We have the most educated collection of people on this planet and the best we can tell these people, especially young ones, is that they should channel this ambition into legible paths that result in them being able to add fancy letters to their story like MA, VP, Ph.D., and CEO.

All of this made sense at one point. The industrial economy was incredible. It helped billions move into a middle-class existence while being part of building the future. My father got his start building aircraft engines and spent an entire career being part of a company that grew from $300M in revenue to $75 billion in revenue over 40 years. Imagine being part of something like that! Many people have parents who were to benefit from being part of similar companies.

When I was interning at that same company as an intern in the last 2000s, the excitement was gone. Jobs had been outsourced, people had been laid off over and over, and people were telling me I should try to work elsewhere. I worked with another intern that used to nap under his cubicle every day for two hours. No one even came to our corner of the office and no one noticed. There wasn’t enough work to keep us busy anyway.

I graduated and went to work for GE and found similar sentiment. Senior people seemed happy enough to collect a paycheck but pined for the GE of the past, often saying it was “not what it used to be.” People told me the best strategy was to work hard for a few years, find a cozy job, and coast. I wanted more.

The Industrial Long Boom

Throughout the 20th Century, there were tons of these kinds of companies. Westinghouse, GE, United Technologies, AT&T, Sony, Samsung, Siemens, Toyota, Chrysler, Caterpillar, Xerox, and so on. At one point if you told people you worked at these companies, people would know your life was set. Work at them now and you likely have to put up with an older workforce that is well-compensated but cynical. They forget how fast they were able to raise the ranks and spend their time trying to convince young people that they shouldn’t feel so entitled. “Hard work!” they say. Put the payoff isn’t a pension anymore. It’s a guarantee that you’ll have the same detached stance toward life and work too.

Young people want more.

And in some parts of the economy, they at least find the appearance of it at first. The kinds of companies growing at similar rates to those industrial companies in the mid-20th century are tech companies like Google and Facebook. Except after the glow of landing at one of these companies wears off, the nature of work is different. They aren’t building aircraft engines or rocket ships, they are shipping product design updates for an ad product that sort of generates money on its own.

Most people today work at a computer and create documents or edit other people’s documents. There are a small number of coders that help tweak the algorithms and build new services, but most of the employees work on moderation, project management, coordination, public relations, finance, communications, marketing, and legal work.

Adair Turner has called this “zero-sum” work:

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

There’s nothing wrong with this kind of work but it leaves an inspiration shaped hold in people’s hearts.

People want to get fired up, they want to be challenged, and they want to work on teams that push their limits. But after years of schooling and working in companies where this is so hard to find, people become convinced it doesn’t even exist. Or at least they come to this conclusion after several job changes, flailing about trying to find something that delivers inspiration.

And this is the saddest thing about today’s working world. So many educated people and so little damn inspiration. It breaks my heart to see how many people have convinced themselves that their current job is the best it’s ever going to be.

But deep down if they really were able to admit it, they’d say it: I want more.

“A young man of average ability has been propelled upward so early—and so pleasantly”

Our current workforce is unique in that there is a large mass of older workers who are also working at later ages in life. This has extended the career ladder and made climbing a ladder if it exists at all a much more drawn-out process.

After World War II, if you read about the environment with work, it seems that young people sort of saw leadership positions dropping out of the sky. In William Whyte’s 1956 book Organization Man, he detailed a young man of “average ability”:

Corporations have been expanding at a great rate, and the effect has been a large-scale deferral of dead ends and pigeonholes for thousands of organization men. With so many new departments, divisions, and plants being opened up, many a young man of average ability has been propelled upward so early—and so pleasantly—that he can hardly be blamed if he thinks the momentum is a constant.

The growth rates in this period, and especially in the US, were bananas. There’s a reason they call it the “great boom.” Opportunities were everywhere. Consider another account from a young person in the 1950s:

“We are a young group without mature leadership,” explains a rising young banker, “so we are forced to take on responsibilities that older people usually assume. For the last two years I have been chairman of the board of the church, a job held by a fifty-five or sixty-year-old man in most communities. This gives me a training valuable in business. The church is a corporation with a $50,000 budget, and we’ve had to think about a $100,000 capital loan. How else could people our age get a chance to deal with that much capital? We’re forced ahead of our time.”

This simply doesn’t happen to young people. So we pretend like young people are just lazy or entitled. The media invents fake stories saying people are losing their ambition, slacking off at work, resigning en masse, and more.

No! This is all missing it. There is a crisis of inspiration and opportunity!

Optimism Premium

In traveling around the world, I’ve met countless digital nomads, freelancers, and other people who take advantage of geo-arbitrage and are able to work less to meet their needs while living in other countries.

I’ve done this too and many people think these people are lazy and just don’t want to work “normal” jobs. I think people are missing it. Most of these people are highly engaged with the work they manage to create for themselves and if given the opportunity, would move back to their home countries to work in jobs – that is if the jobs were inspiring and challenged them. They don’t have an easy time finding them so they’ve opted out. And are literally trying to create challenging work out of thin air.

I’ve hung out with these people across the world. Digital nomads, crypto people, under-employed freelancers, solopreneurs, YouTubers, vagabonds, and investors. These are some of the most optimistic, energized people I know and are just like the people I talk to all around the world.

They are on their paths because of self-preservation. I was happy to trade a large chunk of my income to lower the odds that I would drift into cynicism in my mid-40s. So are many others.

But there is room for optimism! All of these people have a sense that things are changing and better options will emerge eventually.

I think we are starting to see the beginning of better options in the digital creator world, online communities, online learning, and within tech more broadly. Optimism is trading at an incredible premium and any company, country, city, or individual that can communicate a persuasive version of it will reap the rewards. Elon Musk get dunked on a lot but he understands this. You don’t have to care about his vision for putting people on Mars but at least it’s bold and inspiring.

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 Inspiration Deficit – Or Why So Many Young People Still Crave More Challenging Work appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

The promise of “finding a niche” online is one of arrival.  You start dabbling on the internet in some mode of digital creation and feel frustrated.  You don’t know what you’re doing and no one seems to be paying attention.  If you can just figure out a better way to describe yourself, pick better topics, or narrow your focus everything will get better.

I think this fails but not for obvious reasons.  The biggest reason “find a niche” fails is that the people are applying it too early in their journeys.  On top of that, it ignores the reality that most people who do arrive at a state of niche-ness usually have one thing in common: they didn’t give up.

This is why a better strategy than finding a niche, especially early, is “find a mode.”  Find a mode where you can continue to be excited about what you are doing.  Find a mode where the friction to getting started declines over time.  Find a mode where you are excited to keep going despite being ignored.  Find a mode where you want to do something despite not having anything to show for it or in the worst case, despite criticism.

This is really shifting from getting out of your head and into your body and thinking like a psychologist, not an engineer:

“Why am I getting physically upset at the lack of interest from other people?”

“Why do I struggle to get started on something despite claiming to care about it?”

“When do I find myself most filled with energy?”

“Why do I get so excited when I talk about certain topics?”

I think the reason this type of inquiry has become harder is that there are far more examples of people that have reached some easy-to-understand metric like money or fame by creating things online. We see other people achieving outsized success that have some elements of niche-ness and because it’s harder to know what really helped them arrive at that point, it’s easy to convince yourself that only thing holding you back is your own angle, unique set of topics, or brand that might help you distinguish yourself from the pack.

The Best Niche: Population of One

The problem with this I’ve realized is that the most niche-y people often inhabit a territory with a maximum population size of one.  In other words, they are just being who they are.  They are combining their unique psychology, interests, motivators, and evolving curiosity and know-how to drop into a mode of being that enables them to keep going. 

Niches can’t be aimed at.  They only reveal themselves over time.  This is why the most practical thing you can do is to “find a mode” that enables you to stay in the game.

Ali Abdaal is a creator “superstar” who seems to understand this.  If you don’t know, Ali is a now former-doctor and creator with millions of followers on YouTube (and also who dabbles as a part-time marketer of my book) that seems to launch new things once a month.  He’s killing it by all traditional metrics. 

On the surface it seems that the reason he is successful is that he is unique: he is a former doctor, Pakistani, living in London, and interested in entrepreneurship and technology.

Yet this is the error of niche thinking – the idea that the descriptors and outcomes are what matters most.

I’ve been lucky to get to know Ali a little bit and I don’t think any of those things matter as much as others or even he may think.  I think what makes Ali stand out is that he has found a mode of showing up in his life such that he enthusiastically enjoys the things he is doing. 

The first time I realized this, I was part of his first cohort of Part-Time YouTuber Academy.  As I sat through one of the lectures, I realized that Ali had essentially absorbed, understood, and synthesized a comprehensive business school education, all by himself.  As someone who had gone to one of the top business schools in the world, I realized that Ali would have ranked as both one of the best teachers and students at that school.

This made me excited for him.  Why? I knew he was on a path that was uniquely his and that his competition was essentially zero.  And this is the real magic of aiming at a mode: by aiming at a state where you can keep showing up with your unique strengths, you can stumble into your own personal niche. 

Said another way, I think Ali has succeeded because he could find the niche of being Ali Abdaal  – someone who literally gets joy out of learning new things, testing and implementing them, and then synthesizing them so he can explain them to others.  He did not “find” a niche because a niche of Ali is not a place where you can ever arrive– it is constantly shifting, driven by his evolving interests and curiosities.

This is what might be what makes the idea of finding a niche so seductive – it’s the idea that we don’t have to be anybody.  We can just be our weird selves.

Too Many How-To Guide For Future Creators and I am guilty of creating

The challenge of exploring the creator’s path these days is that there is too much damn information on how to succeed.  Don’t get me wrong.  I write and share a lot of this too and I think most of this is a net positive.  But for most people early in their creation journey, the advice and information are not even wrong.  It’s just not relevant yet.

The only thing that matters at the beginning is to stay in the game and find your mode.

This is why I’m sort of grateful that I started doing internet stuff before there was an explosion of success stories and how-to guides.  From 2014 to 2018 I was writing online, creating digital products, and experimenting with running cohort-based courses almost entirely because I enjoyed it and I found it interesting.  I didn’t have a destination in mind.  It was in these years I stumbled into a mode of being where I could keep doing these things indefinitely.

I wonder how my approach would have changed if I had started five years later.  The landscape of doing things online and making a living from it has changed dramatically.  People once “working online” are now grouped into a cooler-sounding “creator economy” that venture capitalists have somehow turned into a thing.

Would I have felt bad about taking so long to find my thing?

Would I have felt like a failure seeing so many other people succeed?

Would I have double-downed on topics that now seem like passing interests?

I have no idea but I’m glad that I didn’t know what I was doing and that for some reason, I had a deep sense that finding things that I liked doing and wanted to keep doing was something worth pursuing.

The Tale Of Two Niches

I have an interesting perspective on niches because out of those early years of writing and creating regularly, two niches revealed themselves in my work. 

One is the writing I’ve done under the banner of “Boundless” – about work, the creator economy, unconventional paths, and whatever I’m curious about.  I’ve launched multiple courses, written for thousands of hours, posted tens of thousands of tweets, and even wrote a book.  Yet until 2020, I didn’t really have any strong positive signal that my ideas were all that interesting, and even now, I’ve probably made less than $25,000 from everything I’ve done over a period of seven years of experimenting in this space.

The second is my “StrategyU” brand where I run a course and write about strategy and consulting skills.  This business has made more than 10 times what I’ve made from my Boundless activities but in terms of the total amount spent it would be flipped.  Despite clear economic incentives and a massive audience (large SEO traffic on the blog, 20k YouTube subscribers), I find myself repeatedly struggling to create stuff for that niche.

This is all to say that I sort of found two niches and one of them isn’t really something I’ve ever been all-in on.  StrategyU is a niche defined by topics and Boundless is a niche defined by “Paul Millerd’s evolving interests.”

This was not always the case.  While I’ve lost my connection to writing about strategy and consulting skills, the early writing I did on those topics was highly enjoyable and exciting.  I was able to create a lot of the ideas that are still resonating.  Yet I haven’t been able to get into that mode as reliably and I feel stuck whenever I think about needing to create more content. This is the biggest risk of a narrow niche – losing interest in the topics. 

The way I’ve been dealing with this is by coming back to the most important thing: finding a mode.  For the past few years, I was stuck, likely by some combination of my own lack of imagination and some real limits of my audience’s expectations.  But I think I now have a path forward.  In doing virtual training workshops with companies, I’ve been able to tap back into a mode that brings me alive helps me be excited about creating again.  But leaning in this direction will inevitably mean that some of my income streams that are downstream of content creation may dwindle over time. 

This is fine, because after being in this weird creator world and fully supporting myself doing this kind of work for the last four years, I realize that the only thing that matters is having the energy, excitement, and motivation to keep going.

Finding a niche is great but the game never changes.  You need to be able to continue to find a mode where you can keep showing up.

The Promise Of A Niche

The financial incentives of creating and sharing online have become obvious but I think many people that are reading this article probably desire something more. The real promise of creating and sharing things online is that it gives you the opportunity to support yourself while doing work you care about.  It’s also the chance to experience the magic of the art of creation which provides a portal to connect deeply to yourself, others, and the world around you. 

This is what I experienced writing this article.  Many of the words flowed out of me in a magical transmission that I don’t really understand but occurs reliably enough that I am sure I want to keep writing indefinitely.

If you take away one thing from what I am trying to convey its that niches are not an end state.  They are not something you arrive at.  They are simply a byproduct of a state where you continue to create and share things.  I think this is also why Visa Veerasamy’s “Do 100” prompt is so powerful.  It eliminates every single goal except one: just doing stuff.

If you do 100 of something, you will simply have a lot of experiences to reflect on.  You will see how your curiosity shifts.  You will see how others react.  You will see if you give up.  If you make it to 100?  You get to know the real secret: that there is no arrival.

The whole game is to keep playing the game and the secret to that is probably not finding a niche but finding the mode which enables you to play.

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 Don’t Find A Niche, Find A Mode appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

That may be the right path for you but I want to convince you that there might be another path.

I want to share my version of how I’m playing something Packy McCormick calls the “great online game.” A version that focuses on building a life where I can work in different ways to pay the bills, have plenty of time for creative pursuits, and don’t have to be tied to a full-time job.

What follows are five principles that have emerged that have guided my path. They have emerged slowly and organically. Only now do some of them seem obvious. I fully expect that they may morph over time. These principles serve as a compass for me as I navigate the infinite possibilities of the internet.

I think that nearly everyone, including people on the default path, should develop their own principles. This is because the stories of how we think about our work and lives are outdated, one based on a 1950s reality. This story worked in a time in which people worked for one company in their life when growth rates of 5% were normal, and most women didn’t work.

The trap of this story is that it actually works in the first few years of anyone’s career. Many companies still believe in this story and this is why the first five years of your career are still filled with promotions and a clear career path. Anyone that’s made it past that point, however, knows the truth. That there aren’t many clear career paths left and because of slowing growth rates, competition and politics are more central to getting ahead than some may think.

Developing your own principles and strategy is the only choice left if you don’t want to play those games. For the self-employed, developing your own game and set of principles is not a choice but a necessity. It is the only way to survive over the long term.

Here are five principles that help guide my path.

Principle #1: Coming Alive Over Getting Ahead

In April of 2020, my strategy consulting skills course started taking off. This was a weird moment because it took off at the same time I started dealing with extreme fatigue following complications from a tooth extraction. My course was selling like hotcakes and I was either wandering around the Canary Islands talking to doctors or sleeping in bed. This is one of the weird things about being a self-employed creator. Your financial reality can shift dramatically in a short period of time and often due to things outside of your control.

I had spent hundreds of hours to get it to that point but it was never my intention to hit a monthly revenue goal. I genuinely thought it would be fun to figure out how to create an online course (If you want to go much deeper, the full story is here). If you had talked to me in January of 2019 you might have thought my principles of keep doing stuff I like, give generously, and don’t work too much were pretty stupid because I had made less than $3,000 doing so in a year. Two years later I’ve somehow made a decent American salary for two straight years.

After a strong year of sales, I reflected on my success with StrategyU. My inner consultant knew that the obvious solution was to double down, add more courses, level up the marketing, create more content, and see where it goes. I was even invited to an accelerator program for proven course creators to make this happen. I could see the path and had a reasonable level of confidence that I could 4-5x my course sales if I wanted to.

But then I challenged myself, “what would you do once you had that money?” I realized I would write. I then reflected upon the fact that I could simply do that now. I was already making enough to support myself and still save a little money each year.

With this in mind, I decided to make a commitment. In 2021 I would write a book. This would be a way to commit to what I claimed to care about and also be a way of testing out this principle of “coming alive over getting ahead.”

My course has remained steady but has not grown much more than the previous year. However, the act of committing to writing a book has been one of the most thrilling commitments of my life. I’ve never felt so alive, challenged, and excited about anything I’ve worked on.

If a choice emerges between spending more time on making money but means I’ll have to cut back on some of the things I like doing like learning, writing, and connecting with people, I plan to walk away from that choice.

Principle #2: Don’t Be Attached

While my online course continued to succeed, I realized that I had come to expect that income.

With a few hours of maintenance per week, I was able to keep a profitable business running while writing my book and studying Chinese full-time for a three-month stretch. In one of those months, I even worked with a client to run a four-week consulting skills bootcamp which led to my best month since being self-employed. Then in May, the sales of my course tanked, likely driven by a change in the google search algorithm, people returning to the office after covid restrictions, and travel for the summer.

These kinds of ups and downs would be terrifying if I had a high fixed-cost lifestyle or if I had not experienced them before. To anyone that’s been self-employed for a long period of time, they learn to deal with these shifts. Here is an example of some various swings in different income sources I’ve experienced over the past five years.

With this in mind, I try to make sure that I’m not assuming that any of these income sources are permanent. I’ve embraced a visualization exercise where I go through an exercise of visualizing all my digital properties and revenue streams evaporating and then asking “am I okay?”

When my consulting course struggled for a couple of months after doing so well for more than a year, I was able to reflect on the fact that I’ve started from scratch in the past and I could do it again.

Principle #3: Build An Income Floor & Optimize For Income Streams

About a year into self-employment I realized I really want to stay on my path longer than my initial plans for a one-year experiment. I realized that if I wanted to commit to this path, I needed a better strategy for earning money than only freelancing.

Freelancing is one of the best ways to get started with self-employment. It enables you to leverage your existing skills while giving you more flexibility with time to spend on other things you want to work on or to simply work less. This worked well for me. I had much more time to work on creative projects but realized that following that path was a lower-income and precarious version of my previous path.

I wanted to embrace an antifragile approach, one in which I would not be as susceptible to stretches without income or to shocks in the broader economy. Freelancing is one of the best ways to make money in a strong economy, but it’s also one of the quickest things to disappear when companies are cutting costs.

With that in mind I set out to focus on two goals:

• Earn money in as many different ways as possible
• Build a portolio of income streams that act as a high probability “floor” of income

This lowered my income in the short term but boosted my confidence and resilience. Knowing how to make money in a number of different ways gave me practical skills and an expanded imagination about what I could do to make money.

While I had a hard time realizing it at the time, my overall income also steadily increased over time with this approach. I now have had at least three sources of income generate over $200 for more than a year and have had at least six income sources for longer than that.

In my first year of self-employment, I had high earnings but it was inconsistent. I had six months with less than $2,000 income and three months with more than $10,000 per month. The second year I shifted away from consulting and had seven months with less than $2k income. The last two years? I’ve made at least $2k every month.

This is much more valuable for the game I’m playing as it dramatically lowers the odds that I will run out of money and gives me more freedom to walk away from any type of work I don’t want to do without feeling like I might go broke

Principle #4: Start Slow & Keep Trying Things

I like trying a bunch of different things for a few reasons. First, I genuinely like creating new things and experimenting. I find the process of turning ideas into my head into things that can be helpful for others to be fun. This is a unique advantage in the world that is emerging and I’m fully aware of this.

Second, it keeps things interesting and also exposes me to a number of different ways of engaging in the world such that I can help others do the same.

Finally, it helps me build a portfolio of “small bets” as Dan Vassallo shared in this conversation with me – any one of which could have unexpected payoffs.

With my newsletter and podcast, both started as ways of sharing what I was up to and without any intentions of turning them into businesses. I didn’t promote them or share them widely because I wanted to be able to quit without people noticing. Tim Ferriss took this strategy with his podcast. He told himself that he would do six-episode and if he was having fun and didn’t hate it, he would keep going.

Conventional wisdom says to grow fast, to take advantage of every launch. However, that increases the odds that you end up doing something you don’t want to do. My approach has been to take a slower path. Five years into this journey, almost everything I’m doing I want to be doing and this has been from a series of incremental “yeses.”

I recently launched a freelance consulting skills course. This course was the result of helping a couple of freelancers that were doing work for me level up my skills. I realized I was having a lot of fun helping them be better and they were finding the information and feedback useful. I had validated both the idea and the feeling. That second part is often ignored. Too many people don’t think about the fact that once they build something that makes money, they have to spend a lot of time doing that thing. I only built the course because I enjoyed helping people become freelancers. Right now it’s still a small bet but when the opportunity emerges to take it somewhere else, I will consider it and if it feels right, I’ll say “yes.”

Principle #5 Make Friends. Be Helpful

This is the most important principle and the one that makes everything else more fun. Yet, it is also the one where I struggle the most.

I’ve always been the person that likes helping other people. In college, I proactively volunteered to help fix people’s computers and help with resumes, job searches, and interviewing. After I graduated I helped people make career changes and write essays for grad school. At my jobs I always took on extra roles to help with training and coaching.

It was fun. But the world tells you that these are silly things. People tell you, don’t get taken advantage of. Adam Grant writes books showing how to avoid being a pathological altruist and to make sure you balance yours gives with your takes. Others ask “why you don’t charge?” You spend your time at work helping your struggling colleague while you watch the skilled politician land another raise.

I was cynical about this for a while. I wanted the working world to change. I wished there were paths for people to progress and get raises while remaining a front-line manager. My first blog was called “better working world project.” Eventually, I realized it was better to create my own game rather than try to swim upstream.

So I experimented. I started a career coaching business on the side. I started writing. I eventually went out on my own and was able to be the kind of freelancer I wanted to be. I had more time to spend helping people for fun without feeling like an idiot (though sometimes it still feels silly to do things for free).

As I continued to do this and built an audience through my writing, people starting sending me thank you notes. I received one note from someone that I had a conversation with a few years earlier. She told me that her conversation with me completely changed her mind on what she wanted to do. Now she was doing something she loved and wanted to thank me for the inspiration. I’d be lying if I said that these moments are fucking awesome.

I did an exercise in which I had to rank my “yearnings” or the things we really crave. My top two were appreciation and freedom. Appreciation was something that surprised me but it felt true. Leaning into that and realizing that it is something I need but can also be fuel is a powerful thing to know.

A couple of years ago I did another exercise in which I had to write down my “purpose.” The person that created it said to keep writing versions until you cry. I thought it was silly but I’m always open to trying new things. It worked and this is what I landed on.

Connect as a real friend to people to give them the courage to create, help simplify the world to enable people to imagine new possibilities, and continuously be more brave in discovering the people and things that matter in my own life

I know that my desire to help others might be a little pathological and after reading Adam Grant’s Give and Take it seems that I’ll probably succeed financially a little less. But I don’t buy his argument that this is something to fix. I have realized that I want to design a life around making this weird quirk a great part of my life. I know that it undermines my ability to be financially successful sometimes and that’s okay.

I’ve just decided that it matters.

The Bottom Line

I don’t know what will be paying the bills next year but the longer I play this game the more confident I become. It could all blow up at any second, but the whole point of the game is to enjoy the journey.

I spent ten years on a path where I was always focused on the next project or the next step.

This is way more fun and I hope I’ve convinced you to find your own game worth playing.

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 Designing Your Own Infinite Game In The Creator Economy appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unfortunately, this is bunk too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Deck Diving Into This Deeper

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

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

She was probably right. I quit my first job at the gas station because I kept missing Patriots games. This was 2001. Looking back, it looks like a great decision — it was the start of the Brady-Belichick dynasty. But I was just being selfish.

However, that word — ambition — stuck with me. I knew deep down how much I was capable of and wanted to prove her wrong.

But I now realize the kind of ambition that drove me was not what my mother was talking about. She was talking about responsibility and ownership.

I was more worried about the kind of ambition that is seen as the path to success in today’s world — climbing the ladder, working at good companies, getting paid well.

In college, I spent a lot of time crafting myself to fit the mold of what I thought these companies wanted. At first, I wasn’t great at it, but I got better and better.

I was able to land jobs at top companies and then use those positions to land even better jobs. I was then accepted to one of the top grad schools in the country.

My resume made it look like I was crushing it, I was winning a game I like to call prestige bingo. But winning prestige bingo has nothing to do with doing what matters to you and deep down, I couldn’t shake that fact.

Losing It All

When I finished grad school I was on top of the world. I had earned two masters degrees from one of the top universities in the world.

Several months later I was waking up every day after 10 hours of sleep completely exhausted — I was muddling through each day. I spend my time trying to make it through work and the rest trying to figure out what was wrong with me. This was not how I envisioned my post business school career!

I eventually was diagnosed with a bad case of Lyme disease and began the road to recovery. As anyone who has dealt with health issues knows — there is a constant sense of uncertainty and I struggled to process it all. A supportive boss at work encouraged me to take a leave of absence just to get my head straight.

Without work I sat home for hours a day, focusing on my recovery. But I also experienced an overwhelming sense of loss. Not only the loss of my health but the loss of my career. I came to realize that my identity was tied up in my job, my career and my resume. Not only that, I realized that as my savings dwindled and my grad school loans still loomed, I was pretty much broke.

Yet, I had started to realize I had been deluding myself about what really matters. I didn’t have much money, but I had family that cared about me and cared more that I showed up rather than where I worked. I had achieved some modicum of career success but really hadn’t done much on my own. I was still scared to put my ideas into the world.

Deep down, I knew that the default formula of success was not going to work for me, but also started to realize that failure as we conceive it in the business world is mostly an illusion. Failure is impossible if you have your health, relationships and freedom to do things that matter.

The default path comes with certain assumptions — These are the jobs you should strive for, the promotions you should get, this is the salary you should expect, you should always try to do more!

The reality is, you can carve your own path. It just takes a bit of work. Over the next few years, I started to test out this belief, not without learning a few lessons along the way.

Crafting a new story

I continued to gain strength over several months and felt a renewed sense of energy. I may have had less energy than everyone else but my brain was moving a mile a minute.

I started to look around at some of my high-performing colleagues and ask are they truly happy? Is everyone just pretending? I asked myself — is there a better way? Is there a way to build a life instead of a career?

I started simple. I made a list of my priorities.

Number one was health. I had known what it felt like to lose my health and didn’t want to compromise on it ever again. My next inclination was to list career but then had the crazy idea that maybe my career should be last. I finished my list: second was relationships, third was fun & creativity and fourth was career. I still have a calendar alert that pops on my phone each morning with these priorities.

I use this simple list to make decisions. For example, I have said no to any type of job or opportunity that is going to force me to compromise my health. No amount of money is worth it. Second, I will never let work interfere with my relationships. I don’t cancel on the important people in my life.

This list makes people uncomfortable.

Shouldn’t you work as hard as possible early in your career? Isn’t that the path to success?

What if we already know a better way to define success?

In the 1970s, Edward Deci and Richard Ryan came up with what they called self-determination theory. They found three elements that helped maximize intrinsic motivation or doing work for its own sake. Those three elements are competence, relatedness, and autonomy.

The theory also helped explain why I felt so lost when I became sick. I was basing my success on a number of extrinsic rewards — the jobs, schools, degrees, prestige, and pay associated with my early career and when I had to leave my job — I had nothing deep down driving me. Deci and Ryan found that these types of rewards often backfire and undermine intrinsic motivation.

While recovering, I spent a lot of time reflecting on what was energizing me. I realized that I spent a lot of time mentoring people to make career changes and helping them make sense of the working world. I love helping people. I also would get so frustrated when people felt “stuck” in companies that treated them poorly. I realized a second big motivator for me was making the working world a better place. I started sharing this with people, saying yes to any opportunities that would enable me to learn more and taking some risks through a couple of side hustles.

Over the next three years, I pursued a number of experiments. Many freelancers tell me it often starts like this — years before they make a formal “leap.” My first side hustle was a career coaching business, after a career coach I met challenged me to put my dream into the world.

Taking this first step was terrifying, but it also taught me a vital lesson about the future of work. By stepping into uncertainty, creating new challenges and taking responsibility, you will naturally push yourself to learn and develop new skills at a rapid pace.

My second experiment was a group coaching event to help people tell their stories and try to find more meaning in their careers. The big lesson for me was realizing how much fun I had creating the content and tools and doing deep research on the topics I was most passionate about.

Over the next couple of years, I kept sharing my passion and looking for opportunities to build my skills. I volunteered to give a 45-minute talk on careers at my alma mater, I gave my first paid speech about careers in consulting and gave another speech at PwC as part of their coaching program for young professionals.

All of these experiments scared the crap out of me, but they were also exhilarating. It was the challenge and rapid skill-building that I wasn’t finding in the corporate world. Pieces of all these experiments have informed what I am currently focused on now — helping people navigate the future of work. Luckily as a freelancer, my life is now one experiment after another.

As I put my energy into the world — reading, writing and taking action (competence) I became more confident. As I connected with others with a shared mission, I felt part of something bigger (relatedness). As I started working on work I was excited by, I came alive (autonomy).

Deci and Ryan were geniuses.

Popping The Delusion

My eyes were on the verge of tears. I felt ashamed. I was sitting in my manager’s office and I knew what was coming. I had reflected on my own performance over the last six months and knew that while my work was great, I wasn’t being my best self at work. I was frustrated and wasn’t even close to being the positive influence on my peers I aspired to be.

Although I had started to tap into something deeper — something more aligned with my intrinsic motivation, that was happening mostly outside the confines of my day-to-day job.

My re-assessment of values and priorities was helping me figure out what mattered, but they left me an increasingly bad fit for the corporate world. When I talked about things that excited me — I found very few others that shared the same interests. When I came up with new ideas or experiments, I was told I was naive or that I needed to learn how things worked.

It wasn’t anyone’s fault…I was still trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.

Around the same time, I had also been trying to position myself for a raise or promotion. I kept getting the responses “you need to be patient” or “you should be happy with what you have.” I was pissed. I was doing great work.

I’m also thankful that I didn’t get that raise or promotion. 

If I had gotten either, I would have been in a worse position. Deeper into a system that did not align with my values of how I wanted to live, create, or work. There was no one to blame. The onus was on me to carve my own path and create the conditions where I could thrive.

If you don’t get out now, you may end up like the frog that is placed in a pot of fresh water on the stove. As the temperature is gradually increased, the frog feels restless and uncomfortable, but not uncomfortable enough to jump out. Without being aware that a change is taking place, he is gradually lulled into unconsciousness.

(William Reilly, from Brain Pickings)

“What does a good life cost?”

There is no right way to leave full-time employment. While some people have ways to earn money before becoming a freelancer, it is mostly a leap of faith. After talking to my employer about my plan, I was able to negotiate a three month transition period.

During this time, I did all of the technical things required to start a company (detailed here). In talking to several people who were full-time freelancers, the most important thing seemed to be commitment. This part was easy for me. I had no intention of returning to the corporate world if I could help it.

…but what about rent?

The most popular question I got when I told people about my plan was “what about rent?” or “aren’t you worried you won’t make money?”

My conclusion: people worry about money a lot.

My second conclusion — A full-time paycheck warps our thinking. It makes us think that money is supposed to come in at regular periods. For most of history, this was not the norm.

There are many good things people get from employers. However, it is often at the cost of doing the work we want to do. We look at someone with a job that they hate and say “good job.” But at what cost?

What I realized was that happiness really has nothing to do with the stuff we have. We buy things because that is what everyone else is doing. We stop buying “two buck chuck” from Trader Joe’s not because we dislike it but because that’s not what you are supposed to do past a certain age. When we make decisions like this for more expensive things like our apartment, clothes, and other possessions, it means we become trapped in a job we hate.

So as I started looking at my finances as a freelancer, I realized I wanted to question everything. I started with the question “what does a good life cost?”

I reflected back to early in my career when I was barely saving a couple of thousand dollars a year. I loved my life! I still loved my life, but the lifestyle creep was real! It was the same happiness for a higher cost.

So I sat down with a spreadsheet challenged myself to answer that question. I was able to lower my cost of living $20,000 a year by making some simple changes and moving cities. All that meant was more time to commit to freelancing, more time to make mistakes and more time to learn.

Stumbling into a future of work mindset

The second chapter of my career started five years before I quit my job and had nothing to do with work. It started with me becoming progressively sick over six months and then a year-long battle to regain my health.

In that time I was forced to question everything I believed and was forced to look at the world, my life, and my career with a different lens.

This was the start of a personal “awakening” that pushed me into high gear to discover a different path. It took four years from the health crisis I faced until I took the leap to become self-employed, but what I learned along the way was priceless.

In the near future, I believe many of us will face this type of transformation — forced into the “future of work” without a path to follow. It is up to you whether you want to start planning for it today or have it take you by surprise. The quicker you face that challenge, the better you will be prepared for the future

I was lucky that my health crisis forced me to discover a mindset shift that has enabled me to better navigate the massive shifts happening in today’s economy. While I am excited, most people I talk to are stressed, anxious and are terrified at the idea of making a change.

We blame companies, bad managers, and even ourselves for our misery. At the macro level, we distract ourselves with stories of how robots will replace our jobs or how politicians limit our ability to succeed. This tells us more about how scared and unprepared we are for the future than the reality that there is more opportunity than ever.

I was never a great fit for the corporate world. The corporate world still defaults to rewarding people who prioritize money, status and power — to the benefit of few and increasing disillusionment of many. Going through the process of identifying my priorities and questioning what success meant helped me make decisions and focus my time on building towards a more sustainable future for my career and life.

Ten years into my career, I had no choice but to take the leap.

The future we are shifting to will be closer to what the firm Vega Factor has uncovered — that when people are at their best work feels like play, it has purpose, and helps you realize your potential. It will likely also lead to an awakening about how we are meant to live, spend our time and support each other.

I am excited about the future. By many lucky coincidences, I ended up working at the types of companies and having the types of experiences that gave me both the confidence and skills to be able to compete in this new economy.

My mission now is to put those skills to use to help others unlock their creativity and curiosity to do things that matter to them.

I aspire to help build the world that Ralph Waldo Emerson talks about when he said:

The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.

So instead of asking someone “what do you do?” let’s ask each other “what are you meant to be doing?”

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 awakening: How I learned to harness my creativity, build the courage to quit my job, and start a new chapter of my life appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

In this episode, Cody Royle and I discuss what sets high-performing NFL organizations like the Patriots and the Giants (and others apart from the rest). Cody is the author of Where Other’s Won’t: Taking People Innovation from the Locker Room into the Boardroom.

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 Super Bowl Minisode – Cody Royle on The Patriots and what business can learn from sports appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

Jennifer isn’t happy. She started her career in strategy consulting, got her MBA from a top business school, went back into consulting for a few years, and is about to be promoted from director to senior manager in a Fortune 500 company. While Jennifer has achieved what she had set from the start as her ultimate career goal, deep down she isn’t satisfied with her work situation, and she isn’t exactly sure why.

Derek works in corporate finance. He took the traditional path, starting at a big bank after landing what he thought was his “dream job.” Since then, he has moved laterally to be an analyst at three different hedge funds. Each time he gets the feeling that something is “off,” he reaches out to a recruiter who finds him a similar job with a nice pay bump. Yet despite making more money than he could have imagined, a feeling of restlessness returns faster every time that he changes positions. His family is proud of him and tells him he is doing the right thing, but deep down he feels doubt and dissatisfaction about his career choices.

The stories of Derek and Jennifer reflect themes that I have heard over and over throughout my career as a strategy consultant, coach and someone generally fascinated with organizations. Some stories are not as subtle, such as the young woman who told me she is verbally assaulted almost weekly at a hedge fund, or the acquaintance who is terrified of taking a pay cut and so endures a dysfunctional workplace culture. One friend got so fed up with office politics in his company that he just said “screw it” and left the corporate world for good.

We are leaving a huge amount of untapped human potential on the table. Gallup found that only 21% of employees strongly agree that “their performance is managed in a way that motivates them to do outstanding work.” Yet, when looking for a new job, the same report found that the number one thing people are prioritizing is a place that enables them to “do what they do best.” It’s no wonder that a majority of the workforce is actively looking or open to a new opportunity.

Why are so many people feeling stuck and miserable where they work, and why are our organizations failing to capture the hearts, minds, and enormous human potential among their ranks? While the answer is complex, I’ve spent the last 10 years of my career trying to unravel this mystery. Here are six reasons why thriving in today’s organizations is so hard:

We’re Defaulting to the Wrong Goals

Peter Drucker’s quote “what gets measured, gets improved” looms over every aspect of the business world. People seek to measure their progress, especially where work is concerned. Yet it’s not always easy to track your own success, whether personal or professional. In our personal lives there are few tangible metrics we can rely on to determine whether one individual is “successful” compared with another. Even if we do identify areas to measure — such as seeing our children attend college, it may take years to see the results of your efforts.

In the corporate world, many of us have a hard time connecting our short-term actions to long-term career success. If we don’t take the time to figure out a definition of success for our career up front, it’s easy to default to goals such as ‘make more money’ or ‘get a promotion’. While few people will admit that their main career objective is to maximize their salary potential, many people are defaulting to exactly that.

More profit, more growth. Default assumptions like these are where we land when there is no deeper purpose or set values in place. In the corporate world, we have defaulted to a paradigm centered on shareholder value — a concept many believe is deeply flawed — that is forcing everyone to keep their attention riveted on profit and power without figuring out what type of system actually increases both engagement and productivity. This is taken for granted: a majority of Millennials (who now make up the largest generation of the workforce) feel that businesses “have no ambition beyond wanting to make money.”

Millennials (and all workers) may be surprised to learn that shareholder value was not always the accepted ideology of the firm. In the 1900’s, there was a debate in the legal world on the purpose of the firm. In one corner was Adolph Berle, who championed the “shareholder primacy” view and in the other was Merrick Dodd who supported a “managerialist” stance. The managerialist view said that firms should serve not only shareholders, but multiple stakeholders including employees and the public good. In multiple court decisions, the courts made it clear that corporations did not have to prioritize shareholder above all other stakeholders.

As the legal debate subsided, Dodd’s managerialist view became the accepted view of how a firm should be run and it stayed that way for over forty years. However, in 1976 economists William Meckling and Mike Jensen helped re-ignite the debate, publishing a paper with the view that ‘maximizing shareholder value’ was the best way to maximize wealth because the managerialist approach made it more confusing to manage, imposed increased costs and lowered the overall wealth created by a firm. By the end of the century, Berle’s “shareholder primacy” had emerged from the dead and in the words of Columbia Law Professor Jeffrey Gordon, “the triumph of the shareholder value criterion was nearly complete.”

While an increased focus on shareholder value could be plausibly credited with increases in efficiency and optimization in firms, it has also increased a focus on short-term results. The pressure on short-term performance is so high that eight out of ten financial officers would be willing to sacrifice long-term value to avoid the headaches of missing short-term targets. Given the fact that executives now see more than 75% of their compensation coming from stock, it is also in their own best interest to act this way.

All things being equal, a move to a corporate model that revolves around maximizing shareholder value increases the attention on financial goals and rewards. The problem is that most employees don’t see the massive economic benefits that the senior leaders are raking in. Research has repeatedly shown that many people are not that motivated by money. In fact, offering money as a reward tends to decrease intrinsic motivation and decrease increased individual performance. As a result, our strong embrace of shareholder value over the last 40 years has likely demotivated and frustrated employees and may have led to worse firm performance.

We’re Mistaking Authority For Performance

Imagine after Tom Brady won his first Super Bowl in 2001, New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft sat Brady down and told him, “Tom, you had a fantastic season. We want to see you keep growing with the organization. We are going to promote you to General Manager.” In sports, we would quickly question Kraft’s sanity. Yet, in the corporate world, we call this talent management.

Google indirectly addressed this issue after trying to figure out how to keep its high performers after the IPO in 2004. They stumbled upon research from Ernest O’Boyle and Herman Aguinis showing that across a wide range of fields, human performance followed the power law: high performers are not only one or two standard deviation above the average — they have dramatically higher levels of impact than average performers. This led to changes in the way google rewarded its people. As Laszlo Bock, Google’s former Chief People Officer wrote in his book Work Rules! “we have many cases where people at more “junior” levels make far more than average performers at more “senior” levels. It’s a natural result of having greater impact, and a compensation system that recognizes that impact.” Google tells their MVPs to stay on the field.

Despite the clear signals from organizations that success and climbing the ladder go hand in hand, most people are unconvinced. McKinsey’s Women in the Workplace 2016 laid out this lack of desire for both men and women. They found that only 40 percent of women and 56 percent of men had any ambition to become a top executive in a company. If we are basing our metrics of success on obtaining powerful positions, why don’t more people actually want that power?

It could be because the climb is exhausting. As companies have become more complex, the range of functional expertise and skills has expanded. What this means for selecting today’s leaders is that they need to meet an almost impossible set of requirements. At the CEO level, the demands are even more extreme, with them having to be highly skilled in investor relations, operations, strategy, community relations, politics and on top of that, being cheerleader in chief for the organization.

We are requiring today’s leaders to be the best player on the team, the coach, general manager and CEO. Instead of attracting people that want to lead and inspire, we end up attracting those that are good at checking the boxes (as well as narcissists and psychopaths). Getting more diversity among senior leaders likely has more to do with changing the way we are doing business than focusing on pushing people up a broken ladder. Without a new way of thinking about what success means in the business world, we are not poised to disrupt this cycle anytime soon.

We Aren’t Providing a Connection to Purpose

People crave purpose. For ages, many people got that sense of purpose from social structures such as religion, family, and local community. In today’s world, though, the only thing we seem to have shared alignment on is consumerism , symbolized by the fact that more than twice as many people have Amazon Prime subscriptions than volunteer – this is a problem.

Lacking a clear route to purpose in our personal lives, we often turn to organizations to provide a sense of meaning and mission. Yet instead of finding purpose at work, employees often find themselves lost in complex organizations with lots of noise and frustration but little in the way of a purpose to which they can feel genuinely connected. This disconnect leads some employees to develop personal mission statements, but this can cause an even greater sense of dissatisfaction when there is dissonance between their mission and that of the company.

Let’s take a look at two companies and their mission statements:

• Mission 1: “The company was founded in 2002 to revolutionize space technology, with the ultimate goal of enabling people to live on other planets.”
• Mission #2: “…to be a leader in the distribution and merchandising of food, pharmacy, health and personal care items, seasonal merchandise, and related products and services.”

Based on research from Edwin Locke, I would predict that you aren’t that excited about committing to Mission #2 (hint: #1 is SpaceX and #2 is Kroger). Locke’s research found a link between challenging goals and higher performance. He also found that one of the foundational elements that determines the level of employee motivation was something called “goal-commitment” — that one’s commitment and their motivation was directly related to how important or significant they felt the goal was. I’m guessing most people at Kroger are not all that personally inspired to be distribution and merchandising leaders, whereas SpaceX is successfully self-selecting new hires based on a bold mission. The types of people they attract and hired are more likely to be aligned with the mission as well as motivated and engaged at work.

We Don’t Understand How Organizations Operate

Everyone that takes a basic business class likely learns about Fredrick Taylor and his influence on management thinking. He looked at organizations as inefficient and filled with waste and bureaucracy. This meant business leaders should spend their time standardizing processes, removing waste and fine-tuning plans for the organization. This point of view often goes hand in hand with a “Theory X” view of the worker as one that is not internally motivated and one that needs to be controlled and told what to do.

Modern business thinkers rarely accept these harsh tenets of Taylorism, but many of the new business paradigms such as “paying for performance”, “six sigma” and “process re-engineering” still operate on the same fundamental assumptions. The goals remain the same — remove waste, increase efficiency and improve planning. But what if an increase in control of the organization increases the chances that the organization will fail? That is the conclusion of researchers who think organizations should be understood as “complex adaptive systems.”

In the 1970’s and 80’s a new field of research began to emerge called Chaos Theory. Scientists were looking at complex dynamic systems and trying to understand how they emerge and evolve. They started in nature, looking at natural phenomena like how organisms grow in nature and how weather evolves, and began applying the lessons to many fields such as finance, biology, economics and eventually, organizations.

One of the fundamental beliefs of chaos theory is that small changes have the potential to have big effects within the system whereas large changes are less likely to shift the underlying order of the system. This is because the organization is seen as a complex system rather than a fixed body. The individual behaviors and reactions of people within a complex system are unpredictable, but they are linked to one another. The feedback from each of those unpredictable actions will give feedback to others in the organizations and influence their subsequent decisions and reactions.

If we assume a certain unpredictability in individual actions, it makes a lot of modern management practices look feeble. In a paper on complexity in organizations, Professor Gary Grobman summarized the implication for organizations and managers quite simply:

“Complexity theory suggests that organizational managers promote bringing their organizations to the “edge of chaos” rather than troubleshooting, to trust workers to self-organize to solve problems, to encourage rather than banish informal communication networks, to “go with the flow” rather than script procedures, to build in some redundancy and slack resources and to induce a healthy level of tension and anxiety in the organization to promote creativity and maximize organizational effectiveness”

Can you imagine a business school class titled “Going With The Flow: How To Relax and Trust Your People”? I didn’t think so. Our leadership pipelines are filled with people getting hired and promoted based on the assumption that they do something. What does this mean for managers and leaders? One could argue that they have an even more important role, but the frame of their role shifts. From a manager and planner who makes top-down decisions to an enabler of experiments, cultivator of healthy competition and supporter of emergent ideas that gain momentum.

Instead of shame and blame, complexity theory says that today’s leaders should accept that fine-tuning and organization is a never-ending and shift their focus to the true power of the organization — the people. We can create plan after plan, but all we are doing is driving our people crazy and as chaos theory researchers say — fighting against the fundamental laws of nature.

We Aren’t Giving People Autonomy

For most employees, working in a large organization means being on the receiving end of a continuous barrage of new initiatives, decisions, and processes. Middle managers experience the result of these changes, but often play little or no role in making these decisions — nor are those decisions likely to connect with their personal values. It’s not a surprise, then, that according to Gallup, front-line managers responsible for carrying out the wishes of senior executives are 16 percent less engaged than those executives.

The cost of this disconnect is a breakdown of trust — the fundamental currency on which someone is willing to do something for someone else. Edelman’s “Trust Barometer” measures the level of trust in different institutions globally. Looking at different levels of the organization, Edelman found that trust in a firm increased the higher you went in the organization, with most senior-level executives showing the highest levels of trust.

Daniel Pink has done extensive research on why we continue to run our organizations blind to decades of research on human motivation. One of the gaps he’s highlighted is autonomy, or the sense of control over one’s own work. Higher rates of autonomy are correlated to higher engagement and productivity. Employers like Costco, Trader Joe’s, Zappos.com and Atlassian are famous for their efforts to give more autonomy to their workers, but for most people in today’s organizations there is a lack of trust in their ability to solve problems on their own. Instead we spend time creating processes and demanding people follow them.

Trust is often hidden, but can have a powerful impact on people. A friend put this into words talking about a perk at his company, “My favorite thing at this company is what the beer kegs represent. It’s not that we have free beer in the kitchen-that’s secondary. It’s the implication that management trusts us to be able to handle ourselves like adults.”

When there is a lack of trust, people can spend weeks spinning their wheels trying to convince leaders to take action. As a leader it can take courage to break this cycle. At Amazon.com, Jeff Bezos talked about how he embraces the principle of “disagree and commit” in his 2016 letter to shareholders,

“I disagree and commit all the time. We recently greenlit a particular Amazon Studios original. I told the team my view: debatable whether it would be interesting enough, complicated to produce, the business terms aren’t that good, and we have lots of other opportunities.” Looking back, he reflected: “given that this team has already brought home 11 Emmys, 6 Golden Globes, and 3 Oscars, I’m just glad they let me in the room at all!”

More companies are putting trust back in the hands of all employees. Basecamp is a company that offers a “no-red-tape expense account.” That’s right, no red tape: “No pre-approval needed, and no limits — just be reasonable.” Organizations like this place value on autonomy over authority and trust over rules. In addition to the savings from the accountants that would need to monitor a more formal policy, companies that put trust in their people are unlocking enormous human potential.

We’re Choosing Comfort Over Growth

The American system of employment is unique in that it ties having a job to the security of many social benefits such as healthcare and life insurance. these pressures increase the anxiety around job security and contribute to the tendency of employees to stay in jobs they hate. In 2016, Aon found that 8% of the workforce disliked their job but had no intention of doing anything about it. And despite conventional wisdom, todays millennials are “job hopping” less than previous generations.

Business author Seth Godin has been fascinated with what keeps people in sub-optimal jobs has challenged people to separate the concepts of safety and comfort. We have an inherent drive towards safety in the sense of not being harmed. But when we default to a comfort zone, we may feel unsafe any time we step outside of it, when really we’re safe, just uncomfortable. Making decisions that keep us in our comfort zone can hurt our career more than taking risks. As Godin says, “the riskiest thing you can do is play it safe.”

Jim Koch would have never started the Boston Beer Company if he wasn’t able to overcome this comfort. He had been working at Boston Consulting Group for six years in what he described as “a great job.” However, he reflected and “I asked myself do I want to do this for the rest of my life? The answer was no. If I don’t want to do it for the rest of my life, I don’t want to do it tomorrow.” He re-framed risk in his mind to help him make the decision. He said “The risk of it was continuing to do something that didn’t make me happy and getting to 65 and looking back and go oh my god, I wasted my life. That is risk, that is danger.”

Americans are quite complacent and comfortable with their current job. A report by the American Psychological Association found that 69 percent of people either agree or strongly agree with the statement “All in all, I am satisfied with my job.” However, if you dig deeper, you find that people still lack is a sense of opportunity. Only 44 percent of employees agreed that the growth and development opportunities at their company were sufficient.

Organizational change researcher and consultant Jacob Morgan challenges people to think about staying in a job you hate like this: if you were given a pill that had the side effects of “weight gain, hair loss, stress, arguments with our spouse…and in some cases death” would you take that pill? Most will say no, yet those are the possible side effects of working in a dysfunctional organization or a joyless job. Our jobs are not giving us what we want, but we keep coming back for more.

Hope for the future

I’ve painted a rather bleak picture of today’s organizations, yet there are signs of hope. The emergence of new business models in the tech sector, the elevation of people operations as a function and increased experimentation with new organizational models are all tailwinds for the companies that want to work in new ways. However, building the organization of the future is not going to be easy. We must change the way we think about our default metrics for success, cultivate leaders who inspire and trust people, root our businesses in big and challenging goals and push people to take more risks and choose uncertainty over comfort in their careers. Organizations don’t have a choice. As noted author on workplace dynamics Dan Pink has said, “talented people need organizations less than organizations need talented people.”

Special thanks to Jake Stone for the help with this piece

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 Crisis at Work: Why Today’s Organizations Are Failing To Unleash Human Potential appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

I was having lunch with a friend yesterday who is a Chief Talent Officer and also a much smarter thinker than I on organizational dynamics & talent.

He introduced me to the framework of task-competency-responsibility alignment. I love it because of its simplicity. In order to get the best out of an organization, you need to maximize the alignment of these three things on as many tasks as possible.

In addition, its a way to think about your own strengths — do you have alignment with what you are working on, your skills and the responsibility for the outcomes of that task?

Thinking about this, it made me identify two common scenarios I have seen in organizations:

1. The highly skilled employee that doesn’t have any skin in the game

This person may be frustrated that senior people don’t give him the opportunity or they may just be careless because they dont see the result of their work

Antidote: Give people more responsibility than you are comfortable with

2. The manager that doesn’t know what they are doing

This person is doing the task and is responsible for the output, but does not really know what they are doing.

Antidote: Shift to areas where this is a strength or give other members who are more competent more responsibility

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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Millennials are the greatest scapegoat available to the business world right now.

• Have problems at work? Blame it on a millennial.
• Have too many people leaving your company? Blame it on millennials.
• Have people not listening to bosses? Blame it on a millennial

Focusing on the traits of a group of people makes for great complaints and headlines, but is a waste of time. Boomers may have a tendency for autocratic leadership, but I’ve met some aspiring autocrats among my peers just as I’ve worked for inspiring and collaborative X’ers and Boomers.

As a Millennial, we are a product of our time. We grew up comfortable with technology, questioning authority and skeptical of any employer telling us they are committed to us. Despite this, we are also incredibly optimistic about the future: 80% of us think we will be better off than our parents.

Despite the fact that millennials likely are not going to be better off than their parents, companies should thinking about harnessing the energy of this group rather than blaming them for not following the same paths as their predecessors.

Technology is transforming our organizations and Millennials are ready to harness that power to shape the future of organizations. While they may not hold most leadership positions, but they are already the largest percentage of the working world as of 2015.

The future of companies depends on keeping this vital portion of the workforce engaged, but it is much more than that. I would urge instead that we take what we know about Millennials and use it as an excuse to create a more vibrant workforce that is more engaging (and profitable) for all generations.

So what is the answer?

Free Food!

(Just kidding)

Everyone looks at google and thinks that free food and bouncy balls are the key to happy workers and an engaged workforce. Anyone who has worked there or read about their culture (Work Rules! or How Google Works are great) understand that everything they do starts with a deep respect for people and not sashimi and chocolate.

Fortunately Millennials are more similar to other generations than different. The things they want will benefit everyone: It all comes down to opportunity, respect and voice.

I offer three examples of what this could look like in the modern organization. I don’t promise to have perfect answers, but I promise to continue to put my ideas out there.

Hopefully you can help me improve on them…

OPPORTUNITY: Give people places to play & experiment

It’s no secret that companies are struggling with growth. McKinsey recently did a study and found that 90% of the companies that exceeded GPD growth rates happened to bein only four sectors: finance, high tech, healthcare and retail.

Companies are desperate for growth.

Luckily, companies need look no further than to their own people. Many people have the desire to start their own business — including 66% of Millennials. The fact is, many will not take the leap to starting their own company — but companies can harness that energy.

66% of Millennials ( and 39% of all employees ) have a desire to create their own business

Companies should think about two things:

First, creating environments where people from all levels of the organization can engage on new and powerful business ideas. It doesn’t have to be a full-blow startup accelerator in your company (though companies like GE and MasterCard are doing exactly this). Just involving a junior team member in a new strategy, new product or new service is a step in the right direction.

Second, soliciting ideas more actively throughout the organization. Managers and leaders at all levels need to ask “what do you think?” and have a safe space where people can offer their ideas — even if they are bad. The quickest way to kill motivation is to consistently shut down someones ideas or perspective. Toyota has built a culture around unlocking creative ideas from front line workers. It has a term, genchi genbutsu, meaning leaders ‘go and see.’ They go to the front line to understand problems, but also involve the front line workers in solving those problems and engaging them in continuous improvement. This is a model companies can borrow to unlock ideas, growth and opportunity in their companies.

RESPECT: Find good people and trust them

Find good people and trust them. That’s Warren Buffett’s philosophy. Of his 50+ portfolio companies he manages as part of Berkshire Hathaway, he only requires a monthly submission of financial results. He trusts them to take care of everything else. Google has a similar value. Laszlo Bock (their Chief People Officer) said the key to google’s success has been to “hire amazing people…” and “…give them more freedom than you’re comfortable with…”

This type of trust is still rare for obvious reasons — but it can be applied in many places, especially work-life balance.

I’ve been lucky to work for some great companies and great leaders that cared much more about the work I did rather than where or how I got it done. They supplied the tools (easy remote access, laptops etc…) and let us make the decisions. This sense of freedom was powerful and made me feel incredibly motivated and valued. The Gen X moms and dads I worked with seemed to deeply appreciate it as well.

This type of thing cannot be implemented as a policy (though a policy helps) — it is born out of culture, one that values performance over face-time and control. This type of culture can be built in two ways. First, you have to share stories and celebrate people who take advantage of the opportunities — not pretend they are an exception. Second, leaders and managers have to role model the change. No one will ever work remotely if they see their manager in the office 24/7.

Managers can also go a step further and ask their team questions like:

What is one thing we can do to make your work-life less stressful?

Or…

What is a small thing we can do that would have a big impact on your performance and success here?

Millennials are the least compensated, most indebted and have the least vacation of any employees in your company. Often the responses you will get will be simple — working remotely on a Friday to start a summer weekend, being able to take an early call from home in the morning or maybe just working from home so you can make some healthy meals for yourself. Who knows, but why not ask?

VOICE: Loosen up the top-down control of information and power

Everyone in your organization is thinking things that they do not feel safe sharing. This is true at google as much as it is anywhere else.

The way to overcome this is to re-think how information flows in your organization. Instead of top-down, you have to create the opportunity for information to flow bottom-up and peer to peer.

I’ve worked at companies where the CEO or office leader would have open Q&A and also allow anonymous questions in front of the entire office. This is incredibly powerful as it gives everyone in the organization the sense that they have a voice. Most people never submit a question, they just like knowing they can.

Another way to give people a voice is to encourage teaching. I’m sure there is a Millennial that could teach some of your executives how to use technology to make their lives and work more efficient. I’m also sure there is a senior executive that could teach your Millennials about financial planning or just sharing learnings from their career. These types of interactions can break down barriers and give people a voice.

Another area is feedback. This is a sensitive topic. When I first started at McKinsey early in my career I was blown away by how open the feedback culture was. Sure, some of the feedback may have been tough to stomach, but what made it genuine was there was a two way street for sharing feedback with more senior people. In fact, I had an experience in my first week where a senior consultant asked me for feedback on what he could improve on. The experience made me realize that everyone wanted to improve and having the culture to support that was powerful.

Giving people a voice is important. Otherwise, Millennials are likely to blindly follow your orders. Surprisingly, they are more likely to follow managers’ orders than their contemporaries:

41% of Millennials “agree” or “strongly agree” that employees should do what their manager tells them vs. 30% of Boomers and Xers (link)

This is not a good dynamic. Today’s business world is changing faster than ever and it requires dynamic teams who can constantly question the status quo and continually improve. Giving people a voice will help you move the needle.

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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I have studied organizations, people and motivation and am fascinated by the changes that have unfolded in my relatively short career. I’ll defer to Neils Bohr to qualify this entire piece:

Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future — Neils Bohr

Since I can’t predict the future, I promise this will contain ideas that are not fully baked. I hope you can help me improve them.

Accelerated Transformation

Most people agree that that change is happening and that the pace of change is accelerating. However, if you look around, our modern organizations are not much different than they were 20 years ago. When I talk to people and HR leaders about their organizations they share with me the feeling that something is not right and that organizations need to evolve.

I’ll get to my vision of that future, but first wanted to call out three trends that I believe are driving this uncertainty. These are trends that are equal parts powerful and also hard to notice on a day-to-day basis:

1. Increased competitiveness — In the 1920’s, the average lifespan of a company on the S&P 500 was 67 years. Now? 1 company is dropping off the S&P 500 every two weeks!
2. Open Talent Networks: Individuals are increasingly becoming aware of their own market value thanks to resources like Glassdoor and LinkedIn. This information is not perfect, but it’s getting better. As more talented people realize they are worth more, they will seek to maximize their value either by switching to a new job, or as technology continues to facilitate a freelance path — go it on their own.
3. Dis-aggregation — Paul Graham had an excellent essay on what he called “the refragmentation” (see here). A key insight was that organizations are setup to minimize transaction costs (coase theory). Technology has dramatically reduced the cost of doing business across many industries. While still substantial, scale advantages will continue to diminish.

But Wait!

Your counter argument is that we have some of the biggest companies ever, right? Yes, this is true in a monetary sense. But in terms of number of employees — not even close. in 1979, GM had 853,000 employees. Now? 215,000. The historical GM is now a complex supply chain consisting of hundreds of companies across the globe.

Your second counter point may be the observation that the biggest firms seem to be getting bigger or merging with other big companies. On this, you are also correct. Between 1997 and 2012 the share of the top four firms’ revenues has risen from 26% to 32% of total industry revenues.

The employment trends also tell the same story:

So where is all this freelancing and disruption that everyone in Silicon Valley promised us?

A lot of it has yet to be realized, but we are seeing evidence of it across industry (with the tech sector leading the way).

I believe that “aggregation” and “dis-aggregation” can both exist within the same industry. In fact, it may signal a more stable strategy for our economy. Nassim Taleb offered the image of a “barbell” in his book Antifragile to talk about a two-sided investment strategy. I think this image of a barbell also offers a compelling vision for firm and industry dynamics more broadly:

I initially used the image of the barbell to describe a dual attitude of playing it safe in some areas…and taking a lot of small risks in others…hence achieving antifragility. That is extreme risk aversion on one side and extreme risk loving on the other, rather than just the “medium” or the beastly “moderate” risk attitude that in fact is a sucker game (because medium risks can be subjected to huge measurement errors). But the barbell also results, because of its construction, in the reduction of downside risk — the elimination of the risk of ruin.

In the book, he discusses how systems become more stable through a healthy amount of fragility — meaning that continual shocks (companies going out of business in this case) make the overall system stronger.

So in a hypothetical industry, there will be a small number of firms that have disproportionate power, but also a very large number of small firms that will be more volatile. These small firms will be ready to pounce or merge when the larger firms stumble.

This could also be a winning strategy at a firm level. Google moved in this direction with its newly re-organized Alphabet. It has a central large operation, but a separate arm to incubate its early stage investments such as Nest, Fiber and Calico. Many firms are taking the route often espoused by Clayton Christensen — of setting up completely separate business units that may or may not cannibalize its central operations — as a path for long term survival.

Setting up this barbell approach internally will not be enough for success for big firms to stay on top.

So what will?

Four Factors of Thriving 2025 Firms

From the successful companies I have observed, studied, or worked at, I believe there are four elements that will drive successful firms in 2025. These firms will be a roadmap for large firms to maintain power and for smaller firms to take to disrupt the big players:

1. Process Excellence — According to BCG, firms are becoming 6.7% more “complicated” every year — a measure of the number of layers, procedures and decisions within an organization. Technology has no mercy for the organizations that continue to complicate. Sub-par processes cannot hide (think cab companies) and firms will decreasingly find protection from existing structures and regulation. Healthcare is a perfect example. A hospital resisting a new process to save lives could still succeed in the 90’s but will have a tough time in 2025. With increased transparency of outcomes, entrepreneurial physicians will spot an opportunity to take a different approach and move to a more innovative practice or start their own. Across all industries, firms will have a tough time retaining high-performers if they are not continually evolving on processes and operational excellence.
2. Purpose-Driven Cultures — Apple is the world’s most valuable company. It’s no surprise that they are synonymous with “think different” and “making the world’s best products.” Some of the smartest people I know now work for Apple — I don’t think that’s a coincidence. John Kotter did a famous study that found purpose-driven companies returned 10 times more than non purpose driven companies over a period of 10 years. Millennials are driving a lot of this change — they make up more than half of the workforce already. Deloitte found that 87% of Millennials believe that “the success of a business should be measured in terms of more than just its financial performance.” In 2025, organizations will need to answer the question: Why are we here?
3. Adaptive Technology: Legacy IT systems don’t cut it anymore — they are too costly to maintain and don’t align with a fast moving processes. In 2025, technology will have to both simplify processes (save time) and enable continuous improvement. Having the wrong system will be costly. Upstart competitors will do the same thing in half the time and half the cost and put you out of business (Compass is a good example of this in the real estate industry). Companies will have to rely on custom and proprietary solutions that can evolve fast and help generate revenue itself. This is Amazon.com’s strategy. It systems are the backbone and driver of continuous improvement on its its e-commerce strategy, while also being a generator of revenue (its Web Services business generated $7.8 billion in 2015!)
4. Agile Teams: In writing about his experiences with transforming the modern military organizations, General Stanley McChrystal’s wrote a book and introduced the concept of “Team of Teams” (here is a great podcast on it). During the Iraq war, the traditional command and control organization did not cut it. This shift was necessary to deal with the information-rich environment in which they operated. They needed to have flexible and autonomous teams that could make decisions quickly but be able to extract the information from other teams and the central office. As the working world continues to become more complex, being able to deploy the right team in the right situation will become more important than ever. It is also imperative not only to attract the best people, but to have the best people working on transformative new ventures that will drive growth. For example, MasterCard tapped into the power of FinTech startups by launching an internal startup accelerator. Google is going one step further and letting employees craft their own roles (in my mind, this helps overcome some of the obstacles of top-down org design). Not being limited by traditional roles and hierarchy and creating more agile teams will be an imperative for high-performance teams in 2025.

These four factors are not the only factors that will determine success in 2025, but a failure to succeed on any one of these four will put you at risk for being disrupted well before 2025.

The best way to predict the future is to create it 

Peter Drucker

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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