Key Themes

Curiosity and Early Interests:

• Bilal’s early interests revolved around technology, playing with computers, and software like Dreamweaver, Photoshop, and Macromedia Flash.
• He followed his curiosities incrementally, leading him from making websites to creating e-commerce businesses.

Perspective on Money:

• Bilal discusses the balance between avoiding unnecessary lifestyle expenses and ensuring comfort.
• He emphasizes the importance of financial security, such as being able to pay rent and provide for basic needs.

Work and Self-Employment:

• Bilal shares his experiences working at Google and the diverse group of people he met there.
• He talks about the challenges of self-employment and the importance of defining what “enough” means in terms of income and success.

Travel and Exploration:

• Bilal mentions the concept of “walk until the day becomes interesting” from Ralph Potts’ book “Vagabonding.”
• He differentiates between the mindset of traveling versus vacationing.

Influences and Role Models:

• Bilal cites Richard Branson and Tim Ferriss as significant influences on his journey.
• Branson’s sense of adventure and Ferriss’s approach to life and business have inspired Bilal.

Current Inspirations:

• Bilal’s girlfriend’s decision to take a sabbatical and prioritize other aspects of life has been a recent source of inspiration for him.

Closing Thoughts:

• Bilal emphasizes the importance of finding one’s path and the joy of seeing others succeed on their unique journeys.

Quotes

Value of Money:

People who say money doesn’t make you happy at all or it doesn’t matter like don’t know what it’s like to be poor. When you don’t have money, it makes a big difference when you can pay your rent on time, your mortgage on time, and you can buy your kids shoes to wear at school so they don’t get bullied.

Scarcity Mindset

Growing up for us, I think money was quite important because we grew up kind of like middle to working class… every month we were in an overdraft. I remember doing like a spreadsheet looking at spreadsheet with my dad every month… it kind of created the scarcity mindset.

Underdog Script:

The other one I’d say that was really prominent was this kind of Underdog script of we are immigrants, we are brown people in the UK… you’re not like everyone else, you need to find your own path, prove to everyone how good you are and one day you’ll be able to show everyone.”

Immigrant Safety Script:

The last one is just a very typical immigrant story script which is you know the safety. That’s all my parents ever wanted and righty so… they wanted us to do the typical… get a safe job. In the Pakistani Indian Community, a lot of Asian people will say be a doctor, a lawyer, engineer.

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 Living Intentionally After “Enough” – Bilal Zaidi on leaving Google, emigrating to the US, the intensity of New York, writing poetry and spoken word, and travel vs. vacations (Pathless Path Podcast) appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

What We Talked About

1. Life After Professional Sports: Ben shared the behind-the-scenes of his transition from being a professional rugby player to life after sports. He talks about the challenges he faced, such as income anxiety, ending a long-term relationship, and feeling anxious about the future. He also talks about mourning of his past identity.
2. Career Change and Self-Discovery: Ben talks about the positive side of being forced to reinvent himself. He mentions working in various roles, such as a bike business, freelance writing, and project management.
3. Writing and Self-Publishing: Ben shares his journey of becoming a writer, including his decision to self-publish. He started by writing articles and blogging, which eventually led him to write a book about his experiences. He discusses his decision to self-publish and how it allowed him to maintain control over his work.
4. Personal Learning Journey: Ben talks about learning to enjoy his own company, challenging himself in new ways, and developing new interests like surfing and long-distance running.
5. Embracing Social Media and Online Sharing: Ben shared how he started sharing on TikTok and Instagram which not only helped him connect with a wider audience but also opened up new opportunities. This helped his book to become a bestseller in the rugby category on Amazon.

Quotes

On Transitioning from Professional Sports (26:00)

I was mourning the loss of my identity as a rugby player… It was a difficult time. I was anxious about the future, I had income anxiety, I’d just come out of a long-term relationship. I was underestimating how difficult that transition was going to be.

On Career Exploration (28:01)

I worked in a bike business, I did some freelance writing, I did some project management… I was just trying to find out what I liked. I was trying to find out what I was good at. I was trying to find out what I could make a living from.

On Networking and Community (33:03)

I was networking, I was joining online communities… I was meeting interesting people. I was trying to find out what was out there. I was trying to find out what I could do. I was trying to find out what I enjoyed.

On Writing and Self-Publishing (37:00)

I wrote a book about my experiences… I decided to self-publish it… It became a bestseller in the rugby category on Amazon. I was really proud of that. I was really proud of the fact that I’d done it myself.

On Personal Growth and Learning (39:01)

I learned to enjoy my own company… I challenged myself in new ways… I developed new interests. I learned to surf, I started running long distances. I was open to learning. I was open to personal development.

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 From Rugby to Writer & Book Influencer: How Ben Mercer Reinvented Himself appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

Ali Abdaal is a YouTuber and a former doctor. But in this conversation, he was still grappling with whether or not he should take the lead to be a full-time entrepreneur. He shared how he grappled with his identity, the challenges of veering off the course of traditional metrics of success, enjoying the journey, and the challenges he faced in his year away from medicine. We explored questions like:

• What would his mom think if he left medicine?
• Why is he so attached to prestige metrics?
• What does it feel like to know you want medicine to be a “side” thing?
• Now that money isn’t the biggest issue, how does he decide what to do?

Podcast Links: Choose Your Player

What We Talked About

1. Transition from Medicine to YouTube: He talks about his initial apprehensions and the strange feeling of introducing himself as a YouTuber along with being a doctor. He also mentions his experiments and secret projects that he undertook before making the transition.
2. Thoughts on Leaving Medicine: He discusses the potential impact of his decision on his family and how it might affect their perception of him. “Do I really want to become that guy who leaves medicine where there’s a shortage of doctors during a global pandemic to become an influencer making videos on the internet?” was a question he thought about when thinking of making the career transition.
3. Future Plans: Ali shares his future plans of possibly working part-time as a doctor while also creating content online. He talks about wanting a portfolio career that isn’t solely focused on being a full-time creator.
4. Impact of Prestige: Ali acknowledges the societal prestige associated with being a doctor and how it initially influenced his career path. However, he later realized that personal satisfaction and impact were more important to him.
5. Productivity and Creativity: Ali and Paul discuss the relationship between productivity and creativity in the context of online content creation. Ali shares his approach to productivity, which is more about personal output rather than the rewards or recognition associated with it.

Quotes From The Episode

What would you do if money didn’t matter and you couldn’t share it?

In terms of figuring out what the hell to do with my life what do I want written on my gravestone? And whenever I think of that, I always land at some combination of a good father, a husband, and an inspirational teacher. And if I think back, a lot of the most meaningful moments in my life have been when I was teaching. And so I’d want to find a way of doing that. And so when you asked that question about if you didn’t have to worry about money, and you couldn’t tell anyone my immediate thought went to, I would, I would be a writer, but I would publish under a pseudonym or anonymously or something. So I can still have that thing of being a teacher, an anonymous Twitter account or an anonymous blog, an anonymous author without it being tied to me because that would feel really, really satisfying.

Ali on his identity as a junior doctor (01:30)

In my head, the image is I’m a junior doctor. I don’t know anything. I’ve only been doing it for two years. Please don’t come to me with medical questions because I’m a junior doctor.

Ali’s playful description of his profession (02:00)

If someone asks me what do you do, I kind of make it into a joke but, ‘Oh, I just make videos on the internet’ rather than ‘I’m a YouTuber’.

Ali’s question to fellow doctors (04:01)

Anytime I become friends with a doctor, I like to ask the question that if you won the lottery, would you still do medicine for fun?

Ali’s perspective on balancing medicine and tech (04:50)

I’ll do a doctor, I’ll be a doctor because it’ll be fun, and then I’ll keep the tech stuff going on the side because then maybe I can do some kind of medical startup or whatever.

Ali’s earliest experiment (10:00)

The earliest experiment was when I was 11 years old… we wanted to create this thing called the UIA, the United Intelligence Agency… the first project for the UIA was the UIA Academy, which was going to be an online forum.

Ali on envisioning the future 48:31:

I can’t have a hard time envisioning the future because I’m very happy with how things are today.

Ali on the ideal day 49:41:

I woke up, I had a Zoom call with someone, recorded a podcast, did some writing, hung out with my wife, cooked a meal, and watched the sunset together.

Ali on aspirations 51:01:

The kind of next level for me is to write this really good book, hit the New York Times bestseller list, become the next sort of Tim Ferriss-esque type figure because that seems cool and it’d be fun.

Ali on the importance of money 54:01:

Money doesn’t really solve any of your problems. It solves your money problems.

Ali on balancing work and passion 56:03:

That’s kind of where I’d like to be, where probably not a full-time job but like a part-time traditional job, going into work, maybe working as a doctor two days a week, and then doing the other stuff.

More From Ali

• My review of his course, Part-Time YouTuber Academy
• His Website, Ali Abdaal
• His Podcast, Deep Dive, and our convo on his podcast

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 Ali Abdaal on Identity, Prestige, Quitting Medicine | The Pathless Path Podcast appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

Podcast Links: Choose Your Player

What We Talked About

1. Passion Crisis: Kyla defines a “passion crisis” as a situation where many young people don’t know what they truly care about. She decided to leave her job and shared the fear and vulnerability that came with it. She also talks about the criticism she faced and how she overcame self-doubt. For her, betting on oneself and the value of creative freedom is essential.
2. Founding “Bread”: She talked about the evolution of her career path and the impact of her work on the economy. She shares how she creates short, informative videos and structures them like poems. Her financial education company, “Bread,” aims to gamify learning about finance.
3. TikTok as Poetry: Kyla thinks it is important to people where they are in terms of learning styles and platforms. She emphasized the effectiveness of short-form video platforms like TikTok. She also talks about the stress and challenges she’s faced on her journey and seeks advice on stress management and self-confidence.

Kyla is a very successful TikTok creator (image source)

She alone made me rethink my perspective on short-form vertical video. It’s not that the format is bad, it’s that most people are unimaginative about its potential, especially in covering “serious” topics like finance.

If you’ve ever spent more than an hour learning about finance you really how much of the “news” coverage is absolute bullshit. “Stocks rise on oil news”, or “Stocks drop on President’s talk” really mean “these two things happened today and we needed to write something but ultimately, we don’t care about going deeper.”

Kyla goes deeper and in her explorations, she coined the term “vibecession” to describe the phenomenon of the last year of a tight labor market and strong household financial conditions with the fact that people actually felt miserable about it all.

I also just love the passion she has for what she’s doing.

She cares.

Which is rare in today’s world. So many people all the way up to people like SBF ultimately don’t give a shit about what they do. The joy of learning, growing, or getting better has taken a backseat to money concerns.

I almost headed down that path too and I understand how alluring it is.

But this sucks and she writes about why this sucks in a recent issue:

Our passion crisis is broadly a function of tapping into the uncomfortable parts of ourselves – in order to find out what you love, you have to be vulnerable. You have to care – and caring itself is an act of rebellion in a world that seems to constantly want to put you down.

And it’s really beautiful to care – but man, it can be difficult. The act of being engaged in the world outside, of having art that is really your soul on a canvas, or perhaps in a song (or video) or maybe it’s a car that you’ve been fixing up, or maybe it’s that little plant on the windowsill – caring, at any level, is so deep, so raw, it was actually the original money

We talk about this all and also talk about how she thinks of designing her Reels and TikToks as poems, which she apparently has never revealed before.

Quotes From The Episode

1. “Regret Minimization” 14:31: “I should take a leap. I can take a leap. Why wouldn’t I try this out? And it was a lot of regret minimization. So I was like, will I regret not doing this? And the answer was always yes. And so for me, I do think I have like more risk tolerance…I’m just used to taking risks. But I also think for me, it was like, I have to see I have if I live this life without ever knowing, like what I could have done. I’d be very sad “
2. “Art About Finance” 29:02: “I never thought I would like video editing. But it’s actually really fun, and I also think not enough people make art about finance… I think like just creating pieces like almost satire comedy and other things like that around finance because that is also how people learn.”
3. “Videos as Poems” 56:01: “I write them as poems. They’re structured as poems. They don’t sound like poetry but in terms of the beats and how it processes, they are.”
4. Money and Morality” 1:00:00: “Money is not a moral compass. People get swayed by money in ways that are immoral.

Kyla’s Website: Educator, Creator, Investor
Follow Kyla: @kylascan on Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok
Path Role Model: Cody Ko

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 Kyla Scanlon on the Passion Crisis, Vibecession, and Quitting Her Job To Bet On Herself | The Pathless Path Podcast appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

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

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

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

Podcasts Links: Choose Your Player

Conversation Topics:

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

Quotes:

Freedom In Childhood:

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

On Graduating High Schol Early

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

The Good Parts of Medicine

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

On Ordinary Excellence

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

👉 Follow Aida on Twitter and Read Her Writing

Links Mentioned:

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

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

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

Luke is now a Professor at the Ciocca Center for Principled Entrepreneurship and has written a book — “WANTING: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life.” The book is one of the best ones I’ve read in the past couple of years, and we talk about some of the ideas in the book and how they intersect with Luke and my life.

Podcast Links: Choose Your Player

What We Talked About

1. Memetic Desire: How memetic desire often leads individuals to conform to societal expectations and norms. He shares his personal experiences of recognizing and breaking free from these influences.
2. Thick Desires and Thin Desires: The concept of “thick desires” and “thin desires”. Thick desires are deeply personal, often unique to the individual, and can sustain them long-term. Thin desires, on the other hand, are highly memetic, contagious, and often shallow.
3. Leaning into Thick Desires: The importance of leaning into thick desires and how they can lead to a deeper engagement in life. He shares his experiences of following his curiosity and passion, which has led him to a more fulfilling and balanced lifestyle.
4. Transcending Current Experiences: The importance of stepping outside one’s comfort zone and seeking new experiences and perspectives. He emphasizes the value of physical experiences and real-world relationships in this process.
5. Role Models and Mentors: The impact of various role models and mentors in his life, emphasizing the importance of finding “hidden models” – simple, everyday people who can offer profound insights and inspiration.
6. Upcoming Arrival of His Child: His anticipation of becoming a father and how this change influences his perspective on work, life, and personal desires.

On Thick vs. Thin Desires

I love Luke’s idea of thick and thin desires from his book:

Thick desires are like diamonds that have been formed deep beneath the surface, nearer to the core of the earth. Thick desires are protected from the volatility of changing circumstances in our life. Thin desires, on the other hand, are highly memetic, contagious, and often shallow

He reflected on his own journey connecting with his thick desires:

“I think it was around that time when I began reading and studying philosophy in that coffee shop that I started unearthing my thick desires. It was an excavation process that didn’t happen all at once, but rather took years. During this time, I was still running my company, but I eventually stepped away completely, turning over control and allowing myself to fully disengage. I was fortunate enough to be able to travel and continue my journey of re-education.

This process was very gradual and led me down a spiritual path, which eventually brought me to Italy. At one point, I even considered a radical life choice to form a religious life. To make the move to Italy, I had to go through a complete self-emptying. I had to make significant changes in my life, including breaking up with a long-term girlfriend. In hindsight, it was the best decision I ever made. I don’t recommend everyone make such drastic changes, but at that moment, I felt a great peace in making those decisions.

However, life isn’t a linear process. It’s not as if my desires just kept getting thicker and the thin ones kept falling away. We always have two wolves inside of us, and there have been times, even recently, where I felt thin desires taking over. But there are always things that bring us back and remind us of what’s important.

Memory plays a crucial role in human life. One of my concerns is that we’re losing our memories, and I believe technology plays a significant role in this. It’s essential to remember the times in our life when our thick desires were activated, when we felt peace. It’s surprising how many people forget the good things in their life. We remember the trauma and the bad things, but sometimes we forget the times when we felt at peace. The act of remembering has been really important to me. There have been things in my life that made me forget, but there are always moments that bring us back.”

The “Three City Problem” – How Athens, Jerusalem & Silicon Valley Can Co-Exist

The “Three City Problem” is a concept that Luke Burgis proposes to make sense of the challenge of living in today’s world. He argues that we all need to balance the pulls of three metaphorical cities: Athens, Jerusalem, and Silicon Valley, each representing a different aspect of society.

• Athens represents reason and the intellectual pursuit of knowledge.
• Jerusalem symbolizes faith, spirituality, and the aspects of life that can’t be explained by reason alone.
• Silicon Valley stands for technology and utility, focusing on what’s practical, profitable, and progressive.

Burgis expresses concern that these three cities often exist in silos, with little interaction or understanding between them. He believes that this lack of integration is a significant issue in our time, especially in debates about AI and technology, which often occur without the involvement of “Jerusalem” (spirituality and faith).

He emphasizes the need for bridges between these cities, for people to transcend their usual environments and engage with different perspectives. He sees value in bringing together representatives from all three cities to foster innovation and meaningful conversations.

Burgis is actively working on this integration, hosting events that bring together people from these three cities to engage in dialogue. He believes that the most interesting and transformative things happen when all three cities intersect.

Quotes From The Episode

1. Work-Life Balance 54:00: “The real danger of working for yourself is that there is no off switch. You can just convince yourself that if you’re not working then you’re being lazy.”
2. Transcending Bubbles 56:00: “Part of it is physical. If we’re very online and we try to solve this problem in a digital sense only, it’s extremely difficult. Maybe even impossible to solve because everything is too abstract.”
3. Tech Narratives 59:00: “Technology sometimes tries to be all of those things at once right where we abdicate ourselves to technology. Crypto is our God, blockchain is our God, AI is our God.”
4. Three City Problem 61:01: “I feel most whole when I’m sort of finding a way to live at the intersection with (Athens, Jerusalem, and Silicon Valley). This is fundamentally one of the big problems of our time.”
5. University Experience 64:01: “There is something privileged about being in a place where you can have intellectual discourse. There is a lot of amazing information sharing that happens, there is organizational wisdom.”

Links:

• Personal website
• Twitter: @lukeburgis
• Luke’s book: Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life
• Luke’s Newsletter

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 Luke Burgis on Mimetic Desire, The Three City Problem & Academia | The Pathless Path Podcast appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

Podcast Links: Choose Your Player

What We Talked About

1. Starting a Podcast: The beginning of his podcast, “Selling the Couch”, and how it transformed from a side project to an important part of his career. He talks about the difficulties he faced, the support he received from his wife, and how he balanced his work as a therapist with his passion for podcasting.
2. Birth of His Daughter: The birth of his daughter was a big moment in Melvin’s life. It made him reevaluate his life and his relationship with work and money. He talks about how being a father changes his perspective and his decision to separate his identity from his work.
3. Detaching Identity from Work: Melvin shares his thoughts on the risks of tying one’s self-worth to their accomplishments. He discusses the importance of separating one’s identity from their work and focusing more on the process rather than the end result.
4. Work-Life Balance: Melvin talks about how he maintains a balance between work and personal life. He shares his daily routine, which includes focused work sessions, breaks for physical activity, and time for learning. He highlights the significance of spending quality time with family and pursuing personal interests.
5. Role Models: Melvin looks up to Pat Flynn and Rachel Rogers as his role models. He admires how they practice what they preach, prioritize their families, and achieve success as entrepreneurs.

Melvin’s 4-Day, 25-30 Hour Week

Melvin likes spending a lot of time with his family and has built his workweek around that.

He works from Monday to Thursday, and each day has its own theme. On Tuesdays, he’s all about podcasting and creating content. Mondays and Wednesdays are for deep work, usually stuff related to his Mastermind group. Thursdays are set aside for Mastermind days.

His workday usually kicks off at 9 AM and wraps up at 5 PM. He takes a break from 1 PM to 1:45 PM to go for a hike. After the hike, he grabs a quick shower and then it’s nap time for 25 minutes. The last two hours of his workday, from 3 PM to 5 PM, are his learning time. He uses this time to learn different things that interest him.

All in all, Melvin works about 25 to 30 hours a week over four days. This approach helps him keep a balance between his work, personal growth, and family time.

Quotes

1. Identity and Achievement 02:00: “I think one thing I took away is like putting our entire identity on achievement right and letting the ups and downs of our self-worth get wrapped up in that I think it’s such a dangerous game to play.”
2. Career Evolution 14:00: “I know 2012 Mel would have been like okay I was going to be like a training director at the University Counseling Center or something.”
3. Determination and Change 20:01: “I woke up at 3:30 A.M to record podcast episodes and I would take a shower at seven and then get on a 7:50 or 8 train to go to Center City see clients for an entire day, come back by 6 and repeat it.”
4. Podcast Growth 33:03: “I know people differ on this but like after some level the download numbers are a little bit of a vanity metric because ultimately it’s about making sure the right people are listening to your podcast versus you know like all people.”
5. Detaching Identity from Work 58:00: “I think I’ve started over time I think I started to detach myself from the outcome but more process and getting better at the craft…and I think I much more enjoy that.”

Links:

• Podcast: Selling The Couch
• Personal website
• Twitter: @mvarghese5
• Linkedin

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 Melvin Varghese: The Creator Therapist | The Pathless Path Podcast appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

Podcast Links: Choose Your Player

Conversation Topics:

1. Transition into Medicine: Dawn talks about her initial excitement when she started medical school, her love for learning new things, and how she thrived in a challenging environment. However, she also discusses the burnout prevalent in the medical field.
2. Brain Tumor: Dawn shares her health crisis, where she was diagnosed with a brain tumor. This event served as a wake-up call and led her to reevaluate her life and career.
3. Leaning Out: Dawn discusses her decision to “lean out” of her career in medicine. She talks about the importance of work-life balance and how she and her husband intentionally designed their lives to prioritize their personal needs and desires over traditional career expectations.
4. Financial Independence: Dawn and her husband followed the financial independence movement, which allowed them to reassess their career paths. They realized they were financially independent around the time their baby was born, which opened up new possibilities for their careers.
5. Homeschooling: Dawn shares her experience with homeschooling her daughter, which she views as an unconventional path that aligns with her philosophy of leaning out.
6. Sharing Her Story: Dawn emphasizes the importance of sharing her story to inspire others to consider alternative paths and to challenge societal expectations around work and adulthood.

Quotes

• Self-Reflection: 00:00 – “I am more than just my roles and it allowed me to think back to like what do I really want out of my life.”
• Career Change: 06:00 – “I realized that I wanted to do something more service-oriented and the other thing was that engineering really pegs you to live in very specific places.”
• Specialty Choice: 14:00 – “I knew that if I picked the right specialty I’d be able to do that and I would be able to live wherever I wanted to and I’d be able to take long periods of time off because I wouldn’t have maybe a patient base in a clinic or I would have a lot of Partners or something like that so I chose anesthesiology.”
• Post-Surgery Struggles: 23:00 – “I had this identity of being an athlete and here I am I had brain surgery and you would not believe how debilitated it makes you feel like it wasn’t like I had my hip done I mean I had brain surgery but it was so hard to get out of the car it was like I was so weak so you’re just starting from Basics.”
• Infertility and Career: 29:02 – “I feel like it’s too late if you say well the critical time is when you’re building a family is to lean in because of the typical age that you are and like the type of career path that you’re on at that time that’s the Assumption she’s making there but she is absolutely not addressing the fact that 13 percent of couples in this country are infertile and worldwide infertility is going up in professions like medicine and probably law but we don’t have data there it’s double it’s at least double that.”
• Parenting Reflections (Timestamp: 32:00, Link): “I feel like I am so into my role as a mom now and I love the relationship I have with my daughter and the things that we do and I feel like I’m a better parent because of some of the things that I’ve gone through.”
• Continuous Practice (Timestamp: 34:03, Link): “Absolutely, it’s like a continuous practice. You’re never going to be perfect at this or a lot of different things. It’s applied to medicine too. That’s why I like to explain it as the word practice because people say they practice medicine and they say that specifically because you’re never a master, you’re never perfect at that.”
• Men Leaning Out (Timestamp: 37:02, Link): “I get men coming up to me and they say exactly what you’re saying where they’re like well you know I don’t want to do the traditional thing either but it’s even like less acceptable in certain circles and for the men to be like well I don’t want to achieve and I don’t want to make the most money and be the biggest Breadwinner.”
• Financial Independence (Timestamp: 40:02, Link): “We started figuring out that we were actually financially independent and that opened up the realm of for me especially what I could do with my medical career.”
• Homeschooling (Timestamp: 43:02, Link): “We homeschool and we yeah was that yeah we had because we were already thinking of living in different places. How has that Journey been when my husband first said to me that he wanted to homeschool I thought he was crazy because I really didn’t know anything about modern homeschooling.”

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 Why Sheryl Sandberg is Wrong — Dawn Baker on The Art of “Leaning Out” | The Pathless Path Podcast appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

Podcast Links: Choose Your Player

Conversation topics

• The importance of taking time off, playing, and fooling around, as these activities are essential for creativity and productivity. He shares his experience of biking across the US in 1979 and how it opened his eyes to different perspectives.
• New collaborative tools are needed to honor and empower other dimensions of our lives beyond productivity and money. He suggests that we are still in the early stages of developing these tools.
• The trap of the startup entrepreneurial path is that people often assume that money will definitely come with success. He suggests that it’s more important to find things that fire up your soul, even if they don’t necessarily bring financial gain.
• His experiences of traveling and living in Taiwan in the 1970s, which greatly expanded his worldview. He discusses the cultural differences he encountered and how they impacted his perspective.
• The changing relationship people have with work and that there is a growing dissatisfaction with the current centrality of work in people’s lives.
• His family life of juggling full-time jobs while raising their three children. He suggests that one of the most effective ways to manage time and responsibilities is to outsource tasks when possible.
• His optimism about the future that is primarily based on history and the potential of future generations. He is currently working on a project called “Protopia,” which imagines a desirable future 100 years from now.
• He encourages people to become themselves fully and to work on something that’s much bigger than themselves.

My Favorite Quotes

On Goofing Off

You have to have a good work ethic, but it has to be counterbalanced by a great rest ethic. You have to be able to rest well and um and goof off…I’m firmly in the belief that the value of goofing off and creative waste sometimes we call it um where you are throwing things away. That’s why young people invent most of the new things because they spend 50 hours wasting time playing a video game. You can’t make a good video game unless you spend time playing video games and so this idea of goofing off, taking vacations, playing, and fooling around is essential.

Kevin Kelly

On How His Son Created His Own Master’s Program

And that was my son who went to bilingual schools, they went to a Chinese American School in San Francisco. They went on to a very demanding High School, they went out to college and did everything well and did everything. And so at the end of college, I said um don’t go into a career, don’t get a job, goof off. You haven’t goofed off your entire life right. I mean you’re like your entire life you’ve been striving and trying to get good grades and it’s like you need to spend some time just goofing off, doing nothing. So he decided to give himself his own degree. So he made a course where for a year he made art every day and then wrote a thesis and sent it to his professors, published it and printed it and then awarded himself an MFA. I love that and I said yeah that’s what you want to do.

Kevin Kelly

On The Goal Of Life

Your goal in life is to be able to say on the day before you die that you’ve fully become yourself.

Kevin Kelly

On What He Wants To Do Next

So, um, I want to become a YouTube Star. YouTube is an accelerant of our culture and that’s where I want to be. It’s vastly more influential on culture in accelerating the speed of learning and disseminating ideas than anything we’ve come before and people don’t really recognize the degree to which it is

Kevin Kelly

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 Goofing Off On Purpose – Kevin Kelly on owning his time, staying optimistic about the future, raising children, and his new book Excellent Advice for Living | The Pathless Path Podcast appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

Podcast Links: Choose Your Player

Conversation topics

• Embracing Change and Self-Perception: how taking bold steps like booking a one-way flight to a new place can change your self-perception. You start seeing yourself as a courageous, capable individual who can live adventurously far from home.
• Travel as a Means of Self-Discovery: how travel can lead to new insights and Self-discovery.
• Challenging Conventional Paths: his unconventional path of pursuing a life in music and how it shaped him. He also mentions how he was influenced by Tony Robbins’ open-ended questions about what one really wants from life.
• Beliefs as a Means to Improve Actions: Derek discusses the idea of adopting certain beliefs not because they are necessarily true, but because they are useful in improving actions and achieving desired outcomes.
• Embracing Randomness: his influence by Brian Eno’s “oblique strategies,” a deck of cards with creative challenges that encourage embracing randomness and injecting it into one’s life.
• Redefining Ambition and Retirement: redefining ambition as the desire to be the ideal version of oneself and retirement as not working for money. He emphasizes the importance of internal growth and self-improvement over external validation and material success.
• Parenting and Lifestyle: the stress associated with parenting often comes from trying to fit a child into an adult schedule. He advocates for a more flexible approach to life when raising children.
• Useful Not True: Derek talks about his upcoming book, “Useful Not True,” which challenges the idea of clinging to beliefs because they are true and instead adopting beliefs because they are useful.

Derek’s Definition of Ambition Doesn’t Factor In “Other People” but is also because people “gave up” on him at 14

I asked Derek how he thinks about ambition, and Derek shared pretty openly about how he thinks about ambition and how that might have come from people “giving up” on him at 14:

Paul: I’ve also called it legible versus legible ambition. Huh? So legible ambition. My definition is your parents can tell their friends about what you’re up to. Legible ambition is really hard to explain to others, even yourself. But is this sort of deeper journey that is more in the heart than in the brain

Derek: See, in all of my hours of thinking about this, I have never brought in. The subject of others. Who cares about others? Why? Why, why care what anybody else thinks? I’d honestly never even thought about it.

Paul: I’m much longer on the default path, Derek.

Derek: Well now it’s funny that you just mentioned this just now and I went like, Hmm. I was like taken aback…like others. So your parents, who cares what somebody else thinks?

No. That’s funny that you mentioned that. I honestly hadn’t considered that, that in all my years of calling myself ambitious, it’s always been for the self…it’s always been about being the ideal me.

Like, okay, let me put this into the second person. If you think about the skills that you really want to have, the talents you really wanna have or the kind of person you really want to be. Say like you’ve spent some time once with somebody that was a great listener and you think like, God, I’d love to be that.

Present and that great of a listener, or I’d love to be that graceful, or, um, maybe you met somebody that really had their shit together, that knows exactly where they’re going in life and exactly how to get there. And they say no to everything else and they’re driven and focused and you think I’d like to be like that.

And you really work towards it. To me, this is ambitious. Um, you wanna be somebody that can stand up on stage and command a room. You wanna be somebody that can sit down in front of a blank computer terminal and make an app out of thin air from scratch? Or somebody that can sing wonderfully or somebody that can write a poem that can move you to me, to yearn, to be that person you want to be is ambitious, especially if you take action towards it.

That’s ambitious to me. Like any idiot can buy a Ferrari, get a credit card, you go down to the shop and you hand them the card and they hand you the car and then you pay the debt. That takes no skill. To me. It’s, it’s that internal stuff. That’s what takes the real work. That’s real ambition to me.

Paul: Yeah, and I totally align with that. I think the process for me was stripping away the outside view. I think that’s the script. The story of what you’re supposed to be and the only work you can commit to actually comes from within.

Do you resonate with that?

Derek: Just because you’re asking me some personal questions about my past, you just made me.

Wonder, why am I like this? And I think it’s because I always think that too, because I think I, in high school, grew up in an upper-middle-class suburb of Chicago. Um, and all the people around me were all in like that college pre-prep kind of course. And I was like; I’m not even going to college. I just wanna be a musician.

And they were all neat and proper and dressed nicely. And I had super long hair and denim jackets and Ozzie Osborne Iron Maiden heavy metal patches on my denim jacket. Um, so people gave up on me long ago, and that was great. They’re just like, Ugh, Derek, you know, like, he’s just gonna be a musician. Uh, so people gave up on me.

Nobody was expecting anything of me. Um, even my parents just gave up on me just like, oh, well he’s just gonna be a musician and. Maybe that’s why I, you know, since the age of 14, it’s like what anybody else thinks is, is moot.

Nobody’s expecting anything of me.

Derek’s Upcoming Book Is About Understanding That Things Don’t Have To Be True to Be Useful

Derek: I’m fascinated with this idea of believing, adopting beliefs because they’re useful, not because they’re true. And in fact, I start out by challenging that we need to stop trying to think of anything as true. Stop trying to apply that filter because it gets you into a dangerous, stuck place of beliefs that you grew up with and not challenging those.

Clinging on too quickly to one, because you read a particular self-help book that has a certain point of view and you say, ah, this, this is the way to live. You clinging onto that and you, because you feel it’s right and it’s true. Instead, I think we should abandon that whole categorization of truth and just look at everything as, whether it’s useful or not to you right now.

So a certain self-help book might be useful to you right now. You don’t even have to ever think of it as true, and then you can just adopt some of it, which then means, kinda like we said earlier about how some books can be deeply flawed and the author can be a jerk, and there can be misquoted, badly attributed lines in there. And there could be quoting psychology tests that have since been disproven, and yet the book can still be incredibly useful to you. An absolute wreck of a person lying face down in a gutter could say something to you that could be really useful to you. It doesn’t matter the source.

It doesn’t matter whether a philosophy is congruently true through and through. Same with religions or whatever. You can pluck the bits that you want to use, that are useful to you right now. And even then, you don’t need to turn an idea into an ideology and subscribe to it. Declare yourself to be a follower of this ideology.

Instead, you just be opportunistic and you just take an idea and say, I can use this now and then maybe next week. You don’t need that idea anymore because it served its purpose. It was useful to you. This approach to life for me has been so helpful, so effective. It’s kind of related to all the things we talked about today.

Not following the rule book.

You know, you need to go to college. No, that’s not true.

You need to stay near your parents. Not true.

You need to you need to follow this path. Nope. Not true.

Having kids is really, really hard. Nope, not true. Apparently that belief is useful to you so that you can validate yourself while you’re stressed or whatever. But that’s not true. That’s just a useful belief for you right now. So you can feel better about yourself or you can hire a nanny to help, whatever. That’s just a belief that you found useful.

It’s not true, and it just, this, this, to me, it, it also helps me break the rules in life. When people said things like I dunno when I started as a gigging musician, I started to get into the university circuit and people said well, you need to do things this way. You need to submit your application and then wait six months and you’ll get approved. I was like, no, I don’t think so. I don’t think that’s gonna work for me.

I just like went straight in through the back door and found my way in and got the gig and, and there are so many things in life that people can kind of try to hold you down through telling you to do things the normal way and you need to be able to say like, you know, you’re stating that like it’s the truth, but that’s not true.

That’s just, that’s something that you believe that’s useful for you to believe that because you have a job that pays you to believe that. But that’s not true. So this is what my next book is about.

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 Derek Sivers on Ideas That Are Useful, Not True, Booking a One-Way Flight, Living on a Kid’s Not Adult Schedule & “True Ambition” | The Pathless Path Podcast appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.