#66: Question Round, Course Preview
Share your answers with me?
September 14th, 2019: Greetings from Taipei! Had some great conversation about life, work & fitness with a grad school friend, Jonathan, while exploring the night markets this week.
👋 Welcome to the newsletter Maria, Greg, Liz, Angelo, Sarah, "R", Shin, Arthur & Gabrielle
💬 Join the group conversation in the Discord "Curious Rebels Club" (or just reply and say "let me in Paul!")
📩 Forward this to a friend who might get a kick out of it via e-mail or share on twitter.#0 Questions For You
I’d love to hear from readers and share some answers next week Here are three question options":
What is a life lesson you’ve learned in the last year? (can share anonymous or not at all)
What is something you’re creating or working on that I can share with the Boundlesss readers?
What is a question you want to research or share my perspective on?
#1 Course Update - Gift Option Now Available
I’m still having a ton of fun doing the research and recording the lectures for this course.
🍿 You can preview some of the lectures here:
The course will always be available, but will increase in price after launch. For the first “cohort” I’ll be planning a number of live sessions and discussions.
You can purchase lifetime access here immediately and join the first cohort
You can join a video session on Sept. 22nd at 10am EST if you have questions
If you would prefer to enroll via a “pay-what-feels-right” gift economy exercise
I’ve added the 🎁 gift option for people that are a bit unsure or facing financial challenges and still want to take a chance on me. You can read more about my other gift economy experiments (and flops) here.
#2 Why Am I Building This Course?
I had a conversation with a coach last week who helps people launch their courses. A number of the questions he asked me made me feel uncomfortable. It made me feel like I sucked at launching my course and it also made me feel like I should hire him.
The price tag of the coaching shocked me a bit and made me realize that my whole motivation for creating the course is to create an alternative narrative to this mindset.
I want to make sense of an alternative story for people that is not centered around “crushing it”, “building a 6-figure business” or “hacks.” That approach is so prevalent and effective because its based on a 500 year history of how we think about work and while preying on our worst insecurities of not feeling good enough.
I’m more interested in the long and slower path of creating not only work, but a life that someone actually wants to live. I want to help people create the space for creation that can be joyous because that’s what they are most curious about. Sure there are better ways to hack your way to a 6-figure launch, but if you’re going to burnout nine months later, what’s the point.
Perhaps this is my eloquent way of saying I’m not a badass hustlepreneur, but I’m having a ton of fun and living a life I’m loving. Isn’t that worth something?
#3 📚 Reads
Four interesting and somewhat connected reads this week:
🆓 The Dark Side Of Convenience:
As I’ve had many conversations about money in the past couple of years there seems to be a deep accepted logic about spending money for comfort. The fact that I question it makes people uncomfortable. This is from the NYT a few months ago:
In the developed nations of the 21st century, convenience — that is, more efficient and easier ways of doing personal tasks — has emerged as perhaps the most powerful force shaping our individual lives and our economies. This is particularly true in America, where, despite all the paeans to freedom and individuality, one sometimes wonders whether convenience is in fact the supreme value.
But is there a dark side to this?
Though understood and promoted as an instrument of liberation, convenience has a dark side. With its promise of smooth, effortless efficiency, it threatens to erase the sort of struggles and challenges that help give meaning to life.
🗽 The American Obsession With Work
An op-ed from a professor that argues we should look at work as a duty to others rather than just looking to find meaning from it. His starting point is that America is in a unique position as being obsessed with work:
While other wealthy nations have shortened the workweek, given their citizens more free time and schemed to make their lives more pleasant, stress-free and enjoyable, the United States offers a curious paradox: Though the standard of living has risen, and creature comforts are more readily and easily available — and though technological innovations have made it easier to work efficiently — people work more, not less.
He cherry picks a letter from Seneca to make a point about duty to others but failes to mention the fact that Romans held a certain sense of leisure as a higher aim than work, which I wrote about here. I think writing about someone like Thomas Aquinas might have been a better fit, who said:
💼💼💼 Careers On Our Mind
Building on last weeks chart showing how much emphasis college students place on money, I stumbled upon this Pew research this week showing that teens are placing tremendous emphasis on their careers and finding a job they enjoy.
This may be final confirmation of Andrew Taggart’s hypothesis that work has become center of life.
💸American Incomes Have Rebounded
Many inequality measurements are misleading because they fail to account for the dramatic shifts in household size and marriage rates. It appears as incomes are reaching or exceeding previous highs from the end of the last millennium (almost 20 years ago!). Roaring 20s ahead or secular stagnation?
After bottoming out in 2011, incomes are rising for American households – and those headed by a Millennial (someone age 22 to 37) now earn more than young adult households did at nearly any time in the past 50 years, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of new census data.
#4 Prototype Your Leap
Having some fun screwing around with video and created this video in under an hour. Let me know what you think!
Want to support this newsletter? Support on Patreon or Podia and be part of the “curious rebels club. A bunch of who the heck is behind this newsletter links below that you can probably skip. Have a good weekend 😃
Below The Fold
👋 Hey there! I'm Paul Millerd and I write Boundless each week. I typically sit down for a few hours on Friday or Saturday and share what I’ve been thinking and interesting things I’ve read as well as use this as a space to work out half-baked thoughts which may or may not go anywhere.
I left my fancy corporate consulting career behind in 2017 to experiment with working as a freelancer. That experiment turned into a longer journey where I wanted to see what would happen if I didn’t default to designing my life around work.
Here are some projects and other things I am working on:
💫 Reinvent Course Helps people imagine beyond the default path & launch a creative project
✍Boundless is where I share lessons on building a life beyond the default path,
🏫 StrategyU is where I run a digital course and do in-person workshops teaching people strategy consulting “secrets.”
🎙 Reimagine Work is my podcast and can be found across all the platforms. E-mail me guest suggestions here.
💵 I occasionally do paid coaching helping people untangle their relationship with work or do kick-ass research and consulting work for companies.
📚 I read a ton of books and articles and am starting to catalog my favorites here in addition to my weekly #goodreads e-mail.
🤝I interact with curious people and explore ideas on Twitter, sometimes share pictures on Instagram and try to awaken corporate America on LinkedIn.
🙋♀️I have a few no-agenda curiosity conversations with people each week.