The Pathless Path

THE PATHLESS PATH

IMAGINING A NEW STORY FOR WORK AND LIFE

PAUL MILLERD

Copyright © 2022 by Paul Millerd

Paperback ISBN: 979-8-9855153-0-5

Hardcover ISBN: 979-8-9855153-2-9

PDF ISBN: 979-8-9855153-1-2

EPUB ISBN: 979-8-9855153-3-6

Kindle ISBN: 979-8-9855153-4-3

iBook ISBN: 979-8-9855153-5-0

All rights reserved.

Editing by Paula Trucks-Pape. Author photo by Alicia Tsai.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author.

I encourage generous sharing of my work. Please feel free to quote passages if you feel inspired.

CONTENTS

I. The Default Path

1. Introduction

The Default Path

Why This Matters

2. Getting Ahead

World Class Hoop-Jumper

Strategy Consulting

Chasing Prestige

The Inner Ring

Existential Opening

Business School

Health Crisis

3. Work, Work, Work

Where Do Work Beliefs Come From?

It Was an Anomaly!

The Meaningful Work Trap

Wage-based Society

4. Awakening

Pebble In My Shoe

A Daily Reminder

A Fool’s Journey

Pushing Forward

What Am I Worth?

5. Breaking Free

Not Who I Wanted To Be

Email from Sarasota

Commuting in the Blob

Too Smart for Burnout

The Dynamics of Mourning

Fool with a Sign

Am I a Worker?

Possibility

6. The First Steps

Prototype Your Leap

Wonder Tips the Scales

Seeing the World in a New Way

Find the Others

Tame Your Fears

Will They Still Love You?

II. The Pathless Path

7. Wisdom of the Pathless Path

The Life-Changing Magic of Non-Doing

Give Me a Break

Waiting for Retirement

Have Fun on the Journey

Reimagine Money

Have a Little Faith

8. Redefine Success

The Second Chapter of Success

Prestige and Bad Tests

Find Your Tribe

You Are a Bad Egg

Find Your Enough

Beyond Scarcity Mindset

9. The Real Work of Your Life

Finding Your Conversation

Design for Liking Work

We Want To Be Useful

Remembering What You Forgot

You Are Creative

Who Do You Serve?

The World Is Waiting

Virtuous Meaning Cycles

10. Playing the Long Game

Working Backward

The Positive Side of Freedom

Reinventing Who You Are

Embracing Abundance

Coming Alive Over Getting Ahead

Create Your Own Culture

Go Find Out

Acknowledgments

Paul Millerd

Find The Others

Excerpt From Paul’s Book Good Work (Published September 2024)

Endnotes

This is the pathless path. Where the journey leads is to the deepest truth in you.

RAM DASS

PART ONE

THE DEFAULT PATH

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

I was extremely nervous. As the teacher of my semester-long Chinese language class called my name, my heart started to race. I took a deep breath and began. I shared the story of quitting my job, deciding to move to Taiwan, meeting the woman who would become my wife, starting an online business, and living in five different countries. It was the first time I had shared my story in another language, and as I finished, a calmness swept over my body. It was the end of a three‑month period where I had felt completely alive, spending my time learning, creating, solving problems, and spending time exploring Taipei with my wife.

This would have been unimaginable to me five years earlier when I lived in New York City. I was single, spending my time at work, eating out, partying with friends, dating, and constantly plotting ways to work less or escape work altogether. I was working at a consulting firm making nearly $200,000 a year and working on projects for some of the most recognizable CEOs in the world. I was successful, and on my way to being even more successful.

This was the end result of an obsessive focus on getting ahead in my twenties. It’s a state familiar to many. Study hard, get good grades, get a good job. Then put your head down and keep going, indefinitely. This is what I call the default path.

Growing up, I thought making $100,000 a year made someone rich. When I made that amount for the first time at 27, I felt like I had more than I could ever need. Yet I opted into an identity that didn’t accept such complacency. Everyone around me was always moving forward towards the next achievement.

Chasing achievements is what brought me to that New York City job working with CEOs, the final one before I decided to quit. Most mornings I came into the office and sat there struggling to start my day. I watched the people pass my desk and wondered if they felt the same stuckness as I did.

Eventually, I would start my work, helping company boards assess their senior executives to see who the next CEO of the company should be. I read through feedback reports from people throughout the company and created summarized reports of each executive’s strengths and weaknesses. We like to think that once we make it we can finally be ourselves, but based on who the companies selected, it was clear that the longer people stay at a company, the higher odds that they would become what the company wanted. I realized I didn’t want that to happen to me.

In a ten‑year period, I worked for five companies and spent two years in grad school. I moved from job to job, convinced the next stop was always the final stop.

My restlessness was easy to hide because my path was filled with impressive names and achievements, and when you’re on such a path, no one asks Why are you doing this? It took me a while to recognize this blind spot and have the courage to start asking myself those kinds of deeper questions in a serious way.

Which led me to walk away. Scratch that – run away. I even gave back a $24,000 signing bonus and missed out on a $30,000 bonus if I had been able to stick it out for another nine months. I left with the intention to become a freelance consultant, but soon enough, that story started to show its cracks as well. It didn’t take me long to realize I had been on a path that wasn’t mine and to find a new way forward, I would need to step into the unknown.

About a year into this journey, I stumbled upon a phrase which helped me take a deep breath. It was the idea of a pathless path, something I found in David Whyte’s book The Three Marriages. To Whyte, a pathless path is a paradox: we cannot even see it is there, and we do not recognize it.⁠ ¹ To me, the pathless path was a mantra to reassure myself I would be okay. After spending the first 32 years of my life always having a plan, this kind of blind trust in the universe was new, scary, and exciting. Whyte says that when we first encounter the idea of a pathless path, we are not meant to understand what it means.

To me, however, it meant everything.

The pathless path is an alternative to the default path. It is an embrace of uncertainty and discomfort. It’s a call to adventure in a world that tells us to conform. For me, it’s also a gentle reminder to laugh when things feel out of control and trusting that an uncertain future is not a problem to be solved.

Ultimately, it’s a new story for thinking about finding a path in life.

As the world continues to change and technology reshapes our lives, the stories we use to navigate life become outdated and come up short. People are starting to feel the disconnect between what we’ve been told about how the world works and what they experience. You work hard, but get laid off anyway. You have the perfect life on paper, but no time to enjoy it. You retire with millions in the bank, but no idea what to do with your time.

The pathless path has been my way to release myself from the achievement narrative that I had been unconsciously following. I was able to shift away from a life built on getting ahead and towards one focused on coming alive. I was able to grapple with the hard questions of life, the ones we try so hard to ignore. And I was able to keep moving when I realized that the hardest questions often don’t have answers.

One of the biggest things the pathless path did for me was to help me reimagine my relationship with work. When I left my job, I had a narrow view of work and wanted to escape. On the pathless path, my conception expanded, and I was able to see the truth: that most people, including myself, have a deep desire to work on things that matter to them and bring forth what is inside them. It is only when we cling to the logic of the default path that we fail to see the possibilities for making that happen.

I had been following a formula for life that was supposed to guarantee happiness. It didn’t. Confusion kept me on a path that wasn’t mine for more than ten years. Along the way, I learned how to play the game of success and achievement, but never paused to find out what I really wanted. I found myself in rooms surrounded by business leaders and didn’t quite fit in. I was in the wrong rooms, asking the wrong questions about how to live.

THE DEFAULT PATH

This book does not argue for or against any singular way of living, but it contests the idea that the default path is the only way.

By default path, I mean a series of decisions and accomplishments needed to be seen as a successful adult. These vary by country, but in the United States, we refer to this as the American Dream, which means a life centered around a good job, owning a home, and having a family.

Researchers Dorthe Berntsen and David Rubin study what they call life scripts, which they describe as culturally shared expectations as to the order and timing of life events in a prototypical life course.⁠ ² Their research found remarkable consistency across countries with regard to the events that people expect to occur in their lives. Most of these moments occur before the age of 35: graduating from school, getting a job, falling in love, and getting married.⁠ ³

This means that for many people, expectations of life are centered around a small number of positive events that occur while we are young. Much of the rest of our lives remains unscripted and when people face inevitable setbacks, they are left without instructions on how to think or feel. While very few young people expect to have one job or career, most still rely on the logic of the default path and assume they need to have everything figured out before the age of 25. This limits the ideas of what we see as possible and many, including me, internalize the worldly wisdom that John Maynard Keynes once pointed out, that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.⁠ ⁴

Since 2017, I’ve had hundreds of virtual curiosity conversations with people from around the world about work and life. I’ve seen the shame of unexpected layoffs, the panic attacks from changing jobs, and the loss of hope people experience when they can’t make it work on the particular path they think they are supposed to follow. On top of that, people are ashamed to talk about these things with the people in their lives.

This anxiety is not limited to young people. Increasingly, people at the end of traditional work careers tell me they are not excited about the default story of retirement. They still have a desire to engage with the world but don’t know how to make that happen. As of 2018, men and women in developed countries are expected to spend nearly 20 years in retirement.⁠ ⁵ As the baby boomer generation enters this new life stage, bringing with them unprecedented wealth, health, and energy, they will be looking for new stories about how to live their lives.

These stories motivate me to keep going on my own journey and give me plenty to write about. Without intending to, I’ve become a repository of wisdom about how to navigate life and build a better relationship with work. Much of what I’ve learned through these conversations has inspired this book.

Prior to embracing the pathless path, I was the friend that people came to when they had career challenges. I once worked closely with a young professional in his mid‑20s who wanted to escape his current job. As he described his career options, he told me he could keep progressing at his company and become a partner or he could take a position at a client’s firm and coast, as he put it.

Are those the only two options? I asked. Yes, he replied. I listed a few other paths that he conceded were possible, but he added, I don’t know anyone who has done that. Many people fall into this trap. We are convinced that the only way forward is the path we’ve been on or what we’ve seen people like us do. This is a silent conspiracy that constrains the possibilities of our lives.

I was testing out a side gig as a career coach when I first met that young professional. He hated his job and wanted to make a change. As he found a new role, working in another company, he lost all motivation to keep working with me and exploring the things that mattered to him.

This disappointed me. I wanted him to see the potential I saw. Yet in my own life, I was doing the same thing. With every new job, I convinced myself I was thriving. But what I was really doing was trying to escape feeling stuck.

I was too afraid to have a deeper conversation with myself. The kind that might pull me towards a different kind of life.

WHY THIS MATTERS

For most of my life, I’ve had the gift of seeing the greatness in others. It hurts when I see people stuck or unable to pursue their dreams, and I want to do anything I can to help them. In writing this book, I realized that this has everything to do with my parents.

I won the childhood lottery. I had two parents that devoted their lives to creating the best life possible for my siblings and me. They did this by figuring out what they were best at and then giving it their complete commitment.

For my mother, it was being an active parent. Right from the start, she had an intuitive sense of my needs. She gave me space to make my own decisions and I learned how to take ownership of my life. She helped remove any obstacles in my way and helped me grow into a confident adult. At every step of my journey, the courage to take the next step was a direct result of her abundant love and compassion.

My father prioritized work. I struggled with this for many years. I wished he was around more. As I got older, however, I realized that this decision was just as hard on him and that he didn’t have any other choice.

At 19 he took a job at a manufacturing company and didn’t think about working anywhere else for another 41 years. The story he told himself throughout his entire career was that he had to work harder than everyone else. Why? He didn’t have a degree. As he earned promotions, he found himself surrounded by people with impressive credentials and likely felt more pressure to keep up. Yet he never complained. He woke up every day at 5 a.m., put in 12‑hour days, said yes to every single thing asked of him, and in doing so, was able to have a remarkable career and ensured that my siblings and I had more options than he did.

My mother also believed that not having a degree held her back and she was right. A couple of years after college, I helped her apply for a job at another school as a director of a financial aid department. The recruiting committee said that her cover letter was one of the best they had seen and that she was the best candidate, but because she didn’t have a degree, they were offering the position to someone else.

This hurt me so much. I knew that my mother was smart and capable and that a degree had nothing to do with what she had to offer the world.

The best option available for my parents was the default path. This worked remarkably well for them, which is what made leaving it so damn hard. I know how much they sacrificed so that I would have better career opportunities. However, what they really gave me was so much more than the ability to succeed in school and work. It was space to dream, take risks, and be able to explore more possibilities for my life.

Many people find it difficult to create change in their lives because they lack someone that believes in them. I have parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents, teachers, and managers who believe in me. Their support gives me an advantage and because of this, nothing motivates me more than trying to be that person for others. I am inspired by what the writer Leo Rosten once argued was the purpose of life: "to be useful, to be