The Pathless Path Pdf Free

[Lucrecio Houle]

Thevagueness of the marketing materials, uniform positivity of the reviews, and my familiarity with the subject matter made me explicitly skeptical that I would enjoy the book, and subtly skeptical that I could learn anything from the book at all.

Through summary, review, context, and memoir, I want to make the case that the book, The Pathless Path by Paul Millerd, is immensely important because of both its content and its context. On its own, the book has a wide range of interesting and useful ideas to offer concerning careers, the nature of work, leisure, society, and how we measure our lives. Beyond that, the book serves as the most recent interest development in a centuries long debate about how to decide what to do with your life.

This is from the Amazon blurb: "The Pathless Path is about finding yourself in the wrong life, and the real work of figuring out how to live." As I mentioned before, the blurb and reviews made it difficult to discern exactly what the book is about, or at least what you would walk away with.

I was pretty prejudiced going into reading the book. I lived in Beijing from 2010-2013. Already back then, there was an explosion of people, mostly millennials, who had what I called lemonade lifestyles. An implosion in the job market, a dearth of affordable credit for houses, and an average student loan debt higher than ever before meant that the safe, cushy, lifelong jobs people had expected to come after college since the baby boom just did not exist any more.

Many smart, capable young people felt they had been sold a bill of goods about what college would get them. College graduates raised on the internet looked around, collectively said, "fuck this," and got jobs they could work from anywhere. They had taken the lemons handed to them by the 2008 financial crisis, inescapable student debt, and inevitability of boomeranging back to mom and dad's house, and turned it into the lemonade of digital nomadhood. They then lived off their laptops doing online or gig work, usually in places their western currency went really far, like South America, East Asia, or Eastern Europe.

Automation, remote work, consistent travel, entrepreneurship, being a brand, prioritizing experiences over possessions, grinding (sometimes), prioritizing mental health over the grind (other times). There were a lot of trends that emerged form this movement which persist to today. Tim Ferriss, with his book The Four Hour Work-Week, was one of the first high profile people to advocate for a lot of the things digital nomads aimed for. The tagline for that book was, "The 4-Hour Workweek is a new way of solving a very old problem: just how can we work to live and prevent our lives from being all about work?" (Sound familiar?)

The 4-Hour Workweek was a great book, and Tim Ferriss is someone I still follow and look up to. On his podcast, his most ubiquitous media property, Tim Ferriss starts most (or maybe all episodes) by saying something close to, "welcome to the Tim Ferriss show, where it is my job to deconstruct world class performers to tease out the routines, habits etc. that you can apply to your own life."

From his podcast and some parts of his books, I think that Tim Ferriss is a rather deep thinker and thoughtful person generally. However, I do begrudge Tim Ferriss one thing: he is arguably one of the most famous and successful proponents of "hacks." In the purest sense, a hack is a way of being more efficient, but what it usually comes across as is a shortcut. (For example, Tim Ferriss famously became a world champion kickboxer, despite not knowing how to kickbox, because he exploited a loophole in the rules.)

The first reason this bothers me is that books like this, which promise to share the hacks of the very most successful people, usually focus on the top 1%, or rather the top .001% most successful people in their given field, and what they do differently from others. (For example, a sampling of names from Tools of Titans: Brene Brown, Jack Dorsey, Malcolm Gladwell, Arnold Schwarzenegger.) There is a lot of important context and cumulative growth missing from these accounts.

The vast majority of people would do much better to copy the habits that the top 10% most successful people have in common with each other, rather than the habits that the top .01% of people do differently than everyone else. Analogously, it would be like people obsessing over the fact that Michael Jordan used to stick his tongue out when he dunked, rather than the prodigious amount of hours he spent practicing or his inhuman will to win, both traits he shared with an enormous number of his contemporary NBA athletes.

The second reason that the focus on hacks bothers me is that it has shown how lucrative teaching hacks is, and therefore created a tremendous number of copycats. In the last 15 years or so, there has been an explosion in the number of people writing about productivity. Books, videos, and podcasts abound with hacks specifically and with habits and routines more broadly, which are lesser offenders although a similar crime.

Many of these books are great, but many are also artless: lacking grace, meaning, or depth. They are essentially selling shortcuts. A huge number of people are spending a lot of time thinking about "how" to do the things that make up life more efficiently or quickly, because that sells better than people talking about "what" to with one's life or, even more profoundly, "why" to do it.

The saddest part is that some of the most famous people for whom hacks are just part of their repertoire, like Tim Ferriss or people similar to him, have extremely nuanced takes on other topics, and a whole lot of depth. Using Tim Ferriss as an example, I found his TED talk about suicide and his fear-setting exercise tremendously moving.

That being said, the people want hacks! When you search "Tim Ferriss" on YouTube and order the results by most views, the TED talk is the fifth most popular video. The first is a clip from his old TV show where a chess grandmaster hustles a chess hustler, but the second most watched video is, "How To Peel Hard-Boiled Eggs Without Peeling." Peeling eggs!

I have an unconventional career. Even within my career, my success and work is measured in unconventional ways. Being a millennial, I am the age where I and everyone I know have spent the last 15 years finding and building careers. Beyond that, I often work with people trying to find a job or start a business. I have read a lot in the last decade about career paths, nontraditional career paths, and making the most out of life. Trust me when I say that there is a lot more media out there of the "list of hacks" than there is about thoughtful re-examination of the ideas you hold closest.

Because of the baggage I brought to the book, I anticipated a cheap list of hacks. I held disdain for the shape which I assumed this book would take, full of straightforward, gimmicky productivity shortcuts. Paradoxically, as I skimmed the book and began reading, I could feel myself judging the book precisely because the opposite was happening: I was getting drawn into the story and as I became more engrossed, it was getting harder to figure out what the hacks would be, and when the actionable takeaways would start.

Over the course of reading the book, Paul Millerd won me over. The Pathless Path is actually a mindset book. Many books claim to be mindset books which can show you how to think in new ways, but they are really just name drops and hacks, or worse, memoirs. Using a mountain climbing metaphor, many books that try to position themselves similarly to the Pathless Path merely talk about how to plant a flag at the summit, and very few ever talk about how to climb the mountain. Almost nobody talks about how to find the right gear and guide. They are usually journey retrospectives, where they try to fit everything into a neat, linear narrative. This technique might make the story inspiring, but it almost guarantees the lessons are not useful.

Extending the metaphor of the mountain climbing memoir, Millerd touches on planting the flag, explains some of his climb, and gives a good accounting of gear and guide. But most importantly, he zooms out and writes about the macro forces which pulled his gaze across the horizon to the mountain looming in the distance, and how he methodically and incrementally made his way toward and up it. He does not just tell you what his mindset is at the time of climbing, but how he evolved from someone who never looked up from his path, to someone who daydreamed of hills, to someone who climbs mountains.

What I really liked about this book is that it is the opposite of what I anticipated: it has zero hacks or to-do lists. Paradoxically, it has a more methodical, applied method toward reinventing yourself and your career than I have read about anywhere else. On the one hand, reading the book is a somewhat circuitous, wandering experience. It's hard to get exactly at what this book is about, even well over halfway through it.

That's not to say that epiphanies do not abound throughout the book, they do. It's just not clear until late in the book how everything comes together. On the other hand, once it does come together, it's a revelation: so obvious that you wonder how you looked at it differently before. In this way, the book is an anti-hack.

A hack promises a straightforward shortcut, where you can omit some work on the way to achieving some goal, saving you time and challenging nothing. This book does the opposite. You wander along through the author's life story, then some anecdotes, quotes, and syntheses of other people's ideas, unsure of where exactly you are going. Then suddenly (for me at least), you "get it." You have grown. Your worldview has changed. Something has been illuminated, but not because someone gave it to you in a straightforward, easy-to-digest way. You have been lead on a journey.

As opposed to a hack, where you take a shortcut to get something you knew you wanted, you finish this book and you have taken the long way to a completely new place. After three paragraphs of explaining how this book is the anti-hack, I still have a nagging voice that says, "bring this idea together, synthesize it in a concrete way." The people who would wait for that concrete synthesis to decide whether or not to read this book are probably the people who should read the book the most, so I resist the urge.

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