Hello, Pathless Path listeners. As you can probably tell, I've been on quite a hiatus. And mostly that's because I've been focusing on finishing my second book, which is now live. I am planning on doing a few more short, just update episodes and what I'm up to.
But right now, I just wanted to get you a preview of the audio book and the beginning of the book and share with you more about how you can buy and support the book. I'm really excited about this one. I feel really good about it. And personally, I think the audio book version is awesome.
It even includes a appearance from my wife, Angie, which you can check out. Let me know what you think and enjoy the preview of the start of the audio book. Could it be this simple? Just do things you like?
Sitting there at the table in my Airbnb in Taipei, a cup of coffee by my side, I felt that my reality had shifted. It all started to make sense. The endless job hopping in my 20s, the dissatisfaction that never seemed to go away, the desire to escape through Asia after quitting my job and blowing up my life, the whole time I had been desperately searching for something I could never quite understand. And now I had found it.
How could I have missed it? I thought. The years I had written for fun and always found so much joy in it. Since I'd quit my job 16 months earlier, writing had been my only consistent activity, but I never considered it work.
At 33 years old, I finally realized that this act of creative expression was an essential part of me. It was my good work. I stopped writing, took a deep breath, and took in my surroundings. Rain pattered down on the metal awnings of the buildings on the street.
The air in the room was heavy and humid, and carried a musty scent from the wooden furniture that had likely been passed down from previous generations. In a city where most cafes don't open until 11 a.m, my pot of freshly brewed coffee filled the air with a distinctly American urgency I had yet to let go of. Since I had arrived in the apartment a few weeks earlier, this table had been my sanctuary. Each morning, I would make coffee, sit down, and write.
But on this particular morning, I'd have profound awakening. Channeling my curiosity into a newsletter post-destin for just a small number of readers, I noticed a deep connection with my work, hyper-aware of it for the first time. I felt at ease, filled with a sense of abundance and possibility. The moment was a stark contrast to my life up until that point.
For 10 years, I'd bounced from job to job searching for a sense of connection to my work that remained elusive. And by the end, I simply ran out of energy to keep going. Pin-pointing the exact cause of my burnout is an impossible task. It may have been the meetings where everyone only pretended to care or how emails from clients were treated as secret messages to be decoded as the team jumped into crisis mode.
Maybe it was simply knowing that I was playing a role in the whole performance, turning myself into the kind of person who gets a good review and a 5% raise at the end of the year. A perfect explanation doesn't really matter, because by the end, I was depleted. Despite having what was on paper a promising career, I saw no reasonable path forward. When I quit, it wasn't an act of defiance but surrender.
I had been vanquished by the demands of a modern career. And as I walked away, I saw work itself as my unofficial adversary. It had done this to me. With this mindset, I had no bold visions of success when I became self-employed.
I wasn't taking a leap to build a successful startup or even trying to increase my earnings. Quite the opposite, I saw work as something I needed to escape. And my plan was to eliminate as much of it for my life as possible. I'd live simply and scrape by.
As I cut my cost to living in that first year, I had the thrilling sensation of becoming free. Wow, it was working. I was doing the bare minimum to pay the bills and I felt better. I thought I had it all figured out, but I was only getting started.
Without work, I spent more time doing things I enjoyed, like writing. No matter where I was, I kept finding myself lost and flow, typing away, trying to find a rhythm with my words. But it was not until sitting at that table in Taipei that I saw it for what it was, work worth doing. I didn't want to escape work.
I just craved work I cared about. In seeking to break free from work, I rediscovered it in a simpler and more powerful form. I realized that my conception of work had been far too narrow. As I awakened to this new perspective, I became upset.
Why didn't anyone tell me this was possible? Why do we pretend that formatting PowerPoint slides is the height of human existence, that jobs are the only form of work? I love the feeling of connection and flow I experienced from writing, and it became everything to me. I became determined to build my life around doing things like writing, things that mattered to me, things that brought me alive, no matter what.