People are often surprised at two things that emerge from a deeper exploration of this topic:

1. How little they’ve really analyzed their own relationship to money
2. How deeply I have thought about it

One of the surprising things of self-employment is that it forces you to face your money fears immediately and because of the unpredictable nature of income flows over time, forces you to develop a working mental model of how to think about money. This is in contrast to many full-time employees who because of steady income flows can put off ever having a coherent framework for thinking about money as long as they stay employed.

What follows are some of the principles I have adopted for how I think about money. Remember this works well for me and might not work for you.

Belief #1: Financial insecurity can’t be “cured” by making more money

Financial insecurity seems to be a proxy for all sorts of insecurities including a general fear of death, the general anxiety of rising costs of the modern world and feeling like you’ll run out of money, and not feeling like you are good enough.

Financial insecurity appears in different forms and has varying level of costs. For some it is a hacking of their brain in the form of a daily refresh of a Mint.com or personal capital profile. For others it is the explicit cost of hiring a financial advisor and paying them 1% of annual assets. For others it can be a desperation to take and stay at any job that will take them regardless if it makes your life better. This insecurity led to me becoming desperate when looking for consulting work a few times when income streams had dried up which led to underpricing or taking project that were not a great fit.

Most people try to quiet these insecurities by making more money, getting another gig, or sometimes, investing in riskier things. It never gets rid of those voices, it only quiets them. I made good money while I was employed but was surprised at how potent some of my hidden insecurities were when I quit my job.

This is why taking a break for employment or earning less money is often one of the most counterintuitive and effective ways to grapple with financial insecurity.

When I first moved to Taiwan my consulting work dried up and I made about $500 over a stretch of 4-5 months. In response I cut my spending dramatically and I learned two things: I didn’t need much to be happy and I could radically re-arrange my cost of living pretty in less time than I thought.

This did not cure my financial insecurity completely but it just made me more comfortable with the feeling and instead of letting it hack my decision making processes I could practice sitting with the discomfort.

Another thing people do when they think about quitting their job is frame it as an all-or-nothing leap. It’s either go into the risky path of self-employment or stay in full-time work forever.

Going “back” to salaried employment is often much easier than people imagine and what people really fear is that people will not accept them anymore. If I decided to go back to full-time employment I am much more confident I’d be able to find work and an arrangement that would work for me because of what I’ve learned over the past few years.

The reality is that most self-employed people like it and don’t want to go “back.”

Belief #2: People will spend years avoiding discomfort

People go to enormous lengths to avoid having to face these emotions directly and this is what makes quitting full-time employment so terrifying. It is not the prospect of going broke or earning less that scares people but having to be uncomfortable for long stretches of time.

Have you ever seen someone that was a bit older and had made really good money for a while lose their job? You probably thought, “wow they have worked hard, maybe they will take some time off and regroup.” What likely happened instead was that they were aggressively job searching the next day.

What you are seeing is someone that has used full-time employment and a steady income as a way to masks deeper insecurities and discomfort.

I was lucky because a two-year health crisis threw me out of the working world. I literally had to sit with discomfort. Sitting in my bed each day I dealt with the physical discomfort of Lyme disease and also the psychological discomfort of being out of work without a paycheck and unsure of who I was.

This is something people don’t see when they look at my current path. I’ve been through some shit and gotten to the other side. I could do it again.

When I decided to quit my job I confused when people would tell me how brave I was or that they could never do such a thing because “they couldn’t pay rent.”

These statements are rarely the result of a financial analysis but instead of the paycheck mindset of one-month, one-paycheck. To imagine life without a paycheck each month is uncomfortable for people and they’d do almost anything to avoid it.

Having a steady flow of income keeps you blind to the fact that when you remove this cash flow your mind will naturally start coming up with ways to make money.

In 1944 worries about food shortages from the War started to emerge. At the University of Minnesota they recruited 36 participants to take part in a starvation study. After extended periods without food, they starting becoming obsessed with food. It was all they thought about and talked about. They planned to open restaurants, to become restaurateurs, memorized recipes, and compared food prices of different newspapers for fun.

The first few months after quitting my job I didn’t make any money. I became increasingly proactive and imaginative about ways of making money. I ended up making a lot of money over the next six months. My worries about making money receded quicker than I imagine but my deeper discomfort with how I would navigate this up and down emerged as the real issue. This is something that never goes completely away but if you start to see the potential scarcity of income as a feature that helps you grapple with this discomfort you can start to see how not leaving your job might be the risky thing to do.

Belief #3: People don’t define “enough”

Many people refuse to commit to a number or salary that is “enough” and even when they do they will often change it once they have reached that number. It is amazing how much wealth people will accumulate without ever realizing this fact. In addition, most people’s expectations of what they need are built on their current lifestyle and if you have head steadily increasing salaries and expenses you will assume it is only possible to live and be happy in such an arrangement

I’ve talked to people with millions of dollars who are convinced they are struggling. I’ve talked to people making $500,000 a year who think that they won’t be able to afford college for their kids, let alone retirement. People who say they need $1 million to retire and then when they hit it they change the number to $1.5 million.

For these people, it is impossible to ever have enough because enough is just always more than they have now. This is the result of refusing to grapple with the underlying insecurities that making more money hides.

Instead of defaulting to “more is better” I’ve tried to calculate what I have, what my ideal lifestyle cost, and try to imagine a range of possibilities and whether or not I’ll be able to make it work.

One thing I did early on in self-employment was to login to the Social Security site which gives you information about the government’s pension scheme. I was curious how much retirement I might get from something like this. I was surprised to find that I had already “fully qualified” after working for 40 quarters in my life. I had not maximized my potential payouts but I could start collecting a payment at about age 62 in the US.

I was also surprised to find that under a worst-case scenario of needing to take money at age 62 and only making $30,000 a year until retirement (and not counting my spouse who isn’t a US resident yet), that I would received $1312 a month until I did.

That’s not bad! Especially considering that we have enjoyed living in different countries, our worst case scenario is probably a nice cushion on top of our existing retirement savings.

I’ve always invested for the future. Perhaps I knew that I’d want to leave the world of knowledge work. As soon as I started working I invested about 15-25% of all paychecks into retirement. The stock market is 4x what it was in 2009. This seems to have paid off even though I never made a crazy high income.

Right now if I project even a very conservative 4% annualized market return for the next 30 years, invested no additional money, and then took out the money and put it in cash and paid myself an annual salary for 25 years this would be an additional $3,423 per month (if you are ambitious you can figure out the details).

This puts me at a “retirement” of nearly $5,000 a month starting at age 65 based on no additional investments and that I can break even for the next 30 years.

Barring any health issues that prevent me from working I would guess that 95% of future life paths will end up better than this. Pretty cool.

To those of you that are saying that $5,000 is not enough this article is not for you. I write for the people who might want to opt for more time rather than more stuff and people who don’t want to design their lives around work.

This analysis helped me shift from a generalized worry about the future to a very clear understanding of what kind of risk I was dealing with. My risk of ruin is quite low which means I can spend a lot more time making small bets on interesting opportunities or even using my time for non-work and spending time with people I love.

I know how to make more money and one day I might change my mind and try to earn more but for not figuring out how to be happy on less money is a way more interesting game to play than trying to keep a steady income or even earn as much as possible.

I think that we can have a pretty good life in most parts of the world, even with kids, making $40,000-$50,000 per year. The biggest challenge will likely be judgement from other people if we decide not to opt-in to the default high-priced success path of high-income knowledge workers. I don’t have kids yet so I am also happy to revisit this admit that I am wrong when that time comes.

Other people see my life as extremely risky but I see the possibility of ruin as almost zero. Defining a “worst-case” scenario enables me to leave space for opportunities to emerge or for extended periods of non-work without anxiety.

I don’t buy into the default retirement story

A lot of thinking about money and retirement comes with a default picture of work and life that says you work 40 years and then retire and live a life of leisure. This does not appeal to me. I want to be actively engaged with the world, even when older.

The current paradigm of work seems to suggest that one should suffer for a long stretch of time working full-time and then at a certain age let out a deep breath and head somewhere warm to retire and spend time with other retired people.

I am quite sure I don’t want this because I am not interested in a life of leisure, at least how people think about it now. I’m much more interested in the historical definition of leisure, one that centered around contemplation and active engagement with the world.

We’ve lost a connection to this idea of leisure because our obsession with work has drained it from our souls. The most interesting thing that has emerged for me in exploring self-employment is the shock at how much energy and enthusiasm for life has reappeared after a decade in the corporate world.

This showed up because I was actively engaging in the world in many different modes. I’ve worked in many different types of gigs and volunteered and spent extended time with important people in my life. My imagination for the possibilities for my life and work have expanded exponentially. When I think about the latter stages of my life I think about how I can continue to do the things that matter to me, writing, teaching, and mentoring in various capacities.

The modern idea of retirement is tied to the idea that work is suffering and that retirement is a relief. While I don’t see work as the most important thing in my life, I also don’t see it as the worst. Thus I likely see it playing some role in my life. Whether I try to make money from those modes of being or not will depend on my needs but I hope it will be the latter.

The other major fear that drives people to follow this script is healthcare. I come from the only first world third world country when it comes to healthcare. I’ll write a bit more about this below but my country is one of the few that regularly bankrupts its citizens who have health issues that are out of their control.

However, we’ve already talked about how making more money is never going to solve the fear of not having enough money. Combine this with a real health crisis I faced in my twenties and I know that compromising parts of your life for future potential worries is just not worth it. I’ve heard too many horror stories of people facing health crisis right after retiring and never getting to live out their dreams.

This is why I think much more about “pre-retirement” experiences like extended vacations with family members and friends now rather than in 30 years wen my health, energy levels and ability to deal with discomfort (and cheap hotels) will be much resilient. Since I plan to always do different types of work I don’t think I’ll be resentful if I have to do work later if I need money.

I rather steal minutes from today and lose money in the future. If I run out of money I know that I can figure it out.

I had a weird experience in Mexico last year when I found myself in a tropical location, watching beautiful sunsets every night with my wife, working a few hours a day and being quite happy. I thought to myself, “this is the goal of retirement people aim towards, huh.”

The bigger challenge with this in mind is what I aim towards instead of a traditional retirement? The simple answer is that I’m not aiming towards anything. I’m trying to be fully alive today.

The Largest Uncertainty: “What about healthcare??”

Healthcare in the US is an absolute dumpster fire and probably is the most valid reason for worrying about the future.

I do worry about the future of healthcare and my ability to afford it but I also don’t see it as a good enough reason to re-orient my life around making as much money as possible through full-time employment.

After dealing with complicated dental issues, nerve damage, getting bit by a dog, an intestinal parasite, and an ear infection while traveling around the world it has eased some of my worries of being able to pay for healthcare.

The best argument for getting super rich is so that you can get access to the best doctors and pay for expensive treatments. However, this is a very American issue. Since my wife is from another country and I am comfortable getting healthcare in other countries, I’d be okay with living outside of the US even when old (or for our generation, maybe especially when old!)

If the US healthcare system is not fixed in the next 30 years we will have much worse problems. Many people are holding off on their dreams because of this and it kills me. I’m not willing to let a broken system shape the course of my 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 How I Think About Money & Retirement While Self Employed appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

I do not summon you to slothful or idle inaction, or to drown all your native energy in slumbers and the pleasures that are dear to the crowd.

That is not to rest;

Yet this is how we now think of leisure. People call this “time off” because work is the central pursuit of life of which we base our concept of time around. We think of leisure as laying around on the weekend catching up on sleep, playing video games, watching Netflix, or a vacation. Bertrand Russell noticed that in the 1930s that work was draining the energy of the average person such that they had nothing left beyond what they gave to their job:

The pleasures of urban populations have become mainly passive: seeing cinemas, watching football matches, listening to the radio, and so on. This results from the fact that their active energies are fully taken up with work; if they had more leisure, they would again enjoy pleasures in which they took an active part.

By 1948 the German philosopher Josef Pieper called the this domination of work over our lives “Total Work” in his book “Leisure: The Basis For Culture.” He was shocked that even after World War II, when the world narrowly escaped destroying itself, people couldn’t wait to restart their old habit.

As an antidote he argued that people should reach back into history and adopt the more ancient version of leisure:

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

He put it even more simply:

We mistake leisure for idleness, and work for creativity.

In a world of “total work,” there is no space for contemplation or rest. There is no need for people to be in “harmony with themselves” as long as they are employed. To “know thyself” is a secondary concern, and any sort of break from work is merely in the service of doing more work. As Pieper put it:

The simple ”break” from work — the kind that lasts an hour, or the kind that lasts a week or longer — is part and parcel of daily working life. It is something that has been built into the whole working process, a part of the schedule. The ”break” is there for the sake of work. It is supposed to provide ”new strength” for ”new work,” as the word ”refreshment” indicates: one is refreshed for work through being refreshed from work.

The case for an old definition of leisure

In the book Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less, Alex Pang examined how challenging it still is to actually take time for leisure:

If you want rest, you have to take it. You have to resist the lure of busyness, make time for rest, take it seriously, and protect it from a world that is intent on stealing it.

This lack of rest is not necessarily adding to productivity. Pang also makes the case that some of the most successful people in history did not work that much. Their lives were filled with leisure, activity, and rest.

Charles Darwin, for instance, did most of his work in a few hours a day in the morning. Here is how his day looked:

8:00: Work

9:30: Read mail and write letters

10:30: Tend to birds, greenhouse, or perform experiments

12:00: Take a long walk

1:00: Lunch & answer some letters

3:00: Nap

4:00: Take another walk

4:30: A little more work

5:30: Dinner

Depending on how you slice it, on a typical day, Darwin did about 2.5 to 5 hours of work, took a nap, and went for a couple walks — yet he still had plenty of time to publish 19 books.

One of the more compelling stories in Pang’s book is about a study from the Illinois Institute of Technology. In the 1950s, the study’s authors surveyed scientists about the number of hours they worked. What they found was that productivity was not linear — those who worked the most hours were not necessarily the most productive.

Instead, the most productive scientists worked between 10 and 20 hours per week. The scientists who worked the most hours were somewhat more productive than the other scientists but were still not as productive as the ones who had more rest and time off in their lives.

Our modern mindset around “hustle” equates hard work with success. More hours equals more results. But Pang showed in at least one environment and with many successful people throughout history, that this is not always the case.

As Pang concluded in his book:

The ancient Greeks saw rest as a great gift, as the pinnacle of civilized life. The Roman Stoics argued that you cannot have a good life without good work. Indeed, virtually every ancient society recognized that both work and rest were necessary for a good life: one provided the means to live, the other gave meaning to 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 How Obsession With Work Killed Our Connection With Leisure appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

I had nothing to do.

It was sometime in early September in 2018. I had just moved across the globe to Taipei. I was technically a self-employed freelancer but didn’t have any clients. I was single and had declared to my friends a month earlier that I was going to embrace a life path as a “cool uncle.” I had one friend in town but he had a job and other things to do so he could only be my chaperone so many hours.

A year later I would be planning a tiny wedding with my girlfriend, figuring out what to do next with the accidental business I created, realizing that writing was an important part of my life, and most of all trying to make sense of a newer, deeper appreciation for life.

Don’t worry, I’ll answer some of your questions but first I want to talk about non-doing.

Non-Doing

To not do things can be scary.

Growing up in the US, we are constantly aware of the perception of others and that if we are not doing enough, we might get called lazy.

You always want to avoid being called lazy.

I’m not here to convince you that being lazy is worthwhile but instead to argue that our fears of being perceived as lazy keep us from experiencing a much different feeling which is better explained by a term from another culture, wu-wei or 無為 in Chinese.

In Chinese this literally means inaction or non-doing but does not necessarily mean “doing nothing.” The desire to “do nothing” often shows up for people as a reaction to spending a lot of time doing things you want to escape from.

Being in a state of non-doing, you are not escaping anything. Instead you are doing things that come naturally and with a spirit of light-hearted playfulness.

Walking around in Taipei was the first time I experienced this feeling. When I was living in New York or Boston in the previous ten years I might be wandering around the city doing very little but it was always in tension with the predominant culture that I should be doing something, that I might have forgotten something, or I might not have done enough.

In Taipei, that feeling evaporated. I didn’t yet know the cultural scripts or expectations around me. I was both in a state of not-knowing and non-doing. 

And I felt okay.

Picture yourself floating in the middle of an ocean and all you can see is the horizon all around you. You have no idea where you are.

Sounds terrifying right?

Now picture you are not worried about where you are. There is no where to go and deep down you know you will be okay. This is the feeling I’m talking about.

The best description I’ve seen of this is from the Tao Te Ching, written in China in the 6th Century BC:

In pursuit of knowledge, every day something is added. In the practice of the Tao, every day something is dropped. Less and less do you need to force things, until finally you arrive at non-action. When nothing is done, nothing is left undone. True mastery can be gained by letting things go their own way. It can’t be gained by interfering

Nothing to do and nothing left undone.

Non-Doing Puts You In Tension With Modern Reality

When I first experienced this feeling in Taiwan I was not transformed. Given enough time, feelings of guilt and shame appeared. In my head were voices shouting “you lazy bastard,” “you’ll go broke,” or “you can’t just do this forever!”

Yet guiding me was a line from from a Rebecca Solnit book I had read, “that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you is usually what you need to find, and finding it is a matter of getting lost.”

Embracing a state of non-doing felt like being lost. So I kept leaning into it.

Over time this enabled me to have a little more comfort with the underlying uncertainty of life. While we can never fully overcome this it is more clear to me now that no amount of action will ever give us the sense of control we desire over life.

The hardest thing about this is the tension it creates with others. When you shift away from moving towards things, progressing towards extrinsic goals, or doing things in exchange for something else, it can raise alarms.

“Don’t you want _____?”

“Don’t you want to grow your audience?”

“What do you mean you aren’t focused on making more money?”

“How could you not want to go? Everyone’s going.”

…and this is the rub. The degree to which you can be content depends just as much on embracing a state of non-doing as the tension and distance between you and your environment.

Legible Goals are the Least Interesting

In my writing I’ve been exploring how non-doing overlaps with our current culture of work. The short answer is that it doesn’t.

Our current work culture and our global economic systems incentivize almost everyone to orient around the idea that more and bigger is better.

This has led to the bizarre scenario where profitable businesses are sometimes called “lifestyle businesses” while “serious” businesses can be losing billions of dollars a year.

In my past work life I was a successful worker in the prestigious world of strategy consulting. To break in and to succeed in this world requires a certain level of business insight, awareness of how to make money, and an ability to decode the paths of how to get there.

With this perspective, my rational brain is tuned to identify extrinsic goals that I know I could reach with a certain amount of discipline.

While these path are not certain they are more comfortable to pursue than embracing the unknown and thus can be nearly impossible to reject Yet as I’ve found when you do say no and create a space, more interesting things emerge.

Non-Doing Is The Space Where Interesting Things Might Happen

You are probably saying, “yes Paul, this is great, but how the hell did you end up married?!”

Great question.

When I tell the story of meeting my wife I tell people that we met at a time when I was wandering around Taipei and reading books in random parks. 

What I was really doing was embracing a feeling of non-doing and seeing where it took me.

I could whip out a bunch of cliches to summarize that story but I think that would hide the deeper truth that when we create space in our lives the things that matter to us seem to show up.

By saying no to the default goals that everyone else expects and accepts I’ve also stumbled upon the fact that I love writing. When I write it feels like something that fits into the flow of life. Something that matters to me. Very much in the spirit of non-doing.

I feel similarly when I am able to get up on a random day and go explore with my wife. Over the last two years we’ve gone on more explorations together and spent more time together than many married couples might in the first five years of their relationship.

Most people see the wisdom in pursuing these things but in practice, grappling with the insecurity of non-doing typically convinces people to opt-in to sub-optimal things and to spend time trading the present for future outcomes.

I spent most of my life in this mode and while other people seem to praise the outcomes of some of my efforts, I don’t think I became much wiser.

I’m a big fan of reading books with advice of people near the end of their life or who have gone through hell and lived to tell the tale. Almost all of these books seem to have the same advice:

Don’t sweat the small stuff. Don’t get caught up in extrinsic goals. Love the people that matter. Don’t put off bold risks. Have fun.

Embracing a state of non-doing gave me the clarity to see the things that matter and belief that its worth non-doing them now rather than some day down the road.

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 Magic of Non-Doing appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

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Moataz Ahmed otherwise known as “motizzy” is a graphic designer, consultant and hand lettering artist.  He recently published Part 1 of his book titled, “Lazy Person’s Guide to Freedom” and we talked about his journey and book in this conversation.

The book was born out of years of taking action in his own life in his attempts to transform himself from a self-described “lazy person” to someone that was motivated and energized by many different projects.  

I found his guide a nice antidote to the “hustle-preneurship” advice we read so often.  It starts with a foundational framing of freedom as something that we choose rather than something where we give up our power to other people in exchange for stuff or money.  

We talk about:

• How we naturally started freelancing by helping people
• His embrace of the “gift mindset”
• How he improved his will-power and motivation
• How he thinks about freedom and justice
• How freedom should also be about speaking out for other people’s freedom
• Learning new languages and the benefit of cross-cultural insight for design work

You can learn more:

• Motizzy.com
• Lazy Person’s Guide To Freedom ($0+ Gift Pricing)
• His great design work on instagram

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 Moataz Ahmed on Freedom, Creativity & His Journey To Overcome Laziness appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

My Short Summary

Alex Pang makes sense of the idea of “rest” through his own journey taking a sabbatical after leaving Academia and the corporate world. What he discovers is that we have lost connection with an ancient idea and broader conception of Leisure as one of a mix of contemplation and action. He explores how our modern work beliefs have crowded out rest – both the active kind (like exercise) and passive kind (contemplation) – in favor of the 40+ hour work week and being “productive.” An antidote to our empty work beliefs. Recommend.

Key Themes & Quotes

When our identity as a person becomes too wrapped up in being a worker we become lost

How taking an identity as a “worker” undermines your existence

If your work is your self, when you cease to work, you cease to exist.

The business world has been overtaken by a cult of “busyness” where we have lost the connection between “hard work” and “good work.” Americans are uniquely obsessed with work and have some of the worst problems with overwork in the world, dating back hundreds of years.

William James diagnosis on Americans

Consider William James’s diagnosis of overwork in his 1899 essay “Gospel of Relaxation.” He argued that Americans had become accustomed to overwork, to living with an “inner panting and expectancy” and bringing “breathlessness and tension” to work.
…
In 1899 William James noted that that many Americans had gotten “into a wretched trick” of overwork and overextension, which increased “the frequency and severity of our breakdowns.” An anonymous writer in Singapore’s Straits Times observed in 1913, “The tendency of the present age is to mental overwork and the exhaustion of the brain force.” Two years later, Bertie Charles Forbes noted that the modern industrialist “works harder than any of his workmen,” and the banker “gets early to his office and performs more work—and brainier work—than any other three men in his nerve-wrecking profession.” Such men had made America the envy of the world, he said, but they were “committing suicide by overwork.”

And the modern cult of busyness and “performing busyness”:

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

Today’s workplace respects overwork, even though it’s counterproductive, and treats four-hour days as “contemptibly slack,” even though they produce superior results.

On how companies are manipulating people based on our broken ideas of leisure to get people to stay in the office:

As sociologist William Davies argues, today’s workers are told that passion is their greatest asset and that they should do what they love (or at least love what they do); employers, meanwhile, have come to see happiness as a strategic resource that boosts employee productivity, decreases absenteeism and turnover, and increases customer satisfaction. In a few very privileged companies, where competition for talent is ferocious, this translates into free food, entertainment, on-site dry-cleaning, and other perks; elsewhere, it’s deployed as a kind of weaponized positive psychology, in which automated systems watch for signs of discontent, negative voice tone during customer phone calls, and indicators that happiness is at suboptimal levels. In environments like these, the ability to detach from a workplace that wants to commoditize your emotional life, and to cultivate a private life rather than succumb to easy alternatives that keep you in the office, is more valuable than ever.

Leisure once had a deeper meaning – it used to be an active engagement with life through contemplation or engagement in things that brought you alive. Our modern conception of it is as a passive pursuit and often merely in the aim of “recharging” for work.

The Roman and Greek conceptions of leisure and rest:

Of course, I can’t claim any special insight here. The ancient Greeks saw rest as a great gift, as the pinnacle of civilized life. The Roman Stoics argued that you cannot have a good life without good work. Indeed, virtually every ancient society, recognized that both work and rest were necessary for a good life: one provided the means to live, the other gave meaning to life. Today, we’ve lost touch with that wisdom, and our lives are poorer and less fulfilling as a result. It’s time we rediscovered the good that rest can do.

Referencing Josef Pieper and his discussion of work in Germany after World War II, he references Piepers idea of leisure that seemed to be lsot in the culture

Pieper described as not just a “result of spare time” but “an attitude of non-activity, of inward calm.”

This idea of leisure – one of “inward calm” was slowly eroded and then looked at skeptically and ow dramatic this shifted our culture:

Anything created through contemplation (or religious revelation, or intuition) was, by definition, less impressive and trustworthy.
…
These philosophical arguments might seem arcane, but the assumptions that knowledge is produced rather than discovered or revealed, that the amount of work that goes into an idea determines its importance, and that the creation of ideas can be organized and institutionalized, all guide our thinking about work today. When we treat workaholics as heroes, we express a belief that labor rather than contemplation is the wellspring of great ideas and that the success of individuals and companies is a measure of their long hours.

Pieper shares the idea of the ratio and the intellectus, which is that ideas can be formulated through work (ratio) or intellectus (spiritual means):

Devoting yourself only to the first (to ratio, in other words) and neglecting the second (intellectus) might make you more productive in the short run but will make your work less profound in the long run.

Another example from history, he cites Sun Tzu

Chinese general Sun Tzu wrote in The Art of War, “It is the unemotional, reserved, calm, detached warrior who wins, not the hothead seeking vengeance and not the ambitious seeker of fortune.” In The Book of Five Rings, written around 1645, Japanese swordsman Miyamoto Musashi advised, “Both in fighting and in everyday life you should be determined though calm.”

Breaks can be vitally important, but a vacation within the context of full-time work probably will only give you 3-4 weeks of relief

At this rate you’d need to take a week vacation every month to really “recharge”

Psychologists have since discovered that a similar effect holds for even relaxing vacations: the benefits don’t last very long. When they measure mood, energy levels, engagement, and happiness levels among workers before and immediately after a vacation, then weeks or months later, psychologists find that the emotional boost that a vacation provides lasts about three or four weeks. After that, your happiness and job satisfaction levels return to their prevacation levels: it’s “lots of fun, quickly gone,” as one article puts it. (And for perfectionists and workaholics, the fade-out effects happen even faster.)

Looking back in history, you find many prolific creators did not work as the people we glorify today. There is a consistent convergence around 4-hours of deep work. Our modern work culture has lost connection to good work because we orient around a 40-hour work week instead of looking at the worth of the output.

Here is how Darwin spent his day”

After his morning walk and breakfast, Darwin was in his study by eight and worked a steady hour and a half.

At nine thirty he would read the morning mail and write letters. Downe was far away enough from London to discourage casual visitors, yet close enough to allow the morning mail to reach correspondents and colleagues in the city in just a few hours.

At ten thirty, Darwin returned to more serious work, sometimes moving to his aviary, greenhouse, or one of several other buildings where he conducted his experiments.

By noon, he would declare, “I’ve done a good day’s work,” and set out on a long walk on the Sandwalk, a path he had laid out not long after buying Down House. (Part of the Sandwalk ran through land leased to Darwin by the Lubbock family.) When he returned after an hour or more, Darwin had lunch and answered more letters.

At three he would retire for a nap; an hour later he would arise, take another walk around the Sandwalk, then return to his study until five thirty, when he would join his wife, Emma, and their family for dinner. On this schedule he wrote nineteen books, including technical volumes on climbing plants, barnacles, and other subjects; the controversial Descent of Man; and The Origin of Species, probably the single most famous book in the history of science, and a book that still affects the way we think about nature and ourselves.

Anyone who reviews his schedule cannot help but notice the creator’s paradox.

Henri Poincaré

Toulouse noted that Poincaré kept very regular hours. He did his hardest thinking between 10 a.m. and noon, and again between five and seven in the afternoon. The nineteenth century’s most towering mathematical genius worked just enough to get his mind around a problem—about four hours a day.

A study of scientists in the 1950s:

A survey of scientists’ working lives conducted in the early 1950s yielded results in a similar range. Illinois Institute of Technology psychology professors Raymond Van Zelst and Willard Kerr surveyed their colleagues about their work habits and schedules, then graphed the number of hours faculty spent in the office against the number of articles they produced. You might expect that the result would be a straight line showing that the more hours scientists worked, the more articles they published. But it wasn’t.
…
The data revealed an M-shaped curve. The curve rose steeply at first and peaked at between ten to twenty hours per week. The curve then turned downward. Scientists who spent twenty-five hours in the workplace were no more productive than those who spent five. Scientists working thirty-five hours a week were half as productive as their twenty-hours-a-week colleagues.

It looked something like this:

Companies and people find tremendous value in taking extended leave – sabbaticals – and they are probably underutilized in modern society – both for individuals and within companies

He is a big fan of sabbaticals, having discovered the idea for his first book during his own sabbatical. Here is an example from Korea he mentions:

Organizations can also benefit from sabbaticals, as the experience of Samsung Electronics shows. In 1990, when it was still struggling to expand outside Korea, Samsung started an overseas sabbatical program for its most promising executives. Every year, two hundred people attended a three-month boot camp heavy on language immersion, meditation, and education in local customs; they then headed off for six months to one of eighty countries, where they learned the local culture, made friends, and essentially played amateur anthropologist; they then spent another six months working on a business-related project of their own design. Within a decade, the experiences of these graduates were contributing to Samsung’s dizzying rise as a global brand. Today, graduates of the sabbatical program are among the company’s most senior executives, both in Seoul and around the world.

He cites the example of Stefan Sagmeister who gave a TED talk about he takes a year off from work every seven years.

“EVERYONE WHOSE JOB description includes ‘thinking’ or coming up with ideas will benefit from” taking a sabbatical, Stefan Sagmeister says. His

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

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Pang’s Own Journey To Understanding Rest

I first stumbled upon Alex Pang when my cousin suggested I read his book Rest, which was published in 2016. The book argues that we are ignoring Rest – a key component of a life well lived and more practically (at least in the short-term) a vital component to getting more done while working less.

I’ve also written about Pang’s own experience with a sabbatical and how he discovered a renewed sense of energy for engaging with the world.

As I’ve talked with people that have taken leaves from work – planned or unplanned – I find a similar pattern. I find that people discover or even re-discover hobbies, interests or projects that they are drawn to. Some people write books, some people decide to volunteer.

During Alex’s three-month sabbatical, he had a moment that made it seem like everything he thought about his work was wrong:

It was about a month into it that I had this realization that I was getting incredible amounts of stuff done, I was reading huge numbers of books, I was having all these ideas, great conversations, producing lots of stuff but I didn’t have this sense of being constantly time-pressured and always being half a project behind in my entire life that was just part of normal existence in silicon valley. It was at this point that I realized I had made a significant transition, a mental shift, but also a shift in how I experienced time. It started me thinking about the relationship between work and leisure and rest and creative work.

I asked him if there was a single moment in which all of this came to him.

I had been reading Virginia Woolf’s book A Room Of One’s Own that makes the argument that for in order for women to be creative, but really for anyone to be creative, they needed a certain kind of space and independence that had long been denied to women…That got me thinking about all these issues and their interconnection.

The connection between rest and leisure is something that has bubbled up in the modern consciousness. I’ve written about how we mistake a vacation for leisure, Andrew Taggart writes about how Leisure was once seen as the supreme aim of life and Pang writes about losing touch with the essence of the idea in Rest (my own book notes here).

Of course, I can’t claim any special insight here. The ancient Greeks saw rest as a great gift, as the pinnacle of civilized life. The Roman Stoics argued that you cannot have a good life without good work. Indeed, virtually every ancient society, recognized that both work and rest were necessary for a good life: one provided the means to live, the other gave meaning to life. Today, we’ve lost touch with that wisdom, and our lives are poorer and less fulfilling as a result. It’s time we rediscovered the good that rest can do.

Working Less = Doing More?

In his book Rest, he quotes an example of Academics from the 1950s:

A survey of scientists’ working lives conducted in the early 1950s yielded results in a similar range. Illinois Institute of Technology psychology professors Raymond Van Zelst and Willard Kerr surveyed their colleagues about their work habits and schedules, then graphed the number of hours faculty spent in the office against the number of articles they produced. You might expect that the result would be a straight line showing that the more hours scientists worked, the more articles they published. But it wasn’t. The data revealed an M-shaped curve. The curve rose steeply at first and peaked at between ten to twenty hours per week. The curve then turned downward. Scientists who spent twenty-five hours in the workplace were no more productive than those who spent five. Scientists working thirty-five hours a week were half as productive as their twenty-hours-a-week colleagues.

The surprising chart of results looked like this:

What he found over and over again was a theme of people that do great creative work for about four hours per day:

Toulouse noted that Poincaré kept very regular hours. He did his hardest thinking between 10 a.m. and noon, and again between five and seven in the afternoon. The nineteenth century’s most towering mathematical genius worked just enough to get his mind around a problem—about four hours a day.

But this does not mean they work 4 hours a day and then just lounge around for the rest of the day. Pang has found that people are very deliberate about their rest.

They often have hobbies that are almost as absorbing as their work – sometimes being time-consuming or physically challenging.

Can the 4-day workweek be a bait & switch for doing better work and finding more rest?

As Alex says in our conversation, overwork has become the norm, even a “badge of honor” in the Western world for knowledge work:

Overwork is now seen as a badge of honor rather than a symptom of a problem and this is a relatively new things. Its so common now, its easy to see it as a natural and inevitable thing. However, its actually very new. If you’re a knowledge work, you naturally work harder than others is really a reversal of practice in the past.

His book Rest led him to find companies that were experimenting with the 4-day workweek and finding that much of what Alex has written about in Rest is coming true – that they are able to do the same or more in less time. This is something I talked about with Tash Walker, who moved her company to a 4-day week in 2019 and found many of the benefits that Pang predicted.

He is launching a new book in 2020 and sharing more stories about the 4-day week – sign up to get a notification when the book is on sale below.

Connect With Alex

You can find Alex on Twitter, Instagram (with his dogs), or on his blog Deliberate Rest

Support Boundless & Alex

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

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At sixty years old, the British philosopher, mathematician, writer, and eventual Nobel Laureate is reflecting on his life. While he has spent much of his life “ working hard down to the present moment” he has had a change of views. 

He believes that:

…immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous, and that what needs to be preached in modern industrial countries is quite different from what always has been preached.

He goes on to make a case for the organized reduction of the amount of work done in the world.

What is work and who shall work?

Russell breaks down work into two categories:

first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so…

…The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid.

If we reflect on our modern conception of work, I would update the first definition to include the organization and movement of bits of data. In this case, the second point still stands. Controlling resources in the knowledge economy (see product managers, consultants, advertising executives) can be somewhat pleasant and definitely highly paid.

Beyond these first two, he highlights the third category of people who are already idle — people that have acquired some sort of private property and “are able to make others pay for the privilege of being allowed to exist and to work.” 

Russell is clearly showing his bias here, but what he was likely getting at was a recent (in his time) shift away from a” gospel of work” to a “gospel of wealth.”

The “gospel of work” is loosely a set of ideas emerging throughout the 1700 and 1800s that one can find a calling through work. Max Weber credited this shift to the Protestants and this sentiment is perhaps most simply put by Thomas Carlyle who said in 1843 in Britain: “Work, and therein have well-being.” 

Abraham Lincoln put it even more clearly:

labor is prior to and independent of capital. capital is only the fruit of the labor and could never have existed if labor had not first existed.

Towards the end of the 1800s, there was an embrace of a “gospel of wealth.” In Andrew Carnegie’s book of the same title, he makes the argument that we should celebrate wealth because of the bounties of cheap things it helps create: “Today the world obtains commodities of excellent quality at prices which even the generation preceding this would have deemed incredible.”

But Russell’s not buying it:

…their idleness is rendered possible only by the industry of others; indeed their desire for comfortable idleness is historically the source of the whole gospel of work

Gospel of wealth or gospel of labor —the belief in the virtue of work is fundamental.

Productivity Should Equal Idleness

Russell’s criticism of the gospel of wealth is not anti-capitalist or even anti-wealth.

It’s that everyone is missing the damn point.

Through technology, we unlocked the ability to meet our basic needs with dramatically less labor. Instead of trying to create more wealth, we should be dancing in the streets. Or at least reading a book in the park.

Instead of rejoicing that the average family could meet their basic needs, the gospel of labor was re-branded as the gospel of wealth with the same foundation of a belief in the virtue of work.

A belief in the virtue of work meant it was impossible to imagine economic possibilities where anyone might work less. To work less would be a subversive act to the whole order of things.

Russell imagines an imaginary pin factory (heyyyy Adam Smith) that creates more than enough pins for everyone at a rather cheap cost. Equipment is created to double the efficiency of pin-making. He imagines a scenario where people might use this as an opportunity to work less:

In a sensible world everybody concerned in the manufacture of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the actual world this would be thought demoralizing.

Instead “half the men…are thrown out of work.”

Russell points out that in this case there is the same amount of leisure as before, except everyone feels terrible about it. The people with jobs are happy to remain employed but are surely wrecked with anxiety about eventually losing their job and the unemployed are made to feel quite terrible in a world that values work as a virtue but provides them no actual work to do.

But have faith, the gospel of wealth will save us all.

In today’s world, we gloss over this real human suffering with political hand-waving and talk of “reskilling” and “upskilling” through programs which have been found to be almost completely ineffective.

Russell also reflects on Britain during World War I, when millions of men went off to fight and millions more men and women re-oriented all of their energies to the war effort. He reflects,

In spite of this, the general level of physical well-being among wage-earners on the side of the Allies was higher than before or since.

When the war effort was dismantled, “the old chaos was restored” and by that, he means that the return to the normal productive industry. Instead of keeping everyone employed and just working a bit less, Britain returned to a state where some people were fully employed and others were left without work. 

One Should Work, But Not Overwork

Bertrand Russell is not making the argument that we should not work. What he is saying is that we do have an obligation to do our fair share. 

it is unjust that a man should consume more than he produces.

On the surface, a belief in the virtue of work seems to support this idea. Except that in Russell’s time and still today, the belief in the virtue of work really means a narrow belief in the paid, full-time wage sort of work and only for the people who have the right skills at the time.

Russell notes “We keep a large percentage of the working population idle because we can dispense with their labor by making others overwork.” The same is true today, where in Britain 74% of the working age population is employed.

He sees the deep belief in the virtue of work transcend all economic models. In the more capitalistic west, it results in “hosts of things that are not wanted,” but in the more centrally controlled Russia, the leaders “will find continually fresh schemes by which present leisure is to be sacrificed to future productivity.”

In both cases, the virtue of hard work becomes “an end in itself.” As China attempts to become the world’s largest economy in 2019, they are taking the “hard work is virtue” model to the extreme with the 9–9–6 (9am to 9pm, 6 days a week) work schedule. While some seem to think this is too far, the modern American industrialists (venture capitalists) have nothing but praise.

As Chinese expert Bill Bishop points out that in China a “Utopian destination of perfect communism will always be kicked a little further down the road.” In the West, we stay addicted to work through “the new pleasure in mechanism, which makes us delight in the astonishingly clever changes that we can produce on the earth’s surface.”

“There was formerly a capacity for light-heartedness and play”

Russell likely chose the word “idleness” in his title to be provocative as a contrast to the endless busyness of work. The core message of his essay is not focused on idleness at all. It is focused on embracing a certain type of leisure that was central to existence for millennia.

In 1930 and especially now, the idea of leisure as an end it istelf, the kind that Philosopher Josef Pieper described as “the disposition of receptive understanding, of contemplative, beholding, and immersion — in the real” has been destroyed. Leisure is no longer something you can just do. 

We work to make money. We make money to spend it on rest. We rest so we can work more.

Part of the loss of the embrace of leisure, or at least the active type of leisure, stems from the loss of energy from working so damn much: 

The pleasures of urban populations have become mainly passive: seeing cinemas, watching football matches, listening to the radio, and so on. This results from the fact that their active energies are fully taken up with work; if they had more leisure they would again enjoy pleasures in which they took an active part.

What Would We Do With More Time?

One of the biggest modern concerns centered around working less is the real concern of wondering if people would know what to do with their time. As Russell says, “ A man who has worked long hours all his life will be bored if he becomes suddenly idle.” While this seems like a concern that has always existed, in 1930, Russell felt it “would not have been true at any earlier period.We have centered our lives around the virtue of hard work for so long that we lack the imagination for what we might do otherwise. 

In this final part of the essay, Russell seems to take a brief departure from reasoned argument to a a deeper plea for a little more joy:

“There was formerly a capacity for light-heartedness and play which has been to some extent inhibited by the cult of efficiency.”

and a call for a world where people might be a little nicer:

Ordinary men and women, having the opportunity of a happy life, will become more kindly and less persecuting and less inclined to view others with suspicion.

Russell’s argument up to this point centers on three things

1. We work far too much and this is based on obsolete beliefs that are not relevant anymore
2. Our belief in the virtue of hard work means some people are overworked and others are left without work
3. We’d be better off letting more people work, but work less and seeing what might happen when you let people devote time to the active pursuit leisure. Or as he says, “there will be happiness and joy of life, instead of frayed nerves, weariness, and dyspepsia”

Essentially what Bertrand Russell is pushing us to do is to dream. This line from 1930 is surprisingly still relevant today:

Modern methods of production have given us the possibility of ease and security for all; we have chosen instead to have overwork for some and starvation for others. Hitherto we have continued to be as energetic as we were before there were machines. 

In this we have been foolish, but there is no reason to go on being foolish for ever.

You can read Russell’s original essay here.

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

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In 1930, amid a global depression, John Maynard Keynes pondered the question, “What can we reasonably expect the level of our economic life to be a hundred years hence?”

The title was “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.” By grandchildren, we are talking about the millennial and Gen Z generations who happen to be questioning whether work should be the center of our lives anymore.

In the essay, he predicts that “the standard of life in progressive countries one hundred years hence will be between four and eight times as high as it is to-day” which has mostly been realized (about six in the US). His point is that this standard of living might open up new possibilities or what he states, “greater progress still.”

What he is getting to is that at some point in the future (for him, 2030), we may have moved beyond our “traditional purpose” or “the struggle for subsistence” towards a world where we may have to contemplate other ways of being.

He goes on,

Thus for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem – how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.

However, he does not think that people will readily accept this transition. He predicts a collective “nervous breakdown” and cites as evidence the wealthy in that age that have struggled to “occupy the leisure” which they have achieved by solving their own basic economic problem.

We rarely see the entrepreneur that says “I’m good!” after selling a successful company. They go right back into startup world, branding themselves as “serial entrepreneurs.” Leisure can wait. For the less lucky in the economy, they have to deal with the shame of unemployment.

Yuval Harari calls these unlucky people the “useless class” but he is quick to point out that they are not useful in a moral sense, but purely in an economic sense:

I choose this very upsetting term, useless, to highlight the fact that we are talking about useless from the viewpoint of the economic and political system, not from a moral viewpoint,” he says. Modern political and economic structures were built on humans being useful to the state: most notably as workers and soldiers, Harari argues. With those roles taken on by machines, our political and economic systems will simply stop attaching much value to humans, he argues.

I often here the modern refrain “you can’t just not work” and I would completely agree based our our current culture and what we value. In order to manage this transition, we will need to broaden our conception of value beyond the monetary-based definition of worthiness.

This is most clearly demonstrated when we ask, “how much does GDP increase if a parent decides to spend their time raising children?” It doesn’t increase at all. But if that parent decides to take a full-time job and hire a full-time nanny? GDP increases two times!

Our concept of “work” or at least the work that we hold important needs to expand beyond what can be paid for and to things that include childcare, taking care of the sick, volunteer work and creative work. As I sit here typing, this feels like some form of work while at the same time feeling utterly distant from the PowerPoint decks of my past.

Keynes addresses our belief in work for works sake and suggests that “Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while. For three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us!”

I imagine Keynes would delight in being alive today as he practically acknolwedges that we are not there yet (in 1930, that is)

But beware! The time for all this is not yet. For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to every one that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight.

In order to get to this post-work state Keynes outlines, he acknowledges that our underlying beliefs will need to shift:

I see us free, therefore, to return to some of the most sure and certain principles of religion and traditional virtue – that avarice is a vice, that the exaction of usury is a misdemeanour, and the love of money is detestable.

This inversion of values seems unfathomable today where in the US making money is seen as almost universally good and our expectation of the kind of life one should enjoy has steadily risen. Keynes acknowledges that “the needs of human beings may seem to insatiable” but seems to think this can be overcome.

Let’s take a quick look at demand for housing, where you notice that as people have gotten wealthier, they have demanded bigger houses and not decided to spend less. The average home size has increased about 1,000 square feet over the last 40 years (while the # of people in that house has shrunk).

Keynes may think that humans can overcome their “insatiable desire” but I’m not so sure.

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

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They decided to take a leap and live in a small stone cottage spending their time:

in our garden in the forest, watching the peaches grow, and our son toddle, rocking him to sleep with Dave Matthews or vintage Stones, serenading the moonlight with candles and home-made peach wine.

When their family returned to the city to send their son to school, Mohit knew he didn’t want to return to full-time employment. Although his friends pushed him to get a “real job” his taste of a different life and the person he had become convinced him to take a different path.

He got by on part-time assignments that “paid a fraction of a full-time wage for someone of my age and training” but it was enough. His years living among nature cured him of a constant yearning for more.

Mohit’s story seems radical, but it shouldn’t be. When people take a break to rest their mind and body, they awaken a different side of themselves.

A side that had been dying a slow and steady death.

Stepping off the hustle train

What happens when you step off the daily grind?

You find a life filled with leisure and the energy to write a book about what you experienced. Or at least thats what happened to Alex Pang.

After 15 years in silicon valley, Pang found himself completely burned out and ended up taking a sabbatical. During his “time-off” he found a curious mix of action and leisure:

But when I was on sabbatical at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, I found that in three months I got an enormous amount of stuff done and did an awful lot of really serious thinking, which was a great luxury, but I also had what felt like an amazingly leisurely life.

While this might not match our current conception of leisure, for most of history it did. “Leisure” was seen as something that was both active and passive, a mix of contemplation, mindfulness and active creation or engagement with the world. 

The modern worker exists in a state devoid of this type of leisure. Instead of active engagement with the world, people find themselves “hustling” to meet the next deadline. Instead of pausing for contemplation, people opt instead for a one-week pleasure filled vacation that serves the purpose of re-charging for a return to the workplace.

Pang’s mindset shift led him to write Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less, which helped him explore why his beliefs had flipped. 

Pang feels we need to take rest much more seriously than we do:

If you want rest, you have to take it. You have to resist the lure of busyness, make time for rest, take it seriously, and protect it from a world that is intent on stealing it.

Mindset shift from a planned sabbatical

Jacqueline Jensen embraced the hustle mindset. She had founded a tech company and earned a number of accolades, but still felt something was off.

She decided to take bold action and planned her own “structured sabbatical” to teach herself to code, write a book and focus on her mental and physical health.

She framed the sabbatical around a tough question that challenged her own identity,

What if I took work…working for a paycheck, what if I took that out of the center of my life, what would my life look like?

As someone that had defined herself by work and her accomplishments, this was no easy task. In fact, she said it took about two and a half months to realize a shift to where work was not the center of her life. 

Much like Pang, she found a renewed and different type of energy in that time off that helped her focus on projects that mattered to her. However, it took almost three months before she was even able to move past the anxiety of waking up and not having work be the central aspect of her life.

It was hard. It was not a four-month vacation. It was a lot of work to untangle myself from all the things I get from work – the validation, the excitement.

As she emerged into a new version of herself, she found energy to write a book and plan a path back into the working world in a more sustainable way, including joining a small startup intense on being a “calm company” a new kind of startup not build around the mindset that work has to be a never-ending hustle.

While people are taking more vacation days from work, it is likely not enough. If it took Jacqueline almost three months to re-imagine her relationship with work, how long will it take for you?

Leaving a path that makes sense

I first connected with Taryn when she was at a near breaking point, contemplating quitting her job. She had been very successful by traditional standards with a resume filled with prestigious companies, global work experience and elite undergraduate and graduate degrees.

Finding herself completely burned out and dealing with a hostile work environment, she decided to quit without a plan. While the corporate world she left demands a narrative around one’s path and what’s next, she didn’t have one. She just needed to heal or as she told me “take time and space for self-care and introspection.”

She took the first few weeks to rest and eventually found herself drawn to different activities. She filled her time reading, training for a marathon, volunteering with local organizations, meeting people she “wouldn’t otherwise meet” and prioritizing her mental health.

She has also found herself drawn to her local community in a way that she wasn’t when she was just trying to keep herself sane while working:

this period has been great in giving me the push to re-establish myself here. I’m finding great activities in my neighborhood and meeting lots of people, which has been the balance I need while I’m reflecting on what to do next

Our communities are not as strong as they once were, yet many people wish they could engage with them in a deeper way, much like Taryn.

Yet people are struck with fear. I’ve worked with many people over the past few years who are taking leaps. The questions are always the same. What will people say? What if I can’t get another job?

Shouldn’t the question be “What will be left of me if I continue down this path?”

Start Your “Eff You Fund”

Although people pushed Mohit to rejoin the workforce and “occupy a desk,” he resisted. Part of his reluctance came from his secret weapon, his “fu** you fund,” which he religiously filled early in his career when he realized he was never meant to be a company man. 

Although he never used it to fund his now frugal day-to-day life, it was literal and figurative “eff you” to the business world that would have been so easy to run back to.

Early in my career, I knew I wasn’t a company man, yet I played the part for more than a decade. Many of the people I talk to share that same indifference and an inner pull to do something else.

Even after Mohit returned to city life, he found himself doing the things that mattered to him:

I ran in the park, lounged in my couch, hugged my son as he told me of his day at school, and drove him to birthday parties in a car bashed into dis-reputability by years of mountain driving.

We all have this inner yearning for a more simple life — a call to rest. As Emerson said, “The incommunicable trees begin to persuade us to live with them, and quit our life of solemn trifles.”

No matter what you do to ignore it, its always going to be there. Perhaps its time we start to listen.

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

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