Embracing Uncertainty on the Pathless Path with Paul Millerd

Did you grow up hearing clichés like "Nobody likes their job" or "Work is just supposed to suck"? From a young age, we are conditioned to believe that adulthood means doing things you don’t want to do.

But does that have to be true?

In this episode, I interview Paul Millerd, thought leader and author of "The Pathless Path,”. He left a career in strategy consulting to find a life of joy and creativity outside the conventional ladder of achievement.

In this episode, we explore what happens when you blow up your old life and start treating your life as if it's an experiment. What happens when you prioritize spending time on what you enjoy? And how do you explain this new approach to other people who may be skeptical?

This episode is going to be that inspiring push you need to face your fears and step into the unknown.

Guest Links:
Grab a copy of “The Pathless Path” HERE
Facebook: Paul Millerd
Instagram:  @pathlesspaul
Linkedin: Paul Millerd

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Click here to book your FREE 30 min Career Clarity Call.

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Transcript

0:17

Did you grow up hearing fun little pieces of wisdom like, well nobody likes their job, or work is just supposed to suck? That's why they call it work. From a young age, most of us are conditioned to believe that being an adult means doing things that we don't want to do. And that's just life. That's the way it is. But you know the rebel in me loves to question. So is that really true? Do we have to accept that as the status quo? In today's episode, I interview another fellow rebel, Paul Millard, who is the author of the book, The Pathless Path. And this book is on the required reading list for all of my clients, and it's something I wholeheartedly recommend everyone listening to this podcast to pick up a copy. For the first 32 years of his life. Paul worked his way up the corporate ladder of strategy consulting, going to grad school at MIT and landing a job in New York City, helping company boards choose their next CEO. But he also had this restlessness, this sense that something was off. And after 10 years of trying to make it work in the traditional workforce, he decided to walk away from it all and set off on his own path. His pathless path. And here's how he describes it in the book. The pathless path has been my way to release myself from the achievement narrative that I had been unconsciously following. I was able to shift away from a life built on getting ahead and towards one focused on coming alive. And in this episode Paul and I explore what happens when you blow up your old life and start living your life as if it's an experiment. What happens when you prioritize spending time on what you enjoy? And how do you explain this new approach to other people who may be skeptical? This conversation that I have with Paul is going to help you check in with what is truly important to you. And I'm so excited to share it with you. If you want a chance to personally ask Paul any of your burning questions, after the episode I have a special opportunity for us. But first, let's dive into this incredible conversation. You're listening to Life After Medicine, the podcast for health professionals who want to make a difference, make a living, and still have the freedom to enjoy their lives. My name is Chelsea Turgeon, and my mission is to help you, the lost health professional, find your authentic path to helping others and generating stable income without having to sacrifice your own health and happiness in the process.

Chelsea: 2:51

Hello, my loves. Welcome back to another episode of life after medicine. We are here today with Paul Millard thought leader and author of the pathless path. to explore what's possible for us when we start to question the default path and imagine a new story for work and life. Paul, can you tell us What was the moment when you started to question the default path that you were on?

Paul: 3:15

So I tried to figure out the answer to this in my book and since you've read the book, you would know that, there wasn't a clear moment that was like, Oh, I'm quitting. I'm taking hold of my life and taking a leap into the unknown. The reality was that. The moment of quitting was rather like sad and I felt like things were falling apart. But if I trace it all the way back, I was actually thinking about this today. I'm reflecting back to being nudged by adults around this idea. Like you have to learn how to do things you don't want to do. Like I got this job at a local gas station. I was so desperate just to find any job. And I hated it. Like it was so bad, but all the adults were like, ah, you're just naive. This is how the world works. And this message over and over again. In my first internship, I come home and I'm like, no, one's doing anything at the office. And people were like, this is what you do. You're naive. This is what you have to learn. and it was this message of, you have to learn to do things you don't want to do. So I was always questioning that. I didn't like that idea, the way I adapted to that was I embraced this idea of, oh, I can find my dream job. If I just find my dream job, I will be happy forever, right? I don't know if it was a moment, but it was just continuing to ask the questions of how do I find my dream job? How do I tolerate work? Cause work supposed to suck. How do I make it less bad? And why? Even when I'm finding work, I somewhat like, do I still feel uncomfortable? So it was always there.

Chelsea: 5:04

It sounds like for you there's this fundamental rejection, of this idea that being an adult means you have to do things you don't want to do, or work is supposed to suck. there's on some level you were. not accepting of that idea.

Paul: 5:17

I didn't like it at all. Yeah. I think I come alive when I am dreaming. I'm generating new ideas. I'm being creative. I'm optimistic around the future. And I think that stance, what I finally figured out literally took me 15 years. Is that that stance is cynical. It's saying like, your future is not supposed to be great. You got to learn how to tolerate it. This is life, And I think the problem with that is in today's world, there are so many opportunities. your audience, your listeners are smart, educated people. There are more possibilities for all of you listening than we've ever had in the history of the world. That is really exciting. But the flip side of that is you actually need to let them figure out what to do, which is the hard thing, right? And I think for me, I was searching in this very narrow box of the job container, right? Just keep going job to job to job. Over 14 years, I had four internships, five full time jobs, four years of undergrad and two years of grad school. And I did projects as part of grad school too. And like, I like didn't find it. I was more lost at the age of 32 than I was at the age of 22 when I started my career.

Chelsea: 6:41

And what was making you lost? Is it, was it just the fact that you're trying to find this sort of unicorn of a job that meets all the criteria, but you just can't seem to find it

Paul: 6:52

I think. Early on in our lives, we're all driven to prove ourselves. We all grew up in this achievement culture, which tells us we have to be our best version of ourselves, right? We always need to be improving ourselves, doing better, doing stuff, keep moving, hitting goals, big goals, right? And so that is very, appealing, especially if personally you feel weird and awkward and not good enough. And it's somewhat worked. Achievement doesn't solve dissatisfaction, right? Achievement only is solves. Achievement and the reward for achievement is the opportunity to pursue more achievement. so that path became a path where I was just distracting myself from what originally drove me at the beginning. most of us in, in college and stuff, we have this desire to like, do impressive things because we have no idea what we want to do in the world. 10 years later, I had a better sense of my interest and stuff, but I was still playing that same game. And I set up for myself at a young age. I sort of like ran out of options of continuing to pursue more achievements, but I didn't really know what came next.

Chelsea: 8:01

The crux of the lost feeling is almost like when you have that moment where you're realizing that more achievement is not the answer. It's not going to fix this feeling of dissatisfaction.

Paul: 8:13

Yeah. I think I kept finding myself a year into my job feeling demotivated and uninspired And I have a lot of empathy, especially for people who become doctors, because you don't actually get to experience the job until you're like 30. and that must be such a hard feeling knowing you've put 10 years into You arrive at the state and you're like, holy crap. I don't want to. Spend more than 50 percent of my time filling out paperwork and doing bureaucratic admin work. This is crazy. But I had jumped job to job and like, I had enough experience that was like, okay, I've done five different jobs in 10 years, including two years off for grad school. I haven't found a solution. the most creative solution I had was, oh, I'll go from full time consultant to freelance consultant. I had seen people who were freelance consultants in a couple chapters of my life, and they seemed happier than my colleagues. And so basically it was like, okay, My path now looks like their former path. I could probably do this, but that was my only solution. I think even a couple months before I left my job, I was doing like the webpage and trying to come up with a name and creating this like offering page of my services. My heart was never in it. And I definitely ignored that at first. And it took me another year and a half. To really realize that that was not the path. And this is the hard thing. Is, people want to leave their jobs and know exactly what comes next. For me, the first two years after quitting my job were very hard. they were very low income years because I quickly realized I can't actually power up enough energy to keep doing this stuff. And I, needed space to get to know myself and honestly to, like, grow up a little. I had taken success and achievement as a cheap replacement of actual virtue and growing up and maturity. I was trapped in this world people were like premium mediocre, millennial pseudo utopia the point of my life was to like work, to make money, to buy, fun experiences, but it never really like satisfied anything deeper. I yearned for something deeper. And I think what I sensed is that I had a lot of work to do. So what that looked like was. Reading a lot, spending a lot of time with myself, getting into mindfulness and meditation, like all the cliche stuff, but all the cliche stuff because it works, or at least it worked for me. And then even bigger was actually just sitting with the uncertainty. So I had been always afraid of the unknown because the unknown meant that I wasn't somebody, And the unknown means pausing and stopping and releasing that identity of a successful achiever. And so instead of listening to my fear and say, you're going to run out of money, said, okay, what happens if I actually just learned to coexist with this fear and let the feelings and emotions flow? The problem with that, you can't create a playbook or get rich quick, guide to this it feels terrible at first, but over time I've come to see that, that dancing with the emotions of uncertainty, the discomfort, the fear is actually a huge benefit being on a path like this, at least for me, because. It really connects me to this deeper reality of the world. The world has never been certain. The default path only sells the promise of certainty and comfort. But with all that's really happening is everyone agrees just not to talk about it.

Chelsea: 12:11

Yeah, I remember when I was pre med, it's like senior year, at the end of college. And I already was accepted into med school. I had my next 10 years planned out for me. And I remember looking around at my friends who were in the business school and in all of these other majors and being like, they don't even know what jobs they're doing. Like their life is so uncertain. And I felt so much anxiety about that. And so I think a lot of people who. Go into fields like medicine. That certainty is, is a draw because it's all mapped out for you. I think there's definitely a tipping point where like you realize if safety and security is like a true value or if it's just coming from a place of fear. So for me, that's what it was like it was more fear and once I learned how to. sit with the unknown, then I was able to move through that for you, like one thing you wrote in your book, you had this equation for tipping those scales to move through the unknown. When you add wonder in to the picture. That's what starts to tip the scales. Can you talk a little bit more about how that plays out?

Paul: 13:13

Yeah. So a lot of people know they hate their jobs and they'll tell me they hate their jobs, But they can't do anything about it, right? Because what they've done in their head is say, Oh, actually this discomfort is predictable. I know exactly how things will be uncomfortable and I know how to cope with it. For me in my twenties, it was eating fancy meals and nice food and going on intense vacations and partying and drinking and all these things. So people rightly say certain discomfort is better than uncertain discomfort, Uncertain discomfort is actually worse than the known discomfort, Because it could be far worse. It could be far scarier. But what tips the scales And you, you see this, I always look for this in people's comments. They say, I just thought like, what if, what are the possibilities? What could emerge? I think what happened for me is I went through a health crisis, in my twenties about three years before I quit my job. And after the health crisis, I had this sense of wonder of like this different. sense of life and it started to creep in small moments here and there started to like sprinkle in the spaces my life and I think it was that energy which I was like there could be something more there I didn't know but it was like enough of a feeling to drive me I just sensed there's these possibilities.

Chelsea: 14:39

Yeah, that's what, for me, it was, I was starting to listen to podcasts. That's why I like, I'm so passionate about creating one and interviewing people because I think it can just introduce people to alternative paths and like different stories. And it's like, you can enter a whole different world than what you're exposed to in your daily life. so I was listening to podcasts of people who were digital nomads and in the coaching space. And I didn't know that was a thing when I was going through, you know, initially in college. And so that's what really started to open up. The possibility for me was like, wait, I could make money online and I could like travel and I could go places and that started to feel exciting and expansive. And it was like that wonder that really had me moving in that direction.

Paul: 15:20

I think podcasts are a big thing in my journey too. And I would listen to all these people, but the funny thing is I didn't connect the dots and think like, Oh, I want to head towards their path. I sort of thought these people were just so much better than me. but I sense what kept me listening was this connection to the excitement and the aliveness that I felt from these people. looking back. I loved writing. I loved ideas. I loved connecting with people. I loved having conversations. That is my life now. But none of it seemed like it was an actual real possibility for me before I quit my job.

Chelsea: 15:55

So how did you get here? A lot of the people I work with, they have this idea of the all or nothing, you know, jumping off a cliff, like in order to do anything, I have to quit my job with no backup plan so can you kind of talk us through what you've learned about prototyping and, and how that can work for people?

Paul: 16:12

Yeah, so I think in one sense, I did take a leap without a plan, like I had no income lined up and I didn't actually make money until four months after I quit my job. knowing what I know now, I would approach that totally different. But in some sense, I did prototype the energy of what I wanted to aim toward. So 2012, my health crisis, and I'm sort of knocked out for a year and a half. Recovering from that, I had this deeper desire to like actually do things that mattered to me just an increasing disgust with like the nonsense I was dealing with at work. And there was this impatience and that impatience drove me to like do all these experiments. I tried things like career coaching, I did a group coaching thing, I spoke, I volunteered for first generation college students, I helped people with resumes, I created this free resume course, and I made almost no money doing all of that. But it was those activities which were like so exciting. I was like sitting down at my desk during my day job and like working on these things secretly. And so I had sort of prototyped that this energy is really cool. And if only I could get rid of the job, then all my life would be this good energy. But the money thing, like, I really didn't think about. I think part of it was, I had to go on unpaid leave when I was sick, when younger. And I had to take three months without pay. And basically, I just sat in bed every day and, like, recovered. It was terrible. But I disconnected with this paycheck mindset of this steady income drip and saw my bank account go down, I sort of like disconnected with my worker identity a little bit and sort of realized like, I'm actually okay, like I'm still me, I still have family that love me, I still have friends that love me, and so I think quitting looks reckless, but with that context, it was probably a little less reckless because it's like, I'd done it before. Like, so what if my savings go to zero? I was so desperate to really go after it But I think something worth pointing out, which I'd love to hear your reflection on is. A lot of people want these things to fit into neat little boxes, they want the money to line up, they want to replace their income before they leave. But you sound like me, in there was really no other choice, you had to go. the soul inside of you was like, we're going. like this life has been exhausted, I'm so sure of it. This might be reckless on paper, but I have to go.

Chelsea: 18:42

For me, it felt really clear and obvious. And I was in a practice of connecting to my intuition and meditating. And I just like, I knew that was the right thing. One of the things that trips up my clients the most too is this idea of like, what do I tell people? How do I tell people that I'm quitting my job to figure it out, to not have a clear answer.

Paul: 18:59

You need three stories. You need a boomer compatible story. So tell people you're a business owner and entrepreneur or whatever fits into that world. You then need a safe and not triggering story, which is like, Oh, I am self employed, I'm exploring a bunch of different things, including consulting and things, freelancing and things like that. And then you need a find the other story, which is like, I'm venturing into the unknown. I'm so alive by the feeling and the questions that I'm chasing and I'm doing podcasting and some days they don't work. And like that is perfect if you're trying to like find the others, right? So that's how I write online and people can opt out of my writing. I'm not CNN being thrown at you on screens all over the place. I'm just a small guy writing on the internet. So the people can see those clues and be like, Oh, Paul's my people. And those are the people I want to find.

Chelsea: 19:57

I love that. So as you're describing that, like the three stories that you need, when I did it, I had one story. I had my find the other story. Dangerous. And I decided no, no, even more dangerous. Not only did I share it to people like in person, I published a blog post the day that I quit and had my find the others story and like it went like mini viral right away. I got my first hater immediately and it's just really funny to look back and be like, Oh shit. just went straight for it. I had my find the other story right away.

Paul: 20:28

Yeah. I guarantee you the day you quit, you're like, Oh my God, what have I done? Like that is when you need the most support, right? And the reason you're putting that bold blog post out there is because you want to reassure yourself too.

Chelsea: 20:40

Yeah, the writing of the story creates and owns the story in a certain way. I was like, all right, well, what's this story going to be? It's not going to be girl, gets burnt out and quits her job. The story is going to be Girl finds another path that she's interested in following and goes for it. And so I just like decided that early on and put it out there. But, you know, I believed it like 20 percent of the time initially. like the hardest part, the stabilizing into the new path, like the pathless path, I feel like that's difficult. Anytime there's a bump in the road, it's like, oh, did I make a mistake? Should I go back? Did you experience that sort of the, the ebbs and flows, like once you started moving into the pathless path and how did you like reassure yourself

Paul: 21:21

I think pretty early on, as soon as I quit my job, I was like, Oh, this is great. But it also was hard. The first year was really hard. I don't think I ever had the thought of like, I want to go back or I need to go back. But I did still have the sense of like, I might have to go back. And then I think after nine months, I'd done a few consulting gigs and I was like, okay, I could probably make like 30 grand a year. Like I could probably figure that out. I determined that was sort of like my worst case scenario, survive mode in the U S and I had aggressively cut my cost of living. And then I ended up moving to Asia and cut my cost of living even further. I think it was down to 800 a month at one point. And at that point, it was like, okay, I could keep doing this for even longer. And when I moved to Asia, I was single. A month after I moved to Asia, I met my now wife. And I think in her I found somebody in a very similar path headed in a very similar direction. And I think early on it was, we sort of like started building a life together based on this new direction we were heading. And that gave me a lot of confidence, like having another person on the journey with me. that helped a ton. So try to fall in love with somebody heading in a similar, similar direction I think is my best advice there, Neither of us want to go back to jobs. she left a tech career with like a couple thousand dollars in the bank and basically went into zero traveling before she started her new path and is like, still like trying to figure it out. She's like working on her first book, but it was like really struggled to, make money and figure out what's next. But we're both basically deploying the same philosophy, which is like, how do we spend our time doing stuff we enjoy?

Chelsea: 23:14

I think that's so powerful to have people who are on the path with you. I like for me, finding community, finding other people who are questioning their lives in this way. That's been such a powerful part of traveling and of just like being on this path as well.

Paul: 23:28

actually think it's the most important part. What do you think? I wonder if you have this experience in coaching people. People think the money's the problem, but I think actually finding the friends early on is far more important.

Chelsea: 23:40

I can see that. I it can be really threatening, if you're giving up a job that gives you status and belonging, that feels like you're losing so much and then you're also losing money, which can help buy you status and belonging. So I think there's a lot of things that having your people. Early on can stabilize you and ground you and help you feel like you're going to be okay no matter what.

Paul: 24:00

Yeah. If you get fired from a job, that's just such a common occurrence that people are like, Oh yeah, of course. But If you end up going broke based on your own opting out of what everyone else is doing, people are like, well, that's your own damn fault.

Chelsea: 24:18

For me, the stronger and stronger, my sense of community has become the more I feel willing to take bigger risks within my content on social media, within just the things that I'm saying and doing it. it's wild how much, human security helps.

Paul: 24:34

Yeah, I think for me, I found a lot of those people online, especially as I was like living abroad and living in Taiwan, I didn't have as much of a community in person, but in the last couple of years, I've been in Austin in the U. S. and actually hang out with a lot of writers who have similar lives. It's been so reassuring for me. I'm about to hit seven years in this path, but I still need this like reassurance. And, yeah, I mean, this morning I was writing with a friend, who's on a similar path. He's putting a book out in a few months and, like, we're talking about books and these weird lives and it's just, really nice. to feel part of something.

Chelsea: 25:13

Yeah, 100%. That's like one thing when people are scared of leaving. They're like, Oh, but like there's parts of my job. I like, I like my coworkers or I like this. And it's like, you can take all the parts you like and bring that into whatever you're doing next. It doesn't have to be this all or nothing sort of a thing. but it just has to be more intentional. You have to really do it all on purpose.

Paul: 25:32

Well, I think that's the tricky thing too, is you may not hate everything about. Your former life. I actually liked parts of it. I love the deep work. I love problem solving, like coming up with interesting ways of shaping ideas and storytelling. But that's what I use now in my writing. I just don't have to react to client demands anymore or jump when a partner says jump and do internal politics and actually show up to the work. Eight hours a day, five days a week, 50 weeks a year, So there's just more degrees of freedom, but I'm essentially doing a lot of the things I used to like. And I didn't totally hate my life on my previous path. So I think there's sort of a mourning process that more people need to go through, which is like letting go of the good and bad parts of your old self,

Chelsea: 26:23

There's so much bittersweetness of all of it. One thing my clients and I do is we, we literally hold a funeral for their past self or their past life. And it's like, there's a mourning process.

Paul: 26:32

I did something like this a year after quitting my job. I had these mugs.

Chelsea: 26:37

I had a

Paul: 26:37

mug from four of the different companies I'd worked from. And they were like my, like one was from MIT, one was from Boston Consulting Group, another from A Connect, and another from like Russell Reynolds. And I just decided to throw them in the trash one day.

Chelsea: 26:53

So like a ceremonial trash throwing or just like a reckless trash throwing or?

Paul: 26:57

No, I didn't break them. I was very gentle.

Chelsea: 27:00

That's very gentle. I should

Paul: 27:01

have broken them. But it was like, yeah, it was like, what am I doing? Like these are trophies of my past life, right? That was my prestige bingo. And it was like, yeah, that doesn't matter to me anymore. I need to let go of that.

Chelsea: 27:14

Yeah. Did that feel cathartic? Like, did it feel like the emotion of it when you threw those away?

Paul: 27:18

I think so. Yeah, I think you need these moments to like, give yourself permission to believe in yourself more of shifting into the unknown.

Chelsea: 27:26

I think ritual is so powerful. On the the default path, there's all these rituals. There's like the graduation ceremony and the orientation ceremony. Like, I think we need to recreate things like that to help signal our brain and body that we're doing different things.

Paul: 27:40

Yeah. And it's never ending too. There's always stuff coming up. Like the scripts and stories we grew up with are so powerful. my book was basically permission to myself to keep going. at the end of writing the book, I broke down in tears, writing the book because I finally realized that. I had to admit that, what I was proposing. And really trying to find the true path you're meant to be on, I think it's one of the most important things in the world. And I was so afraid to say that. And breaking down in tears and in a book, you can't hedge. You have to actually say what you think. So I had to put it down there. And. What I had to do is release the shame of feeling that because the shame I was feeling was I Will have to admit I don't belong to the good path and embrace like I am a bad person in the story. I grew up with

Chelsea: 28:35

So how did that work? Like when the book was published? How has that continue to validate and give you permission

Paul: 28:41

I had this sense when I wrote the book that I wanted to write a book that I still believed in 10 years. So what I did is like. How do I go as deep as possible and like really figure out the fundamental stuff that matters to me? And so I did that. And I think, I wanted to write a book about stuff I'm actually deeply curious about too. So I didn't write the, book, trying to placate to some like general audience I tried to write for like people like you who are like boldly on a path who just want other people's ideas of how they're approaching it too to help make your path better. At first, I was a little bit shy and scared to fully lean into that. I didn't do a launch. I just published the book and put it out there and, like, tweeted about it and created a, blog post about it. And that was it. I sold, like, 130 books in my first week. And it slowly started to gain traction and I think like the more and more people I heard from, I was like, Oh, I did put the best possible thing out there. And people are saying like, I want you to believe in this and it's inspiring. And it's like, okay, this is like the edge for me. How do I believe in myself? How do I be more ambitious? And. do it in a way that feels right and feels good. And that's really been my journey for the last two and a half years and the topic of my next book, which is called the joy of good work and like really embracing the joy that's come from it. And I got comfortable with the bad feelings the first five years of my path. And I was like, okay, I can live with these, but I didn't get comfortable with the good feelings until the last two years of my path.

Chelsea: 30:17

I relate to that so much. Just the feeling of it's not allowed to be this good or like it feels good. And then you're worried that something bad's going to happen. Or like I'm on a group coaching call with clients that I'm like, I'm just laughing and having fun and being myself and they're paying me. And it's so hard to. Accept that it gets to be good. That has been a huge part of my journey too, because you're so locked into the Suffer script the thing that you talked about at the beginning, being an adult means doing things you don't want to do. And so here we are doing things we want to do. And it just feels like, wait, is this real?

Paul: 30:47

Yeah. Joy is a really intense emotion and it brings out the other emotions at the same time. Like joy is this expansive feeling, but also feels uncertain. it's scary, when, especially if you've grown up, thinking like you always need to worry, you should never feel settled. you may always go broke, you don't want to fail, like all these things. And so you focus on those. but you don't learn how to celebrate and do things like that. So still leaning into this.

Chelsea: 31:17

So for people who are on their default path but they're starting to question it but they're too scared to move on to the pathless path. Like what advice would you give them

Paul: 31:26

I think one of the most powerful things you could do is take a sabbatical. the reframe I have for people is not, Oh, you're taking a sabbatical. The reframe is if your life depended on it, could you figure out how to create a three month break in the 500 months of adulthood that you're supposed to be working three months out of 500? Could you make that happen? Now, people aim at dream homes. That are really expensive and they pull it off in all sort of life paths, But they never elevate doing something like a sabbatical and creating the space to like actually buy some time to figure things out. Because this is the hardest thing. Some people can experiment and prototype new paths while employed. I struggled to do this. I wish I had figured out some way to take like a true sabbatical. earlier in my path. just sort of like sample the fact that, Oh, I'm a capable person. I have agency to take action. I didn't know until after I quit my job. And so three months out of the 500 you're supposed to be working in adulthood. I think a lot more people than they think could probably pull this off.

Chelsea: 32:39

Yeah, I think that's such a powerful way to think about it. It's like, if your life really depended on it, could you find a way to take three months off?

Paul: 32:46

Or even smaller, like, even if you can only get one or two weeks off, Go somewhere without a plan. No plans. No vacation mode checking things off the itinerary in achievement mode. Right? Most people that do long term travel eventually discover this. the delight of moving to a different place or going somewhere is actually just showing up without a plan. Shopping like a local at a grocery store and wandering around. It's incredible because it's uncomfortable, and it's weird, and you start having questions emerge, you start thinking about life differently, you start noticing how differently people behave, and you start questioning your own scripts and stories, right? if you're in the U. S. and you can only get like a week or two off, just go somewhere. Go somewhere, stay in an Airbnb with a kitchen, go to the grocery store on the first day, and that's it. And then see what emerges. no one wants to let life emerge. People think they should have a plan and always want a plan. So just figure out some way to inject some non doing into your life.

Chelsea: 33:52

Love that. that's so powerful of just allowing life to emerge because you're right. We don't allow that.

Paul: 33:57

It brings up the weird emotions. We don't want to feel right. And by avoiding our emotions, all we ever do is recreate the conditions that we're trying to avoid anyway. So we want discomfort to go away. So we get the safe job, but then we find ourself uncomfortable again.

Chelsea: 34:15

So that's the coping strategy part, right? if you have known discomfort, but coping strategy and the coping strategy is like avoiding the feelings and the numbing and the changing jobs and kind of creating a chaos, like if we're a snow globe and you're shaking it up to make chaos so that the dust never settles, so we don't have to actually look at what's really there. Is there any one final piece of advice that you would love to share? Like anything that you wish that you would have known when you were embarking on this path?

Paul: 34:41

I think the big thing with all of you listening is that. You've gone after something that is high status, because you're helping people. And to leave that path, you would have to go low status. But I sense there's an enormous arbitrage opportunity, if you are willing to pay what I call the status tax, of actually crafting a life, which feels really good. Because most people aren't doing it right now, right? So if you are willing to pay the status tax and like grapple with the uncomfortable emotions, there's so many possibilities of fitting work into your life. So pay the status tax. Take advantage of the status arbitrage. To lean into the possibilities of the modern world.

35:29

So is it true? Does being an adult mean you have to spend your life doing things you don't want to do? Is it actually possible to design your life around joy, creativity, curiosity, and love? Freedom. I think Paul has such a great way of framing this question. Yes, it is possible to structure your life around the things you enjoy, and there is a cost to it, because building a life focused on coming alive instead of getting ahead means that you are setting off on your own pathless path. It means you have to learn how to sit with uncertainty. You might have to pay the status tax, you might have to give up some of those prestige trophies and some of that recognition, some of those pieces that look good from the outside in exchange for a life that actually feels good on the inside. So if you want to ask Paul any of your burning questions about how he's managed to forge his own pathless path, he has generously agreed to do a Q& A inside the Life After Medicine Facebook group. You can click the link in the show notes to join our Facebook group and drop any questions you may have inside the Q& A thread pinned to the top. And also, be sure to pick up his book, The Pathless Path. This is going to be your guidebook, your permission slip, and your validation to forge your own path to fulfillment.