But she’s at a transition point now. She decided not to pursue clinical practice as a physician—again turning away from the default path right in front of her. She’s been a full-time stay-at-home mother since then to her two children, raising them bilingually after becoming bilingual in Spanish herself during her time in Cuba.

She’s a self-described early AND late bloomer, having sped through milestones early on but now slowly figuring out what’s next for her work and family. She understands many of the challenges of going off the default path—like the paradox of choice—and how decision-making and prototyping are skills to be learned and practiced while building a pathless path.

She is from San Francisco originally but now lives in New York with her husband and kids.

Podcasts Links: Choose Your Player

Conversation Topics:

1. Finishing High School at 15 and going to Med School In Cuba: Her early life, her decision to test out of high school at 15, and her journey through college and medical school. She completed her medical education in Cuba, which was entirely funded by the Cuban government.
2. Medical Practice and Transition: Her experiences practicing medicine in Cuba and her eventual realization that she didn’t enjoy the job as much as she thought she would. Despite the privilege of having her education funded, she decided to veer away from clinical practice.
3. Life Transitions and Mental Health: She underwent significant life transitions after returning from Cuba, including becoming a stay-at-home mother. She talks about the psychological weight of leaving a prestigious profession and the impact of these transitions on her mental health.
4. Exploring New Paths: Her journey of self-discovery and exploration of new paths. She discusses the importance of small experiments in life and work and the value of reflection. She also talks about her experiences with writing and other creative pursuits.
5. Late Bloomers: The concept of “late bloomers” and the societal obsession with early achievement. She references the book “Late Bloomers” by Rich Karlgaard, which highlights the value of those who find their path later in life.
6. Sharing Her Story: The importance of sharing her story to normalize the struggles and transitions people go through. She discussed the positive response she received when she started sharing her journey on Twitter.

Quotes:

Freedom In Childhood:

I grew up with a lot of freedom around following whatever we thought was interesting. It was like from the very beginning, like if you want to do this activity, oh now you’re done with this activity you want to do this other thing, you want to do violin great, you’re done with that, you want to do gymnastics great, you’re done with that. We had a lot of freedom.

On Graduating High Schol Early

I was very determined about what classes do I need to take to make sure that I can get out and I can transfer because I don’t want to kind of extend it in three or four years at city college. I knew I just wanted to be able to graduate so that I could continue to dance.

The Good Parts of Medicine

I loved studying medicine so I loved learning the why, I liked reading the textbooks, I liked learning the physiology. So it was like I liked all that background knowledge around medicine but there were clearly people like my husband who was in the program with me, he was ahead a year ahead of me, but we met down there, he clearly loved medicine. I was like oh yeah I can kind of see the difference, I’m not quite that one.

On Ordinary Excellence

it’s okay to not be exceptional. Like there’s so much exceptionality in being regular like having my family and having the kids and teaching them all of these things and having my family come to visit like the kind of ordinary regular things are things to still be celebrated.”

👉 Follow Aida on Twitter and Read Her Writing

Links Mentioned:

• Life Is in The Transitions
• Late Bloomers
• Lost Connections
• The Hilarious World of Depression

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 Aida Alston: College at 16, Med School in Cuba & Starting Over After Kids | The Pathless Path Podcast appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

Over and over again, when people take a step away from such an existence, they report that they were duped.  Things were not as scary as they were led to believe and the upside of having more space and time in their lives was far greater than they could imagine.  Many people even gladly return to their former paths with a better understanding of the hidden costs they were paying and a stronger set of principles to guide them.

Almost every week, I talk to someone who has solved the financial aspects of life but is impoverished when it comes to the things that matter in life.  Over time, and seemingly without them being aware of it, they have lost their sense of joy, their creative impulses, and even more shockingly, any passion for the things they are doing – the ones that they used to be so excited about. They were led to believe, like me, that if we just put our heads down and worked and made a regular paycheck, life would figure itself out. 

What we bought into was a silent conspiracy. One where as long as we remained employed, we could pretend that we had it figured out. The only thing that enabled people to keep existing in this state was our own silence. As the pandemic forced us to let our colleagues into our homes, we could no longer pretend.

The pandemic and the reshuffling of work have thrown a once stable equilibrium into flux. It is now common knowledge that many people have doubts about their relationship to work and are starting to wonder if putting their heads down and working most weeks of every year of their adulthood is the best use of their time on earth.  And despite media organizations trying to quickly label things as a “great resignation,” “antiwork,” or “quiet quitting,” the truth is that we really don’t know where we are headed. 

At the heart of this shift, many people, like me, are realizing that they priced and sold their time at way too low a rate and for far too long. Leaving my job in 2017, I did not expect that my relationship with time would change as much as it did. Before I quit my conception of “working on my own” was merely doing what I had been doing but with a little more freedom and flexibility.

What I didn’t realize was that for almost all of my adult life, including six years of higher education and eight years of full-time work, I was rarely present. I choreographed every step of my life, living in the future. 

In the first year of being self-employed, I got a taste of something completely different. It was a state of being that was not tied to external metrics of achievement or even any sort of work identity at all. It was a state where I was simply existing, one step at a time, one breath at a time. For the first time, I had taken a deep breath and decided to look around. 

It was experiencing this that convinced me that I had been insane to spend as long as I did on my previous path and when people ask if I have any regrets I tell them I wish I had left earlier! The opportunity to connect to yourself, others, and the world is one that should never have a price, and on my previous path, I had slowly been trading it away at somewhere around $50-75 an hour.

After working on my own for more than five years I’ve realized that the way I had oriented my life previously was completely unnatural. And I sense this is the case for many people.  Structuring our lives working for a company most days of the week almost all of the weeks of the year is a crazy way to spend your time on Earth. Yet it is the default path and so we go along with it.

I like to tell people that I price my time now at a million dollars an hour. Of course, I’m only half joking. I’m not living a monastic existence and need some money to make my current life work. But it’s also not a lie either. Those moments where you’ve had enough space and time to connect to yourself and remind yourself that you only have infinite time on this Earth? They are priceless.

In the movie Up In The Air, there is a powerful scene where the senior consultant character, played by George Clooney, asks a guy he is firing a direct question, “How much did they first pay you to give up on your dreams?” The guy answers, “27 grand a year.”  Clooney then responds, “…and when were you going to stop and come back and do what makes you happy?”  The guy answers softly, “good question.” 

I was once like Clooney, a consultant. And for the most part, I enjoyed working in the industry. Yet at some point, the upsides of learning faded away. I kept chasing the energy and excitement of the first few years of my career, jumping from job to job, and never quite found it. While doing this my salary steadily inched up, igniting the dopamine receptors in my brain every time. The crazy thing about my path is that if a few things worked out differently I might still be on that path. But I’m not and now I know that the costs of trading most of my weekdays for almost every week of the year was a terrible trade and I did it for far too long at too low of a price.  

Unlike the guy in the clip, however, I didn’t have any dreams or an alternative path I wanted to chase. Which is why it took me so long to leave. If I had to plant a piece of wisdom in the brain of my younger self it would simply be to tell him that the state of existence, that of a worker who works most of his adult life, is unnatural. I would tell him that a different state of being is possible, and until you experience it, you haven’t quite lived. 

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 Selling My Time Too Cheap: How Full-Time Year-Round Work Blinds Us To The Joys of Life appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

Christine Bader is currently living in Bali, Indonesia, where she is spending time focused on her family and self. She is the author of The Evolution of a Corporate Idealist: When Girl Meets Oil and a former head of CSR for Amazon before leaving in 2017, a journey she details in an amazing essay titled “The year I learned to quit.” She talks about leaving the corporate world and shifting her focus from building a career to building a life.

She talks about leaving the corporate world and shifting her focus from building a career to building a life.

Topics Discussed:

• Corporate social responsibility
• Taking a sabbatical in Bali
• Building a life
• The greek concept of Kairos
• Working in Asia
• Working at Amazon

Recommended Reading

• Can a business of any size be good?
• The Year I Learned To Quit (New York Times)

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 Christine Bader on “Learning To Quit” & Life Reinvention appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.