She launched a book about this journey, Reclaiming Control, which I read over two days. I’ve been talking to people about similar journeys with people for the last several years, but to sit down and follow Amy’s journey through a 100+ page book was a new kind of experience.

A year ago I was in the “writing books is so 1900s, why not just write online?” but after reading Amy’s I came away thinking it would be great if there were 100 similar books like this. In my call for more creators, I made a loud call for more creators and this book convinced me its a good thing.

We think that no one will care about our story. But I’ve come to realize that people don’t want to follow your path, they are interested in following someone’s story and saying, “hey I’m not alone!”

I had this feeling when I read this passage in the first chapter:

So, yes, I quit my job. I have zero plans for what I’m doing. If you ask, I’ll only tell you that I’m going to spend some time traveling with my family. Because truth be told, that’s all I know right now. Don’t worry, I am not here to tell you to quit your job and travel the world. In fact, I’d highly advise against it (at least for now)

Podcast Conversation

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Three Excerpts From Reclaiming Control by Amy McMillen

“I wanted something different while never having the courage to do anything about it”

When I decided to go to Costa Rica to get certified in permaculture design, all I knew was that I was pursuing an interest. I didn’t know that I would get a glimpse of what it meant to be free.

Sitting in an open classroom made out of bamboo, Scott told us he committed to a desk job years ago after studying economics in college, only to take a road trip throughout Latin America that extended for the next ten years.

Eating her daily diet of mangos, jackfruit, and coconut, Ana shared how she designed apps in San Jose, only to realize that the user experience she was designing didn’t quite align with what her body needed at the time.

Swinging on a hammock outside our bunkhouse, Sarah recalled how in her high fashion career in Australia, she witnessed her team bickering for almost an hour back and forth around how yellow the color of a button on a dress should be. At that moment, she knew she couldn’t do it anymore.

I thought about the many hours I spent in meetings deciding the equivalent of what color buttons should be. I was working with an online system, not dresses, but the sentiment was all the same.

Unlike Sarah, however, I couldn’t pinpoint a specific moment when I decided that I had had enough. My journey instead was a slow-burning cognitive dissonance—a soft underlying knowledge that I wanted something different while never having the courage to do anything about it.

It was probably a week after I started my first full-time job when I was already listening to podcasts about people who had quit their conventional corporate lives to pursue something different. Though I listened to these people’s stories day in and day out, their decisions never seemed accessible to me. I didn’t want to simply quit and travel the world just to travel, nor did I have a successful side hustle that could sustain me, nor did I have a brilliant start-up idea. I felt lost and stuck, simultaneously pulled in a million different directions while feeling empty and blank whenever I thought about what I wanted.

Spending two weeks with over thirty people from all around the world from age twenty-one to seventy or older was the first time in my adult life that I felt surrounded by people who knew how to be free. We were on a ranch in Costa Rica because we wanted to be, not because anyone expected us to be.

How novel it seemed to have conversations beyond how sick and tired you were of your job, how annoyed you were at your boss or team, or to answer, “How are things?” with more than, “You know, same old same old”

I thought finding a new job would be the answer, which led me to explore other positions in tech, product, and venture capital. I’m thankful that I went through this process, which gave me the confidence that if and when I wanted a new job, I would be able to get one. It also taught me that hopping to another job wasn’t quite the answer. I needed to do a lot of internal work on how to control my current thoughts, feelings, actions, and results no matter the circumstances.

The people I met through permaculture not only lived free lives externally, but internally as well. Many days we started class at 7 a.m. and later had evening sessions of group work or extra learning. It wasn’t quite the beaches and waterfalls that my coworkers were probably envisioning my Costa Rica vacation to consist of. In that bamboo classroom, sipping on fresh coffee and eating raw cacao beans to stay awake, we learned about water, soil, fermentation, agroforestry, and composting. With the ranch as a living classroom, we applied the skills immediately.

Externally, our days seemed long and arduous, but we never experienced it that way. Who knows if I will ever use some of the skills I learned? Will I ever need to graft a plant or dig swales? Maybe, maybe not. All I knew was that the low-grade anxiety I learned to live with in my day-to-day life back in New York was gone. To live a life filled with beautiful things you wanted to do and learn—what a thought! With each passing day I soaked in the lives of those around me who were living intentionally, I began to see the possibility that I could do the same.

Living in the jungle with people whose lives were so completely different from mine taught me that I could do something beyond my constructed bubbles of tech, finance, and start-ups. The people showed me there were more possibilities and that these possibilities were possible for me, too.

“This Is My Life”

This is my life now. This is my life now. This is my life now.

I fill the page with these words as I sit on a slab of rock, looking out at a lake in the middle of Wyoming.

I had lived most of my life in preparation for something. In middle school, I was preparing for high school. In high school, I was preparing for college. In college, I was preparing to get a job. After graduating, I turned to what I saw everyone else preparing for, including promotions, next jobs, or graduate school. There’s always a next step.

At first, I wonder what it would be like to press pause for a little bit. Just to catch my breath. What I realize, however, is that I don’t simply want to press pause. I want to live in the present, not as a ghost daydreaming about the future or hung up on the past. I want to allow myself to dream, and then live those dreams in real time.

My shoulders tense and my stomach knots as I think about actually living life and questioning what I want.

I don’t know what I want. I’m too indecisive to live my own life.

Feelings of self-doubt and overwhelm cloud my mind for a bit until I get annoyed. I say, “I don’t know,” to almost everything; I’m even sick of it myself. It’s the same feeling when I’m at a restaurant staring at a huge menu, and the server has already come around three times to ask what I’d like to order. “Just a little more time, please,” I always sheepishly respond.

I toss a pebble into the lake, watching it create ripples upon ripples. Impatience bubbles up inside me, letting me know that my time is up.

This is my life now.

“No longer procrastinate in living life”

Deciding to no longer procrastinate in living life leads me to see things in a different light. I actively choose what I give time, attention, and energy to. I write beautiful stories about watching the sunrise, playing with my niece, and reading by the fireplace. I give my body time and space to rest and heal, knowing I will be more prepared for whatever comes my way.

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 Amy McMillen – Leaving a Path That Makes Sense (Podcast) appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

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John Zeratsky was a designer in the tech industry has worked with hundreds of startups in his time at Google Ventures.  He’s also obsessed with redesigning time and thinking about what matters in life. Earlier this year he just got back from 18 months living on his boat sailing around Central America, which he wrote about in an article titled “What quitting my job to sail around central america taught me about fulfillment.”

John describes himself as “risk averse” but after being influenced by different perspectives on risk (including thoughts from the incredibly thoughtful Brian Koppelman) he realized that he could take smaller steps to test out a bigger leap.  So in advance of taking the trip, him and his wife avoided the trappings of lifestyle creep by saving 50% of their salaries and avoiding the urge to upgrade their apartment.  As a way to test whether they would like a longer sailing trip or not, they took smaller trips, going for a two week trip and a two month trip before heading out. This helped them learn about how they would feel and practice some of the skills they would need while living on the boat.

In this conversation we talk about:

• Growing up in a small lake community
• His love of sailing growing up
• Why him and his wife change their mind on taking the trip in 2015
• Rethinking convenience and comfort
• What comforts are worth paying for
• Belonging and community
• How his relationship with money has changed
• How him and his wife are structuring their life to work how they want
• The one change that helps people be less addicted to their phones

Links Mentioned:

• Designing Your Life
• Sprint: How To Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas In Just Five Days
• Make Time: How To Focus On What Matters Every Day
• Twitter: @jazer

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 John Zeratsky on what living on a boat for 18 months taught him about work, belonging, comfort & money appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

However, in this article, Thompson still seems stuck in a systemic view of work and the symptoms of that system. By doing this, he fails to address the fundamental question of how to build a life around work. Perhaps his inability to get there comes from his own internal struggle:

This is the right time for a confession. I am the very thing that I am criticizing.

As someone who has spent the last two years of my life trying to solve this seemingly impossible puzzle and writing about it through the eyes of others, I know there are many ways to “hack a living” as the practical philosopher Andrew Taggart would put it.  Taggart has written one of the most powerful assessments of this crisis in his book “The Good Life and Sustaining Life: An Inquiry Into Our Great Vexation” where I believe he correctly frames the challenge:

There may be no greater vexation in our time than the question of how to make a living in a manner that accords with leading a good life.

As he identifies in his inquiry, “One cannot deny that the question of the good life must come before that of sustaining life.”

This is Aristotle’s good life, not the Kardashian good life.  

If we look at Thompson’s essay through this lens we start to see the problem. Many of the workers he details have the Kardashian good life, or at least the modern professional equivalent. They have solved many of the problems of sustaining life and but lack their own deeper definition of the Aristotelian good life.  It is choosing pour over coffee and luxurious vacations rather than the ability to do whatever you want on a Tuesday.

Anne Helen Peters actually gets closer to a possible question towards the end of her “Millennial Burnout” essay, which Thompson references, but never takes us any further.

It’s a way of thinking about life, and what joy and meaning we can derive not just from optimizing it, but living it. Which is another way of saying: It’s life’s actual work.

Thompson and Petersen’s articles were shared like crazy, but they never offered any ideas about what to do next.  

Our social media environment incentivizes this. It’s much safer to share something that shows vulnerability and gets a “me too!” reaction than something that might challenge the status quo.

I’ve read articles slamming co-living communities for being utopian, privileged, escapist and out of touch paradises. So last year when I went to visit one of these communities, I was shocked to find people from all over the world who were craving (and achieving) a deeper connection to others and aspiring to build a life-less centered around work.

This attitude of “well what the hell can we do?” most powerfully came through in a recent New York Times “work sucks” piece appropriately titled “America’s Professional Elite: Wealthy, Successful and Miserable” which shares stories of people making gobs of money, but left utterly miserable. Even people who see a potential short-term solution seem utterly unwilling to do anything about it:

“I feel like I’m wasting my life,” he told me. “When I die, is anyone going to care that I earned an extra percentage point of return? My work feels totally meaningless.” He recognized the incredible privilege of his pay and status, but his anguish seemed genuine. “If you spend 12 hours a day doing work you hate, at some point it doesn’t matter what your paycheck says,” he told me. There’s no magic salary at which a bad job becomes good. He had received an offer at a start-up, and he would have loved to take it, but it paid half as much, and he felt locked into a lifestyle that made this pay cut impossible. “My wife laughed when I told her about it,” he said.

Symptoms and stories but no deeper questions.

Based on the number of people that forwarded me these articles, they are still worthwhile.  They are hitting a nerve. The pain is real and people are not sure what to do.

However, they are missing the countless people across the world (and from all countries) who are reinventing their lives and living in new ways. I’d love to see more articles exploring and highlighting two things:

1. Stories of the countless people who are experimenting with new ways of living
2. What it takes to actually transform and reinvent yourself throughout different life stages

What can we learn from people that have carved their own paths?

Over the past two years, I’ve highlighted the stories of many unconventional humans:

• Jen Morilla traveled the world until she figured out a new career for herself;  
• Lydia Lee relocating to Bali to live a more balanced life;
• Jacqueline Jensen took a sabbatical to figure out if work should, in fact, be the center of her life;
• Candace Moore accidentally building a business by generously making yoga YouTube videos to help people across the globe;
• Chris Donohoe built his own consulting firm around a 40-day workweek and bringing his full self to the world every day;
• Andrew Taggart helping entrepreneurs with the “good life question” and operating in the gift economy;
• Laura Gallaher joining Remote Year with her co-worker and employee to shift her business from an in-person one to a digital one
• Ervin Ling quitting his job at 30 to work 15 hours a week as an English teacher;
• Bryan Victor skipped the traditional path of the university in Singapore to learn through life experiments.
• Khe Hy leaving Wall Street to be a sensemaker for the miserable elite
• Christine Bader “learning to quit” rather than missing out on seeing her children grow up because of work

Experimentation is not limited to personal transformation either.  Wade Foster finds that defaulting to a remote team at Zapier has helped his team live better lives.  Tash Walker thought “flextime” was BS and implemented a real 4-day workweek for her firm in London without compromising profits. Tyler Tringas investing in founders who want to build “calm companies.”

At the center of these stories is an uncomfortable truth.  One has to leave the traditional full-time paradigm to build a more reasonable life that makes sense.  

It’s just hard to dodge the judgment and guilt that comes from “stepping back” in the traditional full-time work context. This is why so many of these people I’ve talked to have left and carved their own paths.

If you’re willing to compromise on traditional metrics of success in the short term, you mine as well do it on your own terms.

How Does Change Actually Happen?

Stories of reinvention are great, but they are not sufficient. Most people can find enough difference with another person to explain away that person’s success. “Oh they could do that because they worked at X” or “sure they probably had a ton of savings.” The reason people do this is not because they don’t think they are capable, but because change is not fun and its quite hard. I think this is why it is important to demystify the process a bit. Here are three “steps” I have seen in many people’s journeys:

STEP 1 – A Crisis?: For many, there is a crisis or major life event.  This can be a health issue, a loss of a loved one, a job loss or even a positive event like getting married, having a baby or moving to a new city.

For me, dealing with a health crisis in my late twenties and taking several months leave from work forced me to come face to face the fact that I was too deeply tied to my identity as a “successful” worker.

Yet these crises rarely lead directly to a dramatic leap despite our belief in that narrative. A crisis often shatters our beliefs and then gradually as we start to pick up the pieces, the possibility of change appears as a result of profound conversations, books or other life events that linger in the brain until the person is ready to start taking action.

For Lydia Lee, she found herself literally and figuratively burned out in a Russian hotel room, but did not start to imagine a different way of life until she had a profound conversation on a boat visiting her home country of Malaysia with a German who was running a business remotely.  This piqued her interest and planted the seeds for her to start to think about her work and life in a new way.  When she returned to Canada, she re-visited Tim Ferriss’ 4-Hour Work Week with new eyes and started to apply some of the lessons to how she might work with more freedom.

STEP 2 – Friends: The next thing that seems to matter is that you need at least one or two friends that will support the new way of being.  This appears to help people get “permission” to move forward and have someone to confide in when they are uncomfortable or find themselves a bit lost. These people are typically friends or family that have lived life in an “unusual” way and see some value in experimenting or compromising on short term success.

Candace Moore, who now is an author and yoga entrepreneur, she has support and inspiration from her mother, who was always a natural entrepreneur starting businesses in her home and adapting to her circumstances. Tony Triumph didn’t realize his family was any different until later in life, but reflected that he grew up around people that were always working in different ways to make a living.

One thing I have my coaching clients do is find someone online they can have a “path perspective” conversation with. Whatever you feel pulled towards, there is probably doing something like that already. I have them send a short note asking for advice and see if they’d be willing to offer 15-30 minutes of their time to share insights on what to avoid, what to think about and how to be prepared. People are often surprised at how willing people are to help others that want to follow in their footsteps.

STEP 3 – ASPIRE: Finally, the person needs to have a long-term vision of who they want to become.

People often arrive at this point after first questioning something they have taken for granted, like how they think about “success” and have it be a gateway to a deeper contemplation of who they really might want to be.

Then it comes down to actually shifting energy towards those new possibilities. As much as life hacks and “how-to” guides would want us to believe that change is a straight line and can be planned, the philosopher Agnes Callard gives us a different model. She believes that when we aspire to be a different person, we often have a hard time explaining our motives.

This is often the case in people I talk to. They may not have a clear vision of a future self, but they are open to experimenting in new ways. Callard might say that these people have a vague sense of “something better” in the future but have trouble articulating it. Instead, transformation is a process of “trying on values”

we “aspire” to self-transformation by trying on the values that we hope one day to possess

This is also why from the outside it is so hard to differentiate the money-driven entrepreneur from the self-employed person trying to hack a life. The people I know who are most fulfilled carving a different path are also the ones that have no idea how to explain what they are doing to anyone.

But deep down, they have a pull towards a journey or a life that tells they, “yes this is the right way.”

The “Work Sucks” Perspective Is Still Valuable

A close friend e-mailed me Thompson’s article and said “this is me.” He probably sent it to me because we’ve talked countless times over the past few years about this persons predicament. We walso talked about his unwillingness to do anything about it.

Thompson has added tremendous depth to the discussion around work. He has been ahead of the curve in questioning why we are working so much despite becoming so much more productive in his amazing essay A World Without Work. 

However, I’d love to see the Atlantic, Buzzfeed, New York Times and others do a better job of highlighting the stories of amazing people globally already starting the hard work of reinventing themselves and looking beyond the traditional path that works remarkably well for some, but leaves many hoping for a deeper connection to life.

Want to take action? Paul is launching Reimagine Work a digital online learning x coaching x experiment that will deliver activities, community and connection to people that want to carve a new path. Explore now.

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 Beyond Work Sucks: What To Actually Do If You Are Miserable appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

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

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

Topics Discussed:

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

Recommended Reading

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

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

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

#1 Make A Friend Taking A Different Path

People who take a leap often cite a strong influence that gave them proof or the courage that they could do something different. For some, this person is in their own family — a parent or grandparent who lived and worked on their own terms — often an entrepreneur. 

It can also be someone you meet serendipitously. On my podcast, I talked to Lydia Lee, who had a meaningful conversation with someone who was living and working nomadically in Malaysia. It told her that this kind of life was possible, but more importantly, told her that her circumstance in the corporate world was not the only path.

This “friend” can also turn into a partner. Some people find that they want someone else to join them on this journey. This is often the case in entrepreneurial ventures where someone is starting a business. Having a co-founder not only makes your path seem less crazy, it can also be more fun as you learn and grow.

#2 Redefine Money

Everyone who pursues self-employment has to face their emotional relationship with money at some point. 

A paycheck from full-time employment is a rather peculiar arrangement if you frame it in the entire history of humans. In self-employment, you shift away from this arrangement and instead of getting paid a steady income for performing the duties of an employee (showing up, being available, doing good work) you will be getting paid for work you find, things you sell or projects you complete.

There is often an “a-ha” moment when people start a journey of self-employment that has them suddenly look at their expenses instead of their income. People realize any spending means more paid work needs to be done. People will often start taking active steps to lower their cost of living or if they aren’t willing to compromise a certain lifestyle, look for more ways to make money or charge more for their current work. 

The self-employment fear setting exercise I created can help you grapple with some of your money insecurities by explicitly stating the least amount of money you are comfortable making and how long without paid work you are willing to go. This reflection may even tell you that you don’t actually want to make the leap.

#3 Build A “Say No” / “Eff You” Fund

Build up some cash savings. This can build on #2 — you may find that you can dramatically cut your cost of living for several months to build some savings. Having savings for your leap enables you to “pay yourself” when you want to say no to a project that might drain your energy or even take a few months off to work on a creative project that is calling you.

Mohit Satyanand built his own fun by aggressively saving early in his career:

I chose to be different very early. Within a year of joining the ranks of management trainees at a multi-national corporation, I realised that I was not meant to be a corporation man, that I needed to live in nature, to watch the peaches grow. In my spare time, I drew up business plans to run a dairy farm, or drive a tourist taxi. Most importantly, I realised I needed to build up a war-chest from which to fund my freedom. My F*** You Fund, I called it.

Even if you don’t have massive savings, dealing with a dwindling savings account can be a way to stare face to face with your fears and to bet on yourself. Despite my savings, I went through a several month period early in my journey where I didn’t earn any money. I felt terrible, but it also helped me realize how much pressure we put on ourselves to fit into a standard narrative of success.

It might even be helpful to look at your journey as a sort of Master’s education in life. Even if the leap doesn’t work out, many people find that the experience helps them deal with uncertainty, gain confidence in their work and in many cases if people decide to return to work, return in a better and higher-paying role with a bit more wisdom.

#4 Teach Others

We all have so much knowledge than many would die to know. What about your path or journey in life is different? How can you teach that to other people? I recommend creating a list of 25 things you might be able to teach people. This can be as simple as a new way to fold shirts or as complicated as theoretical physics.

One way to put this into action is to write about something you know. An article could be “Here are 5 Things You Should Know About X.” Writing it will have the dual impact of forcing you to learn it at a deeper level and put something out in the world that people might respond to. You may find that others are hungry for the insights you have to offer which gives you a clue to keep following that path.

Another option is to post on social media or e-mail your connections and give them a list of five things you are passionate about sharing with others. I suggest posting something like this:

Hello friends!

I’m doing a fun course online where I’m pushing myself outside of my comfort zone and experimenting with new ways of working. I’m doing a challenge this week where I need your help. I am looking for someone that wants to learn. Here are a few things I know about that I would love to teach you more.

1. XXX

2. XXX

3. XXX

4. XXX

All I ask is that you give me $25 for the “lesson” — this is to keep us both accountable and to raise the stakes on myself so I don’t disappoint you. If I do disappoint you, its $30 back to you so you can enjoy a free coffee on my dime.

Who wants to learn something? Message me

I suggest charging to help you stay accountable and it will help you with #5.

#5 Experiment & Get Paid

You need to have some evidence (for yourself and your confidence) that you can literally go through the process of getting paid for something outside of full-time employment. 

One easy idea that most people can do is to host a topic-related dinner around a certain theme and gather 8–10 people for high-quality food and conversation. People crave these kinds of intimate gatherings and are more than happy to pay $15–20 (or even more depending on the food).

We often underestimate our own networks and the people that may want to work with us. Many people feel bad hitting up their connections and asking them for help with their work, but find that these are exactly the people that want to support them. Plus, people could be waiting to be helped by you but didn’t know there were people in their network that could help.

Here is an example of an e-mail I sent to 100 friends and family that led to two clients hiring me. It was terrifying accepting payment from clients, but it gave me the confidence to experiment further. While still employed I got paid for two speaking gigs, a group coaching event and by several private coaching clients. These were all small fees but gave me confidence that I could make money on my own.

Don’t worry too much about the pay. A pro-bono engagement can be just as rewarding. I did multiple pro-bono coaching and consulting engagements before taking my leap, but treated them as serious commitments. I asked the same of my clients and that they offered generous feedback during and after the experience.

People underestimate the opportunities that are available to them. We are trained to think that we need to find a job before we can start doing something. However, if you are truly passionate about something and willing to offer it for low or no-fee, people are usually more than enthusiastic to be part of your learning journey. For example, if you want to start freelance consulting, you could send this message to an organization you admire:

Hello, I’m a big fan of your organization and have enjoyed how you have focused on X over the last year.

I’m currently in the process of making the transition to freelance consulting and am looking for a couple of initial clients to work with. I wanted to see if you’d be open to a low-fee or pro-bono project where I help you work on Y.

Given this is a path I’m incredibly excited about, I’ll be taking this very seriously. All I ask is that you are generous with feedback and be very direct in helping me determine if companies would be open to paying for this type of work.

Most companies would jump for the chance to work with someone with such initiative and desire to learn.

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 Five Things You Need Before You Quit Your Job appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

Lydia Lee was a self-described “multi-potentialite” growing up and loves to experiment and play games growing up.  You can probably draw a straight line from her hosting television shows for the stuffed animals in her room to her current YouTube channel Screw The Cubicle TV.  However, life is never that simple.

In University Lydia was drawn to many different things but did not know anyone who was taking a different path so she kept exploring within the context of the corporate world.  To deal with her underlying curiosity, she kept moving to different jobs: “two years was the maximum that I could last.”

Burning Out In Moscow

Lydia was working 60 hours a week, “thinking about work the whole time” and had not taken a vacation in five years.  The stress caught up to her in Moscow when she was traveling on a work trip.  It was burnout.  It presented itself not only as a feeling that something was “off” (she said that had been there for years) but as something that was physical.  She had a panic attack and a feeling of “agoraphobia” and not wanting to leave her hotel room.  She also reflects now and believes that burnout is often a deeper call for more creative expression.  She said: “part of the burnout for me was that I was a creative person.”

Meeting That First Friend

Many of us can grasp conceptually that different options are available to us, but it does not become real until we connect with another person who has done it.  This happened to Lydia during a two-month vacation to her home country in Malaysia.  While on a boat, she struck up a conversation a man from Germany who was running a business remotely.  This piqued her interest and planted the seeds for her to start to think about her work and life in a new way.  When she returned to Canada, she re-visited Tim Ferriss’ 4-Hour Work Week with new eyes and started to apply some of the lessons to how she might work with more freedom.

A Journey Of Learning & Experiments

A question I often get from people who want to leave the corporate world is “how do I get a job doing x?”  Lydia and I talk about how this is often the wrong framing.  Creating your own job is more about a series of experiments and evolution of where your creative energy takes you.  Even this language can be a bit uncomfortable for people to grasp.  We live in a world that operates around getting “access” to a job, not creating it.

Lydia now lives in Bali building a business she is passionate about.  Was that the plan?  No.  Often with many entrepreneurs, the first thing they do is not what they end up sticking with.  The shift from full-time work to a different world often comes with a deeper shift about what is possible.

Lydia was running her first business and blogging on the side about her journey when someone reached out about coaching them on helping him carve his own path.  Freeling a bit hesitant about her coaching skills, she decided to create her own “internship” if you will so she could get the experience.  She decided she would reach out to her network and ask eight people to commit to eight weeks with her.  She offered the coaching for free and in the process created a priceless 64-hour coaching training for herself which enabled her to understand who she liked working with, what she still needed to learn and help her figure out if she wanted to do more of it.

What About The Pineapples?

If you go to Lydia’s site, you will see purple pineapples. Like this one:

I asked her about this and she said that a client she worked with described her as a pineapple: someone direct and firm on the outside, but inside really cares about the people she works with.  She likes working with people that are comfortable being challenged and has had such success with her clients because of this approach!

Connect With Lydia

• Screw The Cubicle
• Bali Retreat: April 2019

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 Screw The Cubicle With A Side Of Pineapple (Lydia Lee) appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

Ervin Ling followed the default path as an actuary, passing test after test. After passing all the tests, he found himself working harder than he was ever working. As he stared at the television and saw his friends on TV during a weekend trip to the Final Four, he realized he didn’t want to keep doing this. He declared (after a few drinks, nonetheless) to his friends, “If UConn wins the national championship, I’m going to quit my job.”

As any good number-driven actuary would, he didn’t quit his job immediately. He took about 18 months to plot his escape from the corporate world. During this time, he re-thought his relationship with money, his possessions and his relationships with friends and family.  He ended up traveling around the world for 12 months.  Here are some stats from his trip:

• Total USD spent: $24,740
• Total days on the road: 338
• Total countries visited: 38 (including the USA)
• Most days in a single country: 30 (Vietnam)
• Total number of miles traveled: 68,307 (109,925 km) – equivalent to circling the earth 2.7 times
• Air Travel: 51,044 mi (82,143 km)

After this trip, he still felt a pull towards living abroad and now lives and teaches English in Taiwan. This journey has helped him discover and invest a life he could be proud of.

Check out Erv’s site, which includes travel hacking tips, travel suggestions in Taiwan and pictures of food from around the world => ErvTravels.com

This podcast was filmed and we had a great spread of local Taiwanese food:

You can watch the full video version of the podcast here:

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

The post Ervin Ling On Escaping The Corporate World At 30 To Travel The World appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

As I started my career, I began my own sort of philosophical and liberal arts education.  But given my limited background, I had to lay the groundwork to get to some of the deeper questions and mental models that helped me eventually take a leap to carve my own path beyond the corporate world.

I often see people suggesting deep philosophical books that question the meaning of life but realize given my own past mental models, that this approach doesn’t make sense for many people.

It is easy to dismiss books such as Dale Carnegie’s “How To Win Friends And Influence People” or David Schwartz’s “The Magic Of Thinking Big” but to someone indoctrinated in business, those may be the most reasonable books to start with.  Alas, it was these kind of books that made me hungry to go deeper.

What follows are ten types of books that you can use as a roadmap to dream of a life beyond the corporate world.  I’ve offered a “starting point” for each category which is probably the most accessible of the options:

1. Thinking About What Matters
2. Building “Human Skills” In The Workplace
3. Know Thyself…In The Business World
4. Questioning The Modern State Of The Business World
5. Finding Some Hope In The Business World
6. Mindfulness & New Emotional Mental Models
7. Carving New Paths & Wandering Into The Unknown
8. New Models For Seeing The World
9. Grappling With The Role OF Work In Our Lives
10. Going Deep – The Hard Questions

I. Thinking About What Matters

Start Here  Tuesday’s With Morrie (Mitch Albom)

Helped me to think about life from the perspective of the end of one’s life. In this story, Morrie has lived a full life and has deep relationships as evidenced by the number of people who are constantly visiting him.

So many people walk around with a meaningless life. They seem half-asleep, even when they’re busy doing things they think are important. This is because they’re chasing the wrong things. The way you get meaning into your life is to devote yourself to loving others, devote yourself to your community around you, and devote yourself to creating something that gives you purpose and meaning.

Last Lecture (Randy Pausch)

Randy Pausch is a dying professor who decides to devote his energy into a literal last lecture.  What transpires is a talk focused on never ignoring your inner child and a story that will likely deeply resonate with many.

Survival In Auschwitz (Primo Levi)

This book is a deep contemplation into what is means to live and survive in the darkest of places.

Sooner or later in life everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealizable, but there are few who pause to consider the antithesis: that perfect unhappiness is equally unattainable. The obstacles preventing the realization of both these extreme states are of the same nature: they derive from our human condition which is opposed to everything infinite.

II. Building “Human Skills” In The Workplace

Start Here  How To Win Friends And Influence People (Dale Carnegie)

I know, I know!  Cliche.  So What? The simplicity of the book makes it powerful.  It doesn’t need the latest and greatest psychology studies.  It just offers principles about how to treat people and is a reminder that the norms and assumptions about behavior in the modern business world lead people astray.  For example, if you want to change someone’s mind, focus more on getting that person to like you instead of attacking them with facts and to focus on simple things like listening:

Talk to someone about themselves and they’ll listen for hours.

Influence (Robert Cialdini)

This book was a bit mind-blowing, making me realize we are more susceptible to influence than we realize.  Cialdini has written extensively about how things such as social proof, reciprocity, commitment, authority, liking and scarcity drive our behavior.  Becoming aware of our behavioral biases will help you identify the decisions you really want to make as opposed to the ones you are just falling into

The Art Of Learning (Joshua Waitzkin)

This book is terrific. Waitzkin walks through how he became a chess champion at age 8 and brought Gary Kasparov to a draw at 11 years old. After quitting chess, he applied the same approach to Taiwanese push hands and became world champion. He introduces the concepts of “beginner’s mind” as well as his own framing of “numbers to leave numbers” which is a great way to show that to go fast, you first need to go slow.

III. Know Thyself…In The Business World

Start Here  How Will You Measure Your Life (Clayton Christensen)

This book is a fascinating perspective on how to define success from within the corporate world.  Christensen made me gain hope about leading with principles in the corporate world, positioning “management” as a way to have a positive impact on other people:

“If you want to help people, be a manager”

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking (Susan Cain)

I thought I had a good understanding of introversion and extroversion until I read this book. This book also made me realize I was a lot more introverted than I realized. This is where I first heard of the term “ambivert” and realized I am energized by a mix of alone time and activity with others. I was fascinated by the history of how extroversion became such an ideal in modern society and the mistakes that can lead us to make.

Mastery (Robert Greene)

Mastery is an incredible book for anyone with a creative bone in their body.  Greene talks about the different phases one must undertake if they want to become a master at their craft or develop a wide range of skills.  He helps people understand the hard decisions that need to be made, such as leaving a teacher (see: manager, leader) once you have learned enough so that you can go out on your own.

IV. Questioning The Modern State Of The Business World

Start Here The Halo Effect . . . and the Eight Other Business Delusions That Deceive Managers (Phil Rosenzweig)

A clear and convincing case that most explanation of who is “successful” and a failure in the business world is highly subject to market dynamics and the firms that happen to have the most profitable business model of the time.  This book will make you highly skeptical of modern business “research” and stories praising or criticizing leaders.

Shareholder Value Myth (Lynn Stout)

This book is a must-read for anyone who has a suspicion that there may be other and better ways to measure success in the world than money and especially, “shareholder value.”  This book helps show that our current state of affairs is a recent innovation.

Reinventing Organizations (Fredrik Laloux)

This book highlights organizations that are typically led by truly transformational leaders that have questioned the status quo and built organizations (sometimes very large ones) that start with deep trust in people and their ability to solve problems.  This book shows that self-organization can work and that it is likely the only path forward if we want to build a better business world.

Skin In The Game (Nassim Taleb)

Taleb looks at the concept of “skin in the game” in terms of people, employees, and organizations.  His perspective on the modern state of the employee/employer relationship:

So employees exist because they have significant skin in the game –and the risk is shared with them, enough risk for it to be a deterrent and a penalty for acts of undependability, such as failing to show up on time. You are buying dependability.

He argues that the modern employee is no longer a “company man” but rather a “companies man”:

A companies person is someone who feels that he has something huge to lose if he loses his employ-ability

V. Finding Some Hope In The Business World

A big part of my career in the business world was an obsession with trying to understand first why organizations seemed to drive so much stress and anxiety in people and then second, what we could do about it if anything.  This led me to discover a number of books that not only helped me discover new ideas for business, organizations, and leadership but also develop my own perspective on what’s happening in the modern workplace.

Start Here Drive (Dan Pink)

Pink’s introduction of the concepts of autonomy, mastery, and purpose through research and company examples is a great way to discover self-determination theory, which is a foundational theory of what motivates people.  If you look at modern organizations through the lens of motivation, you would assume that everyone had lost their mind.

Work Rules! (Laszlo Bock)

The key takeaway from this book was the fact that many things you can do to improve the employee experience are free.  Too many organizations think that transformation comes at a major cost.  But as Bock shows in many examples in his experience at Chief People Officer, the hardest things to do are to trust people and give them freedom to make mistakes.

VI. Mindfulness & New Emotional Mental Models

Start Here The Heart Aroused (David Whyte)

I wish I read this book at the beginning of my business life, but I wonder if it would have been too soon.  Whyte speaks poetically about the experience of the business world in a way that well, arouses your heart. Whyte’s summary of the book:

(it) will look at the link between soul and belonging, creativity and failure, success and stasis, efficiency and malaise at work, but it sets as its benchmark not the fiscal success of the work or the corporation (though this certainly can be good for the soul) but the journey and experience of the human spirit and its repressed but unflagging desire to find a home in the world.

Nothing Special (Charlotte Joko Beck)

This was the first book I read about Zen Buddhism and mindfulness. The story is a conversation between Beck and her students and will resonate with anyone who is curious about mindfulness, meditation, and spirituality.

VII. Embracing The “Pathless Path”

Start Here: My Book! The Pathless Path (Paul Millerd)

My book, The Pathless Path, was published five years after quitting my job and carving my own path. It’s sold over 25k+ copies with minimal marketing so people seem to like it. It’s not a how-to guide but an inspirational account of my journey combined with “recipes” on how to embrace an unconventional path.

Anything You Want: 40 Lessons For a New Kind Of Entrepreneur (Derek Sivers)

Sivers build a company selling CDs of independent artists in the early internet era.  He ignored most of the advice about how to build a company.  He also ignored the advice on how to write a book.  This short book shows that “best practice” doesn’t always lead to happiness.

Field Guide To Getting Lost (Rebecca Solnit)

Rebecca Solnit puts words to the journey of “getting lost” and wandering into the unknown. If this quote resonates with you, you are ready for this book:

That thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you is usually what you need to find, and finding it is a matter of getting lost.

Linchpin (Seth Godin)

Godin has been a self-employed solopreneur and freelancer for decades.  He helps people re-frame their thinking away from needing to be “chosen” for a job towards a world where the world depends on you expressing your creativity and daring to “make a ruckus.”

Designing Your Life (Burnett & Evans)

This book by two Stanford professors was designed to help undergraduate students figure out what they want to do with their lives.  Based on design thinking, they have a number of useful question prompts and exercises that push you to expand the number of ideas and options you can come up with, rather than picking from default options.  If you want to imagine new possibilities, this is the book for you.

Crossing The Unknown Sea (David Whyte)

Whyte is my favorite writer and this book is a beautiful reflection of his own journey from naturalist to non-profit worker to poet. He talks about the inner game of doing the thing which is scary (people thought he was crazy to quit his day-job) and living full out.

The Good Life & Sustaining Life (Andrew Taggart)

A practical philosophical reflection on what it means to live the “good life” in the modern world and the many approaches one might take to sustain such a life.

There may be no greater vexation in our time than the question of how to make a living in a way that accords with leading a good life. Yet if nearly every thinking person has faced this vexation at one time or another and doubtless throughout most of his adult life, virtually no one has ventured to think it through in a well-considered, systematic fashion.

VIII. New Models For Seeing The World

Start Here A Lesson On Worldly Wisdom (Charlie Munger)

This fantastic graduation speech from Munger highlights the need for many different “mental models” for seeing the world and how to move between them.  Worth reading in full.

The Righteous Mind, Why Good People Disagree On Politics & Religion (Jonathan Haidt)

This book made me rethink how people arrive at their beliefs.  Haidt shows that morality is something that is highly influenced by your environment and biology.  This book made me much more understanding of a wider range of ideas beyond politics and religion.

Wanting (Luke Burgis)

The self-employed path is filled with hustle traps and the most powerful one is “mimetic desire.” Luke walks through his own personal journey of awakening and helps steer people toward finding their “thick desires” – things they can sustain over the long term.

Sacred Economics (Charles Eisenstein)

A bold re-imagination of our world to one based on generosity, connection, and embrace of the environment.  This book is a beautiful mix of technical economic analysis with a spiritual questioning of the status quo:

I think ultimately what is happening is that our deep ideologies and belief systems, and their unconscious shadows, generate a matrix of synchronicities that looks very much like a conspiracy. It is in fact a conspiracy with no conspirators. Everyone is a puppet, but there are no puppet-masters.

IX. Grappling With The Role Of Work In Our Lives

Start Here Bullshit Jobs (David Graeber)

Graeber looks at the modern workplace through his definition of a “bullshit job” which is when employees define their job as pointless and without meaning.  He looks at the history of work and shows that our current relationship with employment, time and money was not always the way it was and challenges readers to think beyond the status quo.

Rest (Alex Pang)

Pang’s incredible book on rest covers sabbaticals, unplanned breaks, naps, and sleep while challenging our modern understanding and definition of things like time, leisure, idleness and rest.  He boldly challIf your work is your self, when you cease to work, you cease to exist,” shares counterintuitive results from people who worked 2-5 hours a day and shows the benefits of not following the conventional wisdom that more = better.

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

Reclaiming Work (Andre Gorz)

Gorz argues that “real work is no longer what we do when at work” and that a lot of what we are doing in the workplace is performing a social ritual we have decided is necessary to “earn a living.”  This book imagines a world “beyond the wage-based society.”

The Normal Chaos Of Love (Beck & Beck-Gernsheim)

While this book is very much about love and relationship, it also frames those relationships and our modern ideal of a family in contrast to the workplace.  The authors (a married couple) argue that the modern reality of having everyone be workers is great for the workplace and freedom, but creates chaos and complexity at home – complexity that we have yet to fully grapple with:

Everybody – including parts of the women’s movement – has the right to expect that offers once made to men should now be extended to women, and assert that women are as useful as members of the job world as men are. They should however realize that this road does not lead to a happy world of co-operative equals but to separateness and diverging interests.

Leisure: The Basis Of Culture (Josep Pieper)

In the late 1940s, Pieper wrote of a crisis of “overwork” and a disconnect from the classical sense of leisure.  He wrote that we “mistake leisure for idleness, and work for creativity” and was skeptical of Max Weber’s assertion that “One does not only work in order to live, but one lives for the sake of one’s work.”  In today’s world, “leisure” often just means a break from work.  Pieper argued instead that leisure was:

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

X. Going Deep – The Hard Questions

Start Here: Not a book, but perhaps better than a book? Brain Pickings is perhaps the best source for wisdom on the web.  A voracious reader and learner, Maria Popova pulls the most powerful parts of great writers in history on topics such as love, creativity, art, poetry, philosophy, life and work into compelling synthesized posts.  Start with one post and you’ll end up opening up a ton of tabs in no time.

• Recommended posts: 10 lessons from 10 years of BrainPickings, Ursula K. Le Guin on Busyness, Reclaiming Our Human Dignity in a Culture of Workaholism, or David Whyte on Work/Life Balance

The Great Work Of Your Life (Stephen Cope)

Stephen Cope’s The Great Work of Your Life is a spiritual guide to finding your life’s purpose. The book uses the ancient text of the Bhagavad Gita to frame stories of famous people who have followed their dharma, including Tubman, Whiteman, Frost, Keats, and Susan B. Anthony.

Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance (Robert Pirsig)

This book has been around since the 1970s and its central argument still rings true (perhaps more so?) that in our continued acceleration towards the future, we are losing touch with a deeper, spiritual side of ourselves.  Pirsig contemplates what got us to this point:

The range of human knowledge today is so great that We’re all specialists. And the distance between specialization has become so great that anyone who seeks to wander freely among them almost has to forgo closeness with the people around him.

At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails (Sarah Bakewell)

What does it mean to be free?  How should one act in accordance with that belief.  Bakewell tackles these tough questions through the lens of the existentialist philosophers that emerged in the early and mid 1900’s featuring the philosophies of Kierkegaard, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Heidegger and more.

The Wisdom Of Insecurity (Alan Watts)

Watts contemplates our desire to continue to put life into neat little boxes:

The more one studies attempted solutions to problems in politics and economics, in art, philosophy,and religion, the more one has the impression of extremely gifted people wearing out their ingenuity at the impossible and futile task of trying to get the water of life into neat and permanent packages.

and on following the default path:

To keep up this “standard” most of us are willing to put up with lives that consist largely in doing jobs that are a bore, earning the means to seek relief from the tedium by intervals of hectic and expensive pleasure. These intervals are supposed to be the real living, the real purpose served by the necessary evil of work. Or we imagine that the justification of such work is the rearing of a family to go on doing the same kind of thing, in order to rear another family . . . and so ad infinitum.

Meditations (Marcus Aurelius)

While it was written over 2,000 years ago, we get a peek into the Empreror of Rome’s private journal and his meditations on life:

When you arise in the morning think of what a privilege it is to be alive, to think, to enjoy, to love …

and

Leisure lives on affirmation. It is not the same as the absence of activity; it is not the same thing as quiet, or even as an inner quiet. It is rather like the stillness in the conversation of lovers, which is fed by their oneness.

Essays (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

Emerson’s collection of essays are a great read and accessible for being written in the 1800’s.  Emerson on self-reliance:

There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. (Self-Reliance)

Nature:

The incommunicable trees begin to persuade us to live with them, and quit our life of solemn trifles.

…and Education:

The book, the college, the school of art, the institution of any kind, stop with some past utterance of genius. This is good, say they,—let us hold by this. They pin me down. They look backward and not forward. But genius always looks forward. The eyes of man are set in his forehead, not in his hindhead

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 35+ Books Recommendations To Help You Quit Your Job appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

• Identity: We define ourselves as workers, as someone that “doesn’t quit,” as someone that works hard
• Relationships: We are scared that people will not accept us if we step into an unknown path and don’t have answers for where we are headed
• Belonging: We don’t feel part of anything except our company or work community
• Biological: We mistake comfort for safety and try to avoid the feeling of discomfort
• Inertia: It is easier to do what we did yesterday than to imagine a different possibility
• Emotional Pressure: We want to please the people we work with and our broader network
• Financial Realities: We literally will run out of money if we don’t work for a month
• Future potential money Fears: We cannot overcome the feeling that we will always need “more” and spend a lot of time imagining the worst case scenario (“what if I get sick?” etc…)
• Time-based economic pressure: “If I stay only six more months I’ll get my next bonus”
• Meaning: We find a lot of meaning at work and are not sure what could replace it

What else would you add?

The post The list of reasons we are scared to quit our jobs appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

Jacqueline Jensen has been a digital nomad for 3.5 years, living and working globally.  It might surprise you to find out then, that she’s written a book called “Travel Isn’t The Answer.”  While counterintuitive, she argues for a return to awe and wonder with what is already around us.  She talks about different moments of wonder she has experienced (including a breathtaking view in Montenegro) and different techniques for how people can “Live With a Sense of Curiosity, Passion, and Awe Anywhere and Everywhere” (the subtitle of the book).

Listen: Itunes • Google • Overcast • Spotify

Last year, in a planned sabbatical she came face-to-face with the fact that work was the center of her world.  While she almost “quit” the sabbatical, she pushed herself to redefine her day and time to claim back some of herself from a sole focus on work.   She provides many actionable tips and perspectives that can help people question the role of work in their lives, take steps to increase the amount of awe in their lives and connect with people that matter to them.

More About Jacqueline:

• TedX Talk
• Twitter: @JackieMJensen & LinkedIn: Jacqueline Jensen
• Book: Travel Isn’t The Answer (Amazon)

Recommendation on getting outside of your comfort zone:

• Check out local music: sofarsounds.com
• Go to an art museum
• Travel-as-a-service recommendations discussed: Hacker Paradise, Recess Labs, Roam, Outsite
• App for re-aligning your day: Today

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 Jacqueline Jensen on sabbaticals, rethinking work and building a “calm company” appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.