2023 was the year I became a dad and for the first time, pressure—tested this life that Angie and I have been building over the last several years. In terms of enabling me to be present and enjoy the beginning of the “magic years” of my daughter, it was a complete and unambiguous success. Financially, it was also my best year I’ve had, mostly due to my book selling almost four times as many copies as last year. But in terms of how I think about my path and where work fits into my life going forward I feel more uncertain than ever.
Man parenting is one of those things where I never seek content about it out but when it pops up in my friends' work or in the work of creators I admire I am just completely sucked in. I agree about the scripts and the questions people ask and I am just as guilty. As soon as I found out my wife was pregnant I started worrying about college haha. I had not heard the Mark Manson quote of how identity lags by two years--that's so interesting and something I need to chew on.
Well done on a great year. I'm impressed by how well StrategyU does even though I don't see you mention it all too often. I totally agree also about having one foot in the creator economy and one foot out of it (antifragile?!). Best of luck for the year to come
Great reflections my friend, I'm grateful to have met you last year and excited for you to potentially return to BCN for a longer stay ;)
I love the idea of the Pathless Path course, and doing the in-depth breakdowns of peoples journeys, I'd be happy to help with this in any way I can.
And i'm sorry to hear about Noel, you know my stance on biking so that story really resonates, I'll definitely be checking out your podcast episode with him.
Wishing you and the family a healthy and happy 2024!
So many good questions. And so many scripts that need to be rewritten or at least given a second thought! E.g. I never calculated that my 260 days/year are owned by a corporation like wtheck?!
Noel sounds like a wonderful person. I'm glad you two had time to connect deeply in the time you both had.
P.S. Hope you give fiction another go this year :)
It's very generous of you to be so transparent about the entirety of your path Paul. I have 3 kids. Ages 28, 26, and 14. By the time my youngest son soon comes of age I will have been actively parenting for more than 30 years. I thought for a while that I should be sharing parenting advice with other parents, because, hey, now I know some stuff! But it turns out that what you gain knowledge of in parenting is the particular terrain of your own personality and self, your partner if you're co-parenting, and your kid(s). Love how you're experimenting and finding what works for you as parents. It's the kind of model that is needed, because we all need encouragement to trust ourselves, experiment, stay open, honest, and curious along the way. Which brings me to your tribute to your friend Noel. I think in part a desire to support others is a function of aging. In getting older you start to see that most people are well-intentioned, well-meaning, and smart enough to figure things out, they just need encouragement and appreciation for what they already bring to the world. I deeply appreciate your expressed desire to be someone who supports others. That already seems to be true for you with the way others respond to your content and offerings. The fact that you are bold and courageous enough to challenge the norms and be honest about how your experiment is going is, by itself, a real gift to others. Your daughter, your wife, and your community are lucky to have you sharing your influence and presence with them. Especially because it's clear you feel the same about them.
Wow, what a year and massive congratulations on the continued success of your book. I read it about a year ago and was hugely inspired at the time but reading this piece it is pushing me towards a second read soon.
As Julie says, your baby will quickly grow and you’ll see them become their own person. They will gradually need you less and less which will be hard but the challenge of parenting is to create a balanced functioning adult so this is success. You want them to be looking out into the world rather than inwards towards you. That is really hard.
My children are now 10 and 8. The 10 year old flips between being 16 and 4!
There was a saying I heard the other day that you must “give them to the world in order to keep them”.
With all this going on we must try and maintain a sense of self. A sense that we must go on beyond those precious years together and not slip into living all our life through them. At the end of the day that can lead us to inadvertently hold onto them longer than is good for them.
I wish you all the best for 2024 and look forward to reading more of your work and seeing where you take it next.
Thanks Paul for this summary...what a blessing to make your needed living expenses from the success of your book in the same year as becoming a new dad...such a cool way things work!
So sorry for your loss, Paul. What a beautiful tribute. ♥️
Also love that welcoming your daughter and watching Angie embrace motherhood have been the highlights of your year. That’s beautiful! All the best to you all in 2024 and beyond.
Thanks for this content-saturated and insightful summary. Perhaps this feedback from someone further along the parenting path may help. Everyone says "they grow up so fast" and that absolutely doesn't feel true during the more trying/crying days months and years. But it is often true that not long after their first decade, your offspring is likely to develop their own interests and friends. Their trajectory may launch their path away from you sooner than you think after settling into the most demanding first years of parenting. Consider arranging the next 12 years of your lives to balance your necessary and preferred choices with living fully as possible with your family life and daughter as your top priority. Show her what can be done, demonstrate how to create her own stability and help her sample and practice an array of useful skills. You are perfectly poised to share a wide understanding of the world and her many options within it. For many of us the success of having an "empty nest" came sooner than imagined. Savor your time together.
Thanks for sharing with transparency. It definitely made me think. You have been so successful with your art and your creativity and what you brought into the world.
A question this has brought up for me, is do the pathless ever feel "on the path"? Or are we destined to be pathless forever? Or maybe, once we agree to go down the pathless path, does it get clearer? Or is it forever clearing brush and brambles?
A question from someone hoping to jump off soon :)
It's inspiring to look "deep inside your mind" through these open and honest reflections, thank you for sharing.
Also, I really appreciate the shout-out to our Clarity Session back in October in Bali 3 months ago. It's been great to see the topics we discussed back then come to life in your writing and updates.
Reading your thoughts on StrategyU -I recently listened to a podcast by Tim Ferris with Sam Corcos (Episode #694) with a lot of talk about Virtual Assistants. That may be an interesting avenue to explore for the admin stuff. There are various agencies (e.g. Athena) that could help.
Happy New Year to you and your family, and I look forward to our pathless paths crossing again.
🟢 I’ve Never Worked Less And Never Made More: This was the first year I made more than I ever made in consulting and it was also the year I worked the least in my life. After March I didn’t work more than three days in any week and didn’t get to really do focused work for more than 10-15 hours each week.
🟢 It also gets to one of the more interesting things about this path, that financial success, if it comes at all, doesn’t always align with when the work actually is done. The book rewards are downstream of work I did from 2018 to 2021, a time in which I didn’t make more than $1,000 in writing and when I had internalized the idea that writing was something I did for fun and for free. I could easily drop some cliches telling you to do what you love but even me in 2018 wouldn’t have believed me.
🟢 I’m thinking a lot about what might pay dividends 3-4 years from now.
🟢 "This sort of question can be crippling on a pathless path. And it has been bothering me recently. Did I do too little in the last couple of years promoting my book and leaning into that? Is the podcast a waste of time?
But this is why I write. As I wrote this out I laughed. Who cares? I’m not doing this to turn my life into some sort of business optimization exercise. I’m designing around actually liking what I’m doing. And so I’ll keep going until I get some dramatic signals telling me I’m taking more risk than I thought."
🟢 "Along the way I gained comfort with earning very little, missing out on opportunities, and pushing the limits of doing less when the “smart” path is to do more."
🟢 What has happened for me is that I’ve developed a better relationship to money, gotten healthier, had more time with Angie, and become more at peace with myself. I was able to spend a lot of time in that mode this year and I don’t have an ounce of buyer’s remorse on what felt like a solid 10-months of paternity leave and time freedom.
Man parenting is one of those things where I never seek content about it out but when it pops up in my friends' work or in the work of creators I admire I am just completely sucked in. I agree about the scripts and the questions people ask and I am just as guilty. As soon as I found out my wife was pregnant I started worrying about college haha. I had not heard the Mark Manson quote of how identity lags by two years--that's so interesting and something I need to chew on.
Very sorry to hear about your loss Paul.
Well done on a great year. I'm impressed by how well StrategyU does even though I don't see you mention it all too often. I totally agree also about having one foot in the creator economy and one foot out of it (antifragile?!). Best of luck for the year to come
“It got the worst reaction from readers including an angry post from someone that said I shouldn’t write fiction anymore.” Holly shit that’s so rude!
Don’t sweat them Paul. You know what Warhol said. “Don’t worry what they write about you, just measure it in inches.”
🙃
Great reflections my friend, I'm grateful to have met you last year and excited for you to potentially return to BCN for a longer stay ;)
I love the idea of the Pathless Path course, and doing the in-depth breakdowns of peoples journeys, I'd be happy to help with this in any way I can.
And i'm sorry to hear about Noel, you know my stance on biking so that story really resonates, I'll definitely be checking out your podcast episode with him.
Wishing you and the family a healthy and happy 2024!
So many good questions. And so many scripts that need to be rewritten or at least given a second thought! E.g. I never calculated that my 260 days/year are owned by a corporation like wtheck?!
Noel sounds like a wonderful person. I'm glad you two had time to connect deeply in the time you both had.
P.S. Hope you give fiction another go this year :)
It's very generous of you to be so transparent about the entirety of your path Paul. I have 3 kids. Ages 28, 26, and 14. By the time my youngest son soon comes of age I will have been actively parenting for more than 30 years. I thought for a while that I should be sharing parenting advice with other parents, because, hey, now I know some stuff! But it turns out that what you gain knowledge of in parenting is the particular terrain of your own personality and self, your partner if you're co-parenting, and your kid(s). Love how you're experimenting and finding what works for you as parents. It's the kind of model that is needed, because we all need encouragement to trust ourselves, experiment, stay open, honest, and curious along the way. Which brings me to your tribute to your friend Noel. I think in part a desire to support others is a function of aging. In getting older you start to see that most people are well-intentioned, well-meaning, and smart enough to figure things out, they just need encouragement and appreciation for what they already bring to the world. I deeply appreciate your expressed desire to be someone who supports others. That already seems to be true for you with the way others respond to your content and offerings. The fact that you are bold and courageous enough to challenge the norms and be honest about how your experiment is going is, by itself, a real gift to others. Your daughter, your wife, and your community are lucky to have you sharing your influence and presence with them. Especially because it's clear you feel the same about them.
Wow, what a year and massive congratulations on the continued success of your book. I read it about a year ago and was hugely inspired at the time but reading this piece it is pushing me towards a second read soon.
As Julie says, your baby will quickly grow and you’ll see them become their own person. They will gradually need you less and less which will be hard but the challenge of parenting is to create a balanced functioning adult so this is success. You want them to be looking out into the world rather than inwards towards you. That is really hard.
My children are now 10 and 8. The 10 year old flips between being 16 and 4!
There was a saying I heard the other day that you must “give them to the world in order to keep them”.
With all this going on we must try and maintain a sense of self. A sense that we must go on beyond those precious years together and not slip into living all our life through them. At the end of the day that can lead us to inadvertently hold onto them longer than is good for them.
I wish you all the best for 2024 and look forward to reading more of your work and seeing where you take it next.
Thanks Paul for this summary...what a blessing to make your needed living expenses from the success of your book in the same year as becoming a new dad...such a cool way things work!
So sorry for your loss, Paul. What a beautiful tribute. ♥️
Also love that welcoming your daughter and watching Angie embrace motherhood have been the highlights of your year. That’s beautiful! All the best to you all in 2024 and beyond.
Thanks for this content-saturated and insightful summary. Perhaps this feedback from someone further along the parenting path may help. Everyone says "they grow up so fast" and that absolutely doesn't feel true during the more trying/crying days months and years. But it is often true that not long after their first decade, your offspring is likely to develop their own interests and friends. Their trajectory may launch their path away from you sooner than you think after settling into the most demanding first years of parenting. Consider arranging the next 12 years of your lives to balance your necessary and preferred choices with living fully as possible with your family life and daughter as your top priority. Show her what can be done, demonstrate how to create her own stability and help her sample and practice an array of useful skills. You are perfectly poised to share a wide understanding of the world and her many options within it. For many of us the success of having an "empty nest" came sooner than imagined. Savor your time together.
+1 on the gratitude for your transparency Paul! It's inspiring to see how a life like yours takes shape.
Really enjoyed reading this, and a touching tribute to Noel too. We could all do with friends like that in our lives.
Thanks for sharing this - it's been fascinating to see how others break own their income. I did an insight into my earnings here: https://richardmillington.substack.com/p/how-much-did-i-earn-in-my-first-five if you're interested.
I think overall my takeaway is that diversification is key - but ensuring that all the products/services you offer connect and fit together.
Thanks for sharing with transparency. It definitely made me think. You have been so successful with your art and your creativity and what you brought into the world.
A question this has brought up for me, is do the pathless ever feel "on the path"? Or are we destined to be pathless forever? Or maybe, once we agree to go down the pathless path, does it get clearer? Or is it forever clearing brush and brambles?
A question from someone hoping to jump off soon :)
Hi Paul,
It's inspiring to look "deep inside your mind" through these open and honest reflections, thank you for sharing.
Also, I really appreciate the shout-out to our Clarity Session back in October in Bali 3 months ago. It's been great to see the topics we discussed back then come to life in your writing and updates.
Reading your thoughts on StrategyU -I recently listened to a podcast by Tim Ferris with Sam Corcos (Episode #694) with a lot of talk about Virtual Assistants. That may be an interesting avenue to explore for the admin stuff. There are various agencies (e.g. Athena) that could help.
Happy New Year to you and your family, and I look forward to our pathless paths crossing again.
🟢 I’ve Never Worked Less And Never Made More: This was the first year I made more than I ever made in consulting and it was also the year I worked the least in my life. After March I didn’t work more than three days in any week and didn’t get to really do focused work for more than 10-15 hours each week.
🟢 It also gets to one of the more interesting things about this path, that financial success, if it comes at all, doesn’t always align with when the work actually is done. The book rewards are downstream of work I did from 2018 to 2021, a time in which I didn’t make more than $1,000 in writing and when I had internalized the idea that writing was something I did for fun and for free. I could easily drop some cliches telling you to do what you love but even me in 2018 wouldn’t have believed me.
🟢 I’m thinking a lot about what might pay dividends 3-4 years from now.
🟢 "This sort of question can be crippling on a pathless path. And it has been bothering me recently. Did I do too little in the last couple of years promoting my book and leaning into that? Is the podcast a waste of time?
But this is why I write. As I wrote this out I laughed. Who cares? I’m not doing this to turn my life into some sort of business optimization exercise. I’m designing around actually liking what I’m doing. And so I’ll keep going until I get some dramatic signals telling me I’m taking more risk than I thought."
🟢 "Along the way I gained comfort with earning very little, missing out on opportunities, and pushing the limits of doing less when the “smart” path is to do more."
🟢 What has happened for me is that I’ve developed a better relationship to money, gotten healthier, had more time with Angie, and become more at peace with myself. I was able to spend a lot of time in that mode this year and I don’t have an ounce of buyer’s remorse on what felt like a solid 10-months of paternity leave and time freedom.
Those are my favorite @Paul Millerd quotes from https://newsletter.pathlesspath.com/p/2023-reflections-new-additions-new?utm_medium=email&utm_source=multiple-personal-recommendations-email