The Pathless Path: Imagining a New Story For Work and Life

Paul Millerd was doing well on the high-achieving default path: credentialed schooling and career advancement at McKinsey. Over a couple years, he threw it away to do his own thing. Not "start a venture funded startup" sort of own thing, but literally make his own path in life. Pick the game he wanted to play and would get infinite energy from, and play that game.

I see a lot of myself in Paul. We both were good at the system, and built credentialed resumes quickly. Yet, we never fully felt satisfied. We're both driven by curiosity, learning, excitement, and wonder.

The Pathless Path is a great book if you have that itch — the feeling that you want to be optimizing for a different game than the one you're currently playing. He's not prescriptive about precisely what you do. In fact, I'm not sure he could tell you what he "does". Instead, he offers a perspective shift that's available to many of us if we choose.