Today I am talking with Matt Yao. He's actually going to be interviewing me. I met Matt. I think the first time through a phone call, he basically sent me a message over Twitter saying, Hey, I read your book.
I am reorienting my life, thinking about quitting. And we had a call, super curious. I followed his journey. He's been writing a ton about taking sabbaticals, rethinking work and his journey, finding what I like to call good work.
And yeah, he just read my second book. We met up in SF as well. And he wanted to interview me. So I figured it'd be fun to dive in and also chat about this with him.
Yeah, thanks Paul. And I was really excited to have this conversation on good work and anything else that emerges. And really I just do this as a way for me to pepper you with all the questions that I have about what you've written about and also just the impact that you've had on me in my life and also now in my career as well. Maybe we'll just start off with how things have been so far with launching good work.
And what's been emerging, the thing with books is they're kind of a one and done project, at least in terms of the book itself. So I'm really curious what's been going on since. Yeah, so in the book, I read about my relationship with the work after having a kid. And I think it's something I had to completely reorient.
Not my relationship to the work, but how it fits into my life. And after I put the book out, it basically just stopped writing a lot. I think I really had to lock into this very discipline writing at least three days a week. And then especially toward the end of the book, letting the book take over basically like every free moment of my life.
And so I think I was a little, I think I needed more rest than I thought at first after pushing the book. So I've mostly just been taking it easy. I think 2025 is really when I'm gonna start probably writing a third book. What I found through writing the second book was that, yes, I actually do love this.
It's awesome. I love how it shapes. My relationship to work and just helps me focus and go deep and do the things I love. But yeah, it's been fun promoting the book.
My approach is basically, I'm gonna promote it over like three to five years, slowly and see what emerges over time. Awesome. I'm sure we'll go into more specifics and deeper, but one thing I wanna just start off with is big picture, how do you define work? Because you define it in a very different way than conventional American views it.
And so just right out of the game, I think it's important to lay out on the table how you define work. Certainly not what most of us might think it is. Yeah, I think, I don't even know if most people have a definition of work. I think they've sort of absorbed a very surface level idea of work that is pretty shallow, I would say.
It's more like work is something you have to do. Something really basic like that. Or work is what you get paid for. And I think those definitions are fine.
There's nothing wrong with those definitions, but they sort of ignore two things. They ignore one, all these things that can't be paid for, but might still be worthwhile doing. And two, all the kinds of work that don't fit into like formal employment and paycheck work, right? I think you're journeing over the past couple of years.
You've done a lot of stuff. And I think many people encounter this when they become self-employed. Like what is work? Is your newsletter work?
Is it or not? Like is it, it's enjoyable, but it might also lead to opportunities that you actually do want to get paid for down the road. And so my simplest definition is work is things worth doing, which sounds really silly. But when you think about it, like that's really what life's about is like trying to pack in as many things worth doing that you won't regret that you'll feel satisfying, that delivers some value to yourself or the world over time.
Yeah, if work is worth doing, how do you reconcile that with other words that people associate with what's worth doing, worth doing like hobbies, passions, or is there just a lot of overlap? Yeah, I think I just try to get to the essence of these things. There's so much bullshit out there in terms of like how people are thinking of work. And I think a lot of it comes from a very cynical or a naive place.
So the cynical is, well, you don't have any choice. You gotta work. So what are you supposed to do? It's not like I can stop.
It's interesting because these scripts are very strong. And I've heard that from people I know, know who have like millions in the bank. And they'll be like, yeah, I hate what I'm doing. It's terrible, but you gotta work, right?
It's like, well, the math is a little weird there. Maybe not, or maybe not spending as many hours doing these things you also claim to dislike. And then the second is this like, I think it's a reaction to our world, which is that formal work and formal employment and successful work where you make a lot of money is so central in our conception of work. And so the naive reaction to that is like, okay, let's make this even more special, right?
And so everyone's seen this Ika guy diagram, right? Where you're like, do what you love, impact the world, make a lot of money. And I forget what the fourth one is. But the combination of those three things to me is like actually a really terrible starting point for searching for things worth doing.
Because it just narrows the imagination to basically formal employment or a very narrow type of entrepreneurship, right? And I think it's this wishful thinking of like, okay, here's how everyone seems to be working and living. I wish this framework could map on to that. So I don't have to make too many changes.
And I think mostly I don't write for those people. I write for the people that are like, I actually do want to rethink and make those changes and maybe pay some cost to find something even better. And so that's sort of what I'm exploring. It's this ever evolving open question.
And I think even in the past year, like I'm thinking a lot about these things. And I don't really know what work looks like in the age of AI. Yeah, I want to get to later. I also have a bit of a grip with Ika guy because a little bit of a different grip.
It's that it's sort of framed as like this one time sit down and think really hard and you'll find the intersection of these four circles, whereas I view it as more like a continuous process. Yeah, and it's always interesting because I mean, this comes from a Japanese word, which is reason for being. And I think that definition of like reason for being probably connects deeply with what I'm talking about in good work, but the Western imagination must fit these things into like very defined things. Like even the idea of like, you need to have an impact.
Like I think it's a very sexy idea. It's like, I want my work to impact a million people. You hear this from some people. And I think there's a craving in that that can't actually be satisfied.
And realizing this, I think can lead to a certain devastation of like meaningless or not mattering. But I think working through that end on the other side is this like, okay, if I'm not sure what an impact is going to be, I might as well do things I care about and really just try to like maintain that connection at a local level. Yeah, the word impact is really interesting. I remember when I was first working in tech as a product manager, you know, fresh out of college, we would, we'd cared a lot about the impact that we had like me and my peers who were all in the same code boards who were all 22, 23.
And we would like look at the different teams and the different options and think about how the users were touching and what sort of features we were building. Do you hear a static? No, that might be a enji vacuum. It looks like I think we're live streaming.
What? We don't wear. We are live streaming on my YouTube. We have questions in the live stream chat.
Hello, I love you. I think we should just, I think we should leave it running. Sure, I guess we're live streaming. Okay, cool.
Keep going. I'll just impact. Yeah, I was gonna say two things on impact. One is I definitely had this like external orientation towards impact thinking about like, oh, if I can touch a million users in some unquantifiable way of really how much of an impact, do they feel from my work then somehow that makes my work more valuable?
And the other thing I was gonna say on impact is, I think we both ring about how if you look at like the largest companies and their mission statements, all of their mission statements are all more or less like make a huge impact through your work. And if it's just hilarious, if you look at it across Coca-Cola, Walmart, Meta, Google, all of these major companies at the core, but they're trying to say the same mission statement of like show up here and make a huge impact. Yeah, so Meta's now is build the future of human connection and the technology that makes it possible, right? The future of human connection, right?
And yeah, it's all these pictures of like people in public and hugging and dancing, but like it's just this, like, it's a lot, well, I think there is some truth to it, right? And you almost need to tell yourself these positive narratives because I think one thing I realized and I study a lot of organizational change and complexity is there are a lot of unintended consequences of change at scale or decisions at scale. And you basically have to have a positive view of things, if you are going to do things at scale, because at scale, you will cause some level of destruction. Every change is gonna have a ripple effect and have unintended negative effects that you can't predict.
That's just the nature of change in general. Yeah. Hold on, I'm gonna ask if Andrew will, that should be good now. So, you know, what just came up for me is it definitely does feel like, well, I don't know if this is cause I'm in a bubble or if you're in a bubble or if we're in the same bubble of good work and just, I don't know, whatever is going on in Twitter, but it does sort of feel like there's a, like a certain timing from a historical and like a labor trend perspective, even big things like remote work and AI, like you just mentioned.
And as much as I've enjoyed your personal stories, I also really like, when you take a look at the big picture, even when you're like tweeting those charts of like percentage of people back in office, I always find it really interesting. So I'm curious, how do you fit good work into the history of labor, paint that timeline of however far back you wanna start industrial revolution or 100 years ago and like, what is it about right now that makes good work a fit for the current times? Yeah, so, I mean, I think my overarching takeaway is that work is always changing, right? I think this is something people can miss because I think the narratives a lot of us grew up with feel like so strong and there was sort of like a period of stability in which like, okay, put your head down, get your education, transfer to a company and like follow this path and you'd be taken care of, right?
And that more or less work. And that was the industrial era script. That's sort of like the final, the final like job-based existence in the industrial era. But toward the end of that, as we graduated into like, or more me than you, like my first job literally had a desktop computer.
And so I saw like the tail ends of this, but the internet has upended everything. And the internet is going to take anything with a transaction and this will be accelerated by AI and take the transaction costs to like near zero. So that's gonna upend the economics of like everything, right? And so this is basically the same thing that happened with the industrial revolution, right?
The industrial revolution through mass production and factories, lower transaction costs and increase the benefit to like gathering a bunch of people working through these factory-based processes, right? And then a lot of office work really followed that same model. And so we're going through this shift where like firms, the like firm size is shrinking. If you look at like revenue per employee, right?
More people are employed for bigger companies from bigger companies, but those companies are making more money perms, especially at the high end, like superstar companies and then the superstar employees who are able to extract enormous amount of value. And so I think we're shifting more to this like probabilistic outcome of like more chaos and randomness and less and more variance in the labor economy. And I think this is just incredibly unsettling, right? And so psychologically, like people need new stories.
This is sort of like why I wrote my book, imagining a new story for work in life. That's the subtitle of the Pathless Path. It's my attempt at writing a story for myself that helps me make sense of all these changes. It does seem to have helped other people, right?
The Pathless Path is a phrase that admits we don't know where we're going, but we want to be grounded and have some foundation in the present, right? The Path without a future path, right? And so I think that's sort of like what we're facing. I think unlike many future work thought leaders, I don't have a good prediction of like where we're going.
I just think it's gonna be a weirder and it's gonna be different than we expect. Yeah, that makes me think, it definitely does seem like what you write about. It has an unexpected amount of inner stuff. Like the importance of like you said, in a world where it gets increasingly complex and chaotic and dynamic, you know, thinking about like the term anti-fagile and even what complexity signs would say is when the systems get more complex, then it's all about flexibility, slack, and being able to react as things change.
And that all points to like what you talked about with inner ambition. And a lot of it seems to be like an inner quest, which is very different than I think from other types of, like the books that might get clumped with yours, which are more oriented around like looking outside for what you want to do. Yeah, and that's just how apparently we're live on LinkedIn too. Is this like an automation that you set up or?
No, I think I was playing with it. And I think it just auto went to a bunch of steam. Let me see where we're, yeah, we're going to LinkedIn and YouTube. Great.
I'm just gonna update the captions. Talking good work with, this is a pathless path podcast. So this is on brand. What were you saying again about?
Yeah, it's less of a question, where of an observation that what you write about seems to be quite around like all these buzzwords, self discovery, self-awareness, personal development. The inner world, right? And I think this is really the bigger theme is we're shifting from like a 99% focus on the extrinsic, right? What does my job say about me?
What does the path say about my ability to be successful? What does my employment status say about me being a good member of society? Right? All these things too.
Actually, we live in a more prosperous world now with more paths, more possibilities, more economic opportunity. This actually affords us more permission to not ignore the inner game. Right? And so I think people are saying like, okay, if I am going to work, I might as well not sacrifice everything.
Right? And I think we just have this really intense legacy of this top down industrial era where society was like marching to the beat of a drum, right? We had to be like ready to mobilize as societies and cultures and industries to like for the Cold War coming out of World War II. But one, our economy is no longer like that.
And two, people are waking up that you can actually feel good with the word. Right? And I think jobs in general are like way better than they were 40 years ago. And so people are experiencing this in their job.
And then they're just figuring, okay, there are actually other trade-offs I might want to make and other paths, like self-employment, underemployment, entrepreneurial paths become more possible because it's not about maximizing income or optimizing legibility on a path. Yeah. The topic of work inevitably has a lot of association with money. And I actually look at you towards you as a role model when it comes to healthy relationship with money.
I mean, I know you've told me before that you still think about money and you worry about money. But I think it's admirable how you remain so, like, have such a strong sense of conviction in the path that you're on and knowing that it'll adapt and that you have a kid like you're going to be able to figure out. So just broadly on money, like, what is, tell us about money and how that shows up in good work, the book? Yeah, I think this is like work.
And I shifted from having a very service level relationship with money to one that is much more in-depth real and actually tested with my lived experience. Right? And so I think with work, if you've only worked in a full-time job, it's scary to work on your own because it's totally unknown. You don't actually know what's going to come.
But once you spend a few years working on your own, it suddenly becomes normal to like find your own work, create your own work, charge for your own things and try stuff. Right? And then any other kind of work seems kind of weird. Same thing with money.
I went through a radical shift. Right? And so if you just have a monthly paycheck coming in or by weekly paycheck, cutting that off feels crazy. Right?
All of life has been about acquiring this paycheck up until 22 years old for me. And then for the next 10 years, I've built my life around that steady paycheck. And ideally, to be seen as successful, that's a rising paycheck. Right?
Quit my job, had no paycheck, saving starts shrinking. But the thing that happened is I became like, I was able to lean into my own agency. I was able to take actions and go try to make money. Right?
And so I've made money in a bunch of different ways. One of my goals early on was to try and make money in a bunch of different ways explicitly. And so the more evidence and experience I had making money in different ways, the more confidence I had that I could kind of figure it out. Right?
And so along the way, also, I stumbled upon this way of describing what I was doing called Coast Fire. Right? And so financially independent retirement early is all about saving as much money as possible so you never have to work again. Right?
Now, if you define work as something you don't want to do, that makes sense. But if you define work as something you can actually enjoy and gives you like meaning, that doesn't make any sense. Right? And Coast Fire says, save enough money so you do have a safety net, some retirement savings that hopefully you're not going to touch.
And then the entire goal is to basically work less than full grinding or sacrifice and focus on things you enjoy. And that's basically what I've been doing for seven and a half years. And so for seven and a half years, I've at least broken even every year. The first few four years I've pretty much broke even, did not make much money.
I don't think I made more than 40 grand in my first four years. And but I didn't touch my retirement or investments. And so my net worth grew. Right?
And so this is something that people just basically don't ever test. Like even people that are retired, like they see their wealth as a product of their earnings and hard work. When in reality for a lot of retired people who have a lot of money, most of their wealth came from compounding earnings on investments. Right?
They earned money from capital, not labor. Right? And so you can be smart with your finances and basically just spend less. I was never a big spender and so saved really aggressively for retirement and savings.
And as soon as I add 50k and savings, I basically just like left and my mental goal was always keep the 50 even. That's sort of like my runway to pay for times when I don't maybe don't make money and then don't ever touch the investments. So that's the game I set up for myself. And for seven and a half years, I've succeeded on that.
And then especially in the past few years with some of the success of my book, I was able to even save even more. And so just watching this and having the experience over time, it's like, Oh, I'll be okay. Right? But if my script was still like, I should maximize my potential or earnings based on my skills.
I'm an utter and complete failure. Right? Otter failure. Yeah.
Right? Compared to my business school classmates, I'm probably one of the least well off people. Probably bottom one percent. Right?
Many of my like even college classmates or like peers who work in consulting. Same thing. And so that can be really intense. And so a lot of your relationship with money is about ego and letting go and actually like feeling through like, yeah, I do feel really dumb and stupid sometimes, but I just like sit with that emotion.
The goal of my life is not to make those emotions go away. It's to actually try to fully lean into like the feeling of connection, presence, and aliveness that I really want. Yeah. Now that I can relate.
I remember being on sabbatical last year and I basically track my net worth once a month. That way I don't have to look at any of these apps ever, you know, throughout the month. And it was just this really disorienting feeling to see my net worth at times say the same or even increase month every month while I continued to live off of savings. And then the other surprising thing was I had sort of budgeted going into my sabbatical conservatively like five k a month or six k a month.
And then I, at times I spent like $1,000 a month. And there was like no noticeable decrease in happiness or quality of life. Yeah. This happened to me too.
My spending dropped dramatically after I quit my job. And I think this is something people just don't give themselves credit for like their own agency to make changes in reaction to changing conditions. Right. If you're, if your income disappears and you're spending a lot of money that will feel shitty.
So you'll be like, okay, I have two choices here. Let it rip and decelerate my savings as fast as possible. We're just spend less. And the beauty of spending less is you can actually just notice how you feel and I experienced the same thing.
And I was like, I'm fine. I'm happy. Life's pretty good. And I have like more free time.
And so it was like, I'm willing to fight to protect this free time. This free time is so valuable to me because that's the time I can figure out what I'm going to do next. I can tinker on stuff. I can try stuff.
I can read. I can hang out. I can go for bike rides. And so yeah, over the second year of being self-employed, I went from about 6,000 in spending a month to a thousand living in Asia.
And I was under a thousand for probably like a year. And yeah, it was just really nice. And it also just showed me a 34 years old. I got my spending down to a thousand months.
And I felt like I was thriving. This is pretty good. Yeah. I feel like it's also central to good work.
Like we just talked about money. I think creativity I see as one of those sort of big bubbles of association with good work. It seems like you take a pretty explicit stance that good work is inherently there has to be a sense of creativity or maybe a large amount of overlap. One thing I've noticed in my own experience and just people that I talk to is there's people on full-time jobs, there's like a lack of creativity and also a sense of pent-up creativity.
Like there's this yearning or this longing to be able to express themselves. What is the role of creativity in finding good work? Yeah. I think the creative urge is human.
I think I started to find creativity broadly. I joke that a lot of people planning massive weddings really are trying to express their creativity. And for many adults, like a massive wedding is the only creative project. They're really young at their lives.
And so yeah, I think the desire to be creative is human. I think we're creative in many ways. Like we're creative in how we raise kids. We're creative in like how we figure out how to do things like all the paperwork you still have to do in a modern world.
We're creative in like how we write and reply to emails. We just don't see this creativity. We see it as like creativity has to be big sea creativity, which is we wrote a book and all these things. And a lot of people pair creativity with needing permission to do something.
And so it's really hard for them to see their own creativity because they assume, oh, I don't permission. I can't do the thing. Right. Somebody asked me once was like, who like who let you write a book?
And I was like me. I just did it. Right. But like we're so trained to think we need permission to do the thing.
Right. And so with the internet, you can often just do the thing directly. Like you have with your writing like I have with my writing. But our model is built on this job based reality where it's like, oh, I need to get a job as a journalist first before I can write in public.
Yeah. Permissionless creating. Right. Yeah.
I feel like we both written a lot about sabbaticals. We both got on our own sabbaticals. I don't know if you get this, but I've sort of gotten this. I feel like I sense it in the periphery too, just people thinking that I'm a, like I just show the idea of everyone should take a sabbatical.
And I think that we neither of us actually, that's what we're saying. Maybe it's just a question around the role of sabbaticals and finding good work and how you draw that distinction, you know, holding the importance and the transformative nature of the sabbatical and saying that like everyone you've know has had a really good experience while also, you know, not necessarily telling everyone to go do it. Yeah. I think it's a lot of people's fears.
People don't like non default ideas, many people, right? All new ideas are heretical by nature, right? Because they're new ideas, right? And so they make people uncomfortable.
Like I'm not actually trying to communicate to like the default path that loves their job and is crushing it on the default path. Like actually don't know why they're listening to me. They shouldn't, right? And all my stuff is like free on the internet competing with other free stuff on the internet.
Like you should go listen to Adam Grant or like Simon Cinek. Like they're much better people for you to absorb if you love the default path, right? What I'm communicating for and what I'm investigating is for myself and I'm sharing it with other people what I find along the way, right? And so the difference between somebody already on, already curious about taking different paths or a sabbatical is so vastly different than the other person, right?
You've probably had the same experience. They come to you and it's like, all right, I'm going to plan a sabbatical next year. I have nine months. What should I know?
What should I think about? I'll absorb any book you recommend me. I'll read everything. I'll prepare.
And so those people are the best. That's who I create and write and share for. I am not trying to build. This comes back to the impact question.
I'm not trying to be a mainstream influencer. If I was, I would talk a lot more about how full-time jobs are the greatest thing in the world and how you can thrive at a big company, right? I might land speaking gigs for that. What?
I'm not actually interested in that, right? And so I think people are confused. I call this like mass media delusion, thinking that everything they see on the screen is like something that is communicating to everyone. It's like, no.
All I'm doing is planting curiosity triggers to find the others. This is the beauty of the internet to find small, beautiful, wonderful niches of like-hearted humans. Yeah, like that. Curiosity triggers.
I've also found that when people come to me, they actually start off the conversation. I'm guessing that this is the way for years. They start off the conversation and make it seem like they're just starting to contemplate leaving. And then as you talk to them, you realize that they've actually gotten pretty deep in their exploration.
And it's almost like they're looking for permission from someone else to actually take the leap. But also the question I get most often is like, how are things right now? It's almost like a chap just to make sure that I'm still sane and not trembling. Yeah.
And I mean, you've said before, like, oh, Pathless Path helped me quit my job. But you were probably headed in that direction anyway, right? Well, what's interesting is I've definitely- I've probably written down somewhere where I was like, I think I've used the metaphor of the first domino was reading the Pathless Path. And so that set off more domino- Why did you read it though?
Yeah, well, what's interesting is like, I think this is also when I started journaling. Like I didn't have a set of practice of journaling. But so when I read the Pathless Path was February 2022, but there's at least one sporadic journal entry in 2021 where I was like already thinking about quitting my job without a job lined up. And I just use a lot more words than sabbatical ones because I didn't have the vocabulary.
So it's exactly what you said. Like, I even still view it in my memory. I was like, that was the first domino. But I had the thought like a couple months prior.
Yeah. And I think this goes more broadly to how people tell stories about their leaps. People will ask me all the time, what's the moment you knew you were going to leave your job? And if I'm truly honest, and I tried to talk about this in the Pathless Path, I don't actually know.
Right. I think there are like hundreds of small little moments and awakenings over 10, 15, 20 years. Right. There were even glimmers of me sort of like not following the rules in high school and college.
Right. And looking back on those, it's like, oh, it's very obvious where I ended up. But in the midst of it, we're sort of incentivized to tell this very clean, clear story of a moment. Right.
And I think the idea of a moment is a myth. It's neat, it's nice, and it would be cool if there was a moment. But often there's like the moment before the moment. Yeah.
Do you know that you have the term slov on Stephen Johnson? No, I like that. That was perfect. Have you heard of Stephen Johnson?
The author and the... Yeah. Yeah. So do you...
There's something about how innovation happens and he actually takes the view of how innovation happens at big companies. And there's like an example of like Toyota figure out how to use their recycled tires or something. But the slow hunch is just his contrast to the what we usually view as a moment, an insight, a flash of inspiration. And his book shows how in these organizations, the way they came to the most innovative ideas is actually this slow hunch.
And I say it could be like planting seeds. And when you plant the seed, you don't know actually when it's going to sprout or even what is actually going to sprout, whether it's going to be like a flower or a tree or whatever. But it's like this constant tending. And I think I was more or less doing that where I would have this idea of wanting to go into my job and then I would just revisit that idea month after month or even sometime every day I would think about it.
But just in having that view of like, it doesn't have to be this flash, there's other ways of making decisions helps me find a sense of relief. Yeah. It's a great phrase. Yeah.
It's perfect. Slow hunch. I like it. Something I want to ask you about is being a father, being a dad, having a kid.
I'm an aspirational dad. I hope to have a family one day. I'm curious like pre having a kid, what did your puzzle of work look like and how has it shaped after having kid beyond the obvious of like less time and have to make maybe a little bit more money. Yeah.
I think it's mostly a time thing. Right. And so I just have a lot less time. I think also the starting conditions of both me and my wife being self-employed leads us to more naturally lean into parenting.
I think if we still were in like job world or full-time employment world, there's a very natural idea of like, well, you have to work, right? So you have to then organize daycare and help outside of your jobs. We've leaned in the complete opposite direction. So I've sacrificed a lot of work time.
And so that's been really hard for me because I went from I could just work whenever, like literally whenever I never had a structure schedule and any day was just sort of up for grabs to, okay, if I want to actually get stuff done and do the things I care about, I need to prioritize it and schedule it. And so to write my second book, I had to lock into this three day a week, three hour each of those days, no matter what pace and schedule. And when I did that was delightful. But it took me like a year to shift away from, I'll just work when it feels good.
And so I'm still adapting and adjusting. And I think the thing with being a parent is it's always changing. My daughter is almost 21 months and every month has been different. Right.
And yeah, still adjusting. And then we've just sort of decided over time to just watch our own daughter, which seems crazy, but like, I mean, most humans did this for most of the time on the planet. And so me and Angie are just bouncing back and forth watching her. So Angie's been finishing the draft of her memoir.
She's writing right now. And so I've mostly just been like in dad boat and since publishing my book, which has been great. I think one of the challenges with this though is like, there aren't many dads like prioritizing taking care of their kids during the week. And so it can be a bit lonely.
Still trying to figure that out. But yeah, I don't think I'll regret this when I'm older. And that's sort of the bad I'm making. Yeah, I haven't heard any dad regret or parent for that matter.
Spending a lot of time or wishing they spent less time with their kids. Growing up. So that's cool here. Yeah, it's very, yeah, it's so rewarding.
It's sort of like how I look at good work. And I think being a parent is part of my good work, depending on the day. But when I look back at like all the moments I would call good work, like writing my first book, writing my second book, it's like, oh man, I missed those times. In the moment though, it often can be frustrating or hard or challenging, right?
But when you look back on those moments or extended periods of times, it's like, oh, that's really nice. And that's often the same reflection I get when I look back on the time I spend with my daughter. It's like, oh, it was really nice to spend a lot of time together over the summer. Because I think what you write about is all about being open and knowing yourself and what you want and adapting.
I'm curious what in this moment do you see as potential changes or adjustments that you make to improve your life or how you want to take it. It sounds like being around other dads with young kids would help or something like that. Yeah, so figuring this out, I feel like I have a lot to learn as a parent. And I'm not sure what the right setup is.
I think once your kid gets into schools or a daycare, which is something we'll probably explore soon, then you start meeting other parents who get more of a schedule and a rhythm. And so finding those others that are living in similar ways, I think is a really big priority for us. And yeah, I just don't have good answers. I think we're looking at potentially living abroad and things like that.
But yeah, we're still very exploring and in learning mode, I would say. And I think that's just one big reflection about how me and my wife approach a lot of things is we treat everything as an experiment. We sort of say like, okay, we're living here now. What are we learning from this experience?
What does it tell us about the life we want to live? Right? Okay, we did this schedule and structure with our work and how we're hanging out with our daughter. Like, what are we learning from this?
What should we tweak? What should we change? And so that's very opposed to how most people live, which is like, once you have kids, like your life set, you have to lock into this script. And I think scripts are just a lot more adjustable than people think.
They just have to fire the manager and their head first. Yeah. Do you have like an actual, like, how do you relate to the scripts that are that you have? Like, is your own script even a script or do you call it something else where a script is just a word that is society's conditioning?
Yeah, I think script is a good starting point. I definitely have scripts. I'm running, right? Talk to curious, generous people, right?
That's sort of a script I have running, which already ends my time and attention. Like, try to write consistently right over time. That's like a script. And in my head, like, those will lead to like good outcomes.
Now, when I get evidence that those scripts are no longer true, I need to change. Right. And so one of my scripts before having a kid was talk to anyone who's curious about work, right? I can schedule for those people.
Yeah, exactly. Now that is not my script. My script is I can't afford to talk to anyone at any time because I won't accomplish the things I want to accomplish and I'll be distracted from my family. And so yeah, I think like rewriting those scripts and updating based on what's happening in your life is really important.
This topic of experimentation that you just brought up, I think, is so key because it really flips things upside down from how we've been doing it where like we've probably all learned about the scientific method in like third grade or something, fourth grade maybe. And there's like this hypothesis where there's just this innate sense of curiosity and being open to what the experiment proves or disproves as it relates to the hypothesis, which I have to just be a very powerful frame to approach things. And I'm wondering for the people, you know, I'm just assuming that most people are probably still in full-time jobs that are reading good work or in your audience. How do you advise them as it relates to experiments and what's your look for as the first step?
Yeah, I have this idea I call ShipQuit and Learn. And so the idea is just to try stuff and basically the cheat code to like figuring out what you want to do in life is just trying a lot of stuff. And the problem is most people just stop trying stuff. They think their life is set at like 25 or 30 years old.
And so it's really coming up with experiments and I call it ShipQuit and Learn, which is basically ship something as fast as possible, design it to quit, right? So you're time bounding it. You're saying I'm going to try this for a week or a month or something like that. And then the only goal is to learn something, right?
So ship it as fast as possible, design it to quit, and then the goal is to learn what to do next, right? And so since the default is shutting it down or moving away from it, it's relaxed. Like there's nothing to fear here, right? And so I've run courses before where I have people do something called an action challenge, right?
And the action challenge is this. It ships something in a week no matter what. And you can do infinite things. You can host an event in your town.
All that requires is setting up a landing page, right? Aluma page, a mixily page, a part of full page, something like that. Just say, yeah, I'm going to invite six people to a restaurant. We're going to talk about topic X.
People love this stuff, right? I'm going to host a cooking class for my friends. I'm going to publish one essay and send it to three people. I'm going to start a blog.
So how many things you can do? We all have these ideas like, oh, one day I'll do X. Move that out from the recesses you bring and try to activate it as fast as possible. And so, yeah, that's the thing I keep coming back to is like, what can I try in a month or less?
And so I've tried all sorts of stuff, living in different countries. We've lived in multiple places for a month long since. And we always learn stuff. It's always interesting and always reshapes how we're thinking about the future.
I've done so many experiments of my work. Most of the things I've done have flopped or failed, but along the way, I've learned stuff. And so the more things you try that don't work, you learn, okay, what not to try, or that you actually enjoy or don't enjoy that task and you can update. You can keep trying stuff.
Yeah, I just love this approach to life. It's very fun. Yeah. It reminds me of what you said the title of your next book might be, but I won't.
The whole... Yeah, I mean, I've told people it's going to be called experiments and living, but yeah, I'm probably going to start working that in January. Yeah, thanks. Final...
It's not really a question, but I just remember when we were chatting in SF, catching up and you told me that you haven't been doing the podcast as much, and you've been part of any time with family, then obviously you're sort of in the... Well, I assume the promotional phase after putting out this good book, so a book on good work. So yeah, I'm wondering maybe you can just do your lightning pitch of good work that I've seen on Twitter, but in podcast form, because most of your podcast episodes are where you interview other people. Good work.
Yeah, I'm actually working on a video right now about this, which should be pretty fun. Some of the ideas from the book are it's really focusing on prioritizing a connection with what matters and really defining what is good work. It's talking about the entire journey too, like getting lost, not mistaking a good job for good work, not working to isolate it or taking on too much suffering, flowing with your emotions, having useful workscripts, and then how I've left money on the table. And it's an exploration of all that.
And if you're somebody that has something you enjoy and wants to make it a bigger part of your life or senses, there's something more to your work life, this book is probably for you. Sweet. Now I want to jump in and share what I took away from it as a reader. I think it's interesting.
Something I've noticed in my coaching as well is like, work is such a big part of our lives. And often the inquiries that we have around work, money, meaning it's almost an entry point or a Trojan horse to talk about what it means to live a good life. Yeah, exactly. Your book could work as really a book about a good life, but I don't know, maybe if it was called good life, it just wouldn't attract the people that are stuck in jobs they don't like.
And they think that the solution is around changing a job or what happens in Silicon Valley, where you kind of move diagonally, you work two years out of company, you have to in your company get slightly more pay and you're just kind of doing the same thing all over again. So to me, I appreciated how it really starts with framed around work, but it really touches on how to use work as a vessel for living a good life and also the importance of, I think you do this really good job of, it's almost like a paradox where work is so entrenched in our lives. And yet it's like, it's serious, but it also doesn't have to be crippling and seriousness. There's like this playfulness to it.
There's this lightness to it. And it's making me, it's making me a question along other things that I've been thinking about recently of how can I continue my quest for good work. Like, I think it's an ongoing set of inquiries that we ask ourselves and it's kind of like what Wilka said about living the questions. Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, I love that. All my writing is basically just an excuse to find the others that want to ask the deeper questions about what is the good life. I think that's one of the most important questions. I wish more people asked it and yeah, I think with the work, it's for me, my journey has been, I unconsciously was holding work up as extremely important in the narrow sense of the traditional path in my past life.
And now it's, I've sort of transcended it in this, like, I think work is actually very important, but not that serious. Like, it isn't everything. It's like you actually should approach it with care and lightness and through that, you can find stuff you care about and it's not caring that really matters. And yeah, it's it's cool to hear you took that away.
Yeah, awesome. Greatful for this conversation. We end our informal live stream. Yeah.
Well, do you want to say where people can find the book or do you think it'll be pretty safe for people to find it? Be miller.com slash good work. Thanks, Paul. All right.
Appreciate it.