That may be the right path for you but I want to convince you that there might be another path.

I want to share my version of how I’m playing something Packy McCormick calls the “great online game.” A version that focuses on building a life where I can work in different ways to pay the bills, have plenty of time for creative pursuits, and don’t have to be tied to a full-time job.

What follows are five principles that have emerged that have guided my path. They have emerged slowly and organically. Only now do some of them seem obvious. I fully expect that they may morph over time. These principles serve as a compass for me as I navigate the infinite possibilities of the internet.

I think that nearly everyone, including people on the default path, should develop their own principles. This is because the stories of how we think about our work and lives are outdated, one based on a 1950s reality. This story worked in a time in which people worked for one company in their life when growth rates of 5% were normal, and most women didn’t work.

The trap of this story is that it actually works in the first few years of anyone’s career. Many companies still believe in this story and this is why the first five years of your career are still filled with promotions and a clear career path. Anyone that’s made it past that point, however, knows the truth. That there aren’t many clear career paths left and because of slowing growth rates, competition and politics are more central to getting ahead than some may think.

Developing your own principles and strategy is the only choice left if you don’t want to play those games. For the self-employed, developing your own game and set of principles is not a choice but a necessity. It is the only way to survive over the long term.

Here are five principles that help guide my path.

Principle #1: Coming Alive Over Getting Ahead

In April of 2020, my strategy consulting skills course started taking off. This was a weird moment because it took off at the same time I started dealing with extreme fatigue following complications from a tooth extraction. My course was selling like hotcakes and I was either wandering around the Canary Islands talking to doctors or sleeping in bed. This is one of the weird things about being a self-employed creator. Your financial reality can shift dramatically in a short period of time and often due to things outside of your control.

I had spent hundreds of hours to get it to that point but it was never my intention to hit a monthly revenue goal. I genuinely thought it would be fun to figure out how to create an online course (If you want to go much deeper, the full story is here). If you had talked to me in January of 2019 you might have thought my principles of keep doing stuff I like, give generously, and don’t work too much were pretty stupid because I had made less than $3,000 doing so in a year. Two years later I’ve somehow made a decent American salary for two straight years.

After a strong year of sales, I reflected on my success with StrategyU. My inner consultant knew that the obvious solution was to double down, add more courses, level up the marketing, create more content, and see where it goes. I was even invited to an accelerator program for proven course creators to make this happen. I could see the path and had a reasonable level of confidence that I could 4-5x my course sales if I wanted to.

But then I challenged myself, “what would you do once you had that money?” I realized I would write. I then reflected upon the fact that I could simply do that now. I was already making enough to support myself and still save a little money each year.

With this in mind, I decided to make a commitment. In 2021 I would write a book. This would be a way to commit to what I claimed to care about and also be a way of testing out this principle of “coming alive over getting ahead.”

My course has remained steady but has not grown much more than the previous year. However, the act of committing to writing a book has been one of the most thrilling commitments of my life. I’ve never felt so alive, challenged, and excited about anything I’ve worked on.

If a choice emerges between spending more time on making money but means I’ll have to cut back on some of the things I like doing like learning, writing, and connecting with people, I plan to walk away from that choice.

Principle #2: Don’t Be Attached

While my online course continued to succeed, I realized that I had come to expect that income.

With a few hours of maintenance per week, I was able to keep a profitable business running while writing my book and studying Chinese full-time for a three-month stretch. In one of those months, I even worked with a client to run a four-week consulting skills bootcamp which led to my best month since being self-employed. Then in May, the sales of my course tanked, likely driven by a change in the google search algorithm, people returning to the office after covid restrictions, and travel for the summer.

These kinds of ups and downs would be terrifying if I had a high fixed-cost lifestyle or if I had not experienced them before. To anyone that’s been self-employed for a long period of time, they learn to deal with these shifts. Here is an example of some various swings in different income sources I’ve experienced over the past five years.

With this in mind, I try to make sure that I’m not assuming that any of these income sources are permanent. I’ve embraced a visualization exercise where I go through an exercise of visualizing all my digital properties and revenue streams evaporating and then asking “am I okay?”

When my consulting course struggled for a couple of months after doing so well for more than a year, I was able to reflect on the fact that I’ve started from scratch in the past and I could do it again.

Principle #3: Build An Income Floor & Optimize For Income Streams

About a year into self-employment I realized I really want to stay on my path longer than my initial plans for a one-year experiment. I realized that if I wanted to commit to this path, I needed a better strategy for earning money than only freelancing.

Freelancing is one of the best ways to get started with self-employment. It enables you to leverage your existing skills while giving you more flexibility with time to spend on other things you want to work on or to simply work less. This worked well for me. I had much more time to work on creative projects but realized that following that path was a lower-income and precarious version of my previous path.

I wanted to embrace an antifragile approach, one in which I would not be as susceptible to stretches without income or to shocks in the broader economy. Freelancing is one of the best ways to make money in a strong economy, but it’s also one of the quickest things to disappear when companies are cutting costs.

With that in mind I set out to focus on two goals:

• Earn money in as many different ways as possible
• Build a portolio of income streams that act as a high probability “floor” of income

This lowered my income in the short term but boosted my confidence and resilience. Knowing how to make money in a number of different ways gave me practical skills and an expanded imagination about what I could do to make money.

While I had a hard time realizing it at the time, my overall income also steadily increased over time with this approach. I now have had at least three sources of income generate over $200 for more than a year and have had at least six income sources for longer than that.

In my first year of self-employment, I had high earnings but it was inconsistent. I had six months with less than $2,000 income and three months with more than $10,000 per month. The second year I shifted away from consulting and had seven months with less than $2k income. The last two years? I’ve made at least $2k every month.

This is much more valuable for the game I’m playing as it dramatically lowers the odds that I will run out of money and gives me more freedom to walk away from any type of work I don’t want to do without feeling like I might go broke

Principle #4: Start Slow & Keep Trying Things

I like trying a bunch of different things for a few reasons. First, I genuinely like creating new things and experimenting. I find the process of turning ideas into my head into things that can be helpful for others to be fun. This is a unique advantage in the world that is emerging and I’m fully aware of this.

Second, it keeps things interesting and also exposes me to a number of different ways of engaging in the world such that I can help others do the same.

Finally, it helps me build a portfolio of “small bets” as Dan Vassallo shared in this conversation with me – any one of which could have unexpected payoffs.

With my newsletter and podcast, both started as ways of sharing what I was up to and without any intentions of turning them into businesses. I didn’t promote them or share them widely because I wanted to be able to quit without people noticing. Tim Ferriss took this strategy with his podcast. He told himself that he would do six-episode and if he was having fun and didn’t hate it, he would keep going.

Conventional wisdom says to grow fast, to take advantage of every launch. However, that increases the odds that you end up doing something you don’t want to do. My approach has been to take a slower path. Five years into this journey, almost everything I’m doing I want to be doing and this has been from a series of incremental “yeses.”

I recently launched a freelance consulting skills course. This course was the result of helping a couple of freelancers that were doing work for me level up my skills. I realized I was having a lot of fun helping them be better and they were finding the information and feedback useful. I had validated both the idea and the feeling. That second part is often ignored. Too many people don’t think about the fact that once they build something that makes money, they have to spend a lot of time doing that thing. I only built the course because I enjoyed helping people become freelancers. Right now it’s still a small bet but when the opportunity emerges to take it somewhere else, I will consider it and if it feels right, I’ll say “yes.”

Principle #5 Make Friends. Be Helpful

This is the most important principle and the one that makes everything else more fun. Yet, it is also the one where I struggle the most.

I’ve always been the person that likes helping other people. In college, I proactively volunteered to help fix people’s computers and help with resumes, job searches, and interviewing. After I graduated I helped people make career changes and write essays for grad school. At my jobs I always took on extra roles to help with training and coaching.

It was fun. But the world tells you that these are silly things. People tell you, don’t get taken advantage of. Adam Grant writes books showing how to avoid being a pathological altruist and to make sure you balance yours gives with your takes. Others ask “why you don’t charge?” You spend your time at work helping your struggling colleague while you watch the skilled politician land another raise.

I was cynical about this for a while. I wanted the working world to change. I wished there were paths for people to progress and get raises while remaining a front-line manager. My first blog was called “better working world project.” Eventually, I realized it was better to create my own game rather than try to swim upstream.

So I experimented. I started a career coaching business on the side. I started writing. I eventually went out on my own and was able to be the kind of freelancer I wanted to be. I had more time to spend helping people for fun without feeling like an idiot (though sometimes it still feels silly to do things for free).

As I continued to do this and built an audience through my writing, people starting sending me thank you notes. I received one note from someone that I had a conversation with a few years earlier. She told me that her conversation with me completely changed her mind on what she wanted to do. Now she was doing something she loved and wanted to thank me for the inspiration. I’d be lying if I said that these moments are fucking awesome.

I did an exercise in which I had to rank my “yearnings” or the things we really crave. My top two were appreciation and freedom. Appreciation was something that surprised me but it felt true. Leaning into that and realizing that it is something I need but can also be fuel is a powerful thing to know.

A couple of years ago I did another exercise in which I had to write down my “purpose.” The person that created it said to keep writing versions until you cry. I thought it was silly but I’m always open to trying new things. It worked and this is what I landed on.

Connect as a real friend to people to give them the courage to create, help simplify the world to enable people to imagine new possibilities, and continuously be more brave in discovering the people and things that matter in my own life

I know that my desire to help others might be a little pathological and after reading Adam Grant’s Give and Take it seems that I’ll probably succeed financially a little less. But I don’t buy his argument that this is something to fix. I have realized that I want to design a life around making this weird quirk a great part of my life. I know that it undermines my ability to be financially successful sometimes and that’s okay.

I’ve just decided that it matters.

The Bottom Line

I don’t know what will be paying the bills next year but the longer I play this game the more confident I become. It could all blow up at any second, but the whole point of the game is to enjoy the journey.

I spent ten years on a path where I was always focused on the next project or the next step.

This is way more fun and I hope I’ve convinced you to find your own game worth playing.

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 Designing Your Own Infinite Game In The Creator Economy appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

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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.

#1 Work is virtuous

Bertrand Russell felt that the belief that work was virtuous was one of the biggest barriers to progress:

I think that there is far too much work done in the world, that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous, and that what needs to be preached in modern industrial countries is quite different from what always has been preached.

Today in the United States, there are two political parties that might disagree on almost everything.  The one major exception is that both share a belief in the virtue of work.  While Democrats typically support a large safety net, their approach is still completely tied to the idea that all should work to earn a living.  Work requirements, “jobs guarantees” and more jobs in certain industries are constant talking points. Where did this come from?

There are different explanations, but it seems to have emerged between the 16th and 18th centuries due to various shifts.  One was the shift in the conception of time to something that should be managed, spent and budgeted or what E.P. Thompson called “time discipline.”  The other major trend was religion’s embrace of work for work’s sake for a variety of moral and economic drivers.  This has evolved and is commonly known now as the “Protestant Work Ethic.”  In the 1800’s Thomas Carlyle summarized this view:

“All true Work is sacred; in all true Work, were it but true hand-labour, there is something of divineness. Labour, wide as the Earth, has its summit in Heaven.”

However, this definition was not simply just long hours.  As Steven Malanga has detailed, the “work ethic” was hard work plus a spirit of “thrift, integrity, self-reliance, and modesty.”  We have abandoned these virtues are left with a “work for work’s sake” and nothing else.  Philosopher Andre Gorz makes the case that this historical work ethic no longer makes sense as it is increasingly disconnected from meeting our basic needs:

“The work ethic has become obsolete. It is no longer true that producing more means working more, or that producing more will lead to a better way of life. The connection between more and better has been broken; our needs for many products and services are already more than adequately met, and many of our as-yet-unsatisfied needs will be met not by producing more, but by producing differently, producing other things, or even producing less. This is especially true as regards our needs for air, water, space, silence, beauty, time and human contact.

#2 Leisure is passive

Our modern culture places leisure in contrast to work.  Work is focused on making money.  Hence if one is busy, no matter the underlying value of the activities, one is seen to be not at leisure  Hence leisure becomes any passive activity or is seen as anything not in the service of making a living or earning money.  Leisure becomes breaks from work (vacations), watching Netflix or even catching up on sleep.

This is a recent evolution of our understanding of leisure.  Previously, leisure was seen as an active pursuit.  Active in contemplation of life, active in service of a vocation or calling or active in activities that had underlying fundamental value.  Aristotle famously asked the question: “With what activity one’s leisure is filled?”  However, this type of active leisure has been pushed out of our lives by non-stop work.

In Democracy In America, Alexis de Tocqueville writes:

“a wealthy man thinks that he owes it to public opinion to devote his leisure to some kind of industrial or commercial pursuit, or to public business. He would think himself in bad repute if he employed his life solely in living. It is for the purpose of escaping this obligation to work that so many rich Americans come to Europe, where they find some scattered remains of aristocratic society, among whom idleness is still held in honor.”

One would probably argue that a lot of Europe has moved more in the direction of American that de Tocqueville writes of.  Bertrand Russell argued in the 1930’s that much of our energy is taken up with working and thus, we have nothing left to pursue the deeper types of contemplation and service that typified the historical sense of leisure:

The pleasures of urban populations have become mainly passive: seeing cinemas, watching football matches, listening to the radio, and so on. This results from the fact that their active energies are fully taken up with work; if they had more leisure they would again enjoy pleasures in which they took an active part.

He pushed people to consider a four-hour workday which would enable people to re-discover a sense of “light-heartedness and play.”

#3 One’s value can be determined by their earnings

If we were building a society from scratch, we may set some things up as currently constructed.  For example, we would likely conclude that Doctors should make very high salaries and should go through extensive training.  But many when prompted with this question often propose the same outcome for teachers.

To an outside observer, our current work system might seem insane.  Types of jobs that are easily measured and optimized such as retail and manufacturing are targets for layoffs, wage caps, and automation.  However, the jobs that are responsible for the squeezing of productive labor are rarely subject to the same measurements themselves and happen to come with great wages and prestige.  These jobs seem to multiply constantly and talk of a “skills gap” or talent shortage is constantly discussed.  I know because I used to have one of these jobs.

In his visit to the United States in the 1800’s de Tocqueville noted that “professions are more or less laborious, more or less profitable; but they are never either high or low: every honest calling is honorable.”  It seems that we have, in fact, started to label certain jobs “low” and unfortunately, these jobs happen to be the ones more available to the average American that lacks a college education and happen to also come with low wages and little prestige.

We are implicitly valuing one’s worth based on their ability to earn a high salary from their work.  Someone who makes a high salary is rarely questioned on their choice of profession.  Yet someone who decides to become a social worker or teacher is constantly questioned on their awareness that they may struggle in life.

Who would dream up such a world?

This linking of one’s worth to one’s wages blocks us from seeing different types of value that may result from one’s efforts.  It also blocks us from imagining new ways of living and working.

I’ll leave you with a story

A number of places around the world have started to experiment with giving people a basic income.  Jessie Golem was a recipient of a basic income in an experiment in Canada and decided to use her time to highlight what people have been able to do when they receive a basic income.  She shares the story of a mother:

Basic income allowed me a chance to recover my future. UBI gave me hope to provide a secure and better future for my baby girl. It gave me the confidence to “keep” my baby, rather than being forced to give her up for adoption. My family felt relieved to know my daughter and I would have a fighting chance, as a single mother. UBI significantly reduced my depression, anxiety, and OCD, which allowed a secure attachment to flourish between me and my baby girl. I was able to be a better, more attentive mom; I focused on my baby’s needs rather than ruminate about my own unmet needs. As a result, my baby is a well adjusted, healthy, happy girl.

People often pose the question, If we just gave people money through a basic income, wouldn’t people stop working?

The answer is yes, they might.  But they also might work on things that matter to them and the world. The types of jobs and activities that are not well compensated in our labor economy and instead have enormous payoffs in a deeper sense of creativity, compassion, and love.

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 Three Sacred Beliefs Undermining Universal Basic Income appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

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

Resources Mentioned:

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

Check out Marlow: 

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

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The post Conversation With Chelsea Seid of Marlow About Passion, Purpose & Meaning At Work 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

The post The Nine Future Of Work Mindsets You Need For The Weird New World of Work appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Losing It All

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Crafting a new story

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

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

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

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

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

This list makes people uncomfortable.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Deci and Ryan were geniuses.

Popping The Delusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(William Reilly, from Brain Pickings)

“What does a good life cost?”

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

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

…but what about rent?

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

My conclusion: people worry about money a lot.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stumbling into a future of work mindset

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’ve been reading Peter Diamandis’ book Bold and am really enjoying it. Peter has a great ability to distill complex ideas down to simple thoughts. He’s also quite impressive himself — doing impressive work in space exploration, technology and longevity research and also creating the famous X prize.

Certainly a fan of dreaming big, he cites interesting research that may help you think about achieving your own “moonshots” or maybe more realistically, figuring out how to find a company that will help you unlock a greater level of productivity and passion:

Locke’s thinking relies on three elements — when all three elements are in place, great things can happen.

The first element is attainability — individuals need to believe they can actually achieve the goal.

The second element is self-efficacy or belief in the strength of ones own skills.

The third element is the key one — goal-committment. The greater the alignment between your personal values and the outcomes of the goal, the greater your own motivation and likelyhood of achieving that goal.

When applying this third concept to organizaitons, you can see why so many people are frustrated. Few organizations have a very clear purpose to start with. The ones that do may not align with the personal values of the individuals.

So if you are frustrated at work — are you sure your personal values are aligned with the mission of the organization?

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 Taking your own “moonshots” — the secret of Value Goal Alignment appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

Everyone has heard the statistic from Gallup that 70% of people are not engaged at work. This information is sad — but not useful in understanding how I can actually increase my own engagement.

I’ve often been a fan of creating my own self-assessments to measure how well I am aligned with my own leadership principles — in becoming the type of person I want to become in the workplace. Feedback from colleagues is valuable — but often aligned with a company culture that mindlessely supports principles that may or may not make sense for any type of long-term career success.

So when I read Culture Amp’s professional services benchmark — I was impressed by the individual questions they used to measure employee engagement. I took their questions they asked in a broader company context and applied them to myself:

Now every quarter I assess my engagement levels against these 10 areas both for my immediate team and role in the broader company.

It helps me assess what is energizing me and more importantly, what is sapping my energy. I can then think about what I should o next to address 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

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The post A quick ten question assessment of your own employee engagement appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.