Losing Yourself, Ambition, Writing, 40k Books, Surrender | #247

November 18th, 2023: Greetings from Barcelona! We made it to the La Sagrada Familia this week, and wow. The inside has been closed in my past visits so it was great to be able to make it inside. The way the light flowed through the building and how the pillars took the form of trees is hard to describe. It’s magnificent. This crappy picture really doesn’t do it justice, but is the best one I got:

Upcoming Pathless Path sponsored events:

• Lisbon November 22nd: Hosted by Kelly Davis - RSVP here

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#1 On Losing Yourself

I really enjoyed Joe Hudson’s recent conversation on “finding the one” on the Art of Accomplishment podcast with co-host Brett Kistler. I highly recommend the podcast if you are interested in improving the relationships in your life. Joe has a magical ability to cut through the nonsense and share what really matters. It’s a podcast Angie and I both listen to and talk about. I’ll be interviewing Joe in a couple of weeks so if you want to check that out make sure you are subscribed.

Back to the podcast. In the episode he was talking about “losing yourself” and I found this worth sharing:

Yeah, so I would say losing yourself is when you're not being who you want to be and you don't feel like you can control that. The interesting thing is love in itself is another way of losing yourself more in a good way, like losing identity and losing.

There's a way in which what love does is it erodes your boundaries and it erodes your identity, which can be incredibly healthy. It creates a feeling of oneness.

There's reasons why there's so much poetry that talks about unity with God, being love, and that love feeling like it spiritually moves you into greater things or greater realms, or a deeper sense of connection with yourself. And that is the good way.

But then there's this way that happens in society where we lose ourselves and we're acting like monsters, or we're in huge fights where we weren't in huge fights before, or we are codependent and we don't are jealous or anything like that. That kind of losing oneself is, I think, what people are really scared of. I mean, we're also very scared of love as far as seeing our full selves and losing our identity.

It still is a bit shocking to me that as soon as I let everything go in my life, someone quickly showed up in my life that fit so well. For years I had “lost myself” in the one direction he mentions, becoming what the corporate world wanted me to be (and I was pretty good at it!).

I struggled to find anyone I deeply connected with for years. But then everything opened up for me after I quit my job. I haven’t really talked about this in detail but after I quit my job I started meeting people who were far better matches for me than I ever imagined, despite not really making much money or having a plan, the things a young guy thinks he is supposed to have to attract people.

Joe talks about how this often happens with his clients who learn to cultivate more openness and connection in their lives

Are you ready to accept love into your life? Then the person always just shows up within three or four months, I can just see it. I see that transition happen in a person, and then it's just like I can start counting down and easily within three or four months, boom, they're in a recommitted relationship.

It also made me think of the only highlight I made from a recent Pico Iyer book, Autumn Light, where he talks about leaving his life behind, moving to Japan, losing himself, and also quite quickly meeting the woman who would become his wife:

I simply followed a random impulse out into the temple's garden, where a flock of kindergartners, in pink and blue caps, was scattering across the lawns, collecting fallen leaves. And almost instantly, for no reason I could fathom, I felt I knew the place, better than I knew my apartment in New York City or the street where I'd grown up. Or maybe it was the feeling I recognized, the mingled pang of wistfulness and buoyancy. I was so affected—the quiet morning went through me so deeply—that by the time I boarded my plane in early afternoon, I'd decided to leave my comfortable-seeming job in New York City and move to Japan.

Four autumns later, I arrived, suitcase in hand, outside the door of a tiny temple along the eastern hills of Kyoto. My boyish plan was to spend a year in a bare room, learning about everything I couldn't see in Midtown Manhattan.

That idea lasted precisely a week, which was long enough for me to realise that scrubbing floors and raking leaves before joining two monks crashed out in front of the TV was not quite what my romantic notions had conceived. So I moved to an even smaller room, 75 square feet—no toilet, no telephone, no visible bed— and told myself that in the margins of the world was more room to get lost and come upon fresh inspiration.

Better still, I was back to basics here, with few words to support me and no contacts; my business card and résumé, liberatingly, meant nothing in Japan. Every trip to the grocery store brought some wild surprise, and I barely thought to look at my watch, every day seemed to have so many hours inside it. When, on my third week in the city, I went to Tofukuji, one of Kyoto's five main centers of Zen, to observe its abbot, Keido Fukushima-roshi, receive initiation into some new level of responsibility, I was placed next to a spirited and charming young mother of two from southern Kyoto whose name was Hiroko. She invited me to her daughter's fifth birthday party, five days later, and very soon my year of exploring temple life became a year of watching a new love take flight.

I promise not to turn this into a relationship advice column but it does make you think that

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#2 The NYT Declares Humans Ambitious Again, We Can Stop Panicking Now

Last year, the New York Times Magazine posted an article titled “The Age of Anti-ambition.” They were riding a collective panic around people not wanting to work, something that looking back, looks like a labor market aberration coming out of Covid, just as I was trying to say it was.

In response to the panic around ambition, I shared my own journey with the word ambition on Twitter:

Ambition as an idea has been captured almost entirely by the default path. When I left my former path most people thought (and some even said, "don't you want to succeed?" "don't you feel like you're wasting your experience" They can't imagine a different type of "ambition."

The kind of ambition I'm talking about is the kind of fire deep down that tells you there is a different way to structure your life, a vague pull towards something else that is nearly impossible to explain to everyone else.

So many people are convinced that life operates in a smooth path and line (even if their life doesn't go this way) that it feels crazy to have this sort of vague pull because you know others will try to map a clear path or goal on to your life.

And this is why so many people tend to reject using "ambition" if they've taken an unconventional path and found things they want to commit to. Ambition is a symbol from a world that doesn't quite understand a deeper connectedness to one's work.

Most people writing about work can't seem to explain this either - probably because they are still caught up in a 100-year old marxist class struggle frame of work, they haven't experienced it themselves, or they are caught up in the scripts & stories of work.

Hence someone who writes seriously about work can only imagine "anti-ambition" as opposition to climbing the corporate ladder "why don't people work hard"

Perhaps they ARE ambitious

I sense there is a shift happening where people are realizing that they are channeling an ambitious impulse - the desire to grow and evolve - into dumb goals. Rejecting legible ambitious might be the most ambitious thing you can do.

A shift from legible ambition (my parents can easily brag about me) to illegible ambition (no one, including me knows how to explain this) Because there are more ways to show up, create, contribute, and do things that matter than ever before.

A couple of weeks ago, Emma Goldberg wrote this in the New York Times:

But what I saw at the center of so many labor battles was people reimagining what their work could be. What from one view looked like anti-ambition could, from a different vantage point, appear as new forms of ambition. Ms. Sharon, who quit her pizzeria job, found a new one that treated her well and where she felt she had more to learn. What could be more ambitious than that?

It seems the grips of our job-based reality are starting to soften. Could my writing have had an impact? Who knows. At the end of the day, this more expansive view of ambition is a good thing as it will undoubtedly encourage more people to follow paths where they can succeed rather than paths where they feel like they are fitting a round peg into a square hole.

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#3 I hit 40k books sold

I recently crossed the 40k mark for my book, selling over 30k in 2023 so far. This second year has been absolutely wild. Completely unexpected. What does 2024 look like? I have no idea.

Here’s the detailed breakdown:

Some book updates:

• New Site: I’ve re-launched the book on a separate site pathlesspath.com which feels much nicer and also includes a section on self-publishing where I’ll keep adding updates

• Indie Print-Only Deal: I turned down a foreign rights deal from HarperCollins in India. It was $2k for a 7-year rights deal for all versions of my book. A recent conversation with Charlie Hoehn made me realize that what I want to keep doing with this book is having fun with it and experimenting in interesting ways. So instead of that, I partnered with a hybrid publisher, Think Tank Books, to republish only my print version in India where I retain 100% of the rights. HarperCollins made me take down the Kindle version before even offering me anything and would not tell me when it would be re-published (could have been anytime in the next year). With Think Tank, it looks like they’ll have books in over 100 bookstores by the end of November. Stay tuned and let me know if you’re in India!

• Translation Status: I have a foreign rights agent who said my book had “interest” from a number of foreign publishers for translation at a recent international book fair but no offers other than the India one. I sense this is one area where being self-published is a major disadvantage, as the world of foreign rights is shrouded in more mystery than anything I’ve ever encountered. Who knows what will happen over the next six months but if nothing I will likely hire translators myself in regions where ebook sales are higher.

• Guerilla Gifting: I’ve continued gifting my book with recent gifts including 25 to a coworking space in Bali, 10 to a creative center in Chiang Mai, 10 to a coworking spot in Whistler, 10 to a friend in South Africa, and various copies I’ve left around Taiwan and Spain. If you’d like to receive a gift or know a good home to send some, please let me know.

• Five Degrees of Pathless?: I was having coffee with

  Kevin Maguire
  here in Barcelona when someone leaned over and said, “Are you Paul?” He said he ended up in Barcelona from Ireland after reading my book after graduation (via an Ali Abdaal video). An Italian guy living in Barcelona told me he was recommended the book by three separate people in the last two months months. It’s still sort of shocking how many people hear about the work through word of mouth and I’m so grateful to anyone who risks their reputation to put my personal story in front of someone else.

How does all this feel? To be honest, it still feels weird. I didn’t write the book with any sort of sales results in mind. I thought it would be cool to sell maybe 500 or something like that. Mostly, I am happy that a small set of people seem to find immense inspiration and camaraderie in my story and want to keep sharing it with others.

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#4 Can You “Work” On Writing?

From Bukowski writing to an editor who likely rejected him

No “bookworm or sissy” am I . . . Your criticism correct: poem submitted was loose, sloppy, repetitive, but here’s the kernel: I cannot WORK at a poem. Too many poets work too consciously at their stuff and when you see their work in print, they seem to be saying . . . see here, old man, just look at this POEM. I might even say that a poem should not be a poem, but more a chunk of something that happens to come out right. I do not believe in technique or schools or sissies . . . I believe in grasping at the curtains like a drunken monk . . . and tearing them down, down, down .

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#5 Surrender

From

Sasha Chapin

:

My favorite productivity tip is to surrender utterly to what your life is. Stop bullshitting yourself about what your actual inclinations, appetites, and interests are. Realize how much of your perceived agenda is designed to serve an outdated story about who you might have been, and what you might have wanted, in some other hypothetical existence.

This can narrow down your to-do list a lot. You can suddenly realize that four-fifths of what you had planned to do in life was completely irrelevant. Freed of crazy stories about what your life was supposed to be, you may find that the friction in your life is much lower. That is real productivity, that’s how you get shit done, by not doing most of it.

This is more or less my strategy. I see a lot of people doing a lot of things and I often think for a split second “Oh man I am great, I should do these great things” or “I should have bigger goals,”

And then I remember I have other stuff going on that I like and really do feel like I have enough and then I think to myself “eh, I’m good.”

And then I go out for a walk.

The Value of Surrender

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#6 Hangouts

I got to have a leisurely coffee with

Russell Max Simon

this past week after being internet friends for a few years. He has been living in Barcelona with his 13-year-old son for a year and maybe longer. I highly recommend his writing on following an unconventional path, climbing, adventures rebuilding an old home in the Spanish countryside, and more.

Also shoutout to

Anna Reich

and Gaurav Chandrashekar who had a small hangout in Amsterdam. It’s so cool to see people connecting.

By the way, I might be participating in a YouTube challenge with Anna in December to just post videos without overthinking. While her channel on engineering and business is way better than mine, I think it will be fun. If you’d like to join us:

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Thanks For Reading

Here are four things worth checking out

1. If you’d like to meet others on “pathless paths”, you can join The Pathless Path Community if you want to hang with us too, or if you are already a subscriber, get access here.

2. Buy or listen to my book, The Pathless Path. If you’d like to do a bulk order for gifting purposes or a book club message me and I’ll ship them to you at around $5 per copy via Amazon

3. Subscribe to my podcast and leave a review.

4. Refer 10 people get my book for free:

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