Hey! Itâs me, Paul Millerd.
Pathless is my newsletter sent (most) weeks that offers my thoughts and reflections on my pathless journey, our modern relationship with work, the history of work, self-employment, riffs on remote work and organizational craziness, creativity, self-publishing, books, longreads, and really, whatever I feel like writing about.
Iâve been doing this since 2017, and if you search the archive, you can find almost every issue Iâve written dating all the way back to issue #1.
Ok Paul, who are you?
I âretiredâ from the corporate world in 2017 after ten years of working in strategy consulting. I wasnât close to being financially free or jumping toward a bold entrepreneurial path. I just couldnât do it any longer. I was performing a role that wasnât me, and I needed to find a new way of showing up in my life.
My writing is inspired by my confusion upon becoming self-employed after this leap in mid-2017. Why did it feel so different than being employed? Why were others so worried about my âplans and goals? Why did I feel ashamed about moving toward something that felt exciting? Another question: Why did it feel okay despite my bank account shrinking?
Since those early days, I knew there was no looking back, and to make sense of the new reality I was creating, I wroteâŚ
Slowly, Iâve attracted people from all over the world. Somehow, more than 25k people subscribe to this newsletter now. This is wild. I donât take this lightly.
Here are some reflections from people on Twitter before Mr. Elon got all weird about allowing people to cross-post links on different platforms.
For more than five years, I wrote to a relatively modest audience. I met amazing people. Had hundreds of no agenda âcuriosity conversationsâ with people about their life paths.
Then in 2020, I started writing a book, The Pathless Path, which was published 14 months later in January 2022. It started selling slowly and then took off in 2023. Now, itâs sold more than 65k copies and has been translated into French, Russian, Chinese, and Hindi.
The book is about my journey shifting from getting ahead (achieve, achieve, achieve!) towards a path where I instead orient around âcoming alive.â
Itâs a combination of:
Personal journey
Philosophical reflections on work
A short history fo work
I loved writing the book and knew I wanted to keep writing them. In September 2024, I released my second book, Good Work.
This one is a spinoff of The Pathless Path. Itâs more personal than my first book and a deeper exploration of my relationship with work and my multi-year journey of prioritizing my connection with work (and seeing it as a portal to something deeper) over a more instrumental stance with work.
If you are someone who struggles to stay connected to the work that matters or at the beginning of a journey of trying to do so, youâll love this book.
I also run a community. We have 500+ âpathlessâ humans from around the world. To join, itâs a one-time âpay what feels rightâ fee.
The Pathless Path Membership
Join A Community Of Curious Humans Who Want More Than Life On The Default Path I wrote the Pathless Path after hundreds of conversations with people from around the world. What I found was that people were struggling to fit their lives into a default path that was no longer working. Many people were inventing new paths and new scripts for their lives butâŚ
Here are some other things Iâm working on and where you can find me:
â My Site is where I write and share deeper essays and explorations
đŤÂ StrategyU is where I run Think Like A Strategy Consultant, a digital course teaching people strategy consulting âsecrets.â
đ Pathless Path Podcast is my podcast and can be found across all platforms. E-mail me guest suggestions here.
đ¤ One of my biggest goals is to make friends across the world. I interact with curious people and explore ideas on Twitter, sometimes share pictures on Instagram, and sometimes try to awaken corporate America on LinkedIn.
Increasingly, Iâm sharing and hanging out with people on Substack notes. Come say hi!
