Hello, welcome to the Pathless Path podcast. And today I have an interview I did on another Friends podcast, Abel James. He's somebody I actually have followed for many years. I used a lot of the ideas I found on his podcast about 10 years ago, really recovering from some chronic health issues.
And I've gotten to know him in Austin, and he's been on a pathless path much longer than me, and balances a lot of different creative stuff. He is into VR, he's into music, he has a podcast, and does a whole bunch of other stuff, including writing. So this was a really fun conversation, and I wanted to share it with you. Hope you enjoy this, and don't forget, check out my book, Good Work.
Pemillared.com slash Good Work. Hey folks, this is Abel James, and thanks so much for joining us on the show. Does your work light you up, or are you settling for good enough? Is your work life driven by an illusion where the trivial is disguised as important?
Are you being paid to overlook your overwhelming disinterest in the work itself? Tragically, this week's guest admits, I spent 10 years doing an enormous amount of work, but feeling as if I created nothing of substance. Most of us know the feeling, but it doesn't have to be this way. In other words, work doesn't have to suck.
I'm thrilled to be here today with my friend and fellow Austenite, Paul Millert, joining us on the show. Paul is a fellow former corporate consultant who spent the past seven years blazing an unconventional trail, leaving the rat race behind to pursue a life of creativity, curiosity, and freedom as an independent author and creator. In this conversation, Paul shares the raw unfiltered story of his journey, from the uncertainty and loneliness of leaving behind a successful consulting career to the unexpected joys and challenges of building a life around his curiosity and passions. We'll explore the frameworks he's developed for discerning good work from bad work, and how he's navigated the ebb and flow of creative entrepreneurship, including the decision to turn down a lucrative publishing deal to stay independent.
Whether you're feeling trapped in a soul-sucking job or curious about what's possible when you break free from societal scripts, you'll find an abundance of wisdom and inspiration in Paul's story. It turns out the real journey doesn't come from indulging in our desire to escape work, but in finding meaningful work that is true to our mission and purpose here on Earth. As Paul writes, the only true and worthwhile edge is deeply caring about what you do. So if you're looking to reclaim your inner ambition, this is the show for you.
In a quick aside, if you're in the neighborhood of Austen, Texas, I'm singing and playing guitar with a few bands and I'd love to see you at one of our upcoming shows. So make sure to sign up for my newsletter at ablejames.com, that's A-B-E-L, James.com, and I'll let you know where I'm playing next. Alright, on to the show with Paul. In this episode, you'll discover how to coexist with your doubts, fears, and feelings of uncertainty instead of numbing or running away from them.
Sage advice for those who are considering leaving the traditional corporate world to pursue their passions and creative interests. How to break free of the attachment to social status, material possessions, and your identity as an achiever. How to find a balance between creative work and financial stability, and much more. Let's go hang out with Paul.
Welcome back, folks. Today we're here with my friend Paul Millard, a fellow former consultant in the rat race, now host of the Pathless Path podcast, Adventurer, and author of two remarkable books, including the Pathless Path and his latest Good Work, Reclaiming Your Inner Ambition. Thanks for being here, Paul. I am very excited to be here, Abel.
It has been such a joy to get to know you and also this full circle moment of starting to listen to your podcast, maybe like 10 years ago. So yeah, this is really a delight. Right on, it's got a few gray hairs over here. For people who aren't familiar with your work, tell us about it.
Where did you come from? Where are you going? What happened in between? Yeah, so I think like you, I was in the consulting industry.
I stayed a bit longer than you, and so probably had a little more damage to recover from. But I stayed in the corporate world for 10 years. I worked for top consulting firms, went to a top business school. And in 2015, 2016, 2017, after dealing with a chronic illness, I sort of had this spark that came alive at me.
And eventually I realized I needed to leave the world in which I was in. So I quit my job and sort of slowly stumbled into a new life. And the book I just released is sort of about my relationship with work. So when I quit my job, I was like, screw work, I want to run away from it forever.
I like literally do want to live on the beach. And slowly, as I removed work from my life, I became a lot happier. But in the process, I sort of fell in love with writing. And made the decision, I'm just going to build my life around the energy and connection I feel to this work.
And that has pretty much been what has driven me over the last six years. And it's sort of been like, even as an observer of my own life, it's been pretty fascinating just to see what has unfolded. And it's been pretty magical and amazing. From where I'm standing, it's magical and amazing, too, to see the whole progression of it.
Because interestingly, as you say, maybe you stayed a little bit too long, or you certainly stayed longer than I did in the world of consulting, which means that I started earlier in the whole creative economy thing, or creator economy before there were words like influencer floating around. Everyone was like, when I first started my podcast, they're like, well, it's a podcast. And now it's like the complete opposite side of that. But after doing this for blogging, podcasting, creator stuff for more than 12 years now, it's really interesting interacting with people who have been doing it for a shorter amount of time.
Because even they have been doing it for a long time now. And everywhere you arrive has its own share of problems. And so you're a fellow Austenite. And one of the best things about living here is there are a lot of folks who are in the same boat, and kind of sharing those challenges and those struggles and those wins with each other is so important for navigating a path forward.
But what was it like when you first got out of the rat race? Because it wasn't all positive. I have a list of terms that people threw at you that I'm happy to share, but I don't want to put words in your mouth. Yeah, I think I had built my entire life around full-time employment, and pursuing this successful path.
Not only that, every one of my life was doing the same thing. My entire extended family was building lives around full-time jobs, and most of them liking it, right? And I was in the corporate world, all my friends were in these successful jobs. And so when I left, it was sort of, I was literally questioning what everyone else around me built their life around, which I didn't realize at the time would be so jarring for other people.
And so I had this dual sensation of, oh my gosh, what am I doing? I'm uncertain and scared and filled with uncertainty. And because I'm doing this, other people are now frustrated with me, because I've made them feel these things too. It took me a few years to figure out why that was happening, but yeah, it was very hard.
And I think the first year I was, I felt very intellectually lonely or creatively lonely. Like I had all these creative things I was drawn toward, but I hadn't found the people who were like, yeah, of course, you do those things. Yeah, and it is. It's like you put in your book that like just your mere presence triggers other people, because and I have a similar experience as well, whereas people are just like, yeah, so what are you doing going around the circle?
Other people are, you know, doctors, lawyers, whatever they are, especially people who go to those big, fancy schools with big, fancy educations and going around the circle. I was just like, oh, well, I have a podcast and I've written a few books and they're like, yeah, but what do you do? Like, how do you make money? You know, there's this weird tension there where people just really want to dig in and put you in a box.
The whole point though, is that you don't want to put yourself in that box. Whether it's golden handcuffs or not, you can kind of be stuck in a prison of your own making anywhere. Yeah. And the weird thing about this is I think what I discovered basically to deal with all this insecurity and weirdness and feeling like I had severed some sort of connection with mainstream culture.
And the world, I became incredibly curious. I'm like, what's going on here? Why does it feel so weird? I literally went from full time consultant to freelance consultant and I moved away from freelance consulting, but that was all I was doing.
But the other people was like, oh my gosh, how are you doing this? This is so crazy. People would be like, this is courageous. Some people would say nice things.
Some people would be like, this is so crazy. What's your plan? And I didn't feel like it should have been that different, but it did feel that different. And I became so curious about this.
And what I started to realize is a lot of people have these stories or scripts in their head about how life goes. And these stories give people security. They make people feel safe and they give people a sense that, oh, my life makes sense. I'm not crazy.
And when you step away from that and start making choices that are away from that, I mean, I'm sure you experienced that even now you podcast, but you also do music. I'm sure you still get like, what are you doing? Why are you spending all these hours on VR too? Right.
And there's no script for it. And the further you follow your own curiosities, there's no script. And so what you need to do, I think, and what motivated me to write my first book is develop your own story for how it makes sense. But in doing that, you can't actually expect anyone else is going to see your story or the benefits that you're getting from that script that you're living out.
But there is some like, once you get past the uncomfortable nature of it, all there's like a kind of a giddiness, right, to not having the same story as everyone else and not validating that trajectory that people kind of, at least from the outside in, you see that they're settling for, right? I think this is what unfolded for me in that first year after quitting my job. It was hard. It was challenging.
I had to figure out how to make money on my own. I was trying to figure out what I'm doing. But at the same time, I'm like, this is so exciting. I have no idea what I'm doing three to six months from now.
And that's scary. But also that's kind of exciting. And I was so drawn by the sense of adventure and the wonder for the possibilities of my life, which were so much more expansive than what I was experiencing previously, which was, oh, two years from now, maybe you'll apply for a strategy, director or position. And it's like, I knew exactly what that life would be.
I knew the schedule of my days, schedule of my weeks, how many weeks vacation I'd get. And I loved the expansive nature of just stepping onto my own uncertain path. And one thing I like to tell people is on the default path, the path that everyone knows is the right successful path. The costs are hidden and the benefits are visible.
The benefits are obvious. Stable employment benefits, health care, career trajectory, but the costs are often hidden, right? And the costs are this like, maybe I don't really like this. Or am I really moving after the life I want?
But a lot of people are feeling that. So everyone just agrees, let's not bring that up. And when you leap, what happens is the cost become visible. So everyone sees you're uncertain.
You know you're uncertain. But the benefits become invisible. A sense of aliveness, connectedness to your work, this like excitement about the future. You can't really see those.
It's like, out of family, get together, people will be like, hey, he just got a promotion. That's great. Nobody's like, able just got a 30% upgrade in aliveness over the last year isn't that exciting? But that's sort of what I experienced.
And it's like, there's no way to get any status or like confirmation of that. And we do care what other people think. So I think the way I've solved that is find the others and being in Austin and connecting with people like you has been a really important part of that. It is.
Yeah. And there are more of us out there than would be immediately obvious. And I like the way that you put it in your book as well, where a lot of people talk about leaving money on the table, you know, as if the whole goal is is chase status, chase as much money as you possibly can. And if you're not getting promoted as quickly as possible and hitting those numbers, whatever that max is in your group or in your own mind, then you're, you're failing in some way or you're not like hitting your potential.
But no one's talking about leaving peace of mind on the table or like intellectual curiosity or passion or that 30% increase that you were talking about. Maybe you could just riff on that a little. So once you get these hidden benefits, you start making trade offs. Almost everyone I know who's self-employed or has an unconventional path makes these trade offs because what happens when you're self-employed is you have almost infinite opportunities.
I can do hundreds of things to make money. And you're just not going to be able to do those. So you're going to have to start making choices. Most people do generally over time gravitate toward what they actually like.
But in doing that, you're often seeing, oh, this obvious way to make money. That doesn't make sense anymore. And at first, it might, right, you want to gain the confidence. You want to learn how to make money.
But the people who last on these kind of paths often settle into an understanding, okay, what's going to fuel the journey? What's going to give me energy while I'm doing it? And the first time I realized this was, I got offered a job for $50,000 less than my consulting job right before I quit. And it was this like future of work consultancy.
They were going to make everyone's lives better at companies. And they're like, look, we can't pay you what you're making now. But you'll have a bigger impact and you'll do work you love. And to me, that seemed insane.
Because if I'm going to give them all the same amount of time I'm devoting to this job to another one, I will just stay at my job. But this question popped in my head of, well, okay, let's say I did go make 100 grand instead of 150 grand. Could I work less too? Right?
Like, could I be creative enough to make more money than I am in my current job but work less? And that was just really interesting for me. Because at that time, I still was trying to escape work. And then after I quit my job, I pushed it so hard.
Like that first year, I made some money freelancing, but then I started being pulled by writing. And I was like, I'm just going to write. And I was sort of shocked at how much of a pay cut I was willing to take. I was basically making 20% of what I was making previously.
I was making about 30 to 40 grand for three years. And I was having the time of my life. I was so happy. And so I was experiencing all these benefits and like that experience of leaving money on the table, which felt bad, which felt like, okay, I know I'm giving up these opportunities, but I'm getting paid in these other elements.
And that's given me confidence to keep making decisions like that along the way. I mean, selfishly, very glad that you made these decisions when you did because in reading your books, they've affected me in the way that I think about things. They've affected your first book, you've shared has gone out to more than 50,000 people who have gone on to affect other people. And so if you think about the cost of that, had you just stayed for a couple years of extra money and promotions and all that that brings, what has the world lost, right?
And how many people have said, you know, well, before I die, I want to write a book or I want to join a band or I want to write some poetry or want to do it. Ex-wise, he travels somewhere and the years go by quickly. We don't always feel it at the time. But like those opportunities, sometimes that we have a window and that window closes, but you don't feel it.
You don't notice it and maybe other people aren't talking about it. You just, you know, wake up one day and you're retirement agent, you haven't written any books. And I've talked to a few people, especially post pandemic in the world of music and beyond. And they're just like, oh my God, I mean, my 50s now.
And I feel like I've not, I've not done anything with my life. Like what is my legacy? And thankfully, a lot of them now are doing that thing. They're starting their own project.
They're writing their own thing. And so I think your example is such a powerful one in this modern age because it's not like it's getting easier to afford the cost of living in America yet. Like you said, there are so many different ways of making ends meet, paying your bills, and you can do that in a creative way. It's not appropriate for absolutely everyone.
You know, those traditional paths, middle management, vice president, running corporations, we need that too. But we don't kind of get what you're teaching people in our education system, if that makes sense. So it's super important. Yeah.
And I like to say, I sort of joke that jobs are better than they've ever been, which is pretty true. Like jobs pay really well. If you are willing to work hard and commit to things, you can find so many opportunities and the pay in jobs has gotten better. And this is amazing.
But I am not writing for those people. I'm not writing to a mass audience. I'm writing to the minority that is confused and frustrated and wants more options. Basically, I'm writing to myself 10 years ago.
And yeah, it's been amazing. I mean, yesterday I was talking to somebody, she's on a sabbatical. And she's like, I'm happy now. And like, your book helped me make sense of all these scripts in my head about that.
I was holding myself up to, but I couldn't actually live out. Right. And it helped her understand, Oh, who am I? Right.
And how can I map that onto the opportunities in the world? I think we sort of don't update our scripts about work. We still think that there aren't all these other opportunities, like what you're doing across many different realms. Like when I'm doing across many different realms, like freelancing, working independently, working remotely, it would be hard to argue that it has not been easier than it is now to do all those things.
Can everyone do it? No, but we should update our scripts to try and like try new experiments. And I think we need far more people experimenting. Like in the US now, we have, I talk to people all the time and these jobs have tons of money.
And they're not happy. And they'll admit this, but they don't see alternative paths. It's like, just go try something for a year. And I want to get help people have permission to do that and sort of some psychological framework to make sense of why they would want to do that.
And that's part of your mission, essentially, right, which gives you the passion to do this work. And could you share that just in a sentence or two? My mission. Yeah, I've written it down here a little bit, but just kind of the underlying belief that helps you wake up in the morning and focus your work on inspiring other people.
Yeah, I think everything is a secret message to myself to believe in myself further. It's I want to enable people to live their lives they're capable of, not the ones I think they're supposed to, right? And that continues to be scary for me. I don't know what the next few years look like.
I read about this in the second book, like maybe the book will succeed to make a lot of money. But I don't know, my income's basically been declining this year because I haven't been focusing on anything but writing. But at the end of my life, I sort of have a good bet that I won't regret having worked on this. Yeah, it was it was actually a pretty painful moment in writing this book looking back on the first chapter of my career of how hard it is to pick out memories from my work.
It's all just this blur. But when I look back on those 14 months, I wrote my first book, it's like, wow, that was like, I still have this feeling of like, wow, that was nice. That was really good. And I know you had some drama with some of your books.
So maybe it's not as happy as mine. But yeah, it was like, yeah, if I could get five to 10 of those experiences and the rest of my life, that's pretty good. And that's sort of what I'm aiming at. And I'm trying to bring a live why I'm doing that and how I think about that.
And it is important to focus on projects that don't have a monetary payoff, right? Because you look out there in the world and that's that's the metric, right? For most things, it's simple. Everyone has some number, everyone has some number they're targeting or something like that.
Yet, I found and we can dig into this more in a little bit when you kind of define like, good work, good enough work, bad work and the things that that support it. But man, talking about looking back over the course of your career or the course of your life, the things that are really meaningful that are those memories, it's not the ones that were attached to the giant payoffs that I remember either. It's usually the ones that if money came in, it was a trickle, it was a little bit, I mean, like talking about the world of music. Back in the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, you could pay the bills for the most part.
But by the time our generation came of age, basically the main product that was sold, which is the recording, the album, that sort of thing, vaporized, right? Like you don't get to sell the equivalent of a book in music anymore. It's just kind of gone. And so you have to find some other way of paying the bills if you're going to do that job.
And that trapped me in the wrong kind of work, even though it was in the right vertical. If you could, so like I got to spend my time playing music, but all of a sudden, if I was following the money, which I was, which burned me out on it, and this is before I started the podcast, I find that I'm playing all of these gigs that are private parties and I'm a wedding singer, all of a sudden. It's like, yeah, I'm getting paid, but I'm not playing the songs that I want to play. I wouldn't choose to play this music or show up in this particular way.
I wouldn't choose to put myself in that box unless money were part of that equation. So you take money out of that, and all of a sudden you can prioritize the work that you actually want to do, assuming that you find a way to pay the bills in some other part of your life or by doing some other kind of work. So maybe you can talk about that and how to weigh spending your own time and how some things will give you energy, other ones will extract energy from you. Yeah, I think this became very important to me.
So after my first year of quitting my job, I was doing these freelance projects, which were pretty similar to the full-time job I left behind. And the more I did them, the more my insecurity about money sort of evaporated, not in the sense that I was stacking cash, but more in the sense of, oh, I can pull off landing gigs. And so at the same time, I was losing motivation to do them. I had this like just sluggish energy every time I opened one of these projects or the emails, who was like, I cannot do this.
Exactly what that feels like. And at the same time, I'm like waking up early and like writing random blog posts. I have no readers. I have like 50 people in my mailing list.
And so I was just noticing that. And I had this very half-baked idea of what if I just stopped trying to make money? And about nine months after I quit my job, I really went into that. And it was a lot of false starts at the beginning.
I got nervous. Somebody offered me paid work. I took like three or four projects over the next year. But I started to experience what my days were like when I was doing things that gave me energy.
And I noticed I was able to do a lot of work. And I didn't burn out. And I was still energized after I finished the work. And I'd go to bed thinking about sentences and work.
And like, oh, man. And no one's reading my stuff. No, no one's following me. And so I was like validating that I actually cared about this.
But even at that time, I didn't have the awareness that this was something worthwhile. I just felt like, oh, I'm headed towards this like poor artist, motive life. I'm going to have to figure out a lower my cost of living in it more. And that's what led me to want to move to Asia.
But I had no plan. And once I moved to Asia, I got my costs down to under $1,000 a month. And I was probably pushing that too far. Like I got very neurotic about spending money and also saw money as like evil as well on the income side.
But accidentally, I created this like cocoon for myself to really deepen into the work. And it was once I moved to Taiwan about a year and a half after I quit my job that I find myself at a table one day. And I'm like, oh, this is work. And like, this is worth doing.
Like, why not? I had 10 years in this other path and I never felt right. Now I feel right. What if I just follow this?
And it could be like literally this day about six years ago, I don't know the exact day, but I remembered this moment. And it was just like, I'm going to do this. I had no money coming in for several months. I had no plan.
And it was just like, I'm going to release myself to this journey. And see where it goes. I was still single. I had some savings, but I really had no plan.
And the funny thing is I was sort of committed to being like single for the rest of my life. In my head, that was the only way I could do it. And then a couple weeks later, I met my wife. Like this money like that.
It is. I do think there is a power of letting go. And yeah, it basically took me a year and a half to let go, which is something that's hard to talk about, but it was an incredible shift. And what were you letting go of that the money is the status that the predictability of the path in the future?
Yeah, I was learning to ignore the voice in my head that generated ideas of how to make money, the voice in my head that told me what women want me to be like, the voice in my head that told me what I should be doing. And listening instead to the present moment, I'm walking around in Taiwan. I can't read the signs. I can't speak the language.
I'm not even sure why I'm there, but I felt at peace. And the more I experienced that, I was like, I think this is it. This is it. This is like all I'm meant to be doing.
And this might be the benefit of staying longer than you did. Like I was such a burnt out husk of myself that it was really easy to just like embrace, even at the time it felt reckless to lean into the present. It felt like borderline dangerous, but it was like, I had those 10 years. Man, that was, it was so heavy.
And this feels so light and good. I'm just going to let it rip. Yeah. And I mean, if you're talking about a hack or a life transition or something that can like open your doors for you, being able to reduce your personal household burn rate is a really, really important one.
And we did the same thing, you know, like, and we've done this a few times where we basically just like, all right, we're too comfortable. Let's sell everything. Let's including the house, like we sold the household, everything gave everything away and just, you know, grabbed backpacks and started traveling the world and reduced that burn rate so that we, you know, all that we were paying in terms of like a regular monthly bill was a few things here and there in a U-box or in storage that we could come back to. And everything else was just like living life in different places and opening up your mind to different possibilities.
And if you're a burn rate, you know, if you need to live in the middle of a city to work a consulting job or a banking job or something like that, which many of us do, especially the higher paying jobs are like that, they come with a big pay day, you know, like a big paycheck, but also the cost of living is something that's really hard to get down. Whereas if you open that up, even if you're in transition, like I'm shocked by how many people go straight from one job to the next one with no time in the middle, even if they had that option of taking that mini sabbatical and they know that next job is there, it's like, why don't people take a minute to actually reexamine everything in between? I think you're a great example for showing why that could work, even if that vacation turns into something that's a little bit more indefinite, right? Yeah, and I think this is the weird thing about being self-employed too, is there's been so many chapters interlude seasons of hustle, seasons of contemplation, creating space, intense writing.
And I've had so much time to experiment in seven years compared to the 10 years I worked in the corporate world where I was basically in one mode of life. And so now I have a better sense of the different seasons I'm in, right? And I'm really feeling this transition emerging right now. I have a child now, I am married to that woman that became my wife Angie.
And our daughter is about a year and a half and we don't actually have a plan three months from now. And like, our lease is ending and we're basically contemplating getting rid of all our stuff and entering a season of wandering again. And like, this is the interesting thing is people before I had a kid where like, or even before I was married, oh, if you ever find a woman, like they'll never be okay with this. I found someone that thinks pretty similar to me.
And then there's like, oh, okay, but if you have a kid, you won't be able to do this. Like, you'll need a house and I'm sort of stepping into this. And some of those things are true. Kids do need certain things.
And like, I won't sacrifice those things. But there's a lot more flexibility in the scripts than you realize. And one of the beautiful parts of your story too is when you and Angie, your wife met, you basically started blowing up your lives together. Right?
Yeah, a couple of people read the book already and they love that line. I was like, we found it over blowing up our lives. But yeah, she was like, right when we met, she was weeks from quitting her job. And as she was quitting her job, she would call me in the morning.
I think after she quit, or even before me, she'd call me at 9am. And at that time, I had no plan for my life. I was wandering around reading books and parks. She'd be like, Hey, I'm not going to work today.
Do you want to go for a hike? It's like, let me check my calendar. Yes, I will go. And yet it was just beautiful because I was feeling very isolated and alone at that point.
And I was embracing a season of solitude in my life. But man, it was so nice to meet somebody asking similar questions, deepening into the unknown and not triggered at all by anything I was thinking about or I was headed toward. And yeah, that that is like my cheat code for all of this is meeting her and having her in my journey without her. I think it would have been a lot harder.
I probably would have been in more opposition to my former life and former world and become one of these quit your job, escape the corporate world person. But yeah, I think it was able to soften into something new as I was meeting her to. Yeah. And sometimes when you change things in your own life, you think it might not work and it might not.
But all of a sudden you meet people, like life puts the right people in front of you at the right time. And since you've changed and adapted to this new position in life, all of a sudden, maybe that's the thing that's attractive to the other person that you never would have. You wouldn't have been that person otherwise. And another thing that you share that I think is worth repeating is that when you take that job with a big paycheck, a lot of times you're being paid to overlook the fact that you would never do this work otherwise.
This isn't interesting work. That's why you're paid so well. And so not all work is like that. What a lot of it is for these traditional cookie cutter corporate positions anyway.
Yeah, I think the confusing thing for me was I loved it when I started. Yeah, it was so challenging. I got pushed. I had great managers.
But seven years after doing the same kind of work, I was really good at it and I could do it in my sleep. But the downside of that was I am somebody that needs to be challenged and I am very curious. And so a part of me was dying. My intrinsic motivation was dying.
And what I was being incentivized to do in the jobs was get more clients engage with senior executives. And I just could care less. Like I wanted to do the work I wanted to create and I wanted to play with ideas. And so I exited not knowing what I do, but really I was trying to find that connection again.
And I've been able to find that through writing where I can channel this. I love playing with ideas, trying to fit things together. The process of pulling together a book is so fun for me. And I can't believe I get to do it.
Like it's so good. And it's sort of this game I've stumbled into which is challenging too. And it's something I could see doing, I don't know, 15, 20 more books. Like at the end of this one, I'm like, okay, I'm starting to get a feel for writing what writing a book is about.
It's like, okay, by my fifth book, I feel like I might have a good sense of what I'm doing. Well, you do have a really unique and beautiful way of writing. You have a voice and style that is becoming more and more established and obvious. I think that's one of the things that people pick up on it.
They read it and they're just like, in the age of AI, especially, I think that's one of the most important things you could ever have as a person is your own voice, your own style of storytelling. And you know, compared to all of these books that are spat out by AI or written by ghost writers with no particular, you know, style of their own or that they're trying to emulate, yours is poetic as some people have described it. And I totally agree with that. But more than that, I think you show the soft underbelly of what going through this transition looks like.
And maybe we can talk about that a little more explicitly, leaving behind your identity as an achiever, which so many of us and a lot of the listeners are familiar with that sort of thing. We get locked into this without really even knowing why we've become professional hoop jumpers. And we just keep jumping through these hoops before we've even decided what we're doing next, we're on track to just like jump through the next one and the next one. And this becomes something that is soul sucking and extractive from your own future.
So what was that like for you when you decided to kind of like leave this achiever Paul behind and what adjustments did you need to make? Yeah, and this gets to a broader thing I've realized, which is people sort of talk in these canned ways around transitions and unconventional past, they say like the same things, like I'm taking this bold leap. In my first book, I talk about, well, actually, most people don't experience it like this. They have these like series of incremental things which get them the confidence and then often people take a leap, but it doesn't feel like a leap.
And then on the other side of it, what I talk about in this is you might actually really miss some of the things you leave behind. Like the expense account, I miss that. Yeah, I love getting a monthly paycheck. That would be awesome.
Also, just this ability to show up in the world as somebody really good at something has automatic admiration from other people. Like it feels good. And to go from that to, hey, you're triggering my deepest fears by just existing. You feel the like there's a gap.
Yeah. So you notice, oh, okay, I think I'm the same person, but no, this person's experience with me is totally different. And yeah, it was cool working for these top companies and getting these things. But ultimately, my path now attracts the kind of people I want in my life.
The people that are like, oh, how did you craft that sentence? How did you think about the book? And you started talking about like, I'm writing in a different style. Like I love talking about this, right?
And there are all these nonfiction books and there's like playbooks. It's like 10 chapters, how to stories of famous people throughout history, plug and play a little personal story, some takeaways at the end. It works. People love those.
Like James Clear has sold far more books than me. So don't take advice for me in writing books that will sell millions. But yeah, I wanted to write something that I really want to write, which is like deeply personal. I'm trying to write more like the poets I admire than the nonfiction books I admire.
And yeah, I don't use examples of people I don't know. I basically only quote people I have met and talked to or podcasts I've listened to. And it's like, oh, that's really cool. I love this or things I've read and then to like me and I plug those in.
And so when people read that, they feel that. I think people can tell the very subtle difference between, okay, I have a chapter I need to write about X. I went and searched for things to plug into that to back up my argument versus, oh, this is very emergent. And yeah, I approached my book writing very similarly to my life.
I tried to let it unfold naturally, which leads to quite a bit of chaos at the end of actually pulling everything together. But it's a fun process. What was you writing practice like before all of this? Was it mostly just spent in business engagements or in school doing the traditional thing or did you have like some separate piece of that in your own life?
Looking back, there's this thread. And in high school, I wrote this fun article with my friend about me declaring for the MBA draft like fun, funny writing. I wrote an article about me and my friends, we all had vans because our moms upgraded to cool crossover SCPs. And in college, I wrote a couple of funny articles about friends for the small paper.
But I never saw it was like a thing. Like people would always like make comments like, oh, your writing is pretty good. But never noticed it. I had this like achievement, I will go achieve and conquer the career world.
That was too strong. Yeah. And then I had a blog after college. I had a blog when I was in grad school.
I had a blog about chronic illness right after grad school. And then after that, after recovering from the chronic illness, I was writing on Quora medium LinkedIn. And yeah, but then even then, even it was like a year and a half after quitting my job and writing most days that I'm sitting in Taiwan and I'm like, oh, I love writing. And it's like, that took 15 years to figure out.
Hopefully we come to quicker awareness of what I actually enjoy and want to be doing in the future. I mean, it's so important though to kind of let yourself take time to eventually arrive at that. Because like when I was coming up, you know, trying to envision my future career or something like that, podcasting was not a thing. I mean, like having a radio show maybe or like being on TV, and that's not something that I ever wanted to do.
Maybe like a goofy radio show around music or something like that. But you know, following just being open to things and listening to your friends, sometimes like the ones where you're like, hey, you know, Paul, like you're pretty decent right now. I giggled at a few of those things that you wrote back that. What I would hear is that people are just like, hey, you've got like a radio voice.
Why don't you like start up something or like go on, you should be on the radio. And then podcasting came around eventually after hearing that a few times. I'm like, all right, maybe I'll just try doing a podcast. And I didn't know how I've always loved deep conversations with smart action oriented people who have stories to tell and that sort of thing.
But it wasn't until I really started the podcast that I absolutely, I fell in love with that as not only something you can experience in your own life, like writing for the sake of your own enjoyment, but ultimately having that be something that can be shared with other people and kind of build on this body of work over the course of time and hopefully upgrade your own skills as you do so. And so it's really important, no matter what that love or that passion is that you happen upon and that you keep doing, despite the fact that, you know, making money online in the creator economy is a very, very difficult thing to do, very difficult to make money from writing, very difficult to make money from podcasting or anything and that. But does that mean it's not a good way to spend your time, even though you're not making money at the beginning? I think if you enjoy it and you can feel that fire within you, like, keep going.
You've got to just keep going because something will probably come out of that at some point. And even if it doesn't, at least when you look back over the course of your life, you're like, yeah, I worked for this job and I don't remember much about it, but at least I did this thing. I got really good at knitting or racquetball or whatever it is. We all have that thing and it's important to nurture that whether we get that explicit result that you might get from other domains or not.
Yeah, I think one of my big challenges was I didn't have any role models of prioritizing creative things or doing things like this. And there wasn't much like active like, hey, you're not meant to be working in the corporate world. I was only getting praise for my achievements in the corporate world. And I mostly it was just immaturity.
I was like, I always had these doubts and these dissatisfaction, but I didn't dare tell people. I would just express it in job hopping. Okay, I'll find the next job, then it'll be better. And the jobs are always like solid.
They were challenging, they were interesting. I worked with people I liked. But yeah, there was always this like, got feeling that something was off. And it was just really hard to figure out what that was.
Now it's very clear, I have this explosive curiosity and creativity that demands to be expressed. And now I only get dissatisfied if I've gone like two weeks without writing. It's like, oh, I cannot wait to go. I really need to go sit down and write because it's going to be great.
And it'll help me reconnect with myself. And when you sit down and write, is that something that is project based where you're you're actively I know you have multiple projects that you're working at. So like, what does that look like for you? Yeah, so I'm trying to get more disciplined.
Basically before I had a kid, me and my wife basically just went day by day and went with the flow of what was happening. It wasn't even a default assumption that most days were work days. In fact, I probably didn't work most days, maybe a couple hours if I did some stuff. But yeah, I just went with the flow writing just happened.
There was enough space and time and freedom that I just kept writing. I never had to try to keep writing. And so it just sort of happened. But then when I had a kid, I suddenly had way less time.
I had this cute girl running around her house or crawling or making noises that was like the number one thing I want to be doing with my time. And that entire first year, I didn't start writing until she was four months old. But the entire first year, like I really just struggled. I was trying to like write whenever and I couldn't find a flow.
And the way I think about flow now in creative work is do I have a flow over a series of a week? Do I have a flow over a series of several weeks? Right? And it's really this feeling of like, do I feel like I'm marching towards something?
And the biggest thing to help was basically just committing to a schedule, something me and my wife were very resistant to. But now we each week or a couple weeks at a time, we sort of map out, okay, one of your work blocks, one of my work blocks and we broke a pack and forth because she's writing a book now too. And with that, as soon as I committed to that, I found a direction and sense of flow with this book. And it was sort of inevitable at this point that it would get done.
So all I had in my schedule, that was serious, was three, three hour writing blocks each week. And I'd write a little more than that, maybe when she was napping or after she went to bed, but I knew, okay, yeah, just keep this going, trust it, keep going and we can finish something. And then what about your resistance to working with traditional publishers, in spite of the fact that they've offered a lot of money to you to basically guide your career to the next step as they see it? Yeah, so the first year of my book, it sold about 10,000 copies, which was wild, far beyond my expectations.
And around then, Penguin, the portfolio imprint reached out and said, Hey, we'd love to talk to you about acquiring your book. And their idea was basically to take it out of production, put a new cover on it and republish it and throw some money behind it. And they wanted to offer me 70 grand for lifetime rights to the pathless path plus 130 grand for a second to be named book. Basically, they just want to like get me in their ecosystem.
For me, the math didn't really make sense. But more importantly, I'm on the call with them. And like, I just don't feel connected. I don't feel alive.
I'm not creatively inspired. Their biggest idea for republishing the book was, or for marketing, it was we're going to send the digital version to some blockers. It was like, okay, I think this was cutting edge when Tim Ferriss was launching for our work week, but I don't think this is cutting edge anymore. And yeah, it was just off.
And honestly, it was an easy like the math is not actually that good. Yeah, so 70 grand for lifetime rights to the pathless path, which means I would make much less per book. And they would own copyright for my entire life plus 85 years after I die. Just like, yeah, and people don't realize that.
But yeah, they own my work, they probably stifle my own motivation to share it and do creative stuff with it. And over the next year, I ended up making, I think, 150,000 from the pathless path. And I had some lucky breaks, like some big influencers shared the book and stuff. But yeah, it also was like, yeah, it's not the game I want to play.
And maybe they could sell far more books. In fact, they probably would sell far more books because they could get into bookstores and push it all through all their channels. I don't have access to. But 10 years from now, am I going to wish I spent more time on teams of random thrown together middle managers that are publishing house?
Probably not. That sounds like a job to me. And so I'm just willing to go basically willing to not earn money to do the work that matters to me. This stuff is so sacred to me.
I care about writing so much because I spent a decade doing work I didn't ultimately care about. And so even just polishing this around the edges, I don't want to do it. I am the structural editor and producer of my book. I did so many things that delight me in this book.
I'm just so happy looking at it. It's like, oh, it just makes me so happy. And that is the whole game for me. Because that is the energy that will help me do a third book, a fourth book, a fifth book.
And yeah, it's all a long term game for me. And so yes, going the traditional path around publishing and book writing, you kind of have to work with a formula. Same thing is true with music. Yeah, and their formula is good.
It works. Like they're very good at a certain formula. But I'm not sure my soul can write a formula book and be excited about sharing that. Yeah, exactly.
And especially if you're looking back and making some editorial sacrifices or giving, handing someone else the keys and being like, I trust you with this, I trust you with my book or with my life's work as it may be. I've seen that go sideways on a lot of folks. And it's really important to keep in mind like why you're doing all of this. And it seems to me like you are playing your own game in a very satisfying way and a very forward looking way and making those compromises on something as close to your life and your heart as something like a book.
If you don't want to follow that formula, it's important not to, you know, it's really I think you give a lot of people courage to not necessarily go on that traditional path. Because most people are just like, I want to write a book. And then the next step I was like, I want to have a major publisher publish my book. And then I want to hit the USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, Amazon Besselor charts.
And then at the top of that, there's, I want to be a New York Times Besselor, but that's not enough either because you have to be a number one New York Times Besselor. And then that's not enough either because your next book also needs to be a number one. Yeah, yeah, and this keeps going. And this can take up your entire life.
It might look like you're succeeding, but you've never actually like said that much. And your books might be written by other people. It becomes this whole game that it's so important that you recognize which game you're playing and commit to that, even if it means sacrificing some of that prestige or leaving money on the table. It's better to have that peace of mind to go back to earlier in that conversation.
Yeah, I mean, how do you think about this? I think you're a good example of this of being relentless about protecting your creative energy. Like you have more experience to me. I was telling you when we went for a walk once, I was like, there's not many people ahead of me on paths like this that have made unconventional choices.
I've seen a lot of people who have been really successful doubling down on one thing that works really well financially. People have cashed out building startups and doing things. But a lot of people don't end up expanding their creativity. And I feel like you've done a good job of like you're still exploring new and interesting things.
Yeah, how do you think about it? I appreciate that, Paul. The podcaster throws it back. I often feel very undisciplined, because to be honest, you know, because if I had doubled down in one domain, be it book writing or just putting out albums of music or live performance or VR, any of those, maybe it would look like I was doing a lot more yet being able to put out a podcast a few a month, sometimes every week.
And then on top of that, many, many other people shows for more than 12 years, I get to exercise the muscles of creativity in different ways. So for my own podcast, I get to write as if I were writing a book, it's just like a page or two at the beginning that kind of like sums up the conversation. And I really enjoy that. And I thought about maybe turning some of those concepts and ideas into a book, which is radically different than doing a book of poetry and satire, which is the last one that I released, which was mostly so that I could have fun making the audio book for it.
And then the traditionally published book with Penguin Random House as well was not without its share of struggles, but I'm really glad in retrospect that I went through that whole exercise. And ultimately, it went out and reached a lot of people through channels that I wouldn't have otherwise had access to. And then previous to that, I wrote the musical Brain, which is just way too scientific to appeal to a mass audience and just kind of like a short brochure that was just littered and sprinkled with all of this way too esoteric and scientific discussions about things that most people wouldn't care about. So I think each one of these little experiments is a good excuse to figure out what you want to do next.
Same thing with music. I've tried so many different things and trying to pursue the status or prestige game or follow the money. If you do that, you see what happens to people around, you see what happens to you. And in order to stay creative, you need to keep experimenting and you never feel like you've arrived.
And also the cash flow issue, like what do you want to squeeze money out of to pay the bills is a question that you need to reexamine over the course of time. Because as you say, and maybe we can talk about this next, differentiating between good work, good enough work, the supportive work and bad work is something that is a wonderfully simple framework in a lot of ways, but it's a moving target. Those things have, like you said, different seasons to them. So I don't feel like writing another book of poetry right now at all.
I feel like, and I didn't feel like playing live music a few years ago at all. And now I'm playing with like two bands multiple times every week, like all over the place. It's too much to be honest. It's a little too much.
But like letting yourself be pulled in these different directions and seeing where that goes and seeing how that ignites your own soul and the passions within you, taking a step back and taking a minute to see how you can reframe your future and kind of redefine your trajectory is a critical part to this whole process. Because you read someone's bio and it sounds like they're doing all these things at the same time, not at all. It's different seasons. And I'm always trying to look for that free energy in the future that I'm being pulled toward.
But how do you define, good work, good enough, bad work and all the rest of that? Yeah. Before I answer that, I think you said something at the beginning that is very important. You said you feel undisciplined.
And you also said, I feel like I haven't really made it. Right? And this is what being connected to like curiosity or creativity feels like. And I think this is very confusing.
Because if you're on a path where you're very productive and you're on a set trajectory and you're moving toward goals, you often do feel productive. And like you're making progress in your life and career. And I left that behind. And I think one of the hardest things about being on this new path was I did feel undisciplined.
I felt lazy sometimes. I felt like I wasn't making any visible progress on things. But I think the thing is over time, it's really like you got to just put in the time. I'm sort of amazed at how much stuff I've done over the last seven years and how many of them I like.
And people will say things to me like you're so prolific. Like if you spend time with me, you'll be like this dude never writes. I've never seen you write. You're just playing with this kid or like taking a nap or reading books.
But yeah, that energy is sacred and I protect it and I make sure it does happen. And it's all about that puzzle of good work which we're alluding to, which I've done as like for me, the good work is things like writing is the things where I feel so live so connected. So sure that this is what I'm meant to be doing. Right?
And that can also be a collection of activities and it can shift over time. Right? For you, it might be writing the poetry. It might be also live music.
It might also be the podcast. But at other times, your podcast might be just a supporting activity that is fueling the other stuff. Right? And so understanding like what is the good work?
What is the game you're actually playing? And then the really tricky category is what I call good enough work. This has been things like I do consulting training workshops and I try to charge good money. I try to time bound them.
I try to design them around actually how I want to do them and what doesn't drain me too much. But if you give me an extra million dollars when I still do them, probably not. But it's like good enough. It doesn't undermine the journey.
Now if you put me in a post merger integration between two consumer packaged good companies and put me on site doing a doing dashboards for three months like my old consulting project, man, that is bad work for me. It might pay damn well. You can get gigs like that paying like $1,500 to $2,000 a day. But man, I'd have to do so much recovery after that.
And it's just like the whole game is to avoid that. Right? And so it's this constant trade off of like, okay, what can generate money to buy me the time to do the good work? And earlier this year, I did a couple training projects and then basically haven't done anything since then, even though there's been a couple opportunities.
And then I've only been writing as my main activity since February. And it's been great. And my income has also steadily declined. So my income is down like, I don't know, it's probably down 40 to 50%.
And last year was huge because of the huge spike in book sales. But yeah, every month I'm seeing my book sales go like this or the video go like this. Yeah, down. And it's like, should I do anything about this?
Should I try and get on podcast? It's like, no, actually, I'm going to do less. I'm going to shut down my podcast. I'm going to stop doing my newsletter every week.
I'm going to stop doing social events. I'm going to hang out with my daughter all the time and write. And yeah, no regrets, but I might need a change in strategy next year. I mean, you do this long enough.
And that is a natural part of the process. And it can be absolutely crippling to a lot of people, right? Because you're used to seeing the numbers go up. That's what happens if generally speaking, you work in the same career for a while, right?
And you share some graphs in the book of what your paycheck would have looked like had you stayed on the same trajectory you were on and consulting. And I mean, they get paid very, very well. But you know, there's also this strange disconnect once you kind of go independent and you start working on your own where you're not paid directly for your time. And the amount of lag there can be deeply unsettling, right?
So you work a traditional job and you kind of like clock in, you clock out, you're paid every couple weeks or every month or whatever it is. When you get outside of that, you start writing books and publishing whatever. There is this uncomfortable lag of three, six, 12 months between the time that you actually ship the work and you do the work and the time that it pays off. And so oftentimes you're being rewarded for the work that you did six, 12 months ago.
And that starts going well. And you're like, all right, great, I can kick back for a little bit. This is all going well. You start kicking back and then within three months or six months, you see all the numbers start going down because you kicked back a few months ago.
And trying to keep up with that is its own kind of challenge. But if you're not having that kind of like lifestyle costs inflation that most people have when they have their liability of a steady paycheck, it's really important to be able to just redefine whatever that next project is and to find yourself like, well, what is enough? And for you, I think you have a great advantage of traveling to different places and myself as well. And my wife Allison going to different places around the world, you see how people live and how little they can be happy on in terms of material possessions or material wealth.
And it is far, far, far less than most of us would probably appreciate here in the States. Yeah. And it's also about not fighting a war with yourself. You have to determine what your desires are.
If you're coming to me and being like, how do I do what you're doing and still pay for my mortgage? I have no idea. I rent. We have no desire to own home.
It's just like not reasonable given the life we're trying to live right now. Right. And so we're lucky in that together, like we just don't have a lot of material desires. Me and my wife's like life, love language is more time.
Yeah. Like time freedom. That is our dream home is like just a massive lot of time. Right.
And so it's not visible to other people and other people don't value it. So it can be really weird living in a culture that all wants the big home, but they let you rent places with kids, it turns out. And yeah, but yeah, it's this constant tension. I think the only way to transcend the tension of seeing your income go down though is you have to have things you care about.
And that's sort of what I was trying to convey in this book of good work is the things you care about. And those things can be so powerful that they can guide you in the times when things are uncertain. Because that's like the arbitrage opportunity of like, okay, I'm not making money. I'm not saving for the future.
I'm not making progress. But man, I'm having the time of my life doing things I actually care about. Yeah. Yeah.
Well, in the homeownership piece, I think it's so important, especially in the face of inflation interest rates and kind of what it looks like now compared to what it might have looked like 10, 20, 30 years ago. People now are like, okay, that's reasonable. Yeah. I mean, I sold my house 10 years ago in Travis Heights and Austin, which was a very, you know, like, and still is a very desirable neighborhood.
And I've had a couple of real church tell me, they're just like, oh, I bet you wish you held onto that. And I'm like, no, I'm really glad that I sold it when I did, despite the fact that it's gone up in assumed value or whatever. But so have the property taxes. So has your carrying costs and your burn, if you hold onto this, then you're, wait, but more importantly, yeah, I bet if you kept the house, you might have not published like a poetry book or something, or like, right, that is the cost, right?
That, if you don't have that, that cost is invisible, right? Because you would have been like, you would have been weeding on the weekends and stuff instead of wandering around and dreaming up a weird poetry book. Yeah. Yeah.
And it was weird. But absolutely, it's one of those hidden things that, you know, 10 years go by, like it's nothing, but you still have a house and you can borrow against it and that sort of thing. But it's like, you're kind of locked in. And the way that I think about it is just like, can you be there for 30 years?
Can you be there for 10 years? Can you be there for five? Because I can't even be there for five or 10, let alone 30. And if you actually sit down, you put on your consultant hat for a second, you do the math and a spreadsheet of how much you're paying, especially with the, you know, inflation and taxes and insurance and all these things, rocketing to the moon, it's really important that we redefine what our own definition of success is and what it looks like.
And I think I'm so glad you're doing the work that you're doing, Paul, because valuing time is almost impossible. But once you start to try to approximate that in some way, you'll make radically different life decisions, because money is all made up anyway. This is, time is not. It's the one thing that is disappearing and you can't hold on to money is completely made up, especially our stories about money.
So as long as you can get comfortable with the story, you're telling other people about how you're living your own life. And it's just like, listen, we're renting our place and we're raising a family that's working just fine. Like, as long as you can sit with that and be comfortable with it, it's not other people if they're uncomfortable. Yeah.
And is this practice? I think I've had it very easy to like not focus on trying to make more money. But that comes after seven and a half years of practicing that skill. A lot of times, I said, yes, to the project that I knew I should have said no to, right?