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.

There are plenty of “how-tos” on how to get your podcast into the top ranking of itunes or to have a “successful” launch.  Here I am merely interested in helping the people who have a creative spark they want to explore and want to try out a podcast as a way to learn and to find out what to do next.  Here is what I recommend:

Note: Affiliate Links below (only products I use):

#1 Buy A Microphone: Go with the Audio-Tecnica 2100 (also the one recommended by Tim Ferriss) – buying the microphone first is a great nudge to eliminate a common barrier (“it won’t sound good”) to getting started

• Alternative: You can use the Rode SmartLav+ for iphone recording

Budget option: just use your iPhone or headphone mic. The key is to just get started…

Update: I’ve now gotten fancy and bought the Shure MV7 – this mic rocks if you want to spend around $220

#2 Setup Your Recording Software:  There are many ways to do this.  I currently use Audacity to record solo episodes (easy editing) and Skype + Easy MP3 recorder for digital interviews.  Here are some options:

• Solo Recording: Audacity (PC, Free) or Anchor (Web, Free)
• Multiple-Person PC/Mac Web-Based: Zoom Video Calling – Free for unlimited 1-on-1 calls
• Multiple Person Web-Based Software: Zencastr offers a soup-to-nuts podcasting solution that seems promising (I haven’t tried it yet) or Riverside.FM (which I now use regularly)
• More Advanced PC: Skype (free) + Easy MP3 Recorder (free version) (this is what I used)
• More Advanced Mac: Skype (free) + Ecamm ($39.95) – I have a couple friends that use thi

#3 Record An Episode: Record a short episode explaining why you are starting a podcast.  For me, my first episode was short and recorded the day after I got my microphone answering a simple question: “Why Do I Care About The Future Of Work?”  See my sample episode:

#3b Record an Intro (Optional): I recommend going over to Free Music Archive to grab some audio and using that to record an intro. I recorded a two minute clip showing how I used FMA and audacity to make a simple introduction. I used a similar method for my own podcast intro.

#4 Edit Your Audio: I do some basic audio editing in Audacity (or for mac you can use GarageBand or ProTools.  I typically use the noise reduction tool and clip out any egregious “ums” or slip-ups as well as use the ‘compressor’ tool to keep the audio more consistent.  I keep most of my podcasts unedited and most people who listen don’t ever mention any issues.  The beauty of a podcast is an in-depth unscripted conversation that enables people to talk through the nuance of an issue or go really deep on certain topics.  Don’t worry about perfection at first!

I then use a tool that I loved called Auphonic, which optimizes your audio file for podcasting and audio listening.  If you want to skip the editing, you can get away with just using this!

• Recommended settings: Constant 128k bitrate, mp3 file

#5 Pick A Name: Pick a name and subtitle, but don’t worry too much about sticking to it.  Too many people stress out about committing to a name but don’t worry about changing it down the road.  This is why I recommend a free tool like Canva to create your artwork so you can double down with a new name down the road.

Fun Fact: Tim Ferriss now has one of the biggest podcasts in the world, but originally was going to call it “TimTimTalkTalk”

#6 Create Cover Art In Canva or PowerPoint: Create a 1600 x 1600 image (this is the suggested size for iTunes) using custom dimensions option on Canva and create a basic cover for your podcast.  Canva lets you use different icons and text in a way that helps you create something compelling. For those with advanced business skills, I also recommend creating a large square in PowerPoint and populating the image with your title.

• Tip: Use this free color palette generator to find a mix of different colors that look good together
• Tip: Use “Open Sans” as a font – it looks professional and is a simple option to create something
• Advanced: 99 designs is a reliable service to get great designs and options, but is a bit pricey at $349 for a contest.  You might check out their design tips first (here)

For fun, here is my original podcast artwork created in PowerPoint in less than 15 minutes. I added some text, and shadows to “future of work,” and then used one of the image design options to give my face an artistic touch. I then grouped the image and text and shape and then hit right-click to save as image. I wasn’t 100% blown away by it but felt it was good enough to get started.

#7 Choose & Upload Your Episode To A Hosting Platform:  There are many ways to do this.  I’ve already gone from Soundcloud to Buzzsprout to Pippa and am now thinking about moving to Anchor.  Here is what I recommend:

Free & Easy:

• Anchor is the simplest most straightforward option for launching a podcast and getting it out to all of the podcast distributors (google, spotify, overcast, itunes, etc…). I’ve recently switched from Pippa to Anchor because they are now funded by Spotify, seem to be oriented towards creators and I just rather not pay for hosting if I can get it for free. There are some rumors that “anchor owns your audio” but you can see the post from the CEO here if you are confused.
• Soundcloud is another simple and free way to get started – you can host six episodes for free until you have to pay.  You also have the option of submitting your feed to itunes or just keeping it on Soundcloud while getting some initial feedback. Here is a simple how-to guide.
  

Want more options?

• Pippa is very good, easy to set up, relatively cheap, and is investing a lot in being useful to podcast hosts with analytics and other features. (this is what I used to use)
• Transistor is a platform I recently switched to that I really like, especially if you want to create private podcasts or start to use ads

Depending on the host, they will help you automate the submission process to iTunes and other providers.  If you choose something like Soundcloud, you will need to manually copy the RSS feed that the hosting provider gives you and, you need to sign

#8 Post at least 5-6 episodes, and then give yourself permission to quit:  I call this method, “ship, quit and learn” and I think its important.

I really believe that we need more people putting podcasts out there.  There are no gatekeepers and you have access to 3 billion people with internet access. 

If you can attract 100 people who care about what you do, those are people you can connect with and learn from to evolve your podcast.  However, if you find that you are frustrated by the process and don’t really enjoy creating a podcast, QUIT!  The goal is not to become famous or become a top 100 podcast, but to do experiments such that you can learn something and figure out what to do next.

I decided not to quit because I LOVED the conversations I had and love the learning process of building a new skillset. 

In September 2018, I decided to change the name and images of the podcast to challenge myself in a new direction.  The new subtitle, “the human side of work” as a result of the evolution of conversations I realized I wanted to have as I recorded the first 25+ episodes.

…and then I renamed it again to “Reimagine Work” in 2019 when it seemed like that was more of an emergent theme.

…and then renamed it to The Pathless Path podcast after shipping 100 episides.

Bonus – Free Tools: Here is a running list of other free tools that might be helpful:

• Headliner.app lets you create free videos with transcriptions that you can edit. Very useful for social media formats.

Let me know if you start a podcast!  I’d love to hear about it.  E-Mail Me

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 Anti-Hustle Guide To Starting A Podcast appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

The benefits and upsides of self-employment are priceless and often overlooked

 

When I took the leap to self-employment, it was an act of desperation. I had lost faith in the leaders I saw around me in the business world, felt disconnected from the work I was doing and had started to question whether I would be able to stay true to my leadership principles that I felt were slipping.

What I found in my journey of self-employment has been a shocking amount of upside and unexpected benefits. If you follow the #futureofwork conversation in the media, you read mostly about people being exploited and underpaid, people without benefits and financial insecurity.

These are major issues that need to be solved but if you dig deeper into the research you find that despite all of the downsides, people are choosing self-employment over traditional alternatives.

When people ask me about working on my own, they say things like “I could never do that, I need to get paid every month.” While financial insecurity is real, most miss are the enormous upsides, many of which I could not have anticipated until I had the courage to take my leap.

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#1 Doing things that matter with an “opportunity mindset”

To be a successful full-time employee, you must navigate a complicated system of “hoop-jumping” as William Deresiewicz noted in his famous commencement speech. You focus all your energy presenting yourself as someone that meets a standard.

I was an accomplished, if not excellent, hoop jumper. I even created a 45+ page “Career Transition Playbook” that I give away for free since it never really felt right to monetize my knowledge of a system so focused on the wrong things. The problem with this system was that it is impossible to get through the hoop-jumping without telling some sort of marginal lie about who you are and what you hope to achieve.

Being self-employed, an “opportunity mindset” flips this broken paradigm:

1. Put myself out there in the world as I am

2. Look for opportunities that look interesting or people that inspire me

3. Connect with those people or groups and share my story fully

4. If there is a connection, find ways to work together and see what happens

Earlier this year, I was at a memorial service for the founder and director of the grad school program I attended. During the service, several people spoke of this man’s commitment to the community.  I admired this and I felt pulled to find a way to offer myself to the program.

I e-mailed one of the professors asking if I could help and he proposed that I be a teaching assistant for the summer leadership seminar. Taking this position made no sense from a financial perspective, but made complete sense in my new self-employed universe.  It was the point of becoming self-employed: having space to say “yes” to things that mattered to me.

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#2 Being forced to define my own success

In the corporate world, I always received the most praise when I started a new job or got a promotion. Combine this with the ability of anyone to take your title from LinkedIn and plug it into Glassdoor to see how much money you make and your definition of success (even if you have one) is undermined by our collective obsession with money and status (and our ability to figure out where you stand).

A feature and a bug of self-employment is that you have no idea what people are making and you have no way to judge them. This forces some to ask you about what you are working on. While people do still ask about extrinsic factors (“how big do you want to get?” “how many people do you want to hire”), it is more natural to shift the conversation to the definition of success I have defined.

While many people still think my goals may have to do with money, self-employment forces a shift to think about how to live a life you are proud of rather than thinking about your job or career above all else. In his book Skin In the Game, Nassim Taleb echoes this sentiment which closely aligns with how I now think about success:

“I will keep mentioning that I have no other definition of success than leading an honorable life.”

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#3 Not Being In A Rush

In the corporate world, there is always a sense that you could be moving faster. The two years I spent in New York were the most extreme version of this. Someone once said to me, “you’re doing well for your age” which must have meant I was headed in the right direction. Personally, I was already plotting my escape.

A career is an artificial path which you must always manage, have a story for and be networking so that you can take the next step. The next step being up, of course.

Being self-employed, there are no promotions or paths to judge yourself against. Other people’s confusion with this fact comes out when people invariably ask “what’s your plan?” or “how’s business doing?”

While this question has no answer, I respond with what I know to be true: “I am following my creative energy and seeing where it takes me.” This tends to drive a lot of people who are deep into career thinking a bit mad.

The poet David Whyte offers the idea of the “pathless path” which I take to mean that there may be a general feeling that you are headed in the right direction, but that you may not know which direction that is.

Staying true to my inner creative drive and trusting that things will work out forced me to put faith in other people, see myself as part of a bigger community and world and think deeply about how I can be a more generous member of this world and my communities.

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#4 An escape from the inevitable insanity of corporate cultures

While the corporate world embraces teams, careers are an individual sport. While I may have been praised for helping others in my jobs, I would not be promoted, given a raise or good bonus without shameless self-promotion.

Managing your reputation and any gaps between perception and reality are perhaps the core work of a full-time job and career. Lacking strong cultures to transcend this, most organizations end up rewarding people who are good at acquiring power, which poisons the culture, destroys trust and makes most people within those organizations a bit nauseous.

Working on my own, those dynamics are non-existent. The energy wasted on that drama can be re purposed to all sorts of positive activities in my life, including ironically helping people recover their sanity from within those toxic cultures.

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#5 Detaching from the self-importance of career and embracing vulnerability

For the longest time, I identified as a successful professional who worked for good companies and went to good schools. That was the problem.

Today’s knowledge economy, once you’ve gained access, has almost no downside. You can go from job to job and even if you “fail” you’ll probably still get a higher salary in a new job. Facing vulnerability or uncertainty is to be feared, but rarely experienced.

Working on my own means an almost constant sense of fear, uncertainty and vulnerability. If I ran from vulnerability, I could not make this work. Within that vulnerability, I have had to dance with my fears and take action regardless. Doing so has made me feel much more alive than at any moment in any previous jobs.

Brene Brown shares her wisdom on vulnerability with us by pointing out, “Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity and change.”

While creating and sharing in public is scary, it has had the counterintuitive outcome of making me realize that I am in fact, not that special and that perhaps I have tapped into a courage I did not know I had before.

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#6 Instant connection & camaraderie

Without a team or office to go to every day, I’ve had to purposefully start cultivating relationships and connections. The best way I’ve found to connect with people is to share my story, both through writing and in-person connections.

When I share my story and what I’m passionate about, I often here an offer “you have to meet X!”

At a conference in New York, someone I had met connected me to another self-employed soul working on many of the same things as me. That connection started with an enthusiastic video call, but quickly moved into a real-life friendship and hopefully future collaboration. This process has happened over and over again. Many people underestimate how many people are out there in the world who may be on a similar journey.

When you combine mission with the shared experience and vulnerability of being self-employed, I’ve found it often turns connections into meaningful friendships in no time.

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#7 Being able to “ramp down” my paid work

Being self-employed, the money shows up after you complete work or projects. This can be much less consistent or predictable than full-time employment. Here is what my income looks like over the past fifteen months:

 

Some of this inconsistency is by design. Over the past year, I took two one-month trips to test out extended travel. One trip was completely without any work and one I was able to take while doing some remote work.

In months 10 and 11, I said no to all incoming work because I wanted to work on my podcast and launch the future of work mindset assessment that I had been building. Neither were projects designed to make money, but burning ideas that I needed to create to feed my passion.

Being able to “ramp down” your work is a huge feature of being self-employed not available to many full-time workers. To take a leave of absence or unpaid leave is a sign of failure. This is why so many people often “burn out.”

Working on my own, I can take time to recharge, spend time with family or focus on projects that I’m excited by to make the journey a lot more sustainable. My goal for this summer is to spend 50 days working or not working remotely hanging with my grandmother and family at the family lake house. This would be almost impossible if I were working in a traditional full-time job, but quite easy with the ability to ramp down my work and push for more remote opportunities.

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#8 Re-framing money

Photo by NeONBRAND 

A steady job meant my income on autopilot. Paychecks showed up in my bank account no matter what. Since I was lucky to have jobs that paid me much more than I needed, it led to a certain recklessness and willingness to pay for convenience because much of my time was spent at said full-time job. $300 for an Acela train to Boston to save 45 minute? Done. $75 dinners? Why not?

My relationship to money has flipped. Periods of unpaid work are not a failure, but valuable space to let my creative energy run wild. After all, this journey is a long-term committment.

I’ve also lost a lot of interest in expensive things and experiences. The more I spend, the less creative space I’ll have in my life. There are some things I still splurge on, but I’m much more intentional about what I really need and have embraced a minimalism and “don’t buy it” mentality with most things.

This led me to create a tool for other self-employed people to understand the relationship between how much work they need to do and the cost of their lifestyle (freelance target income calculator).

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#9 Unlocking creative energy

It took about six months after leaving the corporate world for my creative spirit to awaken. While I had worked in an industry which does encourage some creativity, large organizations always have at least one person around who will spend more time poking holes in your creations than sitting with you to dream. Risk-management will always win over new ideas in most companies.

Combining responsibility for my own life (in terms of making money to meet my basic needs), no one to question my ideas and intentional downtime or space to let my mind wander, I’ve found my mind flooded with half-baked ideas to experiment with and put into the world.

My rule of thumb has been to take action once two un-related people push me in a certain direction. This framework led me to launching a podcast, attending a conference of unconventional thinkers in Portland and launching my own digital learning experiment/academy despite my fear and uncertainty.

A strong current of creative energy can easily overcome fear to help turn half-baked ideas into things that make a difference. Some people will never give themselves permission to have space in their time to ever let that creative energy appear.

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#10 Healing & becoming a nicer person

I wouldn’t claim I am Mother Teresa, but relative to the person I was in the corporate world, I find myself being more patient, kind and generous to the people around me. The marginal blows of insanity and negativity in the corporate world slowly eat away at you in a way that is hard to put a finger on, but easy to spot once you get a bit of distance.

Having ownership of my own time, creations, and work enables me to take responsibility for the person I am being in the world at all time, without the opportunity to place blame on anyone else. In addition, it also gives me the freedom to say no to any projects or situations where I would be working with or spending time with people who are good at draining my energy (I like to call these people energy vampires).

Deep down I always had a fear that a long corporate career would be a death by a thousand blows, slowly destroying the person I wanted to be without me realizing it.

It took me almost eleven years to gain the courage to carve my own path, but I now see a path in the world where I have some confidence that I can be who I want to be in the world.

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

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The post The ten most surprising benefits of self-employment appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

The question “what do you do?” increasingly does not make sense. Five years ago, I would have said “I’m a consultant.” People really just want to know “how do you make money?”

Increasingly, that question is coming to mean “what do you work on?” For me the answer is complicated — I create a podcast, I interview people, I write, I read extensively, I coach people in their careers, I volunteer. Some of those things help me make money and some don’t.

In organizations and in the emerging freelance economy, I have seen a steady, but dramatic shift. The people that are able to thrive are the people that are able to create. The people that are energized and excited are the ones that are doing what matters to them.

Yet, we pretend that the old markers of success — climbing the ladder, getting a promotion, having a “good” job — are what matter.

They don’t.

The Nature Of Work Has Fundamentally Changed, Yet We Operate As If It Is Still 1995

Consider the following:

The decline of full-time work: There was no net increase in full-time employment from 2005 to 2015 — all employment growth was in “alternative work arrangements” such as on-call and temporary as well as contractors and freelancers.

Work continues to increase in complexity: BCG has measured “complicatedness” of work showing that it has steadily increased 6.7% a year for 50 years. This has dramatically outpaced productivity improvements.

Limited connection between traditional education and our work: Less than three out of ten people work in fields tied to their major.

Dream jobs don’t exist: In 1997, Amy Wrzesniewski found that work that is a “calling” is a result of a mindset, not our underlying skills.

People prefer autonomy over control: Researchers found that when power is framed as autonomy versus power over people, people were much more inclined to seek power positions. Autonomy is also highly linked to job satisfaction and performance.

Money is not a motivator: In 1949, Professor Harry Harlow introduced incentives to reward monkeys and ended up destroying their intrinsic motivation. We then found the same result in humans. Yet, almost 70 years later, in organizations, we still use the language of “carrots” and and “sticks”

People are meaner at work: McKinsey found that people experiencing rudeness at work increased from 49% to 62%from 1998 to 2015. YIKES!

Failure to understand these shifts means one thing:

People are stressed, miserable and fed up, playing a game with rules that no longer exist.

In my own career journey, I made multiple career changes and eventually carved my own path as a freelancer. At every step of the road, I encountered endless amounts of bad advice, pseudo-science and buckets of hogwash about the choices I was making. Despite this, I was quite happy and engaged.

That made me wonder, why do ignore science and reality when talking about careers? In the last year as I’ve been carving my own path as a freelancer and in my work as a career coach, I’ve become obsessed with one question:

How should someone think about navigating their life and career in a way that enables them to have freedom to do the things that matter to them?

The deeper I looked, the more good ideas I found. From Pryor and Bright’s “Chaos Theory of Careers” to Adam Grant’s work on original thinking to Ryan and Deci’s self-determination theory to the fascinating research on curiosity, creativity, and solitude.

Our Deep Attachment To Work

How did we get here?

We place so much emphasis on work, yet the labor force participation rate is still less than 65%. We live in a time where we have a belief that much of meaning, dignity and identity can be unlocked through work. This cultural meme runs so deep that we tend to value any work for work’s sake and leave unquestioned the deeper questions of what it means to live a good life. It also results in bizarre phrases like “working poor” being a commonly understood and accepted phenomenon.

We need a radical mindset shift in terms of how we think about work and how we are meant to do things that matter

At the core, we need to stop praising someone for merely being employed or dutifully going into an office every day and we need to embrace the ambiguity and reality of the world.

Let’s ask people instead:

• Does your work bring you alive?
• Are you creating value for other people?
• Are you doing things that matter to you?
• What can I do to support your life?

The Framework

Foundation: Perspective, Motivation & Compass

Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier. — Colin Powell

Perspective:

We are operating under the assumption that the default path is the only path. The reality is that the default path is mostly an illusion. Most people that end up doing something that energizes them end up there through serendipity. We need to shift our thinking to embrace optimism and think about work as a life-long journey that will be reinforced by continuous learning and a flexible and open mind to new experiences, ideas and opportunities. Too often, organizations stifle motivation they tell people what not to do — numbing them into a state of learned helplessness. The reality is, for organizations to thrive and for people to thrive, we will need to push people to think on their own, question the status quo and become “original thinkers.”

We are operating under the assumption that career paths still exist and that successful people are the ones with the most money or highest rank. There are jobs and industries with great paths, but these are increasingly reserved for people who know how to acquire the right degrees and credentials. The truth is, we need to destroy the idea that a “job hopper” is somehow a lesser qualified person. We need to encourage people to try more types of work and embrace planned happenstance theory putting emphasis on optimism, open-mindedness and flexibility rather than specialization or the illusion of career paths.

Motivation:

We are operating under the assumption that having a job is enough. Unfortunately, most jobs are not set up to enable you to thrive and at worst, they may also destroy you. You are also more at the whim of the success of your industry, the pace of change in your job, and the “strategic” moves of large companies than you realize. The truth is you will need to continually self-reflect on the work that motivates you intrinsically, prioritizing mastery, autonomy, and relatedness, and continually re-assess your values, definition of success, and a connection to doing work that matters to you.

Compass:

We are operating under the assumption that companies will take care of us. Deep down, many know this is not true — just google the word “layoff” and see who was axed today. Here, I’ll do it for you…and this is only in the last 24 hours:

The truth is, we need to shift instead to approaches like Stanford Professors Bill Burnett and Dave Evans “Designing Your Life” that starts with a focus on living a good life and then helps you find work to do that fits into that. This does not mean living paycheck to paycheck— it means being thoughtful about mitigating risk through lowering expenses and eliminating debt such that you can have the freedom and flexibility to spend time how you want across all aspects of your life.

#2 How You Create: Environment, Connection & Action

It’s the way I study — to understand something by trying to work it out or, in other words, to understand something by creating it. Not creating it one hundred percent, of course; but taking a hint as to which direction to go but not remembering the details. These you work out for yourself.

Professor Richard Feynman

Environment:

We are operating under the assumption that work means going to an office 260 days a year, 5 days a week, working from 9–5 (at least). The reality is, more and more people are not working this fixed schedule and that it is often impossible to do 40+ hours of the types of creative work we will need to do in the future. We need people who are more comfortable in diverse global, virtual and remote teams and understand how to optimize their environments to maximize flow and creativity.

Connection:

We are operating under the assumption that investing more in corporate culture will make us happier. The confusing reality of this is that many of these efforts backfire since they are not built on a foundation of meaningful work. We need to instead align our work and lives around communities that share our passions and values (which can be done in companies sometimes!). We also need to shift beyond the “transaction mindset” which pervades our world and look for ways to be generous and support each other in their work so more people do the work that matters to them.

Action:

We are operating under the assumption that work is easily understood and can be documented in a process. Not to mention that it should be done full-time! The reality is, work is increasingly happening in projects and the companies that thrive are the ones that think in this context instead of keeping employees from quitting. Workers and companies will need to think about experiments — especially ones that will fail. As Adam Grant showed, original thinkers often run enormous numbers of experiments (for example Edison has 1093 patents, but most of them likely had little impact).

#3 How You Adapt: Knowledge, Progress & Vitality

Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement, achievement, and success have no meaning. — Benjamin Franklin

Knowledge:

We are operating under the assumption that our employers and universities will train us and give us the skills we need. The data shows that most of the $150 billion spent on learning & development every year is wasted. Universities are failing to give people the skills to compete in the economy. The truth is, we need to embrace the mindset of learning through doing, thinking about learning as a lifelong project instead of something that happens from ages 5 to 22, and creating opportunities for apprenticing or projects as a way to continuously develop skills. Finally, we need to more quickly shift to and give more credibility and support to alternatives to on-campus learning.

Progress:

We are operating under the assumption that employers and managers should tell us what to do and that the hierarchy determines our value. The truth is, permission is increasingly an illusion and those who seek it are going to be left behind. Hierarchies are outdated and more concerned with power than helping us develop the skills and experience that will help us build a career and a life. This leads to unnecessary suffering, the lack of growth and people in the wrong jobs. We need to shift from external markers of success to internal ones — are we energized?, are we learning? — and think about our careers as a portfolio of different projects, connections and skills. As Marc Andreessen offers: “The first rule of career planning: Do not plan your career.”

“ Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Vitality:

We are operating under the assumption that two weeks of vacation a year is adequate and that “work-life balance” is a worthy goal. This mindset starts with the assumption that work is the most important thing and you need to be some sort of productivity ninja that carves out meaningful time for health, love, relationships and fun. We instead need to start with our work and time and think about how we can invest in other people and communities to get the best out of each other. Finally, we operate under the assumption that workplaces are the source of all dignity, meaning and energy. However, with this mindset, we avoid the solitude and reflection that will unleash our naturally creative spirits. We need to flip our thinking to ask ourselves what the conditions are for us to thrive!

Are You Ready For The Future Of Work? Take The Assessment 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Losing It All

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Crafting a new story

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

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

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

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

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

This list makes people uncomfortable.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Deci and Ryan were geniuses.

Popping The Delusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(William Reilly, from Brain Pickings)

“What does a good life cost?”

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

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

…but what about rent?

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

My conclusion: people worry about money a lot.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stumbling into a future of work mindset

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was July 2014 — I was at a networking event in Boston and ended up having a conversation with someone who just made the jump to being a career/life coach.

I ended up sharing one of my dreams with her:

“I’m want to be a career coach one day. I’ve helped a lot of people land great jobs and figure out what they want to do. I love it.

What she said next scared me:

“You already are a coach, you just need to start doing it”

Damn. Now I had to do something.

I could tell you about taking massive action immediately after this conversation, but that’s not what happened. I was still scared. It took me several months to take action on this thing I knew I had to do. You know what held me back? Picking a name. At least that’s what I told myself. In reality, I was a bit scared of doing something out in the open.

What would people say?

Everyone has something that holds them back. For some, it is perfection — needing everything to be perfect. For others, it is creating such massive goals that they become overwhelming. For me, this was the first time I was attempting something outside of the

On a quiet day in February 2015 in snow packed Boston, I finally landed on “Careers with Paul.” I registered the domain name and put up a quick website. It felt great to take action. It felt like I was moving forward on something that I was excited about.

Within a couple months, I had enhanced the website even more and had re-learned HTML, but was not sharing it with the world or actively finding clients.

Lingering doubts still held me back:

What was I doing?

Can I do this?

What if I’m bad at it?

How do I get started?

But the biggest thing: What will people say? But more on that later…

At this point, I saw a mailing from my alma mater about a career coach that was beginning to work with alums and was intrigued. I quickly sent him an email saying I’d love to connect and see how I could help with alums as well.

That conversation turned into a deeper discussion of what I was trying to accomplish. He asked me the same question: Why haven’t you done anything yet?

I didn’t know it yet, but having someone that saw opportunity and not limits was addicting — I decided to hire him on the spot. Plus, how could I coach other people if I hadn’t put myself through the same challenge?

The Experience Impacted me in Three Powerful Ways

1. Ignoring my self-limiting beliefs — Like many people, I have a laundry list of reasons why I can’t do something. Excuses are easy. But a coach looks past these and focuses your dreams and helps you move in the right direction. This was a powerful emotion I felt consistently while working with the coach. I would say something bold — expecting him to poke holes in my idea — but instead, he would say “that sounds great, when will you do it by?”

2. Having a safe space to consistently reflect: Building a nice website was good fun, but I wasn’t actually learning anything more than CSS and HTML. In each of the coaching session, I kept coming back to the fact that I needed to put my coaching into action to see what I was good at, what I enjoyed and even more important, what I didn’t enjoy or wasn’t good at.

3. Picking a small goal to kick-start action: When I thought about being a career coach, it seemed BIG and overwhelming. I was thinking about the end goal before embarking on the journey. I often tell my clients to pick a small goal and go do it — I needed the same advice. On my first call with the career coach, he said to me “You are already qualified to do this, why don’t you just do it?” So we decided that I would write an article explaining what I was doing and launch the site to everyone I knew in 30 days (here is the original e-mail I sent to 100 family & friends). No excuses. Once I committed to this, everything started flowing. That article was a breakthrough — it led to multiple speeches, helping a client land their “dream job” (their words, not mine), developing an e-book and online course and leading my first group coaching workshop — all in only six months.

So back to my question from above— what will people say?

I still think about it. It never goes away. Criticism is painful, but luckily it rarely comes. What has been more surprising is the incredibly positive reception I’ve received. So many people have emailed me and said how much they appreciate my help, insights or style. One friend even mentioned a small thing I did five years ago and how much she appreciated it. I have faced some skeptics, but the excitement and fun I’m having by experimenting with new ideas outweighs all the haters.

I’m excited for what’s to come and I’m here for you. Just like the coach I worked with, I’m probably going to ignore your weaknesses and when you share your dreams with me, expect to hear:

“That sounds amazing — go do it!”

The Coached Has Become the Coach.

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

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