This is where things get tricky and where we might be on a slippery slope regarding our work beliefs.  

Weber argues that the Protestant reformation and the shift from people believing work was a necessary evil to one where work was seen as an end in itself was the ultimate shift that unlocked the potential of capitalism to succeed across the world.  As he says, “simply: that business with its continuous work has become a necessary part of their lives.”

In the US, this belief is deeply connected with how many measure their success in life:

This necessary part of people’s lives has been stripped away and many more are working remotely and questioning if there work is really all that essential at all.

#2: How does unstable work relate to how people think about the future?

To explore this, it’s worth taking a trip across the world to Japan, where the economy has been relatively stagnant since the end of the 1980’s boom years. 

While Japan has softened some of the blow of this stagnation with a 15% increase in the labor participation rate of women since 2000, it also saw a steady increase “nonregular” work which grew from about 20% of the labor force in the 1990s to almost 40% in the late 2010s.

Many of these people, sometimes called “freeters” opt out of steady paid employment even when it is available.  This loss of faith in the prospects of employment has fueled a vicious cycle in Japan.  People stopped believing in the future and companies stopped investing in employees.

The result was a self-fulfilling prophecy that made the “non-regular” employment class of workers permanent:

Naoki Shinada, an economist at the Development Bank of Japan, explains that in the immediate aftermath of an economic shock, it makes sense for companies to use temporary and part-time workers to control costs and maintain flexibility. But problems arise when this becomes the standard hiring practice, making it “more difficult for firms to maintain some skills embodied in their labor force.”

People have lacked faith that things will improve in the future and so they take the “non-regular” path.

We’ve already seen these non-regular paths emerge as I explored this in my conversation with Sarah Kessler about her book Gigged.

Will we see a two-tiered labor economy emergewhere some have great jobs and others will do various gig work over the course of their lives?

#3 How will the cross-generation disconnect be resolved?

Part of the reason the belief that “if you work hard, you will be taken care of” exists is that it was true. Yet, this has become less and less true:

Every ninety out of one hundred people born immediately after World War II ended up earning more than their parents. For millennials, its a coin flip. What will this look like for Gen Z?

This has had a huge effect on household wealth where each generation (except baby boomers) have had less wealth at similar ages:

Younger generation have not just sat and mourned the decline of the American dream, they have changed their approach to life.  Young people have put more emphasis on experiences over things and have delayed marriage, homeownership and having children:

As a result, the gap between the number of children that women say they want to have (2.7) and the number of children they will probably actually have (1.8) has risen to the highest level in 40 years. (From 1972 to 2016, men have expressed almost exactly the same ideal fertility rates as women: In a given year, they average just 0.04 children below what women say is ideal.)

What further cultural changes will emerge? How will people think about money, where they live and how they spend their time?

One thing that is already happening is a soft wealth transfer from baby boomers to millennials. Consider this:

“in 2000, 23 percent of men aged 21-30 lived with a parent or close relative, but by 2015, that number surged to 35 percent.”

That number is likely going up in the next couple of years.

Many of these parents quietly fund the lives of their kids because lets be honest its a bit embarrassing, especially in a country that believes in work so deeply. Yet this current crisis may be different.

In many western countries, the way to pass wealth down to the next generation was work. That mechanism is not working anymore and has not been working for a while. Will we see new norms emerge? Will boomers embrace a “pre-inheritance” and look to buy a house so their children can start raising their own families or will they continue to believe that work is the only way that people get ahead?

#4 What is the role of making stuff and our relationship to optimism and the future?

Over the past 50 years, there has been a consistent trend of decreasing manufacturing jobs offset by an increase in services jobs. 

These new jobs are often positioned as “higher-value” work.  While some are many are what Adair Turner has called “zero-sum” work – work that can’t be automated and does not drive productivity gains:

Look around the economy, and it’s striking how much high-talent manpower is devoted to activities that cannot possibly increase human welfare, but entail competition for the available economic pie. Such activities have become ubiquitous: legal services, policing, and prisons; cybercrime and the army of experts defending organizations against it; financial regulators trying to stop mis-selling and the growing ranks of compliance officers employed in response; the huge resources devoted to US election campaigns; real-estate services that facilitate the exchange of already-existing assets; and much financial trading.

Dan Wang has written about the role of this shift in our relationship to optimism about the future:

“Although manufacturing jobs can be wasteful, I don’t think (they have) this issue of being zero-sum.” 

The conclusion being that if we just adding more manufacturing jobs we might increase optimism about the future. People have been talking about “bringing back” those jobs for decades – it’s not going to happen.

Silicon Valley is one place that has been dreaming about the future, one with software and robots instead of traditional manufacturing.

Can people become optimistic about these efforts especially if the robots are doing the building? Or do humans need to use their hands and make stuff?

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 Questions About The Future Of Work appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

Look at this cute little guy:

Right now, as citizens of the United States we may become that hamster.  Near term, we don’t really have a choice.  Long term, we might have a choice.

A lot of people have asked us what printing money means. Like, what actually happens and why should we care? That simple question turned into a long investigation. 

The result is this piece, which aims to give you a better understanding of the whole economy using hamsters. Hamsters are fun. They’re playful. We understand their need to run faster and faster on wheels.

But, my friends, the joke is on us. WE are the hamsters right now.

We’ll explain WHY we, U.S. Citizens participating in the global economy, are just like that hamster and explore WHETHER we want to remain on the hamster wheel. 

It’s an ambitious agenda, requiring us to do a first principles explanation of a bunch of economic concepts, including:

• What money really is
• How it powers the economy and as a result, our hamster wheels
• Why fast is never fast enough on the hamster wheel (hint: it’s greed!)
• What happens when hamsters lose interest in the hamster wheel?
• What does the future look like? Wheel or no wheel?

Can you really just “print” money?

Apparently, yes. Governments across the world are “printing money” at an unprecedented rate, unleashing trillions of dollars into the economy.  The US central bank has pushed $2.5T of fiscal stimulus which estimates suggest could become $6 trillion with more expected.  

That’s a huge amount of money. But what does it mean to print money?

Printing money now is not like the very old days, where you had to print paper dollars. Physical Money (or “M1” in economic terms) is not where the action happens. Imagine instead, you log into your online bank account and instead of being like “damn, pay day is so far away”, you’re like “damn, that’s a LOT of money” when you see $10 Billion Dollars in your account. That’s what printing money is like these days. It’s a ledger entry: the government says there’s money in your account and voila, there’s money.

That’s what the  government is doing right now. You can go read the technical details but it’s not significantly more complicated than that. They’re distributing money in all sorts of ways: buying financial objects (in particular stocks and bonds), giving banks money to lend, along with standard policies like setting interest rates and spending on government projects. And thank goodness: people are short on cash right now. They’ve lost jobs, businesses have lost customers, all because people are overwhelmingly staying home now.

Intuitively, printing money seems to be a good solution to a crisis. After all if you can just create money out of thin air, why wouldn’t you? And if it works so brilliantly, why aren’t governments doing this all the time?

You probably have some sense that it isn’t quite that simple. And you’d be right. Furthermore, we’re printing money at a scale the world has never seen. It is an extraordinary global experiment, the implications of which are hard to understand or predict at all. 

Before getting there, we’ve assumed we understand what we’re printing (“money”). Let’s make sure we agree on what that is. In exploring money, we’ll also introduce three simple lessons of “Hamsternomics,” or in other words, how we are all like hamsters running around on hamster wheels.

Three Intro Lessons To Hamsternomics

Hamsternomics 101

With a bit of magic, you are now transformed into a hamster:

Hi Hamster.

Hamsters are simple, peaceable creatures. They care about one thing: running on the hamster wheel. 

Running on the wheel seems to provide them food, shelter, and warmth, which they pay for each month with what they call “hammies.”  No one seems to remember when these “hammies” were created, they have just always been part of hamster world.  Asking where they came from to other hamsters gets you looked at funny.

What they all do know is that each time they make the hamster wheel rotate they get 1 hammy. This shows up on a counter right beside the wheel, so they know how many hammies they have. Hamsters love this direct feedback!

At the end of every day, they  press a button called ‘food’ –each time they press the ‘food’ button, a hammy gets moved from their counter into the ‘food’ pile. At precisely 8 PM, food gets divided among the hamsters based on how many hammies they put in.  Over time, this system works nicely. No hamster runs a lot more than they need to because after all they can only eat so much food. 

So you’ve got a ton of hamsters running on wheels, splitting food pretty nicely. Life is good!

One day, overnight, a new button appears next to the ‘food’ button. It says ‘Hamster Prize.’ Intrigued, a few intrepid hamsters press that button a couple of times. One crazy Hamster named ‘Larry’ presses it 100 times. 

At 8 PM, he gets a neon sign in his cage that says “Hamster Prize.” They soon figure out that the person that puts the most hammies in the pot at 8PM wins this ‘Hamster prize.’ 

People start running on the wheel more to get the “Hamster Prize”, competing against each other. Often to exhaustion and sometimes even to the exclusion of food. This behavior perplexes some other hamsters, but soon enough people seem to take even this behavior as basic.

At this point, even with this simple hamster world. We’ve illustrated what money is. Specifically money (or hammies) is 2 things:

1. A store of value – the counter shows how many times you’ve run around the hamster wheel, and proves that you did so.
2. A unit of account for transactions – food is divided according to the number of hammies you put in. The hamster prize goes to the hamster that puts in the most hammies. No hammies, no prize. But having the prize also proves you put the most hammies in one day.

But in a deeper sense, you’ll recall that hammies merely represent the number of times a hamster has run around a hamster wheel. Hamsters believe that they’ll have food when they press the food button at the end of the day. But there is no rule written that they must, and in fact no one guarantees it. In a very real sense, for a hammy, or any money, to have value, hamsters (or humans) have to believe it means something in the first place. That belief is a pattern, renewed every day, by the run-on-the-wheel-then-collect-your-food cycle. Hamsters run because it always seems to work, and it always has.

On another day, everything changes again. There’s now a new alexHAM button in the hamster pen. It allows them to hit the button and then make a small squeak indicating something that they want.  An algorithm powering the button calculates how many hammies it will cost and then the hamster gets to work on the wheel.  At the end of the day they hit the button again and can exchange a number of hammies for the item they wanted.  Some keep the items, but others start producing them for the hamsters in nearby cages.  Things start to get out of hand as hamsters come up with infinite numbers of things they want: fluffier beds, hamster sweats, upgraded water bottles and so on…

With this shift, the hamsters started paying more attention to how much hammies everything cost and they started to have a better understanding of what was valuable in the eyes of other hamsters.

Hamsternomics 102: Debt

With the new buttons, the hamsters started to imagine all sorts of things they could create and new ways of managing how things are produced.  As things became more complicated, they had to come up with better ways to manage everything.

For example, if a hamster gets sick, would they run out of food because they can’t run on the hamster wheel?  No, of course not, hamsters aren’t savages!   

What they do is they allow the sick hamster to promise to run more times in the future in exchange for some hammies now, which they can use to get food. It’s a simple system. A trusted hamster subtracts some hammies from their counter and gives it to the hamster in need. The hamster in need just runs a few more times around the wheel every day to pay it back to their friend. Voila. 

As the rules get more complex, the hamsters start using the word “economy” to describe all the activities related to running on the wheel and acquisition of things.

As the demand for the new things increase, the hamsters figure out new ways to get what they want faster.  Similar to how the hamsters stay fed when they are too sick to run, they start making promises to other hamsters in exchange for hammies that they can use today to buy what they want.  Some of the hamsters make these promises to hamsters they don’t know as well, who demand a small “interest” payment in case they fail to follow through.  Eventually almost all the hamsters make some transactions using this method, which we would call credit and even start to keep track of everything in a digital account rather than exchanging real physical hammies. The whole system works because most hamsters run around the wheel enough times to pay everyone back. 

This enables the hamsters to dream bigger.  They start doing things that were previously impossible, like building hamster mansions that take months, or writing hamster novels which take years. 

Now remember, when one hamster owes another hamster some hammies, you’ve in effect ‘created’ new hammies magically. The ‘borrower’ hamster gets some hammies now – which they can spend on whatever they want. The hamster gets that same amount of hammies later, plus some bonus hammies! Where do those hammies come from? Well, the borrower hamster has to run around the wheel a few times. It doesn’t take too long to realize that every hamster loan represents some hammies in another hamsters bank account, or a promise to run around the wheel a few more times to get more hammies.  Again this might make your head spin, but that’s OK. Just remember, there’s a balance of payments that exists. Every hammy in the hamster economy can be accounted for, by spinning on the wheel or as a promise to another hamster.

The system works well, but over time people notice there are patterns. 

Some of the more astute among you may have noticed some similarities to Ray “Hamster-Legend” Dalio’s conception of the “economic machine.” We were definitely inspired by him and highly recommend his full 30-minute video on the subject, but its certainly not required to understand what’s happening in hamster world.

Hamsternomics 103: Government!

After a while, hamsters realize they want some things that no individual hamster can pay for. So they create a hamster government. The hamster government can make things like space lasers (so cool!) and giant hamster wheels that hundreds of hamsters can go on at the same time (wow!). But sometimes, their projects get so ambitious that there aren’t enough hammies. No problem, AbraHAMster Lincoln says, we’ll lend money to ourselves. 

“What?” says the collective hamsterland?

“Easy” Ham Lincoln replies.

“We’ll give any hamster that wants a promise to get more hammies (when everyone has gone around the hamster wheel a few more times) in the future in exchange for some of your hammies now.”

“That sounds circular,” say the hamsters. “Aren’t we the ones who you rely on to get hammies for projects?”

“Indeed.” says Ham Lincoln. “Indeed.”

That last point is an important point. If you ask a single hamster to go around one more time on the wheel, it’s pretty trivial. But if you ask a single hamster to go around 1 million times, it’s pretty tough! But it’s pretty easy to promise that you’ll go around 1 million times at some point in the future. At 180 rpm’s (seriously), that’s 90 hours of hamster wheel spinning. Not an impossible amount, but a lot of hamster wheeling!

Making promises is great when everything is working normally. Hamsters run, food is provided. However, make too many promises and, you need to have more hamsters, the hamsters need to go faster, or things are going to get pretty uncomfortable for our furry friends.

INTERLUDE: HAMVID-19 CRISIS!  

CRISIS! HAMVID-19, a deadly disease, emerges in the hamster world. AbraHAM Lincoln decides to shut down all the hamster wheels but this causes a major problem! Hamsters have made promises to run around the wheel a number of times but now that is impossible. What will happen? 

Lots of pain, that’s what.

If you’re a hamster that promised to run around the wheel – you have to break those promises. On the other side, if other hamsters promised you hammies, you don’t get those hammies. Now imagine you’re somewhere in the middle – you were a judicious hamster that saved, gave money to some deserving upstanding hamsters, but then made a promise based on those upstanding hamsters so you could buy your own food. 

Utter chaos. 

AbraHAM Lincoln now can’t make promises to other hamsters. He’d certainly look foolish promising that people will run around the hamster wheel when running around the wheel is prohibited!

What if… Ham Lincoln muses… I just change everyone’s counters *as if* they are running around the wheel? Wouldn’t that make everything better?

And with that question and thought experiment, we bid our fair hamsters adieu.

The fragile human hamster wheel

We’re not so subtle. Perhaps you have seen already the parallels between our world and the hamster world. We operate in our own version of hamsternomics, except it’s more complicated. Instead of individual hamster wheels, we build things, move things or offer services to others.  Money is available, saved, and exchanged in significantly more complicated ways. And when something like Covid-19 hits, not all value is immediately destroyed because there are all types of different hamster wheels that exist.  People who work online might be able to keep going at the same speed.  Others who work at restaurants may be off the wheel for months.

What is similar is that we’ve developed special institutions like the central bank that can “inject” money to help keep hamster wheels in motion when people start to lose faith in the system.  This was partially credited with keeping the 2008 financial crisis from becoming an even worse challenge for the global economy.

In short, as we mentioned at the beginning, what AbraHAM Lincoln ponders at the end is *in reality* what is happening now. The $1,200 stimulus checks are being ‘printed’ – given to us without needing to pay it back.

However, printing money is equivalent to the government automatically running the hamster wheels and eventually hoping everyone will ‘get back on.’ The government can keep the wheels running for a short time but eventually needs people to jump on themselves while picking up the speed over time.

In our current crisis, they are not even thinking about that yet, they are just trying to stop things from falling apart.

“A government’s creation of money and credit and its spending of this money and credit cannot produce goods and services or employ people (though it can give them money and credit to not go broke).”

In the short term, the pattern of ‘everything working’ is so strong and instinctive, we trust that it will in fact keep working. And as long as it does, we’ll all be (mostly) happy. But at some point, people will need to be motivated to get back on their human hamster wheels.  

It’s worth restating the assumptions being this, that it critically depends on people believing that the hamster wheel story is true.  The story goes that if you keep the wheel moving and push harder, you will have more food, security and comfort.

But over the past twenty years, cracks have begun to appear. Looking at alternative measures of success like the “cost of thriving”, it becomes clear that it takes the median person in the US almost 12 more weeks per year to earn the same quality of life in 2018 as they did only 18 years earlier in the year 2000. The wheel is going faster and faster. There’s a “Red Queen” problem (from Alice in Wonderland) – you have to run as fast as you can just to stay in the same place!

Which brings us back to our friend from the beginning. Get thrown off the wheel too many times and you’ll stop believing in the story.

The Three Motivators: What Gets People Back on The Wheel?

Few people have any memory of experiences with the economy working in a different way, so believing in the story is the only option people think they have.  

Our current story enables different people to have different motivator for why they participate in the system.  Three of them we want to highlight are meeting our desires, trying to become wealthy and/or to be employed as a way to contribute to society.

These were all on fragile ground before the crisis, but because of it the cracks are becoming more visible.

Motivator #1: Our “Insatiable Desire”

As humans we have two kinds of needs: relative and absolute. When your child says they ‘need’ a new toy, we consider that a relative need. When a bystander says that an unconscious victim on the beach needs CPR, we consider that an absolute need. The categories are intuitive, but non-obvious. People live without things we’d consider ‘absolute’ needs: consider homeless people. However, we generally agree as humans that certain things should be provided: food, shelter, health care (to a degree) etc. The key to understanding the desire for Universal Basic Income and the like is that we, as a US economy, theoretically have way more than enough to provide for everyone’s basic needs.

Relative needs, then, are where the action is. Many things we want *because* others have them. We want other things because we simply want more of them. It’s not enough to have *a* yacht, you yearn for a bigger yacht. Humans have an innate comparison mechanism to others. We gather our own self worth not absolutely, but for the most part in relation to other humans.

The insatiability of our relative desires means that the conceptual growth of an economy can be modeled as ‘infinite’ – as long as there is something for which we humans are willing to work for, we’ll continue to work for it and go after it. Money is the simplest measure of how badly we want something.. That number can change, and motivate people to do more to get the things they want. You’ll often hear common terminology for this phenomenon: supply and demand, and where they cross as the market price. Prices are extraordinary things in plain sight

but they’re tangible representations of what we value in society.

And so the hamster wheels turn.

Motivator #2: Take Risk, Get Rich

Are we all just hamsters making promises to each other to spin more times around the wheel? You might ask how do we keep getting ourselves into this predicament?  What stops us from looking around and declaring “I finally have enough!”and just live out our days in leisure? 

Essentially, it’s the fact that our relative  needs are a ratchet.  The more you have the more you want.  We are on the hunt for things that are better, faster, cooler and make us stand out compared to others. 

One hypothesis for why the US has been so economically successful is that it is has created better incentives and ecosystems than any other country for individuals to attempt to meet the insatiability of human desire.  

In short, if you have an idea — however crazy — you are encouraged to pursue it and if it succeeds, people readily accept that you should become extraordinarily wealthy because of it..

While this incentive structure can have terrible effects when those people try to hack the financial system (e.g. ahem, too-big-to-fail banks), on the balance it has created the greatest economic engine the world has ever seen.

Things that people want come from the U.S. market: Silicon Valley technology, Hollywood entertainment, World-beloved consumer brands that wash our floors and clean our dishes, and sexy electric cars.

The sheer madness of some of the investments means that some people end up looking like Jeff Bezos, and others like Adam Neumann. And while WeWork’s valuation was magical thinking, the ability of Adam Neumann to keep the borderline fraud alive for so long is a fundamental part of our system.That Neumann can create the company and fail and then try again is a feature, not a bug.

Many other systems wouldn’t allow this to occur, and in fact systematically take actions to prevent it.

Without risk, there is no chance of asymmetric reward. Without that reward, the hamster wheel slows, as we’ve seen from other economies like France and Japan. 

Motivator #3: Get A Job, Be A Good Member of Society

To be on the hamster wheel is to take part in a collective society.  Increasingly, at least in the US, this means paid employment.  

As one of the only countries in the world to embrace “employment-at-will” the amount of people in the labor force is a lot more dynamic in the US than in other countries.  During “normal” times there is an argument that this kind of labor relationship enables companies to react more quickly, hire faster (and more people) and generate more wealth than they would with another setup.

For our current crisis, however, we’ve seen an unbelievable amount of people become unemployed in a short time.  In a 28-day stretch starting March 26th, the US saw more than 30 million people file for unemployment with still more likely to come.  Compared this to Germany, where in a country fourth the size of the US, they only expect about 2.35 million people to collect unemployment benefits throughout the entire crisis.

While this experiment may prove to be a “feature,” not a bug in our ability to respond to the crisis, there is no doubt that the scale of the response will have dramatic implications for the future of the business world and how people think about work and what motivates people to take risk.  

Ultimately, the idea that we collectively contribute to society by being employed has a strong fundamental basis historically. The question is whether that’s true anymore.

No Off-Ramps from the Hamster Wheel

John Maynard Keyes suggested in the 1930’s that we faced an “economic problem” which was simply how do we produce enough as a species to meet a satisfactory level of needs – what we called “absolute needs” earlier.  He projected that by 2030 we would have achieved a level of economic prosperity that would enable us to once and for all solve this problem and that the real problem would shift to how people would think about spending their time after working a minimum number of hours during the week.

Many who argue for a Universal Basic Income are using this line of thinking and trying to tell us “We’ve solved the basic economic problem! Let’s start acting like it!”

While this may be true the argument falls down once you recognize that most of these absolute needs are met within the context of a market economy – the hamster wheel needs to keep turning.. We saw this most clearly in many Western nations in their early reactions to the pandemic.  When the hamster wheel stopped moving, there were breakdowns in production and supply chains.  While people were able to quickly react in some cases, like making masks for their communities or sharing food, people can’t just manufacture their blood pressure medicine in their kitchen.  

Many people are projecting that eventually people will return to their hamster wheels.  That the things that have motivated them in the past will motivate them in the future.  This is a bet that things will return to “normal.”

However, here again we see Dalio pointing out the obvious about human nature and its relationship to economic activity.

The level of economic activity that we will see will depend on how we are changed by this experience with the virus …I believe that we will be profoundly changed by this experience for many reasons including how the discussions about who will pay the bills (e.g., will we pass this debt on or will we raise taxes) and about who should have what (e.g., should there be fewer differences in our access to basic needs) occur. Many other profound changes will also occur, such as attempts to have self-sufficiency in an interdependent world and the changes in the global world order.

There are very difficult questions about life that will come up. Despite being a rich country, there are still people that go without food or shelter and many more struggle to find adequate housing, work that pays a living wage and affordable healthcare. 

Yet, it remains unavoidable that no country has found a system to provide those needs for everyone in a society. Many charismatic leaders were certain that utopia was close, but all have either come up short or taken disastrous turns towards violence and repression.  

For now, all hail the indomitable hamster wheel!

Epilogue: Three Questions About The Hamster Wheel

Why do people stay on the hamster wheel?  Simply, because it’s worked so far and everyone else is on the wheel.  If they keep doing it, their family will be kept safe and secure.  Or at least that’s always been the case.

We do what we do because dammit, that’s what we do!

This crisis is unique in that it is giving millions of people a clear view at the hamster wheel and people are starting to question if it’s all worth it.  Should we go back to the wheel?  Are we getting a good deal? 

No one is really sure, but people are starting to wonder.  Most people want to keep their lives going as they have been going.  They want to meet their absolute needs and also want to keep their relative needs met, but the whole thing is showing more cracks and is more fragile than ever. 

This would be the point when others might pivot to a very clear vision of what comes next and how we will shift.  We’re not so confident.  We see the flaws in utopian thinking.  But we do think it is time to contemplate the questions underlying the hamster wheel.  

1. Is the Hamster Wheel still as important as it has been historically?
2. Is there an alternative to the hamster wheel? What would that look like?
3. What kind of future do we want to build?

These are not easy questions and may even be uncomfortable to even think about. But given what we now know about the hamster wheel – it appears the days of happy mindless spinning may not be as sustainable as it has been in the past..

Unless we decide what we want to do next – there may be a lot of unhappy hamsters.

About This Essay

This essay was a collaboration of Paul Millerd and Ryan Borker, who both have experience jumping on and off the hamster wheel at multiple points in their lives.  This essay put us out of our comfort zone, but we are deeply curious about what we got right and what was missing. We’d love to keep the conversation going and you can join in the conversation by emailing us your thoughts, sharing on social media or following along on our newsletters.  You can easily find Paul’s link to subscribe on this page, but you can also join Ryan’s explorations on “the future is work” by subscribing here.

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

The post Hamsternomics: Printing Money, The Economy & Work Beliefs appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

Pete Buttegieg’s experience at McKinsey & Company has been a hot-button issue in the 2020 democratic primaries. Similar to the attacks on Mitt Romney working at Bain Capital in the 2012 election, the criticisms of McKinsey are that it is an institution that participates in work that many see as fundamentally bad through its recommendations and controversial engagements with domestic and foreign governments.

I don’t have an ultimate stand on whether or not the strategy consulting industry is good for the world, but because it is an industry shrouded with secrecy it seems to be the target of an unusual amount of attacks bordering on conspiracy theories.

I don’t wish to explore where those attacks are coming from or why they seem to be overly focused on one firm, McKinsey & Company. What I want to do instead is explore what I see as the real “dark side” of strategy consulting — more subtle and deeper issues that are fundamentally not solvable and are the shadow side of the ultimate success of the industry.

Growing up, I had never heard of the consulting industry nor had I ever met anyone who had worked at these elite institutions. Due to the combination of good luck and the delusional optimism of youth, I ended up landing a job at McKinsey early in my career and stayed within the industry for almost ten years. 

While I tend agree with Ezra Klein that there are probably better options for many of the typical people that McKinsey recruits, I experienced my shift into this industry, someone from a “non-target” school, as a dramatic step up in terms of skill development and opportunities available to me, many I didn’t know existed before joining.

I always experienced my time within the industry, especially at McKinsey and Boston Consulting Group, as an outsider simultaneously amazed that this world existed at all and wishing more people had the opportunity to work at these firms while also being shocked at some of the blatant blind spots within the industry. 

There are four clear blind spots that make up the “dark side” of the strategy consulting industry.

1. Diversity is embraced, as long as you went to an elite University
2. Faith in a simple model of top-down change in modern institutions
3. A belief that the scale of “impact” matters more than what you are doing
4. Work is thought the be the prime aim of life

#1 Diversity Is Embraced, As Long As You Went To An Elite University

If you walked into an office of one of the top consulting firms, you would be shocked at the cultural diversity. You would likely meet people from all over the world and from different ethnic backgrounds.

But that diversity is within a narrow context. Almost every person has some tie to an elite university from around the world. 

A quick LinkedIn search shows that over 1,400 people or almost 5% of current McKinsey employees went to one of Harvard’s several schools and over 15% of current employees, or 4200+ people are from one of five schools: Harvard, Penn, Stanford, London School of Economics or INSEAD. As a comparison, the total number of people that have some affiliation with the #11–30 ranked public schools in the US barely cracks 1,000 people (and many of them only made it into McKinsey after attending elite graduates schools).

The front-line consultants are almost exclusively from these types of schools whereas the administrative and functional employees tend to be from schools nearby the offices and less connected to top ranked schools. Meaning even once you are inside these organization, you still likely won’t have access to the best jobs unless you went to the right schools.

There is nothing inherently wrong with people from elite schools and in fact most of these people were wildly impressive. but this brings us to our first blind spot:

Blind Spot #1: An elite degree is the best proxy for talent and wisdom. 

This mindset narrows the view on the type of people who get access to work at elite consulting firms and ultimately, who gets to succeed in society.

I joined McKinsey from a “non-target” school early in my career and the biggest challenge for me wasn’t the work but learning how to embrace the beliefs and mindsets of people that had spent their entire lives operating within elite worlds.

#2 Faith in a simple model of top-down change in modern institutions

The clients of top consulting firms are senior executives, CEOs and Board members. These senior leaders, if not ex-consultants themselves, believe in a model of change that revolves around themselves as leaders that are able to design, implement and deliver changes that lead to positive outcomes.

One could say that the job of a senior leader in today’s modern organization is to constantly show progress, which used to be a simple equation looking at decreasing costs and increasing revenues, but now includes more creative options like stock buybacks, acquisitions or complex multi-year “transformation” programs.

This results in a glaring blind spot.

Blind Spot #2: Consulting relies on a a simple organization model which ignores complexity and unintended side effects.

Think about the “cobra effect,” the famous story of an Indian village paying bounties for snakes to eliminate the snake problem which only resulted in a job-creation program for entrepreneurially-minded cobra breeders.

This happens every day in modern organizations, but the unquestioned belief and short-term amnesia of most people involved means that the same types of initiatives get rolled out over and over again.

Every day across the world, a senior executive says yes to a presentation which gives a list of initiatives they can implement, each with a specific measurement of the “impact” they can expect to see, often down to a decimal point accuracy.

The plan gets enacted and a couple years later no one checks in to see what the unintended side effects might have been. In many cases all parties involved have moved on to the next opportunity.

This approach is contrasted with an understanding of the modern organization as a complex system and one that is subject to unexpected 2nd and 3rd order effects. 

Although BCG has acknowledged this paradigm, it is only written about at the fringe of their operations in their think tank, the Henderson Institute. Similarly, it wasn’t until Richard Pascale left McKinsey that he started exploring the potential for thinking about organizations within the context of chaos theory.

Ultimately, the customer of a consulting firms are senior leaders with control and power. Instead of pushing thinking on organizations and performance, consulting firms continue to focus myopically on frameworks, models and projects that can be designed and sold within the existing paradigm and are more a mirror of what organizations are already doing.

While I tend to agree with Tyler Cowen’s assessment that the consulting industry has had a positive effect spreading “managerial and technocratic expertise” globally, I think that consulting firms have failed to push business thinking in many “advanced” economies much further.

Most organizations today have a strong basic management toolkit, but lack a deeper understanding of how complexity plays a role in the types of initiatives that consulting firms typically promote. 

This means that the people designing many of the biggest initiatives for modern organizations are people that are incentivized to ignore how the organization really operates.

#3 A belief that the scale of “impact” matters more than what you are doing

Much of the work of consulting is spending tons of time analyzing and identifying ways to “create value” withing an organization and then subsequently, spending an equally extensive amount of time on how to measure and prove it to the client. 

Typical measures include revenue generated, costs reduced, expenses avoided, number of people affected, number of people reached or increase of shareholder value.

With the sharpest minds in the world, this kind of impact is never too hard to find. You can always “massage” the numbers across hundreds of data sets or spend countless hours “cutting” the data in different types of charts, graphs and tables.

The goal is always to find the “levers” which lead to the biggest impact.

Even though many of these calculations factor in downside, the way they are framed is always to talk about them in the positive direction.

This is hardly controversial and I would argue having an optimism mindset in business is the right frame. However, there are some hidden costs when this mindset loses its connection with the underlying information and starts to lead to the ability of people to convince themselves that anything that leads to a change is worth doing.

Blind Spot #3 An unchallenged belief in the idea of “impact,” which is an abstracted view of doing good measured by the number of people impacted, profit generated or an increase in shareholder value and only appearing in the positive sense that tends to seduce millions of people into the belief that they are “having an impact”

This pervades the consulting industry and extends to the many modern institutions that former consultants tend to join after leaving consulting — large corporations, government organizations, non-profits, NGOs and other professional services firms.

It is the deep rooted faith in the fact that top-down action, orchestrated through well designed plans (typically in PowerPoint slides), is the best way to do good in the world.

I’ve noticed that many who go on to non-profits or other large institution with a strong mission tend to assume they are doing good no matter what.

This blindness leads to a bizarre reality where one can claim that they are taking a job because they “can have more impact” when it is impossible to ever prove such a thing in any concrete way.

Think about someone that gets a job offer from Google or Facebook. Despite a minor backlash against tech, this person will still receive much more praise and support than someone that simply lands a job teaching history at their local public school.

The school teacher is motivated by teaching 30 students but the future tech worker is more excited about the ability to reach billions of “monthly active users.” 

This corruption of the idea of impact undermines the prestige of many people who are having an impact at a smaller scale and it blinds us to the very real and common unintended side effects that are an expected outcome of large-scale change efforts. 

#4 Work is thought to be the prime aim of life

Many people find consulting jobs and the jobs available to former consultants to be ones that are interesting, intellectually challenging and socially engaging. No one would pity the consultant and their ability to find jobs that pay six-figures quite easily. 

Yet there is a trap.

People who work at consulting firms typically work long hours and the longer people spend in the industry, the more their life is centered around work. Where you live, where you eat and how often you see your partner or family are all choreographed around 24/7 work demands.

Over time it is taken for granted that everything is seen in the service of work. Leisure is solely a break from work. New connections are seen as part of building a network. Your clothes and watch and the brands you buy are part of your seriousness as a professional. The books you read are in service of your skills as a knowledge worker. 

Life strategy is career strategy.

Blind Spot #4: Jobs like strategy consultant set you on a career path that nudges you into orienting your life around work, a career and your “employabilty” above all else

There is the loss of hobbies and activities that your employer or coworkers might not look highly upon. There is the slippage of time you spend with your loved ones because everyone else seems to work late and why not you. There is the slow roughening of your personality to one that laughs less and can’t take a joke because your job requires you to “be serious” most days of the week.

To be a worker means that everything is in service of your job and your career and the money you can make.

When one identifies totally as a worker something like taking a year off to care for a loved one is seen as something that is too costly to pursue. Hiring a full-time nanny is the only economic option for raising kids and resting for the sake of rest is seen as laziness. Engaging in your local community or giving money to a friend seems silly when you could just get a job working on the same problem “at scale.”

The Philosopher Andrew Taggart calls this phenomenon “total work” and he sees it as something that undermines the whole point of existence:

What is so disturbing about total work is not just that it causes needless human suffering but also that it eradicates the forms of playful contemplation concerned with our asking, pondering and answering the most basic questions of existence

I have talked to people of all ages from 20 to 70 who wake up to this fact and are deeply troubled by how they let their life slip away from themselves. How, in fact, did they become workers above all else?

As David Whyte says, they should have listened to their bodies instead of their incentives:

“We might at first label the body’s simple need to focus inward depression. But as we practice going inward, we come to realize that much of it is not depression in the least; it is a cry for something else, often the physical body’s simple need for rest, for contemplation, and for a kind of forgotten courage, one difficult to hear, demanding not a raise, but another life.”

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 (Real) Dark Side Of Management Consulting appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

Millenials and Gen Xers are hitting a wall at work. 

Thirty years ago they would have been promoted, perhaps even before they were ready. But now they are told that they need to wait their time. 

They were raised with the belief that if they worked hard, found a good job and put in their time, it would pay off. Not just financially, but with the status of having senior level roles and responsibilities. 

Instead, many are stuck in an endless lateral career loop, moving from position to position, clinging to a fictional story of a “career trajectory” and hoping to find an opening. All while trying to convince the people who have the coveted senior positions that they are not in fact “job hoppers.” Many are able to negotiate good raises with their new jobs, but find that the work they do today is eerily similar to the work they were doing a few years after they graduated. 

This stagnation is leading many to put off buying houses, committing to long-term partners, or investing in their communities. References to “burnout” are skyrocketing as people are feeling disconnected from their work at a time when work is more central to life than it was for previous generations.

Our modern institutions and the jobs and career paths associated with them are the central pillar of a narrative about what success was and should be in modern society.

However, people have lost faith in this narrative. The erosion of trust in company loyalty is certainty to blame, but I believe there is a deeper and more convincing explanation which I am tentatively calling the “boomer blockade.”

This explanation is the combination of three trends which together have had a profound effect on the modern workforce: 

1. A baby boomer demographic that emerge into a healthy and growing workforce in the 1980’s and 1990’s and were able to succeed through high rates of growth and limited competition from older members of the workforce for good jobs
2. A baby-boomer demographic that is choosing to stay in the workforce longer than previous generations
3. A resulting emergence of bad jobs and pseudo career paths due to lower rates of organic growth throughout the economy and boomers deciding to work later in their careers

This blockade is both a literal blockade, stopping people from reaching the senior-most levels of organizations and institutions, and a figurative blockade, holding people back from finding meaning from new narratives and myths of success in life and at work.

Trend #1 —Boomers reshape the working world

Before we dive in, this is not a hit piece on the baby boomer generation. I’m not here to go “okay, boomer,” but instead I’m genuinely curious about how a single generation was able to succeed so remarkably while following generations, most notably Gen X and Millennials, have failed to follow in their footsteps.

Let’s first start with the demographics. The story starts with a literal “baby boom” that coincided with the end of World War II.

Using cohort data from the BLS, we can see how the baby boomer generation has continually reshaped the workforce. By1980 we see their effect in full force, leading to a large influx of workers under 34 years old. 

We can see this more clearly if we roughly code each of the generations by color. As they move through the workforce, we see the slope of the age demographics shift. 

For the first time in the last 60 years, the 55+ cohort is bigger than any other ten year age cohort. 

For millennials and gen X workers in today’s workforce, it is common to have colleagues, managers and executives who are much older than you. When the baby boomers were at the height of their early working career it was less common and from 1979 to 1999 when the median baby boomer was 24 to 44 years old, the percentage of workers under 45 never dipped below 60% of the workforce

In addition to this massive opportunity to progress in the workforce, the boomer generation was backed by the tailwind of economic growth, which in the 1980’s and 1990s were consistently above 3% annualized growth, something that has not happened since.

While this may not seem to be a big deal, lets look at an example of how a small shift in a growth rate can lead to a dramatic increase, using a $100,000 investment over a twenty year period with those same growth rates.

Except instead of money, the thing being created were jobs.

To recap: The boomers entered the workforce during the last consistent period of 3%+ economic growth and had limited competition for jobs during the prime working years of their career. 

Trend #2 —The boomers reached power at younger ages and then have stayed in power

A fascinating study was done by Professors Cappelli and Hamori comparing executives of the Fortune 100 in 1980 to their peers in 2001 which they shared in an article in “The New Road to the Top” in HBR.

They found that from 1980 to 2001, the average age of executives dropped four years from 56 years old to 52 years old. In addition, they found that these executives were reaching the top faster than in 1980:

The journey from first job to executive suite is shorter — by four years, on average — than it was a generation ago, and it involves fewer stops along the way. Though executives stay on each rung nearly as long as they used to, today’s career ladder seems to have fewer rungs, and they’re spaced farther apart. That is, the average promotion entails a greater leap in responsibility. This trend is consistent with the widespread perception that corporate hierarchies are flattening.

Moving into the 2000’s the average of of F100 corporate executuve was 52, meaning a baby boomer born in 1949. They reached the top faster than previous generations and with less jobs to get there. 

So did the trend of younger company leaders continue?

Short answer? No. 

Crist Kolder recently shared this incredible chart:

This is a profound trend. The average age of incoming CEOs for S&P 500 companies has increased about 14 years over the last 14 years.

From 1980 to 2001 the average age of a CEO dropped four years and then from 2005 to 2019 the averare incoming age of new CEOs increased 14 years!

This means that the average birth year of a CEO has not budged since 2005. The best predictor of becoming a CEO of our most successful modern institutions? 

Being a baby boomer.

Let’s reconfigure the graph to make this clear. Using the raw data, we can graph instead the average birth year of an incoming CEO:

In Academia, there has been a similar dramatic jump in age of senior leaders. The American Council of Education shows that the share of 60+ University Presidents increased from 30% to almost 60% in 15 years

The baby boomer generation not only reached the executive levels earlier than other generations, they have also added another entire chapter to their careers. 

To recap: In addition to entering the workforce during a very advantageous time, they have also redefined what it means to work, pushing their tenures well beyond previous generations, staying in power and holding back the following generations from reaching senior roles at the ages they did in their own careers.

Trend #3— Atomization of work and increase of pseudo career paths

In 1967, HBR shared a reflection on middle managers and their career paths:

…most men, attainment of executive rank coincides with the onset of middle age, that vast gulf which begins about 35 and endures until a man has come to terms with himself and his human fate (for no man matures until he has done so).

Putting aside the awkward sexism and enlightenment musings, its shocking to realize that in the late 1960s 35 years old was once considered “middle age” and a reasonable time to be promoted executive of a company.

As we saw earlier, the baby boomers didn’t reach executive positions until their early fifties, but they had already chipped a few years away from their predecessors. 

However, as they became the executives, they were overseeing organizations that were about to dip below 2% annual growth and because they were just kicking off another chapter of their career, the positions that were available to them were not available to Generation X and more recently, millennials.

However, the underlying work beliefs, that working hard, putting in your time and then becoming successful was still deeply tied to many of our modern institutions. 

This is where the story gets interesting and I think might resonate with people trying to find a good path for themselves at work.

Over the past thirty years, there has been a consistent atomization of the workforce, turning many good jobs into bad jobs along with a proliferation of pseudo career paths for good jobs that hide the fact that there just aren’t that many leadership and other jobs that one might paid with having “made it” to go around.

The atomization of work

In Academia, the atomization of work has been extensively covered as a shift from tenure-track roles to adjunct positions. Starting in 1975, tenure and tenure track roles shrunk from 45% to about a quarter of jobs today

While Academia is an example of this happening in the professional world, it is also happening across the economy, especially with blue-collar work. 

Last year, the BLS quietly launched that they call the “Job Quality Index” which measures the ratio of good jobs to bad jobs. This is a simple ration of the percentage of jobs that pay above the average wage to the percentage of jobs that pay below the average wage.

In 1990, the proportion of good jobs to bad jobs was about 1:1. Another way to think about this is that there were about 90 “bad” jobs for every good job. Since 1990, for every 100 new jobs, 63 of them were of the low-wage,low-quality variety.

What’s behind this trend? 

A big driver is the shift away from goods-producing work and a shift towards lower-wage service jobs with less predictable hours such as cashiers, home-health workers and retail workers.

These are not only lower-wage jobs, but often are contract or part-time jobs with less hours. Many want to work more hours, but can’t.

Emergence Of pseudo career paths

Many people in the working world buy into the idea of a career. This is an idea built around the belief that you should always be progressing, learning and growing.

Not able to deliver on some of the opportunities for literal growth, many institutions have created pseudo career paths.

These are paths that don’t give you a real opportunity to move into a leadership role in your firm, but give you the appearance of progress. 

In law firms we see this with the emergence of the non-equity partner track or even the staff attorney path. 

As the odds of being promoted to a real equity partner have diminished, it has coincided with added levels to the pyramid.

This has also happened in consulting firms. If you read the history of consulting firms, you realize that fifty years ago you were a consultant for a few years before being promoted to partner. Now the formal track looks like this:

In addition to this elongated standard path, consulting firms also have alternative paths in research and as “experts” that roughly look like this:

Although rare, neither end in partnership and many people in these roles stay at a certain level for years. In one of my non-consulting roles at a top consulting firms I was told that in my role I couldn’t get a raise or promotion for four years. And this was at a firm growing more than 10% per year. 

I left to another firm after two years. Keep moving or give up.

The proliferation of levels is a necessary step for organizations to keep talented gen Xers and millennials who be able to land senior positions as early in their career but were raised with the belief that they need to have a steady career trajectory nonetheless. 

We could be more honest about the fact that growth has slowed, boomers are staying at work longer, and the myth of the American dream, the one that says anyone who works hard would be taken care of is probably not something that works for most people anymore.

But that would be hard.

Wealth is not shifting to the next generation

The boomers were able to rise to senior-level positions at the peak of their careers and were able to succeed in prosperous times. They’ve continued to lead these organizations well into their sixties. This has enabled them to continue to built wealth well into old age.

If you compare the boomers to the silent generations, the silent generation’s share of wealth shrunk 26% from a median cohort age of 54 to 63 years old. During the same comparable period, the baby boomers increased their share of wealth by 5%. The baby boomers are growing their share of the pie into their sixties.

I’m not against anyone amassing wealth, but something has clearly changed. If boomers are increasing their share of wealth, it is clearly at the expense of the following generations. If they aren’t going to give up their positions in the workplace, I’m not sure when this shift will finally happen.

I’ve stumbled on this explanation because I’ve been mystified by a paradox in the workplace, especially within the “creative class” as Richard Florida calls them. Many knowledge workers are making good money, but are frustrated and burning out at increasing rates. At the same time, most people would agree that the modern workplace is a much better place to spend time than it was thirty years ago. I plot the paradox like this:

I believe that the “boomer blockade” might be the best explanation of the frustration and disconnection that people are experiencing. 

They don’t just want to get paid. They also want the associated status and responsibility that comes with a leading position in our modern institutions.

We can turn to Congress to see proof of this hunger bubbling beneath the surface. With Trump being elected in 2016, peoples beliefs in any sort of career path for a politician have evaporated. 

In the 2019 congressional elections, the average age of Congress dropped 10 years due to a wave of elected Millennials. 

People want to lead if given the chance.

For many of our modern institutions, it might be a good thing that older leaders are staying in the workforce longer. Companies are more complex than ever and their experience probably does matter.

But if we are going to adjust to this new paradigm, we’ll need new narratives of what success means for the generations held back by the boomer blockade. 

Surely its not going to be muddling along as a senior manager for 15 years.

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

The post The Boomer Blockade: How One Generation Reshaped the Workforce and Left Everyone Behind appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

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Andy Holloway is the founder of Holloway, a company that creates comprehensive, practical Guides researched, written, and refined by experts. He founded the company with the mission of “giving people tools to turn their brains on instead of off.”

We dive into the company, but also dive into Andy’s branding fiasco with his first “startup” as a child, how he started a brewery while still underage, a class and professor that changed his life in college, how he got started writing and how a lake can be a great metaphor for life.

We talk about a number of topics including

• Andy’s writing practice
• Teaching & modern education system
• A college professor that inspired him to think differently
• Unlocking wisdom from books on the internet
• Grappling with success & status in the modern world
• How he stays in touch with the people that matter to him

Here is the full quote we mentioned from Kurt Vonnegut:

When a couple has an argument nowadays they may think it s about money or power or sex or how to raise the kids or whatever. What they’re really saying to each other, though without realizing it, is this: “You are not enough people!

Full Quote Here

You can learn more about Andy and Holloway through his thoughtful Good Work Newsletter or go deeper by buying his guides on Venture Capital and other topics.

Some books we mentioned

• The Artists Way (Cameron)
• Linchpin (Godin)
• Mastery (Greene)
• The Art of Possibility (Zander & Zander)
• 10 Books To Escape The Corporate World (Boundless)

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 Andy Sparks on Writing, Entrepreneurship, Success & Life As A Lake appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

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Passionate About The Ecosystem Behind Good Co-Working

Alex Hillman is passionate about co-working that works. He is the founder of Indy Hall, one of the longest running co-working communities in the world in Philadelphia. When he set out to create the space, he was really just intending to find others like him who were working independently and didn’t want to feel so lonely:

Alex missed the camaraderie he’d found in the companies he’d worked for in the past. He longed to bounce ideas off of creative colleagues, and learn from each others successes and challenges. Anything was better for his creativity and productivity than the isolation of working alone.

What started out as a “clubhouse” for independents ended up turning into a business that he’s still running 13 years later. While he doesn’t love the real estate management aspect of the business, he remains deeply committed to building and cultivating a community that people want to be a part of.

He worries that co-working has come to mean too many things to even be a useful descriptor. He sees many “co-working” spaces being run as real estate occupancy businesses without any deeper meaning:

coworking at its best isn’t an occupancy based business at all. If the only time your members can get value from their membership is when they’re in the room, you’re limiting the potential of your community AND fundamentally you’re limiting the size of your business by tying it to your square footage.

One thing he has found that works in co-working is focusing on the underlying relationships and the people instead of the work. Our natural tendency is to focus first on finding people to help us accomplish something. However, what he has found is that people that cultivate friendships and relationships first end up creating new opportunities and partnerships that last.

From our discussion:

If I look at the best collaborations, the best experiences, the most enduring business partnerships I’ve seen form through the Indy Hall community, its was people that built relationships before they started working together…we want to give people the opportunity to make relationships with people that they might need later, but they don’t need yet…

Alex Wants To Create 10,000 Independent Jobs

After seeing countries across the US lose their mind to woo Amazon and the prospect of tens of thousands of jobs, he thought there had to be a better way. He felt that getting one company to move to your city was not the best strategy (just look at Enron and Houston) for our modern working world.

As he started having conversations, he started brainstorming a more sustainable approach for local communities. This led him to publish a working draft (and in my interpretation, a plea for people to dream bigger!) of what he calls his “10k independents project.” Here is his starting point:

That level of dependence on a single employer is brittle at best and dangerous at worst. And that single source of 50,000 jobs being Amazon, who is notoriously one of the most ruthless businesses in the world, is the WORST worst way to generate those jobs.

We discuss his working plan to use Indy Hall as a basis to create 10,000 sustainable independent jobs. He thinks that through giving people the skills to create their own work, this will inevitably lead to many small (and perhaps a few big) employers that are more sustainable for ecosystems across the country/

More Reading:

• Cargo Cults
• Cubed
• Indy Hall
• Alex’s Writing
• 10K Independents Project

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 Alex Hillman on Coworking That Works & The 10K Independents Project appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.