Hey! It’s 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.

I’ve been doing this since 2017 and if you search the archive you can find almost every issue I’ve written.

Ok Paul, who are you?

Me in Taiwan in 2018

I “retired” from the corporate world in 2017 after ten years of working in strategy consulting. I wasn’t close to being financially free or jumping toward some bold entrepreneurial path. I just couldn’t do it any longer. I was performing a role that wasn’t 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 in mid-2017. Why did it feel so different than being employed? Why were others so worried about my “plans and goals? More importantly, Why did it feel so good 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 wrote


Slowly, I’ve attracted people from all over the world. Somehow more than 23k people subscribe to this newsletter now. This is wild. I don’t 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 conversations.

Then I wrote a book, The Pathless Path, published in Jan 2022. It started selling slowly and then took off in 2023. Now, it’s sold more than 60k copies and is being translated into multiple languages.

The Pathless Path is a book about my journey shifting from getting ahead (achieve, achieve, achieve!) towards a path where I instead orient around “coming alive.”

Get the book

In September 2024, I released my second book, Good Work

Read More & Purchase

I also run a community. We have 500+ “pathless” humans from around the world. To join, it’s a one-time “pay what feels right” fee.

Here are some other spaces and projects I am working on:

  • ✍ My Personal Site is where I write and share deeper essays and explorations

  • đŸ«Â StrategyU is where I run Think Like A Strategy Consultant, a digital course teaching people strategy consulting “secrets.”

  • 🎙 Pathless Path Podcast is my podcast and can be found across all the platforms. E-mail me guest suggestions here.

  • đŸ€ 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 try to awaken corporate America on LinkedIn.

Subscribe to Pathless by Paul Millerd

Unexpected takes on the modern world of work. Paul explores our obsession with work and the default path of success and tries to imagine new possibilities for how we can conceive of life, work & what matters.

People

Trying to dream bigger about the possibilities for how we think about living our lives, creating things that matter, and our relationship to work. Longer essays on https://pmillerd.com and also run a consulting skills course on strategyu.co