Paul Millerd is a 39-year-old writer, ex-consultant, and advocate for ditching the default path in favor of what he calls “the pathless path.” (pmillerd.com / @p_millerd)
Paul walked away from a promising corporate consulting career—think McKinsey, prestige, and six-figure salaries—to pursue a life of writing, experimenting, and global wandering. He describes how he initially struggled with unlearning his achievement-oriented mindset, why the idea of good work (work that energizes) became his guiding principle, and how his first self-published book, The Pathless Path, briefly and unexpectedly earned six figures.
We discuss the philosophical basis of work and money, how to avoid the traps of both scarcity and overachievement, and how the value of exercising your freedom is limited by how others exercise their own freedom. (In other words: if you’re free to hike on a sunny Wednesday afternoon, and no one’s available to go with you, are you really free?)
Paul and his wife have a young daughter, and they struggle to find and live near other, like-minded families. We talk about how online communities help Paul stay connected while living nomadically between Texas and Taiwan and how online self-education was invaluable to his success. We conclude with a discussion of navigating fear and uncertainty on the pathless path.
Throughout the conversation, Paul stays refreshingly honest about the tensions between freedom and stability, the allure of easy money, and the ever-present temptation to fall back into old habits of achievement and validation. Energized by this conversation, I ended up talking more than usual about the tricky balance of factors that leads to a Dirtbag Rich existence.
Full transcript: dirtbagrich.com/paul
Recorded in November 2024.
AI Notes
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Summary
In this podcast episode, Paul Millerd discusses his journey from corporate consulting to pursuing a more meaningful and flexible approach to work and life. Paul, who previously worked at McKinsey and other top consulting firms, shares how he redefined his understanding of work as ‘things worth doing’ rather than just formal employment. He describes his transition from a high-achieving corporate career to a pathless path that emphasizes personal fulfillment and creative expression. Paul discusses his experience living in Taiwan, meeting his wife, and developing his writing career. He reveals that his book ‘The Pathless Path’ sold 10,000 copies in its first year, earning $50,000, and later made $150,000 in its second year. Paul emphasizes the importance of time freedom and the challenges of building in-person community while living a location-independent lifestyle. He also addresses the misconceptions about his success story, highlighting the years of low income and uncertainty before achieving financial success through writing.
Chapters
00:00:11 Defining Work and Good Work
Paul Millerd introduces his definition of work as ‘things worth doing’ and discusses the evolution of work from formal employment to a broader understanding that includes various meaningful activities. He emphasizes the importance of distinguishing between good work, which brings life and connection, and bad work, which drains energy and inspiration.
00:09:02 Personal Journey from Corporate Success to Pathless Path
Paul shares his background, starting from his parents’ non-college educated status to working at top firms like McKinsey. He describes his journey through various consulting roles, business school, and ultimately deciding to leave the corporate world to pursue his own path.
00:14:42 Life in Taiwan and Building a New Life
After quitting his job, Paul traveled to Asia and eventually settled in Taiwan, where he met his wife. He describes how this period allowed him to slow down, reflect, and develop his writing career while living on a modest budget.
00:23:54 Financial Journey and Book Success
Paul discusses the financial aspects of his writing career, revealing that his first book sold 10,000 copies in its first year, earning $50,000, and later made $150,000 in its second year. He emphasizes that his writing journey involved several years of low income before achieving financial success.
00:31:31 Community Building and Future Plans
Paul discusses the challenges of building in-person community while living a location-independent lifestyle. He shares plans to experiment with hosting month-long residencies and building connections with other families who value time freedom.
Transcript
Blake Boles 00:00
Paul Millerd, welcome to Dirtbag Rich.
Paul Millerd 00:03
I love it. Excited to be here.
Blake Boles 00:05
I want to start with a really easy question. What is work?
Paul Millerd 00:11
Well, I’ve written like over 100,000 words and two books on this, so I’m not done answering it yet. I want to write more books about work, but the way I’ve increasingly thought of work is that with a really simple phrase, things worth doing, and I think there’s a lot tied into that phrase.And yeah, I’ll just start there, and maybe we can just riff a bit. I’m sure you have questions with that short name.
Blake Boles 00:47
I’ve got questions, things worth doing, who gets to decide what is worth something?
Paul Millerd 00:53
Yeah. And so I think in our world, we are sort of coming out of this industrial world in which our governments and companies and leaders had complete domination over the definition of work, which I think was formal employment. Right. And I think even starting in the 70s, there was pushback on this. There was a movement called Wages for Housewives. Right. And within the frame of formal employment, they were trying to say, okay, let’s acknowledge more types of work, like caregiving kind of work and things like that, not just things for money. And I think we’ve continued along that trajectory, a little moving away from work as formal employment and sort of proof as membership in society toward all the things worth doing.In my personal life, I see taking care of my daughter, which I did for the first half of today as work. I see writing as work, even though for the most part, that usually doesn’t directly generate money. I see paid with that and the healthy way of doing it is also pairing that with a lightness. So I think it’s really tricky to start seeing everything as work and also pair that with the idea that work is your identity. It is everything. It says everything about you. And so I think a lot of my evolution has been going from seeing work as this, oh, you have to do it. It’s your duty. You must do it in formal full-time jobs too. Hey, there’s a lot of things I do as work. Some of these things give me more or less meaning and the combination of them lead to kind of a full and thriving life.
Blake Boles 03:01
Okay. I’ve also noticed this expanding envelope of what we consider work. And then there are debates about how it should be compensated. Let me flip this around. How do you know if something does not work? What is, is there a definition for that?
Paul Millerd 03:17
Yeah, I mean, we were talking about Keynes’ essay, but have you read Bertrand Russell’s In Praise of Idleness?
Blake Boles 03:30
a long time ago, but you’ll have to refresh me.
Paul Millerd 03:34
He has a really good definition of work. Let me see if I can hold that up real quick. But I think his definition was basically like, yeah, what is work? Work is of two kinds. First, altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relative to other such matter. Second, telling other people to do so. And so like, I love that definition.The first really encompasses everything, right? Moving the position of matter relative to other such matter. That could be bits. That could be physical objects. That really- It could be poop off of your kid’s butt. Exactly. And so it’s this, I love that sort of definition because it’s like, oh, let’s just relax, right? And not take it so seriously. And I think in our world, have you read Byung-Chul Han? He’s a Korean philosopher.
Blake Boles 04:46
No, and you can just keep naming cool people who I haven’t read, that’s fine Paul, go ahead.
Paul Millerd 04:50
He wrote a book called Burnout Society, and he argued that we live in something called an achievement society. And so we’ve sort of taken that really broad definition of work and then narrowed it down and layered on top of this idea that we always need to be improving, growing, achieving, evolving, right? And so the downside of that is if your narrative on top of what work means says you need to keep achieving, you need to keep doing, you need to keep collecting more money, progressing, all these things. If you stop doing that, you’re a failure, right? And so I think one, what is work? Let’s define it super broadly. But then two, I think an area I’m more interested in is around like what are the work scripts we have about defining what that work actually means. And I think that’s where people get into a lot of trouble and also can find a lot of space for moving toward a more flourishing life.
Blake Boles 05:56
You recently published a book called Good Work. Can you briefly tell me what the difference between work and good work is?
Paul Millerd 06:05
For me, the good work is the stuff that brings me to life. It’s the stuff where I feel a sense of connection, not only to myself, I feel it to something bigger, right? There’s this lark, it’s hard to describe, right? There’s this connectedness to some sort of like universal. And people have been talking about the creative act being a portal to this forever, right? You can find this throughout history, people talking about creativity and really connecting to something deeper, whether it be God, something spiritual, something universal, something cosmic. And for me, writing has been a portal to that. And it’s an activity in which when I do it steadily, I feel good, when I pause doing it, I feel as if something is missing in my life.Now, to also make good work more clear, it’s very obvious to point out what is bad work. Bad works sucks our energy, it makes us feel cynical, it makes us feel not whole. We are uninspired, we wanna escape it. It is physically draining, emotionally exhausting. And so everyone when they hear those things can typically define, oh, I know what my bad work is, right, you might hate numbers and math, and therefore, like playing the role of an accountant would be really bad work for you, right? Other people, writing is that bad work for them. And so the challenge and what I’m really encouraging people to do is become clear about what you don’t wanna do. Start noticing when you feel a sense of connection to your work, some sort of alignment, some sort of excitement, some sort of energy you’re feeling that you wanna stay connected to, and then take the bold challenge to try to build more of your life around that over time, which for me has been a journey of the last seven and a half years, and it’s been an up and down journey, it’s been challenging, it’s been incredibly rewarding, and it’s a journey I expect to stay on for the rest of my life.
Blake Boles 08:26
You came from a fairly high achieving background. You went to a very competitive college. You worked for, I believe, the top consulting firm in the United States, McKinsey and other consulting firms. And you were essentially at the top of your game. You were not leaving any money on the table, Paul.What, please just so we can bring this down from philosophy level into concrete level. Like give us the quick version of your story and how you ended up on this seven and a half year path.
Paul Millerd 09:02
Yeah, so it’s interesting you say you come from a very high achieving past because it doesn’t quite feel like that. I grew up, my parents didn’t go to college. My dad worked in the same job his entire life. I think the work reality I grew up with was that work is something to be tolerated and you just sort of like put your head down and keep showing up. And so I never really was fully in the mode of I’m optimizing for achievements.I think I ended up on that path one because I was just really good at school and really good at sort of like decoding how to find jobs and break into impressive careers. And I think a lot of my energy in that that world was driven toward trying to like simultaneously keep moving and also trying to escape. Like there’s got to be a better way. I don’t really, really love what I’m up to or where I’m headed. I got to keep just moving and changing jobs. And so I actually did leave a lot of money on the table, too. Like people see I worked at McKinsey and they sort of assume I have like millions of dollars in the bank because of that. I actually took a pay cut to join McKinsey from GE. So I was making about fifty five thousand a year out of college at GE and I took a pay cut down to forty eight thousand, I think, to join GE and to join McKinsey. Yeah. And so early on, I was really just optimizing around learning. I was so bored and so disillusioned at GE was basically just this huge company where everyone had kind of just accepted mediocrity and everyone around me is like, well, this is just work. What do you expect? And I think I had this fire inside of me that wanted more, that wanted to find challenge. And so I desperately tried to break into the consulting world. And McKinsey was literally the only firm that gave me an offer, which weirdly, yeah, like you said, it’s one of the top ranked firms in the world. But yeah, I went there and I really loved it at first. It was such a good environment. People were driven. People were challenging each other. People did want to help me succeed and grow. And I loved that, except what I felt about two years into that path was I’m kind of bored. I’m not challenged anymore. And I kept having this urge for the next seven years, basically, to keep moving. I want to escape this current situation, find a better situation, keep evolving and growing. And I think I know now I had this deep desire to be challenged in like hard ways, something I’ve been able to channel in writing. But I just kept moving. Like I went from McKinsey to business school and went into debt. And then when I came out of business school, I had kind of had this awakening of like, I don’t really love what I’m doing, but shit, now I have this debt. I have to kind of keep moving. And as soon as I took another job in consulting after graduation, I paid off my debt as soon as possible and started building savings.
Paul Millerd 12:15
And I think as soon as I started building savings and paid off my loans, I just started to come up with more ideas about the potential future path of of my life.And eventually, after five years of five years after business school, I did decide to quit and take the leap to work on my own.
Blake Boles 12:38
Why? Why did you quit? Well, I mean, you sound, sound like you were achieving, you were earning money, you, you were doing everything right. Like why leave?
Paul Millerd 12:49
It all seemed pretty pointless to me, to be honest. I also started to notice that I was not like the other people around me. Other people loved what they were doing. And when you love what you’re doing, it’s easy to work long hours. It’s easy to endlessly work on PowerPoint slides. But if you don’t really love it anymore, like I was good at it, I could do it, but it took so much startup and activation energy just to get started working on any kind of project. And so, yeah, I just sort of like ran out of steam to keep going.It was something that sort of snuck up on me too. I think I had started dabbling on the side with creative projects and writing for about three years before I quit. But by the end, I was basically just in a bad situation with a boss that I just wasn’t getting along with. And I was very frustrated at this insane project I was working on for two years and grown men just wouldn’t make decisions on it. And it happened sort of accidentally. I emailed my boss frustrated at him one day and I was like, I think I should just leave the company. And he took it as my resignation, which it wasn’t intended to be, but as soon as I realized he interpreted it as that, I didn’t push back at all. I just sort of like let things go in motion. And a couple of months after that, I was just unemployed and didn’t really have a plan. My loose plan was to be a freelance consultant, but I didn’t end up making any money on my own for about three, four months.
Blake Boles 14:36
At what point did you leave the U.S. and travel and live abroad for a while?
Paul Millerd 14:42
Yeah. So after I quit my job, about three, four months to like find some projects, I ended up finding three or four different clients. I did make some money at the same time as radically lowering my cost of living because when you don’t make any money and you’re just spending money, it’s, it’s pretty obvious like what you need to do. Um, so I started making money stabilized, but I was still living pretty cheaply.And I took a trip abroad about nine months after I quit my job in Asia. And I don’t know, I just felt called to sort of wander. I think I was craving really deep down a season of solitude of reflection of getting lost in my life. And during that one month trip to Asia, I spent some time in Taiwan and for some reason I just had this powerful sense that I had to come back. And so returned to the U S started telling friends, okay, I think I’m going to go back to Taiwan. Started getting rid of my stuff and booked a flight to Taiwan and booked an Airbnb for two months and really had no plan after that. And just decided I’m going to go there. Um, and I, there was some degree of like excitement. Maybe you can relate to this. I mean, you’ve wandered all over the world, but there was excitement of not knowing. It’s like, man, I have no plan and this is fucking awesome. Like I’ve had a plan for the last 15 years of my life. I’m ready to just like screw around and find out.
Blake Boles 16:19
What did you find out?
Paul Millerd 16:22
Yeah, so I think within a month, I think quickly arriving, I just for the first time had the sense that I was on the right path. I didn’t feel like I needed to escape.I slowed down my life dramatically. I was living on less than a thousand a month. I was eating simply. I was living simply. I was just waking up and wandering. I was reflecting, writing, reading, and everything just felt nice. And I think in that first month, I started to develop a connection to writing. And it sort of emerged out of nothing, doing nothing that, oh, this is something worth doing. This is something that can help me make sense of my path. This is something worth doing in itself. And I sort of decided just to commit to it then in Taiwan. And for some reason, I think that was a powerful enough anchor to give me confidence to keep going on this uncertain path.And then soon after, I basically met my wife, which was just this really wild experience of okay, I’m just opening up myself to anything. And within a couple of weeks, I had sort of like fallen in love with writing and fallen in love with this woman. And once these things happen to you, you can’t really look at life the same anymore. Like, I know how to come up with a plan and go after it. But I also know that I should probably approach life now to make sure I have space and sort of let things emerge and let answers come to me rather than trying to like pre-solve them.
Blake Boles 18:20
I know from listening to some of your podcasts, Paul, that you did have a bit of a background in writing, writing blogs in college, Quora and LinkedIn posts later on in life. So it seems like you had a bit of a foundation there, but I actually want to ask about your love life. Were you looking for someone to marry? Were you looking for love actively or did she really just stumble into your life and take you by surprise?
Paul Millerd 18:48
I think deep down I craved that, but part of me had sort of given up, I think maybe too many dates, really never found somebody I’d connected with. I think I’d been single for about seven years when we met, and for many years I just like never really found anyone I connected with.And part of that I realize now was I wasn’t honest about what I desired out of life. As soon as I quit my job, I started meeting people that I connected with much better. And yeah, I think as soon as I met her, there was no single moment where I ever felt the desire to like not be in this situation. It just felt so powerfully obvious that this was meant to be. It’s hard to describe. I probably need to get better at writing to even bring this alive. But yeah, deep down I think I craved a partner in building a life and building a family. That’s always been important to me, but part of me had also completely let go of that at the same time in a way that I think enabled it to show up.
Blake Boles 20:07
Was there a moment, can you share an anecdote, a conversation, something that happened between you two in these first days or weeks of meeting that, that made you think like, Oh, this is her.
Paul Millerd 20:24
I mean, one funny one was she calls me one morning, hey, I’m going to skip work today, do you want to go hiking? And for me, it was just like an instant hell yes. I had been basically sort of practicing like deprioritizing work and pushing that as far as possible, like paid work or work toward like any sort of goals. And I think just that really signaled to me, hey, this is somebody that values quality time. And is basically willing to do it to like sacrifice, is willing to like sacrifice like reputation at work to do it too. And I don’t know that I think that’s just a really cool thing for me.And then I think it was just we were spending like every day together pretty quickly. And they were just no games. It was just like very simple. I wanted to keep talking to her. And yeah, I don’t know, it’s hard to imagine before it happens, but everything just sort of falls into place.
Blake Boles 21:31
So you were at the beginning of your career as a writer. I know you don’t even like being called a writer. You write, active verb. You write, you do many other things too, but you were at the start of your pathless path and what about her? What about your, your future wife? What was her work situation? And did one of you need to like really change or adapt your lives to for them to fit together?
Paul Millerd 22:01
I think we’re both in the active process and blowing up our lives, which makes for things to fit together pretty easily. I think I had no real plan after those two months in Taiwan. And so basically everything after those two months was an open book I could basically write from scratch.And she was in the process of leaving her job and was transitioning to become a fitness trainer. So that’s an in-person job in Taipei. So I basically just decided, yeah, I’ll just come back. I have no plans still. And I think I was still in my season of like, what if I don’t prioritize paid work and just do the things I care about? And yeah, that was basically my plan for the year. I dabbled with a bunch of stuff that felt fun and did get a couple of small projects to make money. But I did the bare minimum money-wise to support that first year 2019 living with her in Taipei.
Blake Boles 23:10
In your book, you have charts of how much money you’ve made over the past seven years. You’re, you’re very open about your, your personal details, which I appreciate. And it was, yeah, pretty low income compared to, I imagine other people in your, your cohort or your background. Um, and then, uh, in recent years, there was a bump, the, the curve changed its shape. And can you just talk about the, the, yeah, the response that you received after you put in all of this essentially unpaid time as a writer and a blogger, uh, talk about the, the so-called success story moment.
Paul Millerd 23:54
Yeah, so my book, The Pathless Path, took off in 2023. Yeah, it really started selling a little more in 2022, the year I launched it. I did sell like 10,000 copies in the first year, which is pretty amazing. I think I made about $50,000 from it after spending about $7,000 creating the book. And so the second year, it just sort of went bananas. And I ended up making about $150,000 from the book, which was so wild. And as the first year, I really ever made more than on my previous path. And this is a lot of people’s goal when they leave their job, like they think they need to replace their income before they leave. That was never my goal. I actually didn’t think it was ever going to be possible given how I was approaching work. So it was really surprising. It’s also really surprising and weird to experience making money from something that happened years ago. So I finished my book in January, 2022, and then I’m making a ton of money from it in 2023. Most of the writing happening in 2021 and influences and ideas and exploration happening from like 2018 to 2022. And so even today, I’m making money from the book. I’m sure you experienced this as well. It’s very weird. And I think my takeaway from it is, okay, there is some proof that people like my writing and I might make money from it in the future. So therefore, I might as well do the work I’m most passionate about in the moment right now.And that is a huge shift from the calculus of I should work on the thing that makes the most money right now. And yeah, it’s just given me further confidence to keep going on that path. And I would add my income has now dropped. This year is going to be quite a bit lower, still pretty good, mostly because I’m doing some training and consulting projects for corporations to fund my journey. But yeah, I don’t really know about next year. I think next year might be even lower than this year. So we’ll see. And for the most part, all I did when I made more money is I saved more and that’s just going to fund further crazy investments down the road.
Blake Boles 26:31
The reason I wanted to get you on the podcast is because you really do seem to have this magical balance of money, time and purpose. And you went through those many years of earning very little money in order to focus on your writing because it felt extremely purposeful to you.And then, and how much of this is, is due to, you know, hard work, how much of it is luck and nice breaks and connections. You know, you were able to make a, quite a nice amount of money from something that you did purely out of passion. And you’ve made this point many times over, like you would have written that book no matter what happened, no matter if like, oh, no one was going to buy it. And, and so you, you have, I’m sure this is why you’ve become so popular online Paul, because it really is this magical, um, combination, this trifecta that you seem to have landed on. And, and I want you to tell me now in what way is this a false story? Like what do people not see when they read your book and they encounter your story and they see that you made $150,000 from, from writing, you know, a self-published book, what are they not seeing? What, what do people miss when they hear these kinds of, of glorious stories?
Paul Millerd 27:48
Well, I think that they usually, a lot of the people that have started following me in the last couple of years, they don’t actually see how crazy I was. And it’s funny, I think people should go back and read my early newsletters. And it’s even funny reading it for me, like I have the same strategy and the same formula as I did then. And so right then, like even in 2018 in Taiwan, I’m saying like, okay, I’m going to do the work that matters. I don’t care if it makes money. If it makes money, that’s cool. I’m going to be pragmatic about trying to make money. But like, this is really the formula and strategy I’m using. I think it’s really interesting now because people don’t actually want to just do the work they care about for five years without making money from it. And really longer in my case, it’s probably about seven years before I made money from writing because I wrote consistently in my final couple of years of work.And so they’ll come to me as like, oh, how do you make money from a book? And so this is sort of the theme of this, of good work. What I’m writing about is I don’t know how to make money from a book. In fact, like my second book hasn’t like, is not as strong as like, it’s probably not like this month, it’s going to sell like 150 copies. But the first book is going to like outsell that, which is wild. And so I just did a whole other second book and it’s not doing like super well out of the gate. Right. So this month, it’s probably going to make like, I don’t know, maybe a hundred. Yeah, maybe it’ll make like $700. And I spent like 9,000 on it. I’ll probably break even early next year, but the second book may go to zero. I don’t know. I don’t know how these things work, but I spent the entire year working on that because it’s the same formula I found five years ago in Taiwan or I don’t know, six years ago now. This makes me feel really good when I do it. And so I’m going to keep doing it. And I have the support of my wife. She sort of sees how much it means to me. And we’re both building our life around doing things like this because we want to be able to feel good about our lives, feel satisfied with the work we’re creating and also be able to inspire our kids to do the same in the future.
Blake Boles 30:34
Let’s take this conversation into the real life community and context of where you are right now, which is Austin, Texas. And you and I spoke earlier about how Austin and other places like that, where a lot of cool people show up who have sort of alternative livelihoods and unconventional approaches, how it’s great to have those people in one place. But at the same time, it’s still really hard if you are someone who’s self employed and in control of your time, and you’re like, Hey, it’s a sunny Wednesday afternoon who wants to go for a hike, or in your case, you have a young child, you’re like, Hey, where are all the other dads, uh, hanging out with their young kids who let’s hang out together. It’s hard to connect with other people.Can you talk more about this? And then we’ll, we’ll circle back to the financial challenges of living in the United States.
Paul Millerd 31:31
Yeah. So, I mean, you read about this too. Personal freedom, I think, is worth obtaining. I think a lot of people undervalue time freedom, and it’s far more attainable than many people think, and usually isn’t as much of a money problem as many people think, especially high-wage Americans who seem to think everything in life is a money problem. But the challenge, once you have freedom, is the value of exercising that freedom is sort of limited by the other people around you exercising the freedom in the same ways, right? And so, if you’re free on a Tuesday, so what, unless you’re able to have deep meaningful conversations or connect in a deeper way with other people, or you’re able to work on the things that matter to you, right? And so, I’m a very social person, and I think that’s been a hard thing in the US, as opposed to living abroad in expat cultures, even Europe, where leisure is a higher value. It’s like I bike around with my daughter, and it’s mostly just me and her, or me, my wife, and our daughter. And we struggle to find people that are valuing that time freedom. I would say most US cities, people are valuing money and material objects higher, and that’s fine. It’s just the returns on actual time freedom are limited by the amount of people who also value time freedom.
Blake Boles 33:15
You’ve done a pretty good job of building community online. You have this pathless path community. And so I know you’ve been able to meet lots of people remotely, but what are you doing about this, this in-person community, in-person connection challenge and obstacle, like what’s your plan for this?
Paul Millerd 33:37
So I’m pretty good at it personally for one-off friendships. And I think the big shift for me is I definitely don’t have the right people, um, parent wise. And so my wife and I are just spending a lot of time meeting people and sort of brainstorming like what are the experiments we could run. So over the next couple of years, we’re probably going to lean a lot more in that direction, uh, of finding other families that are doing this, potentially hosting, um, month long, uh, like residencies and stuff around the world in different places, maybe even long-term building our own sort of like community or hub somewhere. And yeah, that that’s basically been a shift in the last probably three or four months, and I don’t have a good answer, but the question is how do we build a life given our unique time, freedom and location independence, right?And so I’ve married into, um, of Taiwanese family. And so one of the sort of vows we made early in our relationship is we’re going to find a way no matter what to spend quality time, uh, with both sides of the family throughout our life. And that basically leads to a fun challenge for us because we constantly get to solve that and come up with ideas. But, um, yeah, we don’t have a good solution to all this yet. And we’re going to basically just start experimenting more.
Blake Boles 35:15
I know that one of the experiments you’re about to run is leaving the United States and moving back to Asia. Tell me more about that.
Paul Millerd 35:23
Well, we’re still trying to figure that out. I think we’re always going to be connected to two different places. Right now, we’re basically just sort of like thinking through where where are places we kind of want to like test out for the future. And I think Asia is really interesting for us, mostly because we’d love to just sort of make it really easy for our daughter to learn Chinese, her mother’s native language, and also for me to learn Chinese as well.I think also spending time in Asia, too, like children are really highly valued and families. And I think a challenge in the US is that kids and adults kind of live separate lives. It’s it’s weird sometimes to like bring kids to a restaurant, whereas like even in Europe, I find that less. So there’s always kids in the mix. And so, yeah, I don’t know. I think, yeah, this is more of like a big question of like what the next chapter of our lives looks like. And it’s probably more unknown than it ever have been. So I don’t really have good answers about what’s next.
Blake Boles 36:41
Talk to me about the appeal of moving to a lower income country, bringing a US income, even if it’s a low US income to that country, because I know that you are in touch with many people who take this approach. I am as well. You and I have each done this in our own ways. And I’m sure that that would make many things easier in terms of just having to produce, to earn less money, to pay for less stuff and have more time to then spend with family and writing, doing whatever you want.
Paul Millerd 37:15
Yeah, I think I wouldn’t call it lower income country because in many countries, there are high and low income jobs. I would call it more of like lower spend, different lifestyle countries.And so even within the US, there are very low cost places of living. I think it’s actually a little underrated.
Blake Boles 37:40
Some specific examples, I’m curious.
Paul Millerd 37:43
Basically just leave the top 20 cities and you’re there. I think the challenge, I love being around intellectual curious people, and those people tend to sort to high-income cities in the US. You can move to a random place in Alabama or North Dakota or Louisiana that are very cheap, right? But you’re going to be in a rural town with maybe without the people you want to connect with. And so I think that’s always the challenge.Moving abroad, I think there’s just so many expats in cities. For some reason, there’s just not really an expat seen in the US. I think most of the people that emigrate to the US are trying to really make a lot of money or succeed in their careers, which makes sense. I think we’re just the best country in the world for careers and success, innovation and making money. And other countries value different things. And so in places in Europe, it’s more relaxed, right? But there’s downsides to that too. I mean, when I’m in Europe and Asia, sometimes I’m like, I wish people were like 10% more ambitious. But yeah, everything’s trade-offs.And yeah, I mean, in Taiwan, you can live cheap. You can also live really expensively in Taiwan. I mean, you could spend more than I’m spending in Austin pretty easily living in Taipei, but you can also spend like $300 a month on an apartment that is good enough in Taipei as well.
Blake Boles 39:21
Paul, let me drag you back into philosopher mode here. And we started with the question of what is work and what’s good work.Uh, since we’re talking about different spending levels in different countries, tell me, what do you think money is?
Paul Millerd 39:38
Money. Yeah, I, I’ve probably thought less about money than work. I think money is clearly sort of like the thing that is underneath so much in the modern world. Like I think so much of our world has been financialized. And I think money is really like this, like the story we give money can be so powerful. I think the story I give money is that that is the thing I need to acquire to like purchase my freedom, which probably has some blind spots and is a limiting story in it in and of itself. But yeah, it’s I think the trap of money is seeing money as like possessing money as really important versus seeing money as something that flows to enable life, right. And so I would lean much more toward that second definition. I don’t really care about acquiring money and having it grow as much as possible, I think above a certain level, which is pretty low for me and my wife. It’s really just above that amount. It’s like how do we enable the life we want to live versus how do we acquire as much as possible.
Blake Boles 41:06
Let me ask a more pointed version of this question. Why is it that you can do a consulting gig and I assume get paid more than $100 an hour for your efforts and then take that money and go to one of many other countries and receive resources, goods and services, just an incredible number of goods and services relevant to the amount of effort, the amount of work that you have done where someone from the receiving country, if they did a similar amount of effort and work and they took their money and they brought it to the United States would then purchase a very low minuscule amount of goods and services. What’s your explanation for that global differential?
Paul Millerd 42:01
Yeah, so I mean, it’s, I mean, the economics definition is basically like higher value. Like, you have like, different industries, right? And different industries are able to establish different amounts of profits. And I happen to be born in a country in which it has more industries that are able to capture more profits. Right. And so that’s probably like the simplest, that’s my MBA brain, answer. And yeah, we don’t really get to control where we’re born. But the thing that has shifted in the last 30 years is that you can actually exit your economy in which we’re born and have labor rights and enter sort of the global economy. And this has become increasingly easy for more and more people, which is really interesting. And so I think there, it’s leading to more looseness around these things. And so one thing which was interesting is my wife was born in Taiwan. And so she had in this, in her head, an idea of like what she deserved to get paid, what an average wage was and what x kind of people charge for x kind of service. And so she was doing a consulting project, and she determined she should charge $4 an hour. Because that was sort of like the equivalent Taiwanese wage, but she was working for somebody in the US in English.And I was like, one, like you can’t charge that like mostly because no one would take you serious charging that amount. And she, she basically over a series of small projects went from like $10 to 15 to 25 to $50 an hour. And it was pretty fascinating to watch her go through this, mostly because of like how uncomfortable it was. And it helped show me like I’ve had my own journey with this too. I went from charging very low amounts to these trainings I do to very high amounts over basically two years. And a lot of times these what you can charge is arbitrary, and is often limited by your own fears or your own conception of like what you’re worth.And I think we’re in an age in which this is more flexible and negotiable than ever. I mean, I meet people from India, from Philippines, from Pakistan, from all these different countries who are just deciding to compete in a different economy. I think one limit on that is you basically just need to learn English now to earn a high wage, mostly because a lot of the highest paid industries and most robust labor markets are English speaking places.
Blake Boles 45:06
Yeah, there might be a few exceptions like over here in Europe, speaking German or French might get you pretty far. Yeah, definitely. Yeah.
Paul Millerd 45:12
And speaking of Chinese, you can probably make good money working for a Chinese company.
Blake Boles 45:18
The reason I’m asking you these questions is because I feel like this is the discussion that is often not happening underneath so much of the, these conversations around entrepreneurship, around creating a freedom business, around essentially doing something like what you’ve done or what I’ve done, or other people I’ve interviewed on this podcast have done. And people need to be able to find some way to create a high amount of value, uh, in a way that is like uniquely, like not too bad for them. Like it doesn’t hurt them too much. It doesn’t feel like they’re, they’re destroying their soul. They’re selling themselves out. It, ideally it feels like fun and it feels like meaning meaningful, like a fun game that you’re playing at the same time without doing it full time, without doing 40 hours a week or what many self-employed people do, which is 60, 70 hours a week, convincing themselves that all their effort is work when it’s not because they’re not actually doing something that other people, um, value.And then finding a way to spend that money that is, uh, that where it won’t all evaporate at once. And for some people, that means spending it in, uh, you know, some other country, but for like the more like dirt bag outdoor people, it means going and spending it, oh, rock climbing or hiking or surfing or, uh, you know, doing some activity that essentially just requires that you have some free time and the energy and maybe like the friends you might need to do this thing and a little bit of gear. And so it’s all this kind of elaborate game of arbitrage of like creating a lot of value and then figuring out smart ways to spend it at a very slow rate. Uh, does this, this model that I’m throwing out here, does this map on for you experience?
Paul Millerd 47:08
Yeah, for sure. And I didn’t know it existed until I blew up my life and sort of accidentally put myself in a position where I had to really question my spending and lower it.And then after that, meeting people living in radically different ways. Like you mentioned climbers and surfers too. I met some surfers in Bali and these people are so crazy. Like, surfing is life for them. And so they will literally do anything to surf more, right? Live in their car. Like, it weren’t a.
Blake Boles 47:47
fish every day.
Paul Millerd 47:49
Right. I remember meeting this Australian person and they went and worked in Australia for two months. They grind every day. They try to make as much money from tips. They don’t spend any money within there. And then they spend all their money surfing around the world the rest of the year.And so a lot of people will say, actually, the only people that ever say this to me are high-wage American knowledge workers. They say, don’t you think you shouldn’t be talking about this? Because clearly everyone can’t do it. And it sort of cracks me up because, okay, that might be true that literally everyone in the world can’t live this white life. But it’s not a useful belief. Unless your whole goal in life is to not exercise that time freedom.But I would argue it is more possible for more people than ever. My good friend, Jovian, I’ve done a podcast with him. He is Indonesian. He randomly went to a travel school in Indonesia that enabled him to study abroad in Taiwan. He learned Chinese. His first job out of school was he’s making like five, $700 a month selling steel to Chinese people in Russia or something like this. And basically, at night, he would just use the internet. And he used the internet enough to learn how to speak startup and landed a gig at a startup and raised his salary. And then from there, he started replying to remote jobs. And he landed a job working for an entrepreneur in the UK. And he basically just needed someone competent and ended up working his way into a path where he went from like several hundred a month to now he’s earning like $5,000 a month doing remote work.And it’s like these are the people that inspire me and give me ideas for how to live life because they’re seeing the possibilities. And I think often the most interesting stories I encounter are from the lower wage countries because the upside of possibility is actually like upside. Whereas like people look at my path and they’re like, oh, he went from 150 grand to 20 grand. That looks terrible. I don’t want that. But if you’re able to go from 20 grand a year to 40 grand a year, that can be dramatically life changing in many, many countries.
Blake Boles 50:28
I agree. And I like how you respond to the criticism of not everyone can do this by saying, yes, that is factually correct. But the important thing is to look at the delta to look at the slope of change, and more and more people are able to do this. And so therefore, it is okay, it is morally valid to to laud this, you know, even trying even making an attempt towards this dirtbag rich or this entrepreneurial dream or whatever we’re going to call it. Because, yes, many people will try, and they will, I’m putting air quotes here fail, you know, they won’t achieve this, this great height of success.But there are more and more people finding small versions of success. This is what I loved about Chris Guillebeau’s book, the $100 Startup, which whenever people ask me for a book about startups or businesses, I still point them towards that one. Because he was like, Hey, you don’t need to create some multi multi million dollar business, just like, find a way to spend a minimal amount of money, like 100 bucks starting, attempting to start some new business or venture or side project or whatever. And then maybe you can make enough money for it to like, you know, earn to earn half of what you were you were earning in your your normal job that you kind of hate, like that is success. Like if you can do that, you are still doing something that so many people, like you said earlier in the interview, Paul, you know, it was just like work for a boss, it was just work for a job for so long. And so to even make $20,000 a year doing something that’s kind of interesting to you, is this incredible thing that is highly accessible to so many people. I’m going to throw a question at you here. You did not have any role models for this, you didn’t have any role models for a creative life, you know, everything was about being in the corporate world and traditional metrics, metrics of success. Like, who inceptioned you, Paul, like where did you even believe that this was was going to be possible for yourself?
Paul Millerd 52:34
Yeah. So I think starting in 2014, I got more herb podcasts just started becoming a lot more popular. And I was listening to the Tim Ferriss podcast, and I think all the people he interviewed sort of were in septing me, even though I didn’t realize it at the time. It was really interesting how slow it took me or how long it took me to actually quit my job. Even when I’m listening to people like Tim Ferriss, I never thought, oh yeah, that will be my path. I should blow up my life. I’m reading for our work week and not even being like, oh, I should do this. It was more like, oh, this is really cool. This is inspiring. And in some way, I was just short circuited for my own curiosity and interests. I was so deeply embedded in the full-time working world and I had success. So it was very hard to talk myself into not continuing on the path of success because once you’re succeeding, you have more opportunities.Everyone in your life thinks you have things figured out. And so nobody’s like, hey, what the hell are you doing? Like no one’s doing that. But all my curiosity, I’m reading these books. I’m reading about Derek Sivers. I’m reading Alan Watts. I’m reading Tim Ferriss. And yeah, I think slowly those things probably did in septomy. And they were sort of the role models that once I quit my job. But even still, I struggle to find role models. I find people I take pieces from, I call them digital mentors. And often you don’t even need to take ideas from them. I don’t want to copy all of Tim Ferriss’ life. He doesn’t have a partner or a family. So I struggled to relate to that part of him. But the way he approaches creativity and reinvents and does weird stuff, even deep into his career, that is really inspiring. That is something I can take from. And so I take pieces of how people are approaching their life.
Blake Boles 54:48
A big theme in a lot of your writing and the stories that you tell is the internet and especially the power of the internet to connect with people in far away places and to be a self-directed learner. And something I learned from one of your podcasts is that you did consider yourself a self-directed learner who was pretty good with the internet from a pretty young age.Do you feel like this is something that you were kind of born into? Do you feel like this is something that people can learn? Because I genuinely feel, and this is related to my work in alternative education, I genuinely feel that this is the superpower is to be able to just research stuff and self-educate, but not just learn and gain information and teach yourself skills, but to email random people on the internet and ask them to have a conversation with you or answer a question or use a website like Quora or Reddit to try to solve problems that people in your life can’t solve. How do you see this?
Paul Millerd 55:49
Honestly, if I was born 30 years earlier, I think I would have just been miserable. Let’s say I’m born and my parents didn’t go to college. I probably would have had less opportunity. I maybe wouldn’t have gone to college too. And I would have been this hyper curious human at my core, but not able to find my community, find my place, find a job where I could actually express that.I think the internet has always just been a playground for me to follow my curiosity. I love learning new things and exploring topics. I just went on a super deep dive around the history of the book publishing industry a couple weeks ago. There’s no point to that other than that sounds fun. And so I’ve always explored tools. I’m playing so much with AI now. I used to code websites when I was a kid. I did all these experiments. And so once social media was layered on top of that, I was able to find other people. And Twitter’s not as much this now, but from 2018 to 2022, it was sort of this golden age of all these other people like me who were finding each other. And it’s like, oh shit, you spent your childhood playing on computers too. And we’re desperately curious about things. Now we can be friends. This is awesome. And so yeah, I’m just so grateful for it.I really couldn’t imagine. And the internet is like everything in my life is possible because of the internet. All the money I’m making now is because of the internet. I met my wife through Tinder. So I don’t even know. It’s crazy to even think about.
Blake Boles 57:36
You are a product of your times.
Paul Millerd 57:37
Very much so.
Blake Boles 57:40
I want to ask you about fear and you mentioned earlier that, you know, it’s weird to earn money now from something that you created six months ago or 12 months ago. And this new book, Good Work, is not earning quite as much as maybe you hoped or dreamed it would. You’re going to be earning less money this year. It’s not this, you know, this nice bar chart of constantly increasing income like it could have been if you stuck around the consulting world. And so there’s just a lot of uncertainty that comes with the life that you’ve chosen.And I think this fear of uncertainty is paralyzing for so many people and it takes quite a number of years of pushing through that to even consider that this is a sustainable long-term path. Like how have you navigated the fear of uncertainty? And how do you navigate it today?
Paul Millerd 58:39
Yeah, so I think fear is very interesting on an uncertain path. I think on my previous path, fear of the unknown is sort of a solved problem and the narrative of stable employment sort of solves for that. And it’s also this large agreement among all your peers to never really talk about the fact that you don’t really know what’s going to happen in the future. So you have these fears about the future, which are channeled into, hey, just get a job and you’ll be fine. You don’t have to worry.On a path like this, I don’t actually know what’s going to happen. And I have proof of that by things going not as planned or going better than planned even. So I’ve constant proof that the future is uncertain and it’s there. So fear is there. Right now, I think I don’t really know what’s next. I’m going through this evolution now of trying to find somebody to run my… I’m working with this woman who’s going to run some more of my consulting and corporate work I’ve been doing to shift even bolder into writing, writing another book. And yeah, I’m a little afraid.But what I’ve learned is that there’s basically two choices. The choices is to make a decision from the fear, which my fear would probably say, get a job, you dummy. And that doesn’t sound fun for me. So the other option is take my fear with me and grapple with it. Really feel it. So I often go through this anytime I’m feeling intense fear or uncertainty or afraid of the future, I just sit there with it and try to fully feel the emotion. And over time, it passes too. Never fully goes away. But I know I have all these mental models I’ve created of, okay, at the end of my life, am I going to be happy I listened to my fear or that I tried to grapple with it? And so over and over again, I’ve always made the choice of stepping into the uncertainty, dancing with my fear, all these things and taking them along with me. And it leads to a surprising amount of peace of mind because it makes you realize so much of what we do in the world is to make our insecurities go away. And so this is why I often come back and read books like Alan Watts’s Wisdom of Insecurity. It’s like, no, there’s wisdom in the insecurity. It’s telling us what we really want and a deeper truth about the inherent uncertainty of the world.
Blake Boles 01:01:35
I think that’s a great place to wrap up, Paul, like that’s poetic. And I would love for you to now tell everyone, how can they find out what you’re up to, what projects you’re working on and what your books are? Where can they buy them?
Paul Millerd 01:01:51
Yeah, so you can go to PMillerd.com. I link all my books there and also pathlesspath.com I own because I thought that’d be fun to own that. And yeah, you can buy my books anywhere. I don’t care where you buy them.If you don’t have the money for the book right now and me gifting it to you would accelerate it up your wish list or to read list. I’m happy to do that.Just send me an email. And I’m happy to gift you digital copies or if you really want, I will send you a physical copy too.
Blake Boles 01:02:24
Wow. Paul, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Paul Millerd
Awesome.