This episode is with Sky King, the founder of Modern Stoa, a podcast advertising company for podcasters. His path is fascinating – he grew up in Hawaii, rarely wore shoes, was heavily influenced by Asian culture, had a father who was retired, and somehow ended up in a massive corporation right after college.  In 2016. he became fascinated by how the media was shaping the 2016 US election and decided it was time to act.  From a cold email to Ryan Holiday to helping build Aubrey Marcus’ podcast, Sky was on his way.  His long-term vision is to build an alternative to traditional advertising in audio.

We talk about this and a lot more including:

• Why he quit a good job to work at a smoothie bar
• How a cold email to Ryan Holiday changed his life
• Working for Aubrey Marcus
• Buckminster Fuller
• Growing up in Hawaii
• Serendipitous events that lend to him moving to Austin
• The future of Audio

Links Mentions

• Modern Stoa
• Sky’s Podcast (Paid) or RMRK.app
• The Gray Lady Winked
• The Brass Check
• @consumersky (twitter)

Listen & Watch

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 Sky King on Growing up in Hawaii, Quitting to Work At a Smoothie Bar & Building The Future of Podcasts (The Pathless Path Podcast) appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

A review of the first 30 years of the data in 1996 highlighted a fascinating shift in values.

Especially notable are changes in two contrasting value statements: The importance of “developing a meaningful philosophy of life” and of “being very well off financially” In the late 1960s developing a meaningful philosophy of life was the top value, being endorsed as an “essential” or “very important” goal by more than 80 percent of the entering freshmen. Being very well off financially, on the other hand, lagged far behind in the late 1960s, ranking fifth or sixth on the list with less than 45 percent of the freshmen endorsing it as a very important or essential goal in life. Since that time these two values have basically traded places, with being very well off financially now the top value (at 73.6 percent endorsement) and developing a meaningful philosophy of life now occupying sixth place at only 43.1 percent endorsement

You can see a visual representation of this swap in the following graph.

While “developing a meaningful philosophy of life” seemed to drop steadily from survey launch, the goal of being well off financially didn’t seem to take off until the early 1970s.

The other interested thing from this long-term data is how consistent the other values have been. I looked at the top 4 values from 1970 – 2015 and found that despite the two above mentioned values changing place, the other three values remained remarkably consistent.

Those three things?

1. Raising a family
2. Helping others who are in difficulty
3. Becoming an authority in my field

Essentially, take care of the people in your life, try to help others and be good at what you do.

These seem like a good recipe for like and aligns with the wisdom and research on what leads to a meaningful life.

But still, why did college students become so obsessed with money and why has it remained so central?

Could it be due to how school has become about test scores and grades?

A Harvard study from 2014 highlighted the gap between what parents claim to care about and what children thought their parents cared about.

According to a 2012 study, 96% of parents surveyed viewed developing moral character in children as “very important, if not essential” and highly valued their children “being honest, loving, and reliable”(Bowman et al., 2012). Research suggests that most parents across race/ethnic groups value caring or “benevolence” more than achievement and are far more likely to value “benevolence” over “power” (Suizzo, 2007).

When you ask parents what they care about they say that they want their kinds to be kind people with integrity.

But what happens when you ask their kids? Here is the results of a survey of 10,000 students asked to rank what their parents value:

Hmmm. Who you going to trust, the parents or the kids?

I was lucky not to have parents that cared a lot about grades but it was still clear that getting good grades was the best thing you could do in school. If you were not getting good grades, parents often were quite concerned about that person’s future. The social pressure to achieve was clear at an early age.

Its easy to see children raised into this environment looking for the next metric they can optimize for after college. There may not be any grades in life but your compensation is is the next best thing.

But What Does Society Want?

Almost everyone seems to have an opinion of what “society” wants and this seem to be very different about what people report about what they really want.

Partly because of my own experiences earning less money and partly because of a fascinating survey from Gallup called the Success Index. In their survey they ask people two questions:

1. How do you personally define success?
2. How do you think others define success?

Take a look at the main section of this on status:

Almost everyone thinks success is about being good at something you care about while at they same time they think that almost everybody else only cares about being rich and famous.

How can this be?

Either most people are lying about how they define success or people have a terrible understanding of the motives of other people.

My guess would be that it is a bit of both. It’s very easy to delude ourselves into thinking we are doing things for the right reasons while assuming that others are in it for the wrong reasons.

What I think this survey tells us is that even if people do have good motivations for doing whatever they are doing, they feel that they will be judged by a different societal standard.

A different section of the survey shows this in an even more dramatic way. It asked people to rank 76 different elements that are part of their personal definition of success. Similar to the survey with college freshman we see that having a family is an important part of people’s lives.

However, when you ask the same people about their perception of broad societal definitions of success we see the lowest ranked value from above jump all the way to #1 and to a dramatic degree.

It seems that most people assume there is a broad societal benchmark of “success” that mostly has to do with how much money, status and fame one has. Despite this, most people also seem to proclaim very different definitions of success.

What does this all mean?

Could it be that people still care about what it means to live a philosophically meaningful life and that they are too ashamed to share that?

Or have money and fame overtaken everything else as the de facto aim of life for most people?

It’s worth looking back at the start of the original data set. Who were the people answering the survey in 1966?

William Whyte’s book titled “The Organization Man,” which detailed the new trend of young people moving to suburbs and large corporations, gives us a glimpse into the mindset of a college student in that time.

While they talk little about money, they talk a great deal about the good life. This life is, first of all, calm and ordered. Many a senior confesses that he’s thought of a career in teaching, but as he talks it appears that it is not so much that he likes teaching itself as the sort of life he associates with it—there is a touch of elms and quiet streets in the picture. For the good life is equable; it is a nice place out in the suburbs, a wife and three children, one, maybe two cars (you know, a little knock-about for the wife to run down to the station in), and a summer place up at the lake or out on the Cape, and, later, a good college education for the children. It is not, seniors explain, the money that counts.

William Whyte, The Organization Man

In the book he shares how it was genuinely shocking how little risk young people wanted to take compared to previous generations. They saw the chaos of the war and did not want to repeat those days. With this backdrop it might make sense that developing a meaningful philosophy of life might become a central goal of one’s life.

Over time, however, young people started to care more about money until it became the most important metric in their life. This was furthered by the common knowledge that everyone knew that everyone else thought getting rich was the prime aim of life.

Revisiting the American Freshman data, the #1 goal of students was has remained “being very well off financially” for almost 50 years and throughout that time has only become more important. In 2019 it reached one of the highest levels on record with 84% of students said that being well off financially was essential or very important.

Despite this, all of these surveys share some very consistent themes over the past 55+ years. People still see having a family, being helpful to others and being good at what you do as things that are centrally important to a life well lived.

It doesn’t appear that money is losing its grip on our imagination but it might be a relief to consider the fact that many people only conform to these goals because they think everyone else thinks this way.

I for one don’t have wealth as my #1 metric of success and I officially give you permission to abandon that as a central aim of your life as well.

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 Did People Stop Caring About Developing a Meaningful Philosophy of Life in the 1970s? appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

• Should work even be meaningful or does pursuit of this crowd out meaning in other aspects of our life?
• Does this undermine the millions of people that may have no chance of “meaningful work”?

I don’t have good answers to the two questions but have stumbled across research from Adrian Madden and Catherine Bailey from the University of Sussex (which I’ve called out before) that helped to make sense of what meaning is.  They found it was described by five characteristics: It is self-transcendence, poignant, episodic, reflective and personal.

In simple terms, meaning relates to your personal values, has an impact on others, is powerful, may happen sporadically and is realized when you reflect on it and name it.

I received a text from a friend who mentioned he just took a job at a new company where I had introduced him to a connection over two years ago.  I had no idea he was looking.  That initial connection turned into an ongoing relation and helped him make a move he was excited about.  That text made my day.

Our moments of meaning are not constant bliss and happiness, but the episodic moments that we can’t predict.  It can be as simple as an unexpected text from a friend.

The post Meaningful Work appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

I had a conversation with the amazing Chelsea Seid, co-founder of Marlow – a coaching platform for companies, about what is happening in organizations.  We get pretty nerdy and talk about passion versus purpose (and why passion is overrated), how to pursue mastery (but not too much), how to find meaning at work (hint: avoid managers) and how we are limited by default definitions of success.

Resources Mentioned:

• Passion, Purpose & Play, Vega Factor
• Self-Determination Theory, Deci & Ryan
• Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
• Drive (TED Talk) by Dan Pink
• Future of Work Mindset, Paul Millerd
• Crisis at Work, Paul Millerd
• The Rise of Superman, Steven Kotler
• Passion & Purpose, Thrive Global Article
• What Make Work Meaningful, MIT Sloan Review

Check out Marlow: 

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

[contact-form-7]

The post Conversation With Chelsea Seid of Marlow About Passion, Purpose & Meaning At Work appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

“Work as you know it is currently changing in fundamental ways that we have not seen since the industrial revolution”

 Subscribe: Itunes • Stitcher • Google Play • Overcast • Spotify

Stephen has been self-employed for more than 18 years.  At first, it was by accident.  He referred to himself as a “reluctant freelancer.”  We talk about how that mindset evolved into one where he now sees self-employment as THE option for today’s world.  He is the founder of Life Skills That Matter, a platform, and community to help people to build the real skills they need to build a life they are proud of.

There are many future of work “thought leaders” but that title would sell Stephen too short. He has been in the weeds experimenting in his own life and has helped hundreds of people carve their own paths in the world that I would instead call him the wise elder statesman of the freelance economy. If you have ever thought about working for yourself, I recommend Stephen’s work over my own.

Stephen puts the emerging trends bluntly: “The only work left is managing yourself.  If your going to manage yourself, you mine as well work for yourself.”

To get started, he pushes people to “work on creating…you’re not just going to get paid right off the bat, just enjoy the freedom of creation of whatever it is that you want to do, whatever form that is, however you want to do it without judgement…just start doing that.”  Because that’s what really gets people interested when you can share your creations and there’s nothing more human than that.

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

[contact-form-7]

The post Boundless Podcast – Stephen Warley on the biggest shift since the industrial revolution (Episode 19) 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.

“Pursue your passion and you will never work a day in your life”

— Many people

For me, this was always a very vague notion, albeit one worth pursuing.

I’ve always had a restless spirit. I remember being in school when I was younger and throwing myself into doing well. Doing well and getting good grades was rewarding, but I never really had an answer to “What do you want to do when you grow up?” question.

That restless spirit stayed with me as I got older and transitioned into a productive, taxpaying adult. During my first corporate internship during college, I worked at a desk for 40 hours a week. I was dumbfounded by how little everyone really accomplished — It was incredibly frustrating. I wanted to get rid of that feeling.

I had a few more internships in other major companies and kept finding the same thing: Inefficiency and personal frustration. I was NOT finding what I wanted to do. This put me in a bit of a desperate state and I started looking everywhere for inspiration. I picked up Freakonomics one summer and could not put it down. It unlocked a period of creativity for me that hasn’t stopped ten years later.

Discovering my first passion was easy: A restless hunger for learning

With senior year looming, I sunk my energy into obsessively researching careers that might be a better fit for me than a corporate job. I came across strategy consulting and was immediately energized. Consulting firms were a place where you could work on some of the most challenging business problems and be surrounded by people who also crave learning at a incredibly fast pace. Why had nobody told me about consulting? This became my new goal.

With little preparation, I threw myself full-steam ahead into trying to get a full-time offer at a strategy consulting firm. I quickly built a massive spreadsheets of over 100 firms and tried to find every possible connection through family, friends or alumni that I could.

I ended up getting a number of phone interviews and four or five final round in-person interviews.

Bottom line: I got rejected from 100+ consulting firms

The following rejection is my favorite:

October 2006

Dear Paul,

Thank you for your interest in McKinsey & Company and your patience in awaiting our reply.

Unfortunately, we regret that we are unable to extend an interview to you at this time. Our team’s decision was a difficult one given the strength of our applicant pool and the limited number of positions available. In the event that our hiring needs change, we will get in touch with you directly

On behalf of McKinsey & Company’s recruiting team, we wish you every success in your career.

All the best,

XXX

Recruiting Manager

McKinsey & Company

In the moment, the rejection hurt. But I didn’t let it impact my confidence. I knew I was capable and I had committed to this goal. So I kept applying. Two years two years later, I was sitting at my desk, working at that same firm, one of the top consulting firms in the world, McKinsey & Company.

I had made it, right?

In a sense, yes. I was proud to have achieved my goaI. However, I still had a certain bit of restlessness — I wanted to figure out what I wanted to do. I still had more learning to do.

It took me a few years after leaving McKinsey to understand how much the culture in my office had resonated with me. My peers were brilliant, kind and enthusiastic about learning. Team leaders were 100% supportive and mostly hands-off, letting me achieve the already high expectations that I had for myself. It was incredible. The problem? This culture was not the norm in the business world. I wanted to help create these environments elsewhere.

My second passion: Being a part of and building amazing communities and company cultures

The discovery of a third passion solidified for me only recently, but was accelerated by an experience I had in 2009. After I finally “broke into” consulting, others from UConn reached out to me for advice on how to do the same. One persistent and enthusiastic student stood out. He was determined to work in consulting. He was a bit late on application deadlines, but seemed undeterred. I was not as confident.

It was 2009 and the economy was in absolute shambles. This kid was a rock star and had enormous potential, but the opportunities were slim and all the jobs were going to students at the most prestigious schools. There was no sugar coating it. This was going to be hard.

I was impressed with his determination — he wanted to pursue consulting, even if that meant graduating without a job. Fortunately, his hard work paid off. With weeks to go prior to graduation, he received an offer at a consulting firm. Not only that, but it led to an impressive career in consulting and strategy. I’d now consider him a peer, at an equal level to the success I’ve achieved in my career. He may not have known it at the time, but he was inspiring to me — and still is. It gave me tremendous joy to play a part in helping someone so impressive achieve their goals. I had to do more.

Passion #3: Helping inspirational people achieve great things

I’ve only recently gained clarity on this. This has taken years of reflection and soul-searching, but it adds a lot of clarity in my future career choices. If I use these as a lens for my career choices, a lot of the decisions I made seem to make a lot more sense. Everything I’ve pursued checked at least one of the three boxes. For now, I’ll use these as a guiding force, but have no idea where it will take me. Here’s hoping I find new inspiration and passions down the road….

To summarize, the key learnings for me were:

1. Finding my passion really meant getting to know myself better. I did this through a combination of putting myself in different jobs and environments and combining that with reflection on my experiences, especially the most frustrating and exciting emotions

2. Passion does not equal a job title or company. Instead of defining my success based on a role or company I was working with, I focused on the behaviors and environments

3. Listen to your frustration or angst. I took notice of what frustrated me and what energized me. I tried to do less of the things that frustrated me and more of the things that excited me. Simple, but powerful.

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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