This October, I will have 5 years of Remote Work experience. For the past 4, I have been sharing the journey with my liveaboard colleague and wife – Maria. We both work for Automattic – a 1000+ employee company that prides itself on making the Distributed work work.

I pursued the remote setup in order to get more life out of my years. I was fed up with sacrificing surfing lessons to sitting at the office and commuting instead of traveling the world.

If you want the same, my #1 advice is to be really careful where you attach your identity, especially if your transition is an abrupt one. With Google, Facebook, Amazon, and an impressive list of large companies extending their “emergency remote setup” well into 2021, a lot of us will get to try Remote Work.

If you want to guide your life and structure of your days more deliberately, you cannot just replace the office with another thing (say home or nomad lifestyle). Being deliberate means that there is no “plug&play package” waiting for you to open. Freedom means choice, but it also means you have to make a choice.

Salarymen

Working in an office of a larger company is a surprisingly uniform experience. You would expect it to differ quite a bit across cultures, but I have my doubts. If you haven’t already, I highly recommend checking out Patrick McKenzie’s adventures in doing business in Japan

The salaryman/employer relationship is best characterized as “You swear yourself to us, body and soul, and in return we will isolate you from all risks.”

– Doing Business in Japan

In the west, we like to make fun of total devotion that Japanese workers have for their careers, but are we really that different? In some countries, we fear for our jobs, because that dictates our health insurance or the ability to pay the next loan installment. In others – any “gap” in your employment history is suspicious, so people keep working long hours for 50 years, with only the prospects of retirement to keep them going.

That isn’t to say there are no benefits – we have ample perks in the office: chef, gym, laundry service, sleeping pods… the perks – especially in the tech companies – seem ridiculous. 

The company hereby promises the employee: Your company will provide structure and purpose for your life. You will be clothed in the company colors, literally and figuratively. You will be respected, inside and outside the company, as befits an employee of ours. You will be provided with benefits perfectly calibrated to allow you and your family to lead a middle-class Japanese life. Your children will go to as good schools as they test into. Your wife will be able to afford an annual trip to Hawaii with her girlfriends. – Doing Business in Japan

The Japanese are just like everyone else, only more so. and working in any larger company is Salarymandomlight. The company dictates where you get to live, what time you get to spend with your family and where should you spend more than half of your waking hours. In exchange, you get a comfortable middle-class life, assigned playmates (aka colleagues), and some purpose.

Fast forward to 2020.

You already know what happens. The global Remote Work experiment gets reluctantly launched and many of us lose their perks and their identities. No more private chef, gym, and an office to go to. 

You are not an Office Worker (Salaryman) anymore. Without the office, who are you?

Identity 1: Worker-From-Home

The default occupational mode of 2020 is working from home. This is a pretty sweet deal and the lists of benefits have been widely circulated:

• No commute
• You get to eat lunch with your partner, get that Amazon package, 
• You get to spend more time with your kids

The above list has been repeated almost as often as the downsides in countless “contrarian” articles from the mainstream media:

• New communication modes take some getting used to (usually phrased as “this doesn’t work”)
• Work-life balance getting out of hand, trouble focusing after being stuck at home the whole quarter
• You get to spend more time with your kids

All these challenges can be managed by taking breaks from working from home. Even while maintaining social distancing, there are other options that will give you a much-needed break – a workation, coffee shop, or a restaurant. If you are not a worker-from-home, you can be a person that works from home occasionally.

Identity 2: Digital Nomad

I will be honest – the prospect of traveling the world while working from exotic places was what prompted me to seek remote employment in the first place. My wife and I got to swim with Turtles in Mexico, seals in Cape Town and spotted sharks in Thailand. We got engaged in British Columbia and spent the honeymoon in a Japanese Onsen. Thanks to remote work, we have been at least a month in each of those places, taking our sweet time soaking in the local culture.

Everyone who gets to know us perceives us to be digital nomads, but we have an apartment in Warsaw (Poland) that we love. The perspective of traveling with our lives’ belongings sounds quite scary and uncomfortable, and we quite enjoy the change of pace once in a while. Home is much sweeter after a month on the road and the travel is more exciting after some downtime. But it seems like many people expect an all-or-nothing answer.

Identity 3: Entrepreneur

With the publication of 4 Hour Workweek, Tim Ferris coined the term “Lifestyle Design”. The idea is simple: you design the lifestyle you want and build a “lifestyle business” to fit around it:

• You set your working hours (down to title 4hr/week)
• Work smart instead of working hard
• Outsource whatever you can, so you can live the life you want

I walked this line and it’s a tough balancing act because the identity of an entrepreneur is more about business growth than a comfortable life. I fell into the hustle trap:

1. Become an entrepreneur to live the life you want
2. Make sacrifices in order to get good at it
3. Now you are good at it, do more of that because this is what you do
4. Congratulations, you are a slave of your business.

Entrepreneur mindset appeals to me so much, that I consider myself an Intrapreneur in my organization. I found that entrepreneur identity for me is a ticket straight to 90 hr workweeks and the boundaries of salaried job description keep me from trying to do everything.

But I’m me. Why do I need a ‘worker’ Identity?

Bravo! Good News: You don’t. Bad news: the world wants you to he one, so it takes deliberate effort to keep your identity small, navigating between different, “established”, and “legible” modes.

The pull of new identity is also seductive – especially if you are becoming good (or even great) at something. It’s a powerful force that can help you, but also trap you in a mode of operation way longer than it serves you.

It’s like “Salaryman Lite”, “Worker-From-Home”, “Digital Nomad” and “Entrepreneur“ have a certain mass. The more you identify as X, the more gravity it produces. The more gravity it produces, the more effort it is to escape the identities’ pull.

If you want to cherry-pick different flavors of life, you will have to steer the spaceship you to skim the atmosphere (or even land for a short while) in both of those planets and all the configurations in between – coworking spot, renting an office with a friend, coffee shops, museums, libraries, parks, you name it.

Despite the shorter commute, I don’t particularly enjoy working from home and have rented a co-working office prior to the pandemic. Truth be told, I’d rather be with my team in one building, exchanging jokes over coffee or goofing around in meetings.

The biggest benefit of Remote Work is that by uncoupling the physical location of your colleagues and you – it permits infinite configurations. Remote Work lets you structure your work around your life, and not the other way around.  You can keep exploring and sampling the lifestyles and identities that tempt you because work seizes to be your main lens and limiting factor.

• ✅ I can work with world-class colleagues without leaving my family and moving to the Bay Area.
• ✅ I can spend time in exotic places without sacrificing my career opportunities
• ✅ I can visit my grandpa for lunch across town without asking for permission or really telling anyone
• ✅ I can enjoy a very flexible schedule while working in a big company and enjoying the safety of a salary

Counter-intuitively, newfound freedom is scary and people often deal with it by running straight into the gravitational pull of one of the identities I mentioned. If you can avoid that, the possibilities are well, boundless

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 Spaceship You: How To Understand Who You Are as a Remote Worker appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

For many, working remotely is unsettling. They start questioning their relationship with work, worry about how to continue to “perform” work without the established in-person norms and often find themselves completely unmotivated to get started without the ritual of commuting to an office.

For many people who are self-employed, freelance or who work in companies who know how to work remotely they know the “secret” of remote work – namely that it unlocks an enormous amount of freedom and responsibility in terms of how you manage your time.

I wanted to share some tips that if you share them or tell your boss you’re following them, will make even the most secure managers get a bit nervous. However, I can attest that in my experience working remotely in big companies for several years and on my own for the past three years, it is more than possible to work less, improve your life and still do good work.

The following are all things I’ve embraced or others have shared and I’ve tested out in my own routine. Outside of other independent workers, people rarely talk about these practices because there is such a stigma and a certain amount of shame attached with the admission that you work less.

15 Tips You Should NOT Share With Your Boss

#1 Reclaim your morning: Try to get out of your morning meetings or zoom “stand-ups” as the cool tech-folk are calling them and spend your time as you wish until 10am. No more dread of getting to work and an un-nameable emptiness ruining your morning. If you are looking to inject more joy, check out Craig Kulyk’s suggestions for your morning routine, or what he calls the “morning effect”

#2 Cancel Meetings: The worst way to move to remote work is to replace all your in-person meetings with zoom meetings.

Many meetings are performative or holding spaces for live thinking. All of the best remote companies (and companies like Amazon) have realized this and have people spend more time writing out their thinking than sitting in a room sharing half-baked thoughts.

To help change the norm, change your own behavior. Before a meeting, write-up your comprehensive thoughts on the topic and send them to your teammates a day before in writing. Ask for feedback and if the team should consider using that approach for the next meeting. Over time, your team will realize that if people think on their own time, you can shift an hour long meeting to a 10 minute group slack chat.

Worst, case just don’t show up to the meetings or decline the invite. At a previous company I used this technique and my colleagues assumed I was “swamped.”

#3 Keep Zoom Fun: If you must meet, make sure that you embrace the principles of online communication. These include pre-reads before the meeting, using meetings for decision making and keeping things fun and high-energy. A good rule of thumb is to keep zoom meetings to less than 5 people and to not spend more then 1-2 hours a day in zoom meetings.

If you must use zoom, have a little fun with it.

#4 Cap your workday at 5-6 hours: Once you’ve eliminated those meetings, you’ll probably find that since you are not confined to an office, you can probably get your work done in less time. Shift your mindset to a 5-6 workday (secretly of course, don’t want to excite your boss too much).

#5 Nudge your colleagues and boss to asynchronous communication: Tell your team that since you are experimenting with working from home anyway you “want to try to organize your time to be even MORE productive!” Don’t tell them the details, but just suggest that maybe you experiment for 1-2 weeks without expecting to respond immediately to texts, e-mails and phone calls so you can focus on deeper, more focused work. If you have a manager who thinks their job is running a instant command response center with 24/7 e-mails and texts, its probably time to look for a new job.

#6 Adjust your expectations of motivation: While some people find they are more productive at home, I find more find the opposite. I tell people to subtract two points from the question “how motivated are you to do this?” because of the lack of in-person emotional pressure and the ritual of being in an office.

Vega Factor has some good resources about that here and why these things probably aren’t great if you want to like your job. With this lower level of motivation, trying to get rid of things you don’t want to do and creating your own work is more important than ever.

#7 Experiment with a bimodal workday: One thing I like doing is working a couple hours when I wake up and then later from 4-7pm. Other times I work in the morning and a couple hours at night. Once you’ve gotten a little more freedom in your work, working at different hours give you back a little more energy to your day.

#8 Move : With the extra free time you’ve unlocked you don’t need to rush to “fit in” a workout before or after work. Do it during the day and experiment with different times throughout the day. I enjoy getting out and about from 2-4pm every day since it’s usually when its the warmest and I don’t have much creative energy anyway.

#9 Coordinate non-work with partner or kids: My wife and I have been working flexibly with non-set schedules for our entire relationship. One thing we try to do is pick times to spend together whether it is going for a bike ride during the day, meeting up for meals (pre-quarantine), or spending time together. I always try to put these things ahead of my work and then fit in work around them.

#10 Experiment with time-blocking and time-tracking: I don’t use them regularly, but sometimes it helps to block off a couple hours on my calendar to work on a project. Another tool I like is the Toggl chrome extension, which helps you quickly track what you are working on and set 25 minute “pomodoros” to help you focus. Focusmate is another useful tool you might consider to do a working session with someone on the internet.

#11 Invite your kids, spouse and pets to the video conference: Let’s stop pretending we’re productivity machines and not humans. It’s okay to be you. I once wore a Snuggie to the office. Come as you are.

#12 Ask yourself uncomfortable questions: Since being self-employed, I’ve had to grapple with the uncomfortable realization that before working on my own, most of my decisions were made around work. Where I lived, when I ate, who I hung out with and when I got to see family. The question Andrew Taggart offers is “if you’re not a worker, who are you?” (see below).

#13 Schedule a “freedom hour” to do things you really want to do: So many people I talk to have creative projects they want to work on or a secret passion (“I want to write but I don’t have the time”). Schedule a “freedom hour” on your calendar – make it private or call it something like “update TPS reports.”

#14 Write online: I’ve been writing publicly on the web since 2014. I was scared because I was still employed but then I realized no one even noticed. It’s been the most important thing in helping me make friends, learn and find ways of making money outside of a job. Most people don’t do it because they get frustrated by the nonsense on the web. That’s the point. We need more people with self-doubt writing, not just the people that have complete faith in themselves.

#15 Push the limits: Challenge yourself to get your work done in only four hours. Try to spend an entire day not doing any work and see how it feels. Do you really have that much work? Are you uncomfortable if you don’t have something to do? See what arises and don’t push those thoughts away

I’ve been writing quite a while about putting our lives first ahead of work. Abandoning the idea that one needs to “earn” a living and accept that we are already living. Use this opportunity to work remotely to sit down and imagine how you’d want to spend your days but just be aware you may have a hard time going back to the office…

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 best advice on working remotely your boss doesn’t want you to see appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

Remote work is poorly understood and for good reason. What most people have experienced is merely being “allowed” to work remotely on occasion, having to stay home with someone sick in the family, logging in while traveling or waiting for the cable guy to install internet.

While I am a fan of remote working I am not sure that most companies realize that experimenting with remote work until the end of the covid-19 crisis is a free strategy option. I’ll detail more of what I mean at the end, but first its worth helping you reframe how you think about remote work.

Over the last ten years many “remote-first” companies have been rethinking how work should get done and have discovered that to truly thrive as a distributed, remote organization there is an inevitable learning curve that one must progress.

Matt Mullenweg has been one of the biggest proponents of this way of working and is the CEO of Automattic, which employs more than 1,000 people “in 75 countries speaking 93 different language.”

In a podcast with Sam Harris he outlined his “five levels of remote work” which I thought was the best explanation of some of the subtle differences of remote work I’ve head.

Remote Work 101

Most people are familiar with the experience of level 1 or level 2 remote work. During the covid-19 crisis many employees are finding themselves in a “copy the office” experience of remote work still being available during the same hours they would in an office.

Level 1 – Emergency

Working from home is not easy, but possible. If you have to.

• Basics: Have internet, cell phone, some way to access email
• Work if possible: Usually can put things off until back in office because that’s how most people work
• Mindset: “we don’t know what employees are doing” therefore you want to minimize the ability for people to work remotely or flexibly as much as possible

Level 2 – Copy The Office

In level two, companies have better tools and access to working remotely, but it is still mostly for people who have an excuse. In this scenario, the company is still designed to operate around an in-person dynamic and people who are working remotely are expected to follow similar hours and procedures as everyone else. At this level if someone starts working remotely full-time it is often with the understanding that the person will be harming their long-term career prospects.

• Language: outdated terms like “telecommute”
• Requirements: Need to be able to access things from the office
• Default mode: synchronous; Copying “office hours” 8am-5pm; factory model for knowledge work
• Pitfalls: More tracking, screenshots of screens
• Challenges for workers: removing some freedom & agency, may end up being even less productive

Transition

The Covid-19 crisis forced many companies to adopt remote work quickly.

While many companies are “level-three ready” they have not spent much time operating in a truly remote fashion. However, the last three years saw many companies adopt a new stack of tools such as slack, teams, gsuite, zoom, and other live collaboration tools that have made it much easier to work remotely and in new ways.

Despite this, most companies that decide to start working remotely will do an awkward dance between levels 2 and 3, using new tools but making them morph into the office-first company culture.

Level 3 – Virtual Tools

In this phase people start adjusting to working remotely for more than a couple days. They typically upgrade their equipment, create a space at home for working, have a basic familiarity with the video and collaboration apps, but still mostly work in similar ways as if they are in the office.

This is copy the office with a bit more experimentation:

• Technology: Share screens quickly (desktop & mobile). People start to invest in better equipment: microphones, lighting, screens, ergonomics
• Unlocked modes: Collaborative work via video calls; live note taking for shared understanding
• New Skills: Companies start to realize that writing is vital. They start investing and recruiting for written communication – clarity, quality & skill becomes more and more valuable

This transition stage also surfaces a lot of challenges. People who are used to working in the “old way” reject many of the new approaches and declare remote working a failure. They may push for abandoning the experiment because its easier than than feeling uncomfortable.

Teams also find that doing things the “old way” just doesn’t work. The more capable teams start working in new ways, rethinking meeting, using video when appropriate and defaulting to longform over quick IMs.

Real Remote Work

Once companies get use to working remotely and the kinks are worked out they can start shifting to unleashing the power of remote work.

This is when things start getting interesting. As Amir Salihefendic, CEO of Doist, has said:

“Remote first isn’t the same as remote friendly or ability to work from home. Remote first is a whole new way to organize companies.

Level 4 – “Asynch”

This means new ways of decision making, communicating, developing trust, leadership, and recruiting and to do this with 4,000 people during an economic crisis carries a certain amount of risk. However, I think the alternative is more certain and caps any possibility. This is why I think going-remote will remain a “free strategy move” for the coming months.

This is why people are so excited about remote work. If companies are going to stay at level 3 there is not a ton of value in long-term remote working other than flexibility.

• Realization: You can’t track when people work so you shift to judging on what they produce. This makes people assess meetings and realize that “most meetings are terrible.” Eliminate many status updates meetings.
• Requirements: Need to develop capacity for handoffs, especially between time zones. Quality of handoffs should be valued over speed.
• Unlocked: Can start hiring & operating globally and do work at all hours
• Challenges: Use of writing and multiple time zones makes decision making harder and longer, but often results in better decisions.
• Space for New Types Of Workers: Introverted and non-neuroptypical types become more valuable for remote companies and they can hire great people that in-office companies don’t value. space for introverts, people that like space for thinking

Letting People Design Their Lives

The real magic of remote work is when you can start working asynchronously and give more autonomy to workers to let them decide when to work and how to operate within their teams. This takes a tremendous amount of trust but often creates a better relationship with work for not only junior level employees, but the senior level employees as well.

Level 5 – Nirvana

This is more of a “true north” than day-to-day reality, but Mullenwieg sees this as one of the great things about working remotely – its ability to unlock more freedom for employees

• Employees can design day around health, wellness, well-being. Able to operate around peak creativity, daycare, parenting, health, gym etc..
• Challenges: People often struggle with unlimited freedom and often end up overworking
• Goals: Striving for an “idea meritocracy,” where best ideas, projects and contributions are elevated throughout the company

As Gumroad’s Sahil Lavingia has discovered in his own company:

People build their work around their life, not the other way around. This is especially great for new parents, but everyone benefits from being able to structure their days to maximize their happiness and productivity.

Developing A Capacity For Remote Work Is The Greatest Strategic Advantage

Right now there is a huge opportunity for forward-looking companies. Because most companies are struggling, making bold bets doesn’t carry the potential downsides it might in regular times.

Going remote is a strong strategic play because it removes the guaranteed uncertainty of navigating the ever-changing guidelines and information on “returning to work.” Companies have two options:

• Option A: Follow everyone else and have guaranteed uncertainty of “returning to work”
• Option B: Go remote, remove the guaranteed uncertainty of “returning to work” and build a capability that will enable you to attract new talent and build a gap between you and your competitors. This move is inherently uncertain, but in the positive direction.

We’ve been operating companies for the past ten years as if the internet does not exist. 

In the last five years the tools we have are more than good enough and there are no good excuses for using remote work to build more agile and adaptive capacity within your organization. Business leaders are often worried about their own careers and getting fired if things go wrong. Right now, that may happen anyway, and going remote in the next six months is a lot more fun from a business challenge standpoint than navigating the guaranteed uncertainty of this pandemic.

If six months down the road, it looks like it won’t work with your company? You can get back in the same boat with everyone else.

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 Matt Mullenweg’s & Automattic’s Five Levels Of Remote Work appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

Two years ago I moved to Asia and “default to remote” went from a nice idea to the only option to continue to with my consulting business. In addition, it gave me useful constraints that forced me to think more deeply about how to build a lasting life and work by creating and working digitally.

Over that time, I’ve worked in many different ways with Zoom as the central tool I’ve used. This includes:

• Four multi-week cohorts for my online courses, Reinvent and Think Like A Strategy Consultant with anywhere from 5 to 25 people
• 1-on-1 Coaching
• Over 150+ Curiosity Conversations
• 1-on-1 Consulting & Presentation Coaching
• Running my podcast, Reimagine Work, via virtual interviews

So what follows is a working list of some of what I’ve learned. I’m going to assume that you are using Zoom, though many of the principles and options are very similar in other tools such as Skype, Slack & Whereby. 

But first, welcome to what I see as the inevitable future of work — a future that is built on being remote and distributed and gives people more space to live and design their life.

None of this is easy, but I find that many people have a hard time “going back” once they’ve adapted to working online. Best of luck as you embrace this shift towards virtual collaboration and send me any additional tips you might have.

Nail The Basics – Four Tips Before You Dive In

#1 Get Used To Video Being On

I’ve worked with many people that refuse to use video even when most other people are using it. I get it, you don’t look your best or you don’t want to look at yourself on the screen.

However, having your video on focuses your attention and keeps you from surfing the web or checking your e-mail (a little bit at least!)

Research from UCLA has shown that while not as good as an in-person, video communication is better than audio and text communication for “affiliation cues” a predictor of bonding.

This study was done in 2013 when failed video calls were probably more the norm than the exception. I would not be surprised if video chat creeps closer and closer to in-person connection over the next decade.

Another finding from the same study was that “those who used video chat more frequently reported greater bonding with friends through video chat,” meaning that the more you get used to video communication, the better it will be.

#2 Practice troubleshooting

No matter how many video calls you’ve been on, at some point your speaker and microphone will decide to take the day off. The key in this situation is to have a couple backup options ready and to know where to look to fix the problem. 

When I launch a zoom meeting, I always go to the sound options and select my external microphone and external headphones. This is the setup I prefer as at minimizes background noise and delivers a high-quality sound to the other person.

Don’t forget to check your keyboard or sound options in the tray to see if you’ve muted your own microphone or speakers. Many people often forget the simplest option. 

Finally, if nothing works, consider the always handy restart to let the computer sort itself out.

#3 Consider Upgrading Your Equipment

Having a good video camera and microphone can dramatically improve the experience of a conversation for the other participants. Being able to clearly hear you and see you will help others stay engaged in the event. 

If your computer doesn’t have a nice video camera, you might want to consider buying a simple external camera. Here are my recommendations:

• Cheap and good: Logitech C310 (about $35)
• More expensive and even better: Logitech C922 (about $100)

In terms of microphones, there are a lot of good options, including the standard Apple wired earpods. I personally use a more expensive microphone because I also use it for podcasting. Here are some recommendations from my own use and friends:

• Airpods or Earpods
• Jabra Evolve 40 single ear or double ear options ($70 or $100)
• Audio Technica 2100x USB microphone ($100) — my podcast mic

If you are using wired earphones: Here is a tip if you are using wired earphones — sometimes the microphone rubs against your clothes as you move. It’s a good idea to ask someone on the call how you sound to confirm you don’t have a constant “ruffling” sound when you talk.

#4 Better Eye Contact

Until engineers design computers with a camera at the center of the monitor, video conversations will continue with everyone looking slightly below their cameras.

Two quick hacks I’ve used to improve my eye contact with the camera is to hide my own self-view and to position the people towards the top of the screen (works best in a smaller conversation)

Putting my zoom app towards the top of my screen

Removing self view

No more distracting self!

[susbtack]

10 Lessons I’ve Learned Facilitating Groups For Online Courses

These tips apply for groups of 5–20 people. For larger groups, you probably want to put more emphasis on staying on time and coming up with a process for screening questions and involving guests in the session but a lot of these principles still apply.

#1 You are closer to an entertainer than professor

We often try to map our offline experience into the online world and this is a mistake, especially for online learning. 

The online learning facilitator is more entertainer than professor. I agree with David Perell, who is building a promising school helping people learn to write, share and create online:

The line between learning and entertainment will blur. Learning demands emotion and energy. The best professors will be inspiring, entertaining, and personality-driven. They’ll establish emotional connections with students, at scale.

We need less professor who turns their back away from the crowd

and more street performer:

You are someone that cultivates curiosity, enabling people to be on the edge of their seat wondering “how does that happen?” and “what comes next?” rather than worrying about what you need to know for the test.

#2 Level up your energy level slightly beyond what is comfortable

As the facilitator, people are looking at you to set the tone for engagement and energy. While you don’t want to be screaming at the group, you do want to be 100% focused and bringing some energy to the call.

One practice I’ve found helpful in making me more aware of my energy level is to practice delivering a speech in front of a mirror and increasing my energy and volume well beyond what would be appropriate for a small audience. This helps desensitize you to energy increases that might be more acceptable, but useful when doing things like facilitating online Zoom sessions. 

Tip: Ask a member of the group before a session to observe your energy levels throughout the session and to provide feedback afterward on what you could do to improve.

#3 Outline a clear agenda & set expectations

At the beginning of each session, I give the group an outline of what they should expect and how long each session will take. 

It may not seem vital, but sticking to the times you propose (or asking the group for permission to be flexible on the time) is important for maintaining trust with the group.

Before the sessions, I write down the takeaway I want the students to have for each section. This is a simple intention and often the insights raised by the group are unexpected and even better than I could have designed.

Throughout the session, I take notes on the key points made in each session so I can help summarize towards the end of the session and use them in a recap e-mail I send afterward. 

I’ve found that 15–20 minutes is a good amount of time for a “block” right amount of time to introduce a section, have some space for discussion and then to wrap it up and move on to something else.

In addition to setting the agenda, is setting expectations and norms of the discussion. I typically offer the following guidelines:

• Aim to stick to a maximum of 2–3 minutes for individual reflections and expect to be cut off if we need to stay on time with the agenda
• If you have any concerns or issues, send them in a direct message
• If you have something simple to add, don’t be afraid to message it to the whole group

#4 If you use slides, use engaging images and big text

I typically use slides and share my screen, but shy away from using the densely packed slides with 10 point font that I saw all the time in my past as a consultant.

I’ve written quite deeply about persuasion & presentation principles, including details like font and background colors, but for video calls I keep it pretty simple. I stick to simple messages, large font, and images that tend to make people smile, inject playfulness or make people think.

#5 Assign lectures, readings, reflections to do before the call

Don’t use a virtual session to deliver a lecture. If you have a lecture you want to deliver, record it ahead of time and having people review it before the session. 

This is the cadence I use for my online courses:

Before the session:

• Watch & review lectures (typically 30–90 minutes of video content)
• Read any pre-reading
• Complete mini-exercises (if applicable)
• Consider 2–3 reflection questions prior to the call

During the session:

• Group working session on the exercises & assignments
• Create space for shared reflections & takeaways from the readings & lectures

For optimal engagement, you want to have as many people as possible who are doing the pre-reading. If you are running a free or open event, the percentage of people who are “prepared” will be low, but think about ways to identify the people who can contribute most to the conversation.

One other option for Zoom calls is to co-watch something together. Zoom works quite well for sharing full screen videos, especially on Youtube. When you click share you have the option at the bottom to optimize it for full-screen video.

I try to limit clips and other media to 90 seconds or less. If you have something longer, ask them to watch it before the session.

#6 Show progress throughout the call

As I progress through the call I use the agenda slide and highlight where we are in terms of time and section of the overall call:

#7 Manage the conversation

Managing the overall flow of the conversation is more art than science and takes a while to get used to. The larger the group, the stricter you want to be in the time you give people to speak.

A couple things that work:

• Speaking time suggestions: Give people a guideline length to think about their contributions (“keep your comments to 2-3 minutes, if possible)
• Set expectations: If you tell people you will cut people off at the beginning of the call, it can be less harsh when you do it later.
• Cold Calling: Everyone hated cold calling in school, but it works. Even if you only cold call once or twice, it will give people the incentive to pay attention. Use the first cold call of each session on someone you know who is prepared and ready to contribute.
  Remember: Don’t go out of your way trying to embarrass people who are not paying attention and give them the right to “pass.”
• Sending A Message To The Group: Give the audience a heads up that you’ll be moving to the next section of the call (“in five minutes we will move to breakout rooms”)

Managing group calls on video is often a trade-off between giving people space to share and staying on track with the outlined agenda. If you feel something emerging also be ready to acknowledge that and pivot the focus of the conversation.

Another thing I like to do at the end of calls if people have not spoken is to say something like “hey, __________, I noticed you haven’t shared, do you have anything to add? feel free to pass of course.”

#8 Facilitate 1-on-1 interactions between the group during and outside of the call

If you are facilitating a session you may take for granted that you have an individual relationship with each of the participants. However if you really want to increase the engagement level for the whole group you need to facilitate 1-on-1 interactions between the group. 

When running online courses, the sessions always get better the more sessions we have because the participants get to know each other. 

While people may connect naturally outside of the call, one powerful tool is Zoom’s “breakout rooms” feature which I think will begin to take off as more people know about it.

This is a great way to enable 1-on-1 conversations and can also be used for smaller breakout discussions that don’t make sense in a large 10+ person group. They typically work best when you have a prompt question for people to answer and discuss.

#9 Get your hands dirty & use a virtual whiteboard

I use Zoom’s tools to collaborate with the group and have found a lot of success using a “virtual whiteboard” approach. I create simple frameworks which can be used to fill in responses from the group and use Zoom’s annotate options which are available when you are sharing your screen:

In my consulting skills course and consulting work, I use screen sharing while I actively make changes to the PowerPoint or material we are working on, which helps people feel engaged in the process. Often I’ll also give up control to the participants so they can share their own solutions or lead some of the problem solving.

#10 Recap at the end & follow-up

At the end of the call I always try to summarize what I heard on the call, spend 2–3 minutes to share the next steps and to leave space for questions, comments and open discussion. 

I often block off my calendar and make sure that I don’t have anything after the virtual calls. Often people want to hang out a bit longer or want to connect in a smaller group. I try to keep the virtual room open for those connections to happen.

Finally, I copy the meeting comments and summarize the contents of the call in a follow-up email within one day. I often include things like book recommendations and/or contact information if it is relevant.

It Is Still Early For The Future of Learning So Don’t Be Afraid To Step Up and Teach

I’m excited for the future of learning. 

As hundreds of thousands of students (and possibly more) across the world are shifting from in-classroom to virtual learning, there will undoubtedly be many innovations and experiments that go well beyond what I’ve offered here. 

While a lot of the technology exists for people to teach their friends or broader audiences, most people do not take advantage of such opportunities.

We assume we need a credential before we can do something.

You don’t need to open a University, you just need to find one person that’s curious about what you want to teach and share. I started teaching strategy consulting skills to my colleagues while I was still working and then to students at my alma mater. I taught hundreds of people before it evolved into something people were telling me to charge for.

In my Reinvent course, there is an “action challenge.” This is a one-week challenge where you try to take action on engaging with the world through the web. Some people take the opportunity to launch a podcast or start a website or blog. Others take the opportunity to teach.

One of my students of a past cohort wanted to learn more about cooking so he decided that he would host a “cooking show” on Faecbook Live in seven days. Because of the pressure he put on himself, he panicked and spent the next six days actually learning the recipes and secrets from his grandmother.

You can also think about just engaging with people 1-on-1. A good friend wanted to explore coaching and put up a post on facebook saying they were going to host complimentary coaching sessions with the intent of it being a “learning internship” to figure out what she wanted to do next. That learning internship grew into her main focus and business that has helped to sustain her life.

Don’t put pressure on yourself to be perfect. I’m still learning a lot with everything I do online, but what keeps me going is the people I meet and the connections that emerge.

Since people have been told to work at home because of the pandemic, I’ve seen many people throwing up a zoom link and inviting people to join them to discuss meditation, a book, a virtual happy hour or even just to hang out.

Whether you like it or not a lot of our future is going online. The quicker you are willing to start sharing what you’re excited about and giving people a space to come join, the faster you will find the like minded weirdos that will help give meaning to your life.

The guide and tips I’ve offered are in no way complete, but I hope they inspire people to take the chance to teach & share what brings them alive.

See you online!

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 Virtual Spaces: How To Teach & Engage With Virtual Communities appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

Apple PodcastsGoogle PodcastsSpotifyOvercastStitcherRSSAnchorCastroTuneInYouTube

Laurel and I decided to jump on a video call to talk about the world emerging work-from-home experiment amid the evolving Covid-19 pandemic. We wanted to talk about some of the deeper principles & opportunities that remote work offers and talk about how companies might think about it in the next month and over the next few years. We talk about:

• The short-term mindset companies should take in the next few weeks (hint: don’t overdo the tools right now)
• What the broader opportunity is for remote work over the next 10 years
• The role of trust in remote work and what happens when it breaks down
• How to think about meetings and how to design your day and re-think productivity
• Examples of companies who have been innovating in this space for 10+ years
• Experience from Laurel’s 10+ years as a remote team leader

Links Mentioned:

• Evernote guide to communication
• Github guide to communication & meetings

Find Laurel Here:

• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Distribute Consulting

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 Laurel Farrer on The Global WFH Experiment & The Long-Term Promise Of Remote Work appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

I’ve also been writing about the potential of remote work to enable people to design their lives in ways that help them raise families, improve their mental health and live in places with reasonable rent and cost of living. I’ve recently helped Holloway write a primer for understanding culture within the context of remote work that should be a good in-depth guide for companies exploring remote work once its released and also have interviewed multiple people leading remote companies on my podcast.

While I assumed that the embrace of remote work would be slow, it appears that the sudden emergence of Covid-19 and its impact on travel and work has thrown companies into reactive mode, embracing remote work right now without any preparation. 

What follows are some of the best tips and resources I’ve found to help your company think about getting the most out of your remote work experience even if it is only necessary in the short-term while also helping you prepare for the inevitable shift towards a remote-first working world over the next decade.

Most companies are not prepared for remote work. Here are five tips for getting started

If the outbreak of Covid-19 has forced your company to quickly embrace remote work for an indefinite time, your company will likely suffer a short-term productivity drop. Despite the fact that many companies use e-mail, messaging, and work across global offices, most still default to the norms of in-person offices.

In-person norms mean that most problems are withheld until they can be addressed in person. This means walking over to someone’s desk or convening a quick meeting in a conference room. Even for teams that are distributed, many know that decisions rarely get made on big initiatives or projects until the team convenes in person. 

Despite these hurdles. There are many lessons companies can quickly learn from other companies that have been paving the path ahead of them.

Tip #1: Default to Video (Ideally Zoom!)

While uncomfortable for many at first, many find that defaulting to video for all meetings can be a powerful way to connect with others. Instead of browsing the web while on a conference call, the in-person interaction can help people work more efficiently while getting some of the benefits of working together in-person.

Your company likely has embraced a tool such as Skype or even another clunky enterprise solution. It’s probably not all that great and most people opt not to use it. If possible, signup for a free Zoom account and just use that (if it works with your company system). It’s just the best tool out there and the one trusted by remote workers across the globe. 

Use video to try and work in different ways. Experiment with co-working on shared documents, screen sharing and other ways to use the technology. For example, Zapier does digital dance parties to inject some energy into people working remotely across the globe. 

Tip #2 Commit to at least a “two-week experiment” and have people document their experiences as they go

I talked with Wade Foster, who’s company Zapier has been remote-first since inception. He’s had many other founders and companies reach out to him for tips on how to shift to working remotely. The advice he always gives people is to pick a team and 100% commit to working remotely across the entire team (no exceptions):

Pick a team, one that is well suited to remote and have everyone work from home for one week or two weeks. It has to be long enough that you can build habits, structure and processes around a new way of working

Reimagine Work Podcast Episode: Wade Foster On Running A Remote Company and Digital Dance Parties

Since you may not have had any choice in choosing to work remotely, the important part of the two week experiment is noticing some of the challenges and roadblocks that people face to getting work done. Have every member of your team keep a remote journal and jot down instances where they hit a roadblock or needed guidance on what to do. Your team can use this to develop a more robust handbook and solutions to improve how you work remotely and in-person in the future.

Tip #3: Consider blocking out time for “deep work” or consider experimenting with “asynch” chat tools

One of the dangers of working remotely has to do with the technologies that many companies adopt. Companies have rapidly embraced tools like Slack or Teams and have defaulted to responding whenever they get a message. This can be a disaster when going fully-remote as any semblance of work quickly gets overcome but non-stop chatting and messaging.

I interviewed Amir Salihefendić, who’s company Doist shifted to asynchronous communication after people struggled with overwhelm from non-stop Slack messages.

“We were using slack at the beginning, but we could see huge amounts of issues…that didn’t resemble how we wanted to work.”

Reimagine Work Podcast Episode: Amir Salihefendić (CEO, Doist) on building a great remote team

Running a software firm, they decided to build their own technology to help the firm orient around communicating in a more thoughtful manner. 

“you can design software to promote different interactions. the chat apps are designed for these quick one-liners. We designed Twist to promote more thoughtful interactions”

By defaulting to asynchronous communication and setting up norms like only expecting a response within four hours or even a day, remote work can be a powerful way for many employees to re-claim the deeper work and more thoughtful interactions that may have been lost in the open-office non-stop distraction offices you may be leaving behind.

One way employees can approach this is to proactively block out their own schedules and communicate to their team that they’d like to work on certain things at certain times.

Shifting to remote as a default can help employees reclaim their time and dictate what they want to work on and when. 

Suggested Resources:

• Basecamp’s guide to internal communication
• Twist: The ultimate guide to time blocking

Tip #4: Give more freedom and trust to your people than you’re comfortable with

If you are the kind of manager that likes to micromanage every detail of your employee’s work or likes to know where people are at all times, remote work is going to be a struggle. One option is to force all employees to constantly check-in or share constant updates. It might make you sleep better at night, but it might also land you in the news like Away did a couple months ago.

Shifting from in-person work to remote-first can feel awkward at first and leads many to be more suspicious of others. This can kick-off a vicious cycle.

Many companies adopt meta-norms of defaulting to trust and using your best judgement in alignment with company values. To many managers that are used to micromanaging every detail of their employee’s work, this can be challenging to adopt. Yet many quickly find that without giving up some freedom and control to others, remote work becomes an endless stream of distracting digital communication without getting any actual work done.

As Wade Zapier said about his mindset with his employees in our podcast conversation:

“We trust you. We think you’re smart, we think you’re talented, we want you to come work here. We’re going to treat you like an adult. Just come do good work, thats all we ask.”

Tip #5: Start writing down the unwritten rules & processes to help you gain a deeper understanding of how your company works

If you ask people at a large company to explain how their company works, many struggle to explain the process. 

It just works.

When companies first experiment with remote work, they find that employees sit around waiting for responses from e-mails or chats to figure out what to do. Instead of self-directed work, people are more confused than before.

Work can grind to a standstill.

Most remote companies who have committed to a fully-remote culture have found that they need to be very explicit about not only their policies and procedures but their norms. They also realize that good writing can go a long way in helping people understand how the company operates and often spend hours fine-tuning the communication of company values and norms.

Many in-person companies pass this type of knowledge on in tribal knowledge or through long-tenured elders that can share stories about how one should behave within the company. In a remote company, you can have informal calls with people throughout the company, but most employees are going to want more direction.

One of the best things you can do during a short-term remote work experiment is to have senior leaders or other influential people within the company synthesizing some of the norms and values that are not as clear as people thought before the experiment. They can create documents and solicit feedback from people throughout the company. This can also double as an exercises in gaining a better understanding of the current culture and identifying areas that need more clarification or leadership to take the team or company in a new direction.

Additional Resources From Leading Remote Companies & Practicioners

Many companies have been experimenting with best practices of remote work for several years. Many also share their learnings publicly. You can save a lot of time by learning from their mistakes. Here are some guides I recommend:

• Gitlab’s Guide to Remote Work: “GitLab is the world’s largest all-remote company with team members located in more than 65 countries around the world.”
• Twist Remote Work Guides: Twist is an asynchronous chat tool for remote teams by Doist and has written a number of guides on working remotely
• Zapier’s Ultimate Guide To Remote Work: Available online or even in Kindle form for offline reading
• Basecamp has published a lot of writing about remote work including the book Remote:Office Not Required by its founders and its company handbook, which they share publicly.

Research & Other Resources

• Buffer publishes an annual survey The State of Remote Work that always has interesting findings on the evolving state of the new work arrangement

Podcasts

• Outside the Valley by Jovian Gautama
• Distributed Podcast by Matt Mullenweg, founder of Automattic

Tools

• Focusmate – find a virtual coworking partner to keep accountable
• Zoom – My favorite video conferencing too (my referral link if you’d like)
• Toggl Time Tracking – big fan of this tool for easy time tracking

Writing

• Yonder is a blog and podcast by Jeff Robbins and Mindi Rosser
• The Honest Guide To Remote Work by Steph Smith

Consultants

• Laurel Farrer runs a remote work consultancy called Distribute Consulting, and has been helping many companies “go remote” for several years now.

Have additional resources or suggestions? E-mail me and I’ll add it.

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 Going Remote? Here are five tips from companies who are already fully remote appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

Apple PodcastsGoogle PodcastsSpotifyOvercastStitcherRSSAnchorCastroTuneInYouTube

Why is talking about money so hard? Diania puts it bluntly:

When were talking about money, were talking about what we value

This conversation covers Diana’s journey over the past several years reinventing her path and learning about new modes of living life. She shifted from someone who graduated college assuming she “would be the highest paid CEO in the world” to someone who wanted more ownership over her time, creativity and money.

Asking for time off from work

A few years ago she had just finished another year at work and was likely going to get a big raise. However, she didn’t actually want more money.

She wanted more time.

She decided to go into her manager’s office and ask instead for two months off so that she could walk the Camino de Santiago, a famous walking pilgrimage in Spain.

On the first day of that trip she had a profound experience of being able to help others in a powerful way that was the start of a shift of how she wanted to orient herself in the world.

Launching the EconoMe conference

Experiments with the FIRE movement, minimalism and seeing how resourceful she could be in her life taught her a lot and led her to want to create a space where people could build bonds and share their experiences for a “new American dream”

She was a brave early tester of my Reinvent course in summer 2018 and prototyped the origin story for the conference, which will happen March 7th, 2020 in Cincinnati, Ohio:

I love what Diania is doing so I am sponsoring one free ticket to the EconoMe conference. All I require is that you share this podcast via twitter or another social app. Use the hashtag #reimaginework and I’ll shoot you a message if you win!

The conference will explore “The American Dream” which Diania believes originated as an ideal where “every person has the right to pursue his or her own idea of happiness.”

EconoMe is a one day conference about reclaiming this right!

Join them.

Links Mentioned:

• Mr. Money Mustache
• Econome conference
• All the Money in the World

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 Diania Merriam on Imagining The New American Dream appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

Apple PodcastsGoogle PodcastsSpotifyOvercastStitcherRSSAnchorCastroTuneInYouTube

Amir Salihefendić is the Founder and CEO of Doist, a fully distributed, remote company that creates productivity tools (Todoist & Twist). We dive into his story of moving from Bosnia to Denmark as a child and how he started Doist while in college.  He’s built a growing technology company in a fully remote setting, often experimenting with different ways of working and sharing the thinking behind the decisions as he goes on the doist blog as a major supporter of the remote work movement

The Remote Doist Team

Doist has published one of the best guides to remote work and its existence is making people question established business assumptions such as needing to be present in an office, needing to limit the amount of vacation people take and keeping people’s personal lives disconnected from a work identity. There mindset is focused on the long-term:

We’re running a marathon, not a sprint. That’s why we value ambition and balance. We believe that good health comes first – both as a sustainable business and as individuals with rewarding lives outside of work.

He reminded me of a great word from Denmark, Hygge, which a friend taught me years ago that I’ve yet to find a good equivalent of. He says this has also definitely helped influence the culture he’s built at Doist. Here is the definition:

a pleasant and highly valued everyday experience of safety, equality, personal wholeness and a spontaneous social flow

Links:

• Amir on Twitter
• Balance & Ambition blog
• Todoist and Twist
• Twist guide to remote working

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 Amir Salihefendić on trust, communication & deep work in building a remote company appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

Dr. Laura Gallaher joins me from Serbia, where she is part of Remote Year, a community that travels to twelve locations within a year with a cohort of people working remotely.  Laura is an organizational psychologist who studied humor and communication in the workplace and notably completed a dissertation with “that’s what she said” in the title (office fans, anyone?).  With a title like that it was probably clear that Academia would be too limiting for her.

We talk a bit about humor and how it can be helpful or destructive in an organization.  She first points out that “aggressive” humor – even if you mean well is rarely a way to strengthen bonds.  We then talk about how leaders can embrace humor, especially to show their vulnerability, and give their teams more freedom to make mistakes, be open and be themselves.

After getting her Ph.D., she worked with NASA after the Columbia explosion and worked on some of the toughest “they fell victim to the same thing that could happen in any organization.”  She notes that these factors are prevalent across many organizations, but the stakes are often not life or death.  Her work with a small tech company found that two key elements can help companies transcend hierarchy.  First, the leader is willing to be vulnerable and second, the leader demonstrates both through words and actions that they care deeply about all the people in the organization.

“We hire people for what they think….what we care about is your ability to learn, your ability to think, your ability to grow…creating an environment where the employees opinion and input has value and you ask for it and you seek it out and you actually listen to it, this is where really, really engaged organizations are born and powerful cultures are created”

Links:

• Check out Laura’s Free 3-Part Culture Course
• Gallaher Edge
• Remote Year

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 Dr. Laura Gallaher on humor at work, leadership at NASA after crisis, and building a business traveling the world appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

Listen Now: Itunes • Stitcher • Google Play • Overcast • Spotify

Damien Peters is a self-described “personal finance nerd” – which explains how he ended up founding WealthNoir.com, a platform to preach and teach about the importance of financial freedom and generational wealth to Black millennial professionals.  He started blogging over ten years ago and has recently focused more on writing as he increases his focus on building Wealth Noir.  Damien is also a big fan of travel and recently made the decision to move out of San Francisco and move with his family and son to Spain, where he will focus on building his company remotely.  We talk about a range of topics including his passion for writing, how he defines success, his influences, how to run a remote company and his relationship with money.

Book Recommendations:

• The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking
• Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big
• Four Hour Work-Week, Tim Ferriss

Personal Finance Influences:

• Afford Anything, Paula Pant
• Bigger Pockets, Real Estate Investing
• Financial Samurai

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 Boundless Podcast – Damien Peters on blogging, wealth, and building a remote business from Spain (Episode 16) appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.