The Pathless Path
The Pathless Path: Imagining a New Story For Work and Life by Paul Millerd
🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences
An inspiring approach to think broader about our relationship with work, and how you can learn to embrace the spirit of the pathless path.
Understanding that there is more than one way to live than your current path. You can shift to a place where you can gain more freedom and where your path can become something you choose again every day.
We are living in a time when it’s possible for more and more people to design a life in which they can thrive. Yet many look at that possibility and say, “no thanks,” because it means discomfort, uncertainty, and a higher risk of failure.
🎨 Impressions
I’ve followed Paul’s work for almost 2 years now. His ideas about work are nuanced, thought-through and unique. Getting a more intimate look at his story and journey in understanding how he has arrived at the conclusions he has was fascinating.
How I Discovered It
I was keen to read this as soon as it became available having been an avid reader of Paul’s other work.
Who Should Read It?
If you are unhappy with your current path this book will inspire you to make a change. If you are unable to detach your own self-worth from work, this book shares how this idea originates and how to think more deeply about the role of work in your life.
✍️ My Top 3 Quotes
The more experiments I’ve done, the more comfortable I have become, and this gives me more freedom to try new things without being afraid.
The pathless path is a define-your-own-success adventure.
Finding the work that matters to us is the real work of our lives.
📒 Summary + Notes
The Pathless Path:
The pathless path is an alternative to the default path. It is an embrace of uncertainty and discomfort. It’s a call to adventure in a world that tells us to conform. For me, it’s also a gentle reminder to laugh when things feel out of control and trusting that an uncertain future is not a problem to be solved.
The Default Path:
This was the end result of an obsessive focus on getting ahead in my twenties. It’s a state familiar to many. Study hard, get good grades, get a good job. Then put your head down and keep going, indefinitely. This is what I call the “default path.”
Ideas Around Work:
People, including myself, have a deep desire to work on things that matter to them and bring forth what is inside them. It is only when we cling to the logic of the default path that we fail to see the possibilities for making that happen.
The Origin of Work:
Where Do Work Beliefs Come From? Max Weber found that the “spirit of capitalism” struggled to take hold in societies that embraced a “traditionalist” mindset towards work. In Weber’s view, a “traditionalist” view of work is one where people work as much as they need to maintain their current lifestyle, and once that aim is achieved, they stop working. The idea that people might decide to work less is hard for some people to imagine.
In Greece, during the time of Aristotle more than 2,000 years ago, work was simply considered a necessary evil. The prime aim of life according to philosophers was “Eudaimonia,” which translates literally as “happiness,” but is better expressed as “flourishing.” In Aristotle’s words, “the more contemplation, the more happiness there is in a life.” Contemplating one’s place in the universe was seen as one of the most worthwhile things to do and at minimum, more important than the “money-making life,” which Aristotle described as “something quite contrary to nature…for it is merely useful as a means to something else.” For the next 1,500 years, most of the world either remained skeptical of work or saw it simply as a way to meet basic needs.
The ideas around work were strengthened by 13th-century Catholic priest Thomas Aquinas, as he argues “labor is only necessary for the maintenance of individual and community. People should be expected to work, but the reason is to meet the needs of our families and communities.
In the 1500s, Martin Luther and John Calvin expanded this definition as part of what is now known as the Protestant Reformation. They had grown disappointed in religious leaders and attacked them for living idly in monasteries. Their angle of attack was one’s relationship to work. Max Weber summarises the shift, saying that the way to honour God, “was not to surpass worldly morality in monastic asceticism, but solely through the fulfillment of the obligations imposed upon the individual by his position in the world. That was his calling.
This introduced the idea of a “calling,” with the intention undermining the authority of the Catholic Church to govern an individual’s relationship with God. It was thought individuals should be able to have their own relationship with God. This increased individual freedom with the idea that everyone is predestined to serve God through a specific calling. Working hard in the area of one’s calling determines the status of a person’s relationship with God.
But the Church’s expectations had always provided a way to measure “goodness,” and for many, these benchmarks no longer applied.
Accidental Meaning:
If you were born in 1945 or 1950 or 1955, things got better every year for the first 18 years of your life. So continuing on the default path made sense for that generation. But this created accidental meaning for them. The paths that enabled people to thrive were the result of unique economic and historical circumstances, and as millennial’s entered the workforce, these circumstances no longer applied.
The baby boomer generation was born in the middle of this booming period, and rose to leadership in global institutions by the end of the 20th century. The idea that life should be built around a good corporate job soon became so sacred that almost everyone had forgotten that only 100 years earlier most people worked on farms.
We entered adulthood thinking we could copy-and-paste what our parents had done, but it was more complicated than that.
Creating More Meaningful Work:
It is obvious to people that there are pointless tasks, and menial jobs. But we always meet this criticisms with: “It may suck, but you’re getting something to put on your resume!” or “Everyone has to work, what are you supposed to do?” or “You should be grateful for being paid.” No one wanted to grapple with this fundamental question: “Why the hell are so many grown adults spending their time on obviously pointless tasks?”
The First Steps:
Paul’s story is not one of courage, but of pragmatic and safe experiments, experiences, and questioning over several years. This approach, one of prototyping a change, is not only a better way to think about taking bold leaps but is quite common across many people’s stories.
The more experiments you can do, the more comfortable you can become, and this will give you more freedom to try new things without being afraid.
Wonder is the state of being open to the world, its beauty, and potential possibilities. With wonder, the need to cope becomes less important and the discomfort on the current path becomes more noticeable.
Uncertain Discomfort + Wonder > Certain Discomfort
In thoughts about the future, worry is traded for wonder. People stop thinking about worst‑case scenarios and begin to imagine the benefits of following an uncertain path. They get curious about who they might become if they embrace discomfort and are filled with a sense of urgency that says, “if I don’t do this now, I might regret it.”
Making life changes requires overcoming the discomfort of not knowing what will happen. Facing uncertainty, we make long mental lists of things that might go wrong and use these as the reasons why we must stay on our current path. Learning to have a healthy distrust of this impulse and knowing that even if things go wrong, we might discover things worth finding can help us open ourselves up to the potential for wonderful things to happen.
Wisdom of the Pathless Path:
“The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours.” — Amos Tversky
Paul’s comments on suddenly having unstructured time: In seven days, I’ll be boarding a flight to Taipei to begin a chapter in my life of living and working nomadically. As I’ve simplified my life and embraced minimalism, I noticed that I have had more time and have been in less of a rush to “do things,” giving me the chance to take routes that don’t make sense, go for random walks through the city and make time to have conversations I wouldn’t otherwise have. I feel so lucky and as I make the shift to Taipei, it seems much less a “vacation” or “trip” and much more an extension of an increased appreciation for life and the people in it.
“The more we associate experience with cash value, the more we think that money is what we need to live. And the more we associate money with life, the more we convince ourselves that we’re too poor to buy our freedom.” – Rolf Potts
Having faith does not mean being worry-free: I still worry about money, success, belonging, and whether I can keep this journey going. However, I’m able to recognise that the right response is not to restructure my life to make these worries disappear. It’s to develop a capacity to sit with those anxieties, focus on what I can control, and to open myself up to the world.
Ideas of Success:
In 2019, Gallup surveyed Americans about success. In response to the question, “How do you personally define success?”, 97% agreed with the following statement: A person is successful if they have followed their own interests and talents to become the best they can be at what they care about most. In response to the question, “How do you think others define success?”, only 8% gave the same answer. Instead, 92% felt that other people defined success as follows: A person is successful if they are rich, have a high-profile career, or are well-known.
Ideas of Enough:
As I developed a better relationship with money and stopped acting from a mindset of scarcity and fear, I started to work out my own perspective on “enough”:
Enough is knowing that no amount in my bank account will ever satisfy my deepest fears. It’s knowing that I have enough friends that would gladly open their door and share a meal if I was ever in need. It’s the feeling that I’ve been able to spend my time over an extended stretch of time working on projects that are meaningful to me, helping people with a spirit of generosity, and having enough space and time in my life to stay energised to keep doing this over the long-term. Enough is seeing a clear opportunity that will increase my earnings in the short-term, but knowing that saying “no” will open me up to things that might be even more valuable in ways that are hard to understand. Enough is knowing that the clothes, fancy meal, or latest gadget will not make me happier, but also that buying such things won’t mean I’m going to end up broke. Enough is having meaningful conversations with people that inspire me.
On the pathless path, knowing you have enough is what gives you the freedom to say “no” to clear financial opportunities and say “yes” to something that might bring you alive and might even pay off much more over the long term.
The pathless path is a define-your-own-success adventure.
Behind our money fears are existential fears, like the fear of death or the fear of not being loved, respected, and admired. These fears are likely not solvable but we can learn to coexist with them. This is also why financial worries can be infinite and people can chase more and more their entire lives. The flip side of this is that if we can learn to coexist with our financial insecurities, we can turn them into a secondary concern. This opens you up to the real secret: the opportunities of the pathless path are infinite too.
Natural Creativity:
Creative output is fuel for the pathless path. While my writing hasn’t made me famous or rich, it has been vital for staying energised and being able to connect with people that share my curiosities. Growing up, I didn’t think I was a creative person. Nor did I think I had permission to share with the world. Luckily, I stopped believing those lies and started to see that there are deeper and more important reasons to create and share
Creating Your Path:
The pathless path is the deliberate pursuit of a positive version of freedom. Revisiting Fromm’s definition, “the full realisation of the individual’s potential, together with his ability to live actively and spontaneously,” we see that developing our own sense of agency is vital. Thus, figuring out what to do with your time is a real concern.
To create your own culture on the pathless path you must identify the assumptions you make in your approach to life. Here are some of my assumptions, many of which have been sprinkled throughout this book: Many people are capable of more than they believe. Creativity is a real path to optimism, meaning, and connection. We don’t need permission to engage with the world and people around us. We are all creative, and it takes some people longer to figure that out. Leisure, or active contemplation, is one of the most important things in life, There are many ways to make money, and when an obvious path emerges, there is often a more interesting path not showing itself. Finding the work that matters to us is the real work of our lives.
We invent the stories we use to guide our lives, and these stories will continue to evolve. Due to many factors, many of our current cultural scripts and stories have calcified over several generations and have stopped working as reliably as they have in the past. This has left large numbers of people around the world confused and frustrated with their relationship to work.
Key Steps:
Question the default - there are endless possibilities.
Reflect on your true self and what you value most.
Figure out what you have to offer - what makes you stand out.
Pause and disconnect - aim for a month away from work.
Make a friend - reach out to someone who is on an interesting path.
Go make something - start creating.
Give generously - it’s a skill we need to practice.
Experiment - prototype a change, mix up where you live, test your beliefs.
Commit - dedicate your time to creating the environment to do work that actually matters to you.
Be patient - don’t rush, it can take years.
