A Bit About Me & A Warning About Online Courses

As you read this you may be a bit surprised at how obvious some of my failures or are why I seem to shy away from pushing things further or doubling down on trying to make more money.

Throughout this entire journey I was on a broader exploration of how one might design a life not centered around work. While I’ve seen clear opportunities to make more money at several points along the journey, I almost always optimized for a simpler life and more time to write and do the things that bring me alive.

The creation of courses and coaching were downstream of many years of intense coaching and consulting work as well as hundreds of conversations and thousands of hours of writing about these topics. For the most case, I created these courses after I had some validation that people were struggling with these things and that I had some sense that my way of thinking about these issues was helpful for people.

I see many people aiming at creating courses without first finding the things that they enjoy doing or directly helping people first. The following journey is a five year journey and knowing what I know now I’m a bit embarrassed by how poor some of my thinking and decisions were at the beginning of this journey.

I am sharing my journey below of creating digital content and several online courses and meeting mixed success along the way. I am not the most successful or the flashiest online course creator but I am in it for the long-term, really care about doing these things in a lasting way and want to see others find ways to create their own work.

I write this with the intention of saving you some time on your own journey.

Chapter 1: Idea For A Resume Course

It was 2015. I had decided to dabble in my first side gig as a career coach. Careers with Paul was born and I started writing and sharing what I knew publicly. 

When you decide to call yourself a “career coach” everyone wants help with their resumes. After helping 100 people I decided I couldn’t do 101.

Inspired by the Massive Online Open Course movement and learning about things like Udemy, I thought I might dabble with creating an online course. 

My background in consulting blessed me with the ability to create content quickly and to be able to have a good sense for how to sequence and structure that knowledge. Over the course of a few weeks I created a bunch of slide:

Lesson #1: Creating content with the intention of teaching others enables you to learn something in a much deeper way than simply “knowing” how to do something. I had helped many people with resumes but never approached it by thinking about how to clearly explain what I was doing and why. Creating the resume course forced me to sharpen my thinking, develop an easy to understand framework, and actually helped me get better at what I wanted to teach

I bought my first microphone, a Blue Snowball ICE and set out to record voiceovers with the slides. Given that I was still employed and working with my work computer, I didn’t do any video. For me, I just wanted to ship this thing and get it out there.

I had all sorts of roadblocks and issues with recording voiceovers as well as audio and video editing. When you are first starting never discount how much time you will spend tinkering and fixing really minor things.

Chapter 2: Getting Rich!

Just kidding. 

I posted the course on Udemy in May 2016 and I ended up making $30–$40 in that first year.

While I didn’t expect to make a lot of money, I was surprised at how little you could make on a platform like Udemy. Udemy controls a lot of the pricing and even if you priced something at $20, they might sell it at a discount of $0.99. Not really the kind of platform that’s going to support your life.

I did make my first paycheck from selling things online which was a huge confidence boost as I was thinking about potentially leaving my job.

Overall I was still pretty proud that I was able to create and launch something on my own after having my work tightly controlled by overzealous managers for the previous decade in my consulting jobs. 

I ended up using this as something I could send to anyone who asked for resume help too, which felt pretty good. 

At this point I was still thinking a lot about the depth of materials, the quality of video and audio and the “features” of a course. This led me to want to upgrade the content and make it a little more visually appealing and also to upgrade the audio voiceovers. I have a lot of fun messing with content so I thought this was a fun use of time. 

Lesson #2: It doesn’t matter how good your slides or course are if you are competing on a massive platform where there are 25 other resume courses who are priced at $0.99. Udemy was a great place for some early adopters but probably wasn’t a great place long term if I wanted to make money.

At this point I was still thinking of a course as something that could be consumed asynchronously and as a potential passive income product. I was aiming at helping someone make a change but had still not thought about a LIVE cohort-based course until I stumbled upon Seth Godin’s altMBA.

Chapter 3: “Digital Course Experience”

I’m not sure when I first heard about the altMBA but I remember thinking that this was definitely something that needed to exist. 

I was in my first year of self-employment and discovering that although I had worked in some of the best companies in the world, the skills I had developed were inadequate to creating my own work. I had always written or created things to please others and now I was figuring out how to channel my curiosity into something different.

I talked to alums like Cody Royle who credited the program with enabling him to write his own book. He found the support of others and the focus on creating your own work transformation and for only $2,000 at the time it felt like this might be more promising than the two years and $100,000 I spent on business school.

In 2018 I had started creating and was inspired by Godin’s general advice to focus on finding the people who want your help and to do it with generosity. I took this approach and announced to my newsletter that I was going to launch a “LIVE” course called “Solopreneur Shift” and let people sign up using a pay-what-feels right approach. This felt right in terms of balancing generosity and dealing the the terrifying fear of charging people money for the first time. Here is the announcement from my newsletter:

I paired this with a landing page which mapped out my vision of the course. 

To my surprise I ended up getting eight people to signup up at a mix of different price points. A few people paid the full tuition price (>$300!) which felt both amazing and terrifying. “These people really believe in me, wow!” and “Holy crap, can I do this?”

Here’s a secret you should know: I only built about 20% of the content before “launching”

I don’t recommend this for everyone. My superpowers are creating content and figuring out how to fit different ideas together. I knew that getting signups would be rocket fuel to motivate me to build the course, which turned out to be true.

Instead I focused on getting the sequence and structure of the course right and making sure it made sense to others:

Lesson #3: The biggest motivator for me is helping other people and getting people to pay me up front for a course was the biggest motivation in the world to not let them down. It was also terrifying and there’s probably not a good way to fast-track this step. It’s just something you’ll need to figure out how to power through.

A side note: Traditional vs. Online Courses

In this same summer At this time I was also a Teacher’s Assistant for a class at MIT for the MBA program, helping out a professor I knew. I found it striking to compare this kind of Professor-at-the-front type of “school” with my digital course which was interactive, collaborative, enthusiastic and part of an ongoing conversation on Slack. Many of the MIT students were interested in figuring out what they had to do to barely pass the class while the participants in my digital course were craving a transformation and really wanted to improve their live.

Chapter 4: Dreaming Bigger

Coming off this successful course experiment I was excited. I had made about $2,000 and was convinced that I was on to something. The online course felt alive whereas the class I was helping out with at MIT felt like it was from another era.

While I had given up on making money from my resume course, I made it free and kept it on Udemy and forgot about it. Out of the blue, I received the following graphic in an e-mail that made my brain explode. People from 94 countries had taken the course, what?!

This is when I started to realize that the opportunity of online education might be a lot bigger than simply training Americans in my backyard. 

Online courses shifted from something that I saw as a fun experiment to something that I wanted to place a bigger bet on for the future.

Chapter 5: “Strategy Toolkit”

My background before I quit my job was working in the strategy consulting industry for nine years from 2008 to 2017. One of the things I loved while working in the industry was taking extra time to participate in developing content and leading trainings for new hires and colleagues, teaching them the “consulting process.” 

In addition to this, I had started advising an undergraduate consulting group and over a few years had figured out how to backwards engineer a lot of the things I had learned and explain and train them in a way that was making a real different in their skills.

So when I went solo I thought that one thing I might do was to lead internal company trainings and I did exactly that as one of my gigs in the first year. I helped to design and lead a training for first year analysts at a software consulting firm. This was a month before I ran “Solopreneur Shift,” however, and I had never imagined that I might do this online. 

After Solopreneur Shift, I changed my mind about consulting trainings and quickly adapted some of the ideas for a virtual setting. I ended up moving to Taiwan in the fall of that year and when my consulting work evaporated and I was rested after an extended period of non-doing mode, I decided that I would embark on what I was then calling The Strategy Toolkit.

The first thing I did was to purchase a year subscription to Teachable (affiliate) which felt quite bold at the time for someone that had made less than $1,000 in three months. However, what it was was a bet on myself and a way of raising the stakes to guarantee that I would follow through.

I’m a bit embarrassed by the first iteration of the course but not about the Ninja.

I launched this after a steady month of creating and shipping and I got rich!

Just kidding, again.

I sold a few copies of the course to friends that believed in me and then considered it a failure. I stopped thinking about it for a bit and assumed that it might be time to move on from this dream of being involved in online courses. 

Chapter 6: Re-Branding As StrategyU + Think Like A Strategy Consultant

A month before I left my job a company flew me out to Los Angeles to have a conversation about leading an Academy that would help train consultants. I told them that I thought we should go virtual and call it “StrategyU.” They wanted me to merely be a salesperson for the course. They already had the materials and they thought people don’t want virtual trainings. I said no and left to self-employment a month later.

Fast forward 18 months later and I had created my own consulting course but I had launched it under “BoundlessU” which was the home of my main blog. As I mentioned, I had figured this might earn me some money here and there but that it was a lost cause. I was hoping merely to recover the $39 a month teachable fee. 

I moved to Bali after my failed launch and luckily I was joined by Jay a freelance digital marketer who quickly made me realize I was a marketing moron (he’s since moved on to launch a woodworking business in Colorado). He was really impressed with the course and believed in what I had. Simply seeing him excited about it was encouraging. It made me want to pick it up and give it another go. Together we brainstormed four things I would do immediately:

#1 Video: Shoot high quality videos introducing myself and giving more of a personal explanation why this course mattered to me and how the pieces fit together along the way

#2 New Brand and Course Name: Move the consulting articles I had written off my main blog and on quora to a separate site, which I planned to call StrategyU and change the course to “Think Like A Strategy Consultant” to more clearly communicate the shift I was selling. I had the advantage of already having SEO traffic of many of these already as well as many other “validated” posts I had written on Quora that received a lot of attention, including a post upvoted by Ramit Sethi which gave me another confidence boost.

#3 Give away high-quality content: Create a lot of valuable content for people to get an understanding of what kind of skills I was teaching in my course

#4 Free e-mail course: Create an e-mail signup and create a multi-day free e-mail course previewing content in the course.

Excited by this second chance, I started writing like a maniac and had rebuilt the course and site within a few weeks.

By the end of April 2019, I landed my first sale of the course from a stranger on the internet and the excitement of having something that might work motivated me to keep working to improve the course. 

In that first month I ended up selling 10 copies of the course (which I was still pricing at $99) and was kind of shocked that my strategy had worked. Throughout the rest of the year I had a steady stream of sales.

It’s hard to understate how shocking this was to me and how much it shifted my attention away from working as a freelancer and towards the creator economy. I was equally excited to see that less than half of the course sales were from the US and the rest spanned across 23 other countries:

Australia, Austria, Canada, China, Denmark, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Malaysia, Netherlands, Norway, Peru, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Thailand, Turkey, UK, USA, Vietnam

Lesson #4: Digital products need some form of distribution. For me, SEO worked really well because this was an in-demand topic via google but other strategies like e-mail marketing, audience building on platforms like Twitter, and partnerships all seem to be viable strategies.

Chapter 7: My First Live Cohorts Of Think Like A Strategy Consultant

Although I was finding success with my course as an evergreen course, I wanted to run it as a cohort-based course to work directly with the students and use it as a way to keep improving and upgrading the course. 

In July 2019 I ran my first cohort to launch my first cohort and used this as an excuse to upgrade the course including adding challenging assignments and structuring it around a four-week cadence. This four-week schedule would pay bigger dividends down the road when I shifted it back to an evergreen course. 

I ran two cohorts and used a discord chat and also added a discourse forum. I enrolled about 10–15 people in each sessions and it went pretty well yet the entire time it felt like something was missing.

The biggest challenge about the cohorts was that almost everyone was a beginner in terms of the skills and they all wanted direct access to me and my feedback. It’s not easy for a novice to identify clear opportunities for improvement as easily as a novice might be able to point out opportunities in something like writing or speaking. 

After running two cohorts, I decided to shift the course back to an evergreen format with the new assignments and four-week structure. I created two clear options. One that was self-paced and another where they could work directly with me to get feedback.

• $429 “Consultant” — Self paced and minor feedback
• $699 “Partner” — Coaching Call + Feedback On Weekly Assignments

With this pricing and structure, I was in a great place when my target audience was forced to work remotely. This lead to a sustained spike in sales from April onward and for 2020, the course was able to fully support me and my wife’s life off, with more than $50,000 in revenue.

While I had made a decent amount of money in 2019 it was nothing like what happened in 2020 and for the first time I started to think that running online courses was something I could really lean into to support my life for the next several years.

Lesson #5: Just because “cohort-based courses” are all the buzz right now does not mean other models won’t work well for your course. I’ve been fascinated by the cohort-based course movement but I think there is room for a number of models to work with online courses.

Chapter 8: Re-launching “Solopreneur Shift” as “Reinvent”

While it was amazing to be gaining traction with my consulting course in 2019, I knew that the course I needed to put into the world was the updated version of solopreneur shift. Since I quit my job in 2017 I have been increasingly drawn to helping people navigate and make sense of this new world of work.

As someone that loves the act of creation, creating a course has the added benefit of forcing me to simplify, synthesize, and communicate my ideas for other people. While the course has only had minor success since I launched it, it has had an incredible downstream impact on my writing and the quality of my ideas, helping me reach many more people through my ideas in 2020.

I had learned my lesson of not validating my course before launching so this time I decided to build it in public, inspired by the approaches of people like Nat Eliason and Ryan Kulp who both took similar approaches with course.

For me this was a great strategy because it channeled my motivation for helping individuals as a push to “keep going.” By tweeting and sharing my progress, asking people for feedback and sharing my progress, I was able to passively sell 10–15 spots in the course before I had built most of the materials.

To raise the stakes for myself I also decided to invest in a $100 light and also signed up for Podia as a way to make another financial commitment. These small purchases seem to have the effect of committing me to following through and once I spend the money I am thinking about running the course as a micro-business where I need to earn back the initial investment. Your mileage may vary. .

The course was designed around a five-week structure and the biggest component was an “action challenge” that would require students to publishing something in week three. 

Several people launched things that they are still working on to this day which is pretty much all I could ask for.

(Side note: I have a much more detailed writeup of the process of creating this course on Podia’s site)

In October of 2019 I finished the course in time to spend a relaxing few days in Japan before I launched the cohort with 35 people from around the globe. I ran two different sessions for the different time zones, had a co-facilitator join me, more actively encouraged sharing in a Discord group and overall it is the best experience I’ve had running an online course. 

Creating and running this cohort of Reinvent was one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever done and although I haven’t run a proper cohort again (mostly due to health issues), I’m excited to potentially run it again in 2021 or 2022 or whenever I find someone that might be interested in re-launching it with me.

Lesson #6: Not every course has to be a monetary success. The biggest benefits for me in creating reinvent have been going much deeper in a number of topics I plan to keep writing about for many years in the future. In many ways creating this course helped me improve my thinking and writing and helped me build the courage to pursue writing a book in 2021.

Chapter 9: Gift Economy Approach

With all the material I’ve created I’ve always tried to integrate a gift economy approach. I’m not going to go in-depth here but my goal in creating is usually for my own selfish reasons of making sense of the world, joy of creation, and then if I’m lucky, helping others. I want as many people as possible to benefit regardless of how much money they have.

It’s taken a few iterations to get right but I have landed on an approach that seems to deter most people from taking advantage of the system and encourages people with less to apply.

Here is the current language I have on my site

This directs people to a small exercise where they can share their motivation and offer a “gift” that feels right. I nudge people to offer something because in previous iterations where I offered it for free no one finished the course!

Here is an example of some of the amazing applications I receive:

Nothing inspires me more than people with the motivation to learn from all parts of the world. I find over and over again that the people with the least are often the most hungry to learn and this makes me incredibly optimistic for the future.

Chapter 10: Ongoing Tweaks and Opportunities

The success of my consulting skills course has continued. At the end of 2020 I was offered a chance to take part in an accelerator program to re-launch the consulting course as a cohort-based course. While it was increasingly clear to me that I had a lot of upside potential, I decided against it and doubled down on making my course even stronger. I invested in experimenting with ads, learned how to upgrade my landing page (h/t to Julian’s guide here) and have continued to slowly upgrade videos and content based on student requests. 

At the beginning of 2020 I crossed $100k in total sales which would have been unbelievable two years earlier when I had all but given up on my course and also reached 300+ students in 36 countries

The money I’m making from this course is more than I need and for now I am spending time writing, learning Chinese, and writing a book. I might decide to take my courses to the next level at some point, but I’m not in a rush. 

That doesn’t mean I’ve ignored all opportunities. I recently kicked off the first cohort-version of my course with a small data consulting firm in the US and am hoping this turns into something I can run with more organizations in the years to come. My hunch is that running it within a single organization solves a lot of the challenges I had with running it with random people across the globe. Time will tell. 

With Reinvent, I’ve turned it into a self-paced course as well but there has not been much interest. I’ve more or less broken even on this experiment which I’m happy with because this is the material I enjoy the most. I’ve recently launched a high-end coaching version of the course which I’ve having a lot of fun doing with someone in Mexico right now.

I’ve had a ton of fun doing all of this and if I never made another dollar from online courses I would have zero regrets from any of this. I feel incredibly lucky that I’ve been able to to build a life and work doing things I enjoy doing and get paid for it. 

Lesson #7: While it can seem like there is a lot of pressure to capitalize on the zeitgeist immediately there is probably also a benefit in playing the long-game and building things in a way that are sustainable and in a way that integrate with how you want to live and work. It seems after five years of doing this that I’m down to keep exploring for another five and I’m excited to see where things go!

Hopefully this guide will help you do the same.

To Learn More & Some Links

If you’re interested in learning more about my courses you can check them out. I’m always open to hearing ideas, or suggestions and definitely open to hearing about ways we might be able to partner on something:

• StrategyU and Think Like A Strategy Consultant
• Reinvent Course

If you are interested in supporting my journey or launching your own course, you can check out my affiliate links for Podia, or Teachable. Here is more I’ve written on creating courses

• Launching a course in 30 days
• My review of Ali Abdaal’s course & online learning in general
• “Are online courses the future?”
• Gift economy thread
• Reinvent launch thread
• Online course journey thread

Some must-read links:

• Tiago Forte’s article on STEVEs and The Future of Online Education

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

The post My Five-Year Journey Creating, Launching, Failing & Succeeding With Online Courses appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

I am going to look at this through the lens of the full-time MBA, something I did from 2010 to 2012, but increasingly irrelevant and overpriced in today’s world.

What is the “job” of the Full-time MBA?

I’m a fan of the “jobs to be done” framework. It looks at the job that a service or product is performing. It’s not a useful frame to argue whether or not a business school is worth it. Instead its more useful to see what jobs the service performs and if there are better ways to pay for those jobs.

There have been a lot of arguments over why people get MBAs and what people are paying for. In my own experience and upon reflection, I think the MBA gives people three core things:

1. Confidence: Being in a positive, ambitious, and friendly environment that will help you overcome the everyday friction and self-doubt that most people face when trying to achieve anything, leading to an increase in confidence.
2. Hidden Codes: Learning some of the hard to understand behaviors, norms, calculations, frameworks, and styles of communication that enable one to aim towards large goals without getting laughed at by the established leaders in these spaces
3. High-Paying Jobs: Access to a number of high-paying jobs across a wide range of industries and functions that hire a new crop of MBA graduates every year and know the unique demands of this group of graduates

This system works extremely well, I think, because of the incredibly tight link between MBA programs and the companies that hire from those schools. The schools need a steady number of openings of jobs that pay six-figures and offer interesting problems and potential career paths. The companies need a steady crop of middle to senior managers that all behave in predictable ways and might produce future executives.

The secret force keeping this together is a large group of alumni at these companies. They want to keep hiring the students from their schools because it helps them stay connected to a University (often a source of nostalgia and memories of youth) and gives them a source of prestige within their company, especially if they discover a “rising star.”

Wildly Expensive, But Still (Mostly) Working, For Now

This state of affairs has been operating quite smoothly and without much competition for 50+ years. As the industrial economy has grown and globalization and financialization have created more attractive post-MBA career paths with 6-figure jobs, the MBA programs have been able expand and raise tuition.

It’s also notable that the MBA has steadily infiltrated the tech industry despite the popular meme that MBAs don’t know how to run businesses. Currently the four biggest tech companies all have MBA CEOs: Cook (Fuqua), Pinchai (Wharton), Nadella (Booth), and Jassy (HBS).

I graduated in 2012 and over the last eight years I’ve seen a steady flow of my classmates from more traditional industrial-era companies to BigTech. If there is one other thing you learn at business school, its where you can make the most money working a full-time job.

Despite full-time MBAs costing more than $75,000 per year just in tuition one can still make a good argument that these programs are worth it, especially if you are confident you want to work in the types of jobs these schools have access to. The median salaries of HBS grads is almost $150,00 and if you know anything about BigTech or Finance salaries, its quite easy once you’re in these worlds to find a job making almost a quarter million dollars a year within five years after grad school.

Networks are credential-making machines

Despite many people thinking the technology industry would make the MBA irrelevant, it strengthened it. However, the technologies and social networks it produced are enabling a new way for the worker to engage and own their own career in ways we haven’t really seen at scale. I predict that 2020 be seen as a major inflection point for many full-time MBA programs.

Consider that when I graduated college in 2007 almost no one used LinkedIn and my only source of potential connections was through my school’s alumni database or the connections of people I knew.

Thirteen years later the ambitious young person is part of many different networks. When I lived in New York I was part of many different communities:

• An informal group of people interested in organization change I met through my writing online
• Virtual and in-person events led by companies like Culture Amp, Live in The Grey and other startups on wide ranges of topics
• A group called IVY which held events for young professionals but kind of operated as a way to meet potential significant others
• A volunteer group with 100 other young professionals as part of a two-year program I was part of
• Alumni networks of two companies I worked for
• Two alumni groups for my schools

Now, as a citizen of gig world, I am part of many more networks. In a world where connecting with others based on interests, skills, and passion is easier than ever, connecting based on a common degree feels stale. Hence why I rarely open emails from my schools. They are stuck in a world based on credential and endowment size rather than having an understanding that in an opt-in world, where you devote your energy is a signal to others about what matters to you.

Schools are going to have a hard time adjusting to a world in which anyone in the world can now earn prestige from their desk. Some examples:

• Launching a startup and joining incubators around the world
• taking an online course with a engaging community
• attend conferences and meetups in your field
• Writing or sharing content publicly in your expertise
• Hosting or participating in online meetups
• Engage with people in your industry on twitter and sharing interesting ideas
• Attending online schools like Lambda Academy

Schools are certainly still in the mix but for many people its becoming a much smarter bet to at least test out one of these alternative pathways before spending months studying for exams and dropping 5 or 6 figures for a credential.

That’s not to say this is easy to understand. This new dynamic of network-driven prestige is messy and often illegible to people who have not engaged with it.

Older people will often say things to me like “you can do what you do because you went to MIT.” They are still operating in the hierarchical prestige view of the world. Success is a result of having earned the right credentials.

They are often surprised when I share that I landed a writing gig on Twitter after sharing an essay I wrote on a similar topic or that hired me as a presentaiton coach after watching my YouTube video.

My essay and video were both proof-of-skill. They were able to exactly the person they needed. For good or bad, this type of dynamic is coming to every part of the economy which is going to put tremendous pressure on high-priced credential-awarding institutions but it also offers a tremendous advantage for the individuals and employers that learn to operate in a new way.

The Better Options Are Emerging

One of the reasons the MBA has remained relevant is that better options have not emerged.

Consider my friend who has felt stuck in his career for four or five years. He’s been successful but doesn’t really like what he is doing and has wanted to experiment with working on startups. He’s not a natural at reinventing himself and has been talking about doing a full-time MBA as the way to make that shift.

Top MBA programs are mostly driven people that aren’t sure what they want to do but are sure that they want to be successful.

I’ve coached many people like him over the years and 100% of them end up going to business school. Yet last week he texted me that he had decided to do the On Deck Fellowship. For $2,500 he’ll join a 10-week program focused on helping people transitioning to launching a startup or at least working in that space.

He’s saving $147,000, two years of salary loss, and is likely going to get many of the benefits that the MBA would given him, especially the confidence and hidden codes mentioned above.

As these better options emerge people are starting to realize that paying an insane amount of money for a grad degree is quite a dramatic way to make a career change.

On Deck is creating the space for strong connections to form and making the bet that people don’t need to hang out at a university campus for another 94 weeks to continue to develop those bonds, find their own opportunities and learn the skills they need to follow their path.

The driven young person is used to already accessing all sorts of apps, communities, networks, and services and as higher education becomes unbundled there will be countless new paths that emerge.

On deck is betting “finding the others” is a bigger problem to be solved rather than getting access to high-prestige jobs. If people can find the others and start working on what they want to be working on, especially the kind of people already doing that, the jobs and opportunities will come.

They even share their playbook:

Not that schools are going to do anything about it.

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 Inevitable Decline Of The Elite Full-Time MBA appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seven Takeaways From The Course

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Apple PodcastsGoogle PodcastsSpotifyOvercastStitcherRSSAnchorCastroTuneInYouTube

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

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

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

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

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

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

Links Mentioned:

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

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

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

Apple PodcastsGoogle PodcastsSpotifyOvercastStitcherRSSAnchorCastroTuneInYouTube

I talked to Alastair Humphreys after he had returned the previous night from a micro-adventure. It wasn’t a four year biking trip or a challenging long walk across the desert (he’s done that though!), but instead a short overnight camping trip with himself to re-connect with nature and his adventurous spirit. He helps others think about how they can design similar micro-adventures to find joy in the “5 to 9” rather than doing everything in service of the 9 to 5.

Alastair Humphreys is a British Adventurer and Author. He has been on expeditions all around the world, travelling through over 80 countries by bicycle, boat and on foot. He was named as one of National Geographic’s Adventurers of the year for 2012.

More recently Alastair has walked across southern India, rowed across the Atlantic Ocean, run six marathons through the Sahara desert, completed a crossing of Iceland, busked through Spain and participated in an expedition in the Arctic, close to the magnetic North Pole. He has trekked 1000 miles across the Empty Quarter desert and 120 miles round the M25 – one of his pioneering microadventures. He was named as one of National Geographic’s Adventurers of the year for 2012.

We talked about:

• His path after University
• Redefining success two years into a four year bike ride
• Walking across the desert
• Finding joy in “miro-adventures”
• His creative process
• His aspirations for his kids adventures
  

Links Mentioned:

• Alastair Humphries
• Subscribe to his newsletter “living adventurously”
• His new book: My Midsummer Morning: Rediscovering How to Live Adventurously Hardcover – May 30, 2019

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 Alastair Humphreys on microadventures, long-term travel and busking his way through Europe appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

Apple PodcastsGoogle PodcastsSpotifyOvercastStitcherRSSAnchorCastroTuneInYouTube

After attending a few corporate recruiting sessions, he didn’t take for granted that his path was to enter the corporate world. Twenty years later, he is still carving his own path and has recently returned from Koh Lanta, where he lived with his three children in Thailand for the last six months.

In the early 2000’s inspired by social networks like Myspace and the potential to bring people together online, he started Tribe Wanted, which was a “tourism experiment” to bring people together somewhere in the world. He and his business partner found an island for sale in Fiji and signed a three year lease. This experience taught him a lot about living in new ways, running a business and bringing people together. He described it as “doing a ten year MBA in six months.”

Ben has continued to bring people together throughout his career, combining eco-travel, community, career transition and learning. He has worked at the Escape school in London, which helps people “escape” the corporate world and shift to new careers. He has also started the Rebel Book Club which is a virtual and in-person book club group in England.

Last year, Ben and his wife decided to go on an adventure with their children and landed on Koh Lanta after some serendipitous discoveries of a co-working space and small school for international families on google maps. Here is what Ben wrote about the experience and whether he would do it again:

Despite the hard bits, the answer is definitely a ‘hell yeah’. It was a remarkable experience to have with our children when they were so young, and one we feel has made us closer as a family. Like all good travel journeys, doing something a little different helps your perspective. You get out of your bubble, you see how the world works somewhere else, you learn. As for Brexit, it seemed less important whilst we were away compared to more global social and environmental challenges. The evident impacts of mass tourism (plastic pollution), climate change (bleached reefs) and smartphone consumerism (every Thai child seems glued to their phone), has galvanised us to try and live and work with more awareness of the world than before.

Links Mentioned:

• Ben Keene’s site
• Rebel Book Club
• Tribe Wanted Fiji
• Right to Dream
• Escape The City
• Moving to Koh Lanta with three kids
• His experience after the six-months in Thailand
• The 100 year life (book)
• Curiosity Conversations with Paul

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 Keene on dreaming, starting a tribe & living on an island with three kids appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

Apple PodcastsGoogle PodcastsSpotifyOvercastStitcherRSSAnchorCastroTuneInYouTube

Heather McGowan is the most thoughtful writer and speaker I follow on the future of work. She is able to connect the dots between work, culture, society and identity in a way that has captured the attention of many individuals, companies and universities around the world.

She credits much of her interdisciplinary mindset with her own University experience, saying that “every road points back to the Rhode Island School of Design.”  Contrary to how many students are now pressured to choose a professional identity, she reflected that during her educational experience she was “not trained to be anything” and instead taught to embrace a beginners mind, focusing whether or not she was asking the right questions.

She defines learning as “figuring out something you didn’t know before.”  While organizations claim to care about learning, many are not willing to embrace failure, letting people admit when wrong and be vulnerable.  She has worked with Universities to re-imagine their curriculums toa adapt to many of these changes, leading the strategic design of the Kanbar College of Design, Engineering, and Commerce at Jefferson, and working with Becker College to craft the “Agile Mindset” curriculum.  Even though much of her focus is on helping people think about work, she believes that because the Universities massified so much, we have lost touch with a liberal arts tradition in our academies and it’s an imperative to reimagine our liberal arts tradition to make it work for our modern world.

In the working world, she focuses on how we can think about learning and work in a more holistic way and often traces a lot of the challenges back to education.  She cites research from Gallup showing that: “while 74% of surveyed fifth-graders are engaged with school, just 32% of surveyed 11th-graders are engaged.”  Perhaps some of that disengagement is because people aren’t too excited about their job prospects. She worries that organizations in the short-term are still too focused on productivity, which depersonalizes the experience of work.  As work increasingly becomes specialized – she calls it “atomization” – she fears that we will increasingly only focused on “explicit knowledge” instead of the deeper tacit knowledge that makes us special.

Her advice for companies:

“If your lens on attracting talent is to create a box called the job, which is an artificial box and then figure out who best fits that box, that is defined as the rear-view mirror.  If you look out to your future, where are you going to get the best human potential, how are you going to attract it, how are you going to nurture it, how are you going to develop it?”

Heather’s career is a perfect example of the type of path and work that was not possible in the past.  Reflecting on her path she admits “this field just sort of emerged.” As her career has shifted more towards speaking, she has been able to design her life around learning.  Through her talks, she is able to get feedback and combined with her own curiosity, it helps her focus on what to learn next.

Ultimately, on the future of work, Heather remains an optimist:

I think if we focus on what humans do best…connecting to humans, and lighting the fire in a human by connecting to their motivational purpose…we’re going to see a huge boom in the future of work.

Some of my favorite articles of hers and links to learn more:

• What if the future of work starts with high school?
• Preparing students to lose their job
• Future of Work: Learning to manage
• Heather’s Work

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 Heather McGowan on learning, adapting & identity in the future of work appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

Bryan Victor has never taken a traditional path but he doesn’t know any other way.  Perhaps that is why he started his own podcast in Singapore, Misfits, which interviews unconventional Singaporeans.  At 20, he saved up $10,000 while he was serving required military time and decided he would travel the world for a year.  During the trip, he realized this was all the “schooling” he needed (see 10 things I learned).  After learning how he could live simply on very little money, he knew that this opened up many options for him.  He knew that he would always value flexibility over maximizing income, learning this lesson earlier than others.

Regardless of any position towards “formal” schooling, his chosen path, wedding planning, wasn’t something you learned at school.  He knew he had to create his own internship.  So before his trip, he wrote to 50 American wedding planners (the best, he says), to ask if he could work with them.  One person gave him a chance and he was able to learn while making enough money to live.

Going back to Singapore, he couldn’t get anyone to hire him, so he realized he was “forced” to create his own wedding planning business.  In the process, he became named one of Singapore’s Top 10 Wedding Planners (though he argues there weren’t that many anyway!).

After proving he could make it, he started dabbling with a side business, 2D animation and founded Sage Animation.  He decided to give the wedding planning business away as a gift and was able to find one person (out of 40) that he thought would do a great job.

Bryan has been fascinated with understanding what makes him happy.  As he was on another trip in the United States, he was drawn to another project (motivated by the #vanlife movement) to build a liveable van for himself.  While he accomplished the feat, he found that he was overcome with a “something-like depression” feeling after he achieved it.  While he thought he had everything, it led to a new and deeper curiosity in what actually leads to happiness.  This tweetstorm summarizes his latest working thoughts on the topic:

How to Be Happy (without being rich):

— Bryan Victor (@bryanvictorlim) November 20, 2018

Books & Other Resources Mentioned:

• Jose Villa – Wedding Photographer
• Seth Godin
• Tim Ferriss
• Antifragile
• Naval Ravikant Podcast on Farnham Street
• Solve For Happy
• SEO That Works Course
• Vanessa Van Edwards – People School

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 Bryan Victor, Unconventional Singaporean on creating his own education through wedding planning, year-long travel & creating a visual animation studio appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

Lydia Lee was a self-described “multi-potentialite” growing up and loves to experiment and play games growing up.  You can probably draw a straight line from her hosting television shows for the stuffed animals in her room to her current YouTube channel Screw The Cubicle TV.  However, life is never that simple.

In University Lydia was drawn to many different things but did not know anyone who was taking a different path so she kept exploring within the context of the corporate world.  To deal with her underlying curiosity, she kept moving to different jobs: “two years was the maximum that I could last.”

Burning Out In Moscow

Lydia was working 60 hours a week, “thinking about work the whole time” and had not taken a vacation in five years.  The stress caught up to her in Moscow when she was traveling on a work trip.  It was burnout.  It presented itself not only as a feeling that something was “off” (she said that had been there for years) but as something that was physical.  She had a panic attack and a feeling of “agoraphobia” and not wanting to leave her hotel room.  She also reflects now and believes that burnout is often a deeper call for more creative expression.  She said: “part of the burnout for me was that I was a creative person.”

Meeting That First Friend

Many of us can grasp conceptually that different options are available to us, but it does not become real until we connect with another person who has done it.  This happened to Lydia during a two-month vacation to her home country in Malaysia.  While on a boat, she struck up a conversation a man from Germany who was running a business remotely.  This piqued her interest and planted the seeds for her to start to think about her work and life in a new way.  When she returned to Canada, she re-visited Tim Ferriss’ 4-Hour Work Week with new eyes and started to apply some of the lessons to how she might work with more freedom.

A Journey Of Learning & Experiments

A question I often get from people who want to leave the corporate world is “how do I get a job doing x?”  Lydia and I talk about how this is often the wrong framing.  Creating your own job is more about a series of experiments and evolution of where your creative energy takes you.  Even this language can be a bit uncomfortable for people to grasp.  We live in a world that operates around getting “access” to a job, not creating it.

Lydia now lives in Bali building a business she is passionate about.  Was that the plan?  No.  Often with many entrepreneurs, the first thing they do is not what they end up sticking with.  The shift from full-time work to a different world often comes with a deeper shift about what is possible.

Lydia was running her first business and blogging on the side about her journey when someone reached out about coaching them on helping him carve his own path.  Freeling a bit hesitant about her coaching skills, she decided to create her own “internship” if you will so she could get the experience.  She decided she would reach out to her network and ask eight people to commit to eight weeks with her.  She offered the coaching for free and in the process created a priceless 64-hour coaching training for herself which enabled her to understand who she liked working with, what she still needed to learn and help her figure out if she wanted to do more of it.

What About The Pineapples?

If you go to Lydia’s site, you will see purple pineapples. Like this one:

I asked her about this and she said that a client she worked with described her as a pineapple: someone direct and firm on the outside, but inside really cares about the people she works with.  She likes working with people that are comfortable being challenged and has had such success with her clients because of this approach!

Connect With Lydia

• Screw The Cubicle
• Bali Retreat: April 2019

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 Screw The Cubicle With A Side Of Pineapple (Lydia Lee) appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

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

#1 People rarely set truly bold goals

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#3 Courage to leave the path that made sense

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Taste to leave taste.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[contact-form-7]

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