Transcript
00:00:00This video is a case study about how to quit your job without a plan, where Paul Millard,
00:00:05who is the author of The Pathless Path and the wonderful book, Good Work, Paul and I are charting
00:00:09both of our respective paths towards moving off of the default path, where we had lots of titles
00:00:14and credentials on our resume, more towards the path where you're sort of figuring things out as
00:00:18you go along. But in theory, you're happier and more fulfilled and more joyful because of it. And
00:00:22so when Paul came over to visit Hong Kong, we sat down for a lengthy conversation about this and
00:00:26sort of broke it down into a 10 step roadmap. So if you are currently on a high prestige path where
00:00:31society thinks you're successful, but maybe you're feeling like it's not as fulfilling as it once was,
00:00:35but you don't necessarily have a plan, then hopefully this conversation will have some value for you.
00:00:40Step number one, win the prestige game. So the conversation between me and Paul started out
00:00:44exploring this idea of prestige and how prestige is often the north star that when you don't really
00:00:52know what to do with your life, if you're like us, you tend to gravitate towards whatever gives you
00:00:56the most prestige points in the prestige game. What sort of jobs did you do and how much money
00:01:01were you roughly owning? I've done many different jobs. So in college, I did three different internships
00:01:06and I was making pretty good money as an engineer in undergrad. But every summer I decided I don't
00:01:11want to stay at this company. I need to try something new the next summer. I was always trying to move
00:01:15towards something more impressive, right? I got sucked into prestige because prestige is a really useful
00:01:21outcome and salary, high salaries too. If you don't know what you want to do, right? And you're restless.
00:01:28Early on, I worked in finance in my first job at GE that lasted about 12 months. The whole time I was
00:01:34desperate to escape and try to break into consulting because that's what I, where I really wanted to go.
00:01:39I went to consulting. I was making similar salary at consulting. I worked at McKinsey. I was only making
00:01:4550 grand a year. I went to grad school for two years. I did an MBA and master's in systems engineering
00:01:51at MIT. Nice. That's fancy. It's quite high prestige. Yeah. So I don't even really talk about this
00:01:57anymore. But yeah, I basically dominated prestige bingo for 10 years. Okay. McKinsey, Boston Consulting
00:02:06Group, MIT, MIT MBA and engineering worked for GE and one of their top leadership development programs.
00:02:14And at the end of it, I just absolutely lost. And the weird thing is now being on this path,
00:02:21eight and a half years in, I have no idea what I'm going to be doing six months from now, but I am lost
00:02:27in that way. But I feel totally grounded and at home in myself. Now, when I first discovered Paul's work,
00:02:33and when I first read the pathless path, this was part of the journey that actually really vibed with
00:02:37me, right? Because I've read some books from people that are like professional vagabonds,
00:02:41right? Where they've never, you know, they don't graduate high school. They've never been to university.
00:02:46They've never held a real job. And then those people are like, oh, you should totally like travel the
00:02:49world and do your own thing. But like, I could never take it seriously because they'd sort of opted
00:02:53out of the default path way earlier than I did. And so I couldn't really relate to them. But when I first
00:02:59discovered Paul's stuff and I realized that, oh, he too had fancy logos and like credentials on his
00:03:03resume and then decided to give all of that up to pursue the pathless path, I was like, oh, that's
00:03:09much more interesting and relatable to someone like myself. You're doing the things that a lot of
00:03:13people in our audience think that they aspire to. McKinsey, BCG, like MIT times two, you know,
00:03:18all of that kind of stuff. I was good at it too. And so this is the crazy thing. All I had to do
00:03:23was basically just keep showing up and doing it. And I would become a millionaire. I could have the
00:03:28upper middle class, comfy life doing whatever I wanted. And it was all laid out for me there.
00:03:36There was really no downsides on the default path in terms of career opportunity. Right. And I actually
00:03:44have estimated what did I actually give up if I just coasted and like market salaries with like maybe
00:03:51normal or even conservative promotions. I think I probably gave up about a million dollars in income
00:03:57over the last eight and a half years. I don't really feel anything when I hear that, oh, I left
00:04:03all this money on the table because what I got back was a life I actually wanted to live. And this is
00:04:08the thing on the previous path. I had all these things you're supposed to want, but I didn't want any
00:04:14of it. As we go through the video, I'm going to be offering you some tentative homework suggestions
00:04:18if you're serious about potentially leaving the default path and maybe stepping onto the pathless
00:04:23path where you're sort of doing your own thing. And so your homework from step one is to write down
00:04:27what version of the prestige game have you been playing in your life so far? And what version of
00:04:32the prestige game are you continuing to lean towards when it comes to figuring out what to do with your
00:04:36life? So then once you've done very well at playing the prestige game, step number two is to spot the
00:04:40myth alignment. Work was the stuff that slowly sucked away all my energy and passion in life by the age of
00:04:4932. And so when I quit, I really just wanted to run away. I wanted to minimize that thing and what it
00:04:56had done to me for years. I want to double click on this. In what way did work slowly suck away
00:05:01your passion by 32? I was sort of on this journey of what I call following the default path. The default
00:05:10path is basically what you might consider what most people are doing and how they're orienting
00:05:16work and the role of it in their lives. Early on, I loved work. I got a lot out of it. I was learning a
00:05:23ton. And then I think slowly over 10 years, there was sort of an inversion of the learnings gradually
00:05:31decreased and the pay was increasing. And so the intellectualization of work made sense. So, oh,
00:05:41you should just stay, make sense. Your career trajectory is looking good. But I was constantly
00:05:47restless. I was leaving jobs after 12 months, after two years, after 14 months,
00:05:53after 15 months, after two years, I never stayed in a job. I'd just get restless as soon as six to nine
00:05:59months would hit. And every iteration of that kind of left me at a lower point. And so by the end,
00:06:06I did this self-assessment sort of analyzing these goals I had came up with in grad school and had to
00:06:13look in the mirror and be like, you're not doing well against your own values. You sort of lost your
00:06:19way. What were the goals that you came up with in grad school? Don't take
00:06:22yourself too seriously. Don't become too narrowly obsessed about money. Don't lose your sense of
00:06:28humor. And so as I was doing this five years after grad school, about nine years into my career,
00:06:34I was grumpy. I was showing up to work sort of feeling like I was in a battle with my boss. I needed
00:06:40to like fight for promotion. I felt undervalued. I was pushing for a raise in promotion. And just like,
00:06:48I don't want to show up as this person. So with whatever you're doing now, you're probably following
00:06:52some sense of direction that you had a few years ago when you decided to do this thing that you're
00:06:56doing now. So I think what's worth doing at this point is to identify what were the things that you
00:07:01claimed were important to you, let's say three years ago or five years ago. So with whatever you're doing
00:07:05now, is it moving you towards the person you thought you wanted to become? Or is it moving you away from
00:07:09the person you thought you wanted to become? In Paul's case, it was very much a moving away from
00:07:14it. He didn't want to be the guy who was like a corporate drone who had the energy and vitality
00:07:18sucked out of him. And yet, you know, 10 years into his career, he ended up being that corporate drone
00:07:23with all of the energy and vitality sucked out of him. And so then he had this sort of realization and
00:07:27then moved on to step number three, which is to face the shame. And here we talk about the private
00:07:31shame that you sometimes feel about the fact that you hate the work that you do. Now, since he
00:07:36started to write about this stuff, Paul has actually had conversations with, at this point, probably
00:07:39thousands of people around the world who are in the same position that I sort of was, that Paul was,
00:07:43that maybe you might be, where, you know, you secretly hate some aspects of your work, and maybe even
00:07:48a lot of aspects of your work. But like, it's a little unfashionable. It feels a little shameful to
00:07:53actually talk about it out loud. I remember this conversation really early. This guy is telling me all
00:07:59about these challenges. He's really struggling. Verbal abuse at work, in pain, like totally lost
00:08:06wants to blow up his life, has some money to do it. I say, have you talked to your spouse about this?
00:08:11No. After this call, I'm like, okay, this person on the internet won't talk to his spouse about this,
00:08:18but he's talking to me, internet stranger, who he's never met before. And so I really felt and I had a
00:08:25bunch of these conversations where people said, I don't tell my friends about this. I don't tell my
00:08:29spouse about this. I don't tell my parents about this. And so I sort of felt like I had this secret
00:08:34knowledge through these conversations. What sort of stuff are people saying in these conversations?
00:08:39Like, what's the this that they're not telling people about? Just that they don't like their work.
00:08:44This seems crazy, right? That people wouldn't talk about this. But I think the pandemic blew the door
00:08:50open a little in terms of making it more loud to have these conversations. People feel an immense amount
00:08:57of shame about their relationship to work. Tell me more. What do you mean?
00:09:02Work is how people determine whether they're a good person in the world. What do you mean?
00:09:08Right. So in my first book, I write about this idea called a bad egg, right? This is an idea from Ben
00:09:14Hunt. He talks about the idea of an industrially necessary egg. And so the industrially necessary egg is the
00:09:22egg that needs to be clean. It needs to be fit in the carton such that it can be stacked and chipped,
00:09:28right? It has to be a certain way. It has to be defined and standardized. Similarly, we're products of
00:09:37the economy too. Many of us are in the industrially necessary job, right? The jobs fit because they fit into
00:09:45the economy and generate value in a very specific way. Now, when you don't fit in that, you feel bad. When you leave the
00:09:52industrially necessary job, you are a bad egg. And so I'm sure even you face this, right? I think this is something people get
00:10:02wrong is they'll look at someone like you and say, "Oh, you quit your job. You had all this YouTube income.
00:10:08It's easy for you." I can guarantee that you get criticized by people and probably people close to you in your life.
00:10:17Right? This is because you're making them feel uncomfortable. Why don't you just fit in? Do it like us. Do it in the appropriate way.
00:10:25So with me, I had the shame around leaving medicine for a long time, probably for years after I made the
00:10:29decision to leave being a doctor. This shame around, am I a bad person for leaving medicine? Now, in my
00:10:35mind, I thought this made sense, right? Because medicine, you know, being a doctor is one of those
00:10:38things that's like, you know, explicitly, supposedly good for society. But surely if you're like a lawyer,
00:10:43a corporate lawyer or a management consultant or a hedge fund guy or an investment banker or whatever,
00:10:47surely you wouldn't feel that same thing, right? Because it's not really in the same category as like
00:10:50saving someone's life. But having spoken to loads of people in those kind of jobs,
00:10:55people also feel this shame around leaving that path. And it's this idea of, am I a bad person?
00:11:01Not because I'm quitting a job that results in like lives being saved, but like, am I a bad person for
00:11:06kind of not creating economic value? Like there's, there's this like weird connection that we have
00:11:11between the work that we do and being a good productive member of society or something. And
00:11:15it's like an assumption baked into that, that we very rarely think to question.
00:11:18So you said that there are a lot of feelings of shame that people get at like, I don't like my work.
00:11:24I wonder if we can just sort of double click on that. Can you tell me more about like what sort of
00:11:27thoughts and feelings people are describing to you, feelings that you might've had yourself
00:11:30around this thing of like, oh, I kind of, kind of hate my job.
00:11:33Yeah. So I think a good way to separate it is guilt and shame. Guilt is, I feel bad for not doing
00:11:41something, right? And so if I'm away too long from home and not helping out with my daughter,
00:11:47I might feel guilt, but on the other side of guilt is like responsibility. Some guilt might be good,
00:11:53right? Shame on the other hand is I'm a bad person. And so after I quit my job, I felt like I was a bad
00:12:02person. Like I had really done something wrong. It was incredibly painful. And I realized over time,
00:12:08I was soaking up a lot of the insecurity of the people around me, right? They would say,
00:12:14what's your plan? You can't just quit. You need to make money. Like you need to have a job,
00:12:19right? And so I internalized a lot of that. It was really hard in that first year. And a lot of my
00:12:26writing is sort of permission to myself to feel better about what I was doing. I grew up in a family
00:12:32where many people had built lives around full-time employment, right? Doing something like your own
00:12:37path was extremely risky. And there's this silent agreement of just do it like us. Don't make us
00:12:44question the underlying assumptions in what we're doing and how we do it.
00:12:49At this point, I would like to tell you about the ultimate productivity hack,
00:12:52which if you're not using, you're really missing out. And that is using voice dictation rather than
00:12:56typing. And that is where Whisperflow comes in who are very kindly sponsoring this video. Whisperflow is
00:13:00a blazingly fast, amazingly high quality voice to text. And so on basically any device that you use,
00:13:04like your phone or your browser or your computer or whatever, Whisperflow acts as a sort of keyboard
00:13:08replacement. Like you just hit the dictate button, you speak into it. And then like within a couple of
00:13:12milliseconds, it just transcribes everything that you've said and automatically inserts it into
00:13:16wherever your cursor is. So for example, in my case, I use this a lot when I'm talking to AI tools on my
00:13:20phone or on the computer. Yeah, you could use the dictation that's sort of built into the AI tools,
00:13:23but it's not very good. And it's like, if you use voice mode, it's kind of annoying because you've
00:13:27got to wait for them to respond. And then if there's background noise, it's like they struggle to
00:13:29respond. But with Whisperflow, I just hit the dictate button and it like immediately transcribes
00:13:33everything I've said. I can just have a scan through, make sure it is what I actually want it to be,
00:13:37and then send it to the AI tool, which then responds back. And so this has saved me so much time,
00:13:40because even though I type really fast, I speak faster than I type, which is true of basically
00:13:44everyone in the world. Whisperflow is also better than the standard dictation built into your phone
00:13:48or your computer because A, it actually works and B, you can also define its own vocabulary. And so it'll
00:13:52remember things like the names of your products or the names of your business or the names of your
00:13:56co-workers or your family and stuff, and it will do the appropriate capitalization. And you can even
00:13:59change the settings so that if you're, for example, in WhatsApp, you might not type with
00:14:03capitalization. And so you can set a profile that's more casual that uses less punctuation and stuff
00:14:08when you're on WhatsApp compared to when you're on email, in which case you might want to use slightly
00:14:11more like capitalization and punctuation and all that kind of stuff. All of that stuff is built in
00:14:15by default and is really, really helpful. These days I use dictation for absolutely everything I do on
00:14:19the computer. I get actively annoyed when I'm having to, you know, like a freaking caveman type fingers
00:14:23on a keyboard. And so if you are not yet using voice dictation to drastically speed up your workflow
00:14:27and your productivity, you are really missing out. And if you'd like to try it out, you can get one month
00:14:31completely free of Whisperflow Pro. And that will be linked down in the video description. You should
00:14:35totally check it out. And I promise you won't look back. Yeah. To your point about sort of criticism,
00:14:39I found that over the years, I've spoken to a lot of friends who are still in medicine and sometimes,
00:14:44and I'll, I'll sometimes, I'll sometimes ask them to be like, you know, they'll say, oh,
00:14:46you know, I met someone the other day and they ask you, they found out I went to Cambridge.
00:14:49They're like, oh, do you know, Ali Abdal? I'd be like, I'd say to them, you know,
00:14:51I'm curious, like, I'm sure people don't talk about this very much, but like,
00:14:54what's the sentiment around the name Ali Abdal in like the medical field? And they'll be like,
00:14:59oh yeah, I'd say maybe half the people I speak to are like fanboys and the other half
00:15:03really hate you. And I'll be like, oh, that's interesting. Well, it's easier to hate you
00:15:07than sort of absorb the message that there are more possibilities for them than anything else.
00:15:14Right. And so from a survival standpoint, it's easier to just internalize the message that,
00:15:19okay, the only option is full-time employment. One of the weird things for me after quitting my job,
00:15:24was realizing I had not considered self-employment as a viable path until about six months before I
00:15:30quit. I had just been surrounded by everyone who is succeeding and achieving and making good money
00:15:36in full-time jobs and my family like that. And I hadn't considered other options.
00:15:42People would just self-gaslight themselves.
00:15:44Nice. What do you mean?
00:15:47They would say, well, like my boss is manipulating me. He's kind of a psychopath,
00:15:53very aggressive, um, embarrasses me in front of my teammates, but you know, like I have a good job,
00:16:00like I shouldn't complain. And it's like, whoa, whoa, not healthy. Like you, you can actually
00:16:08complain about that and you can actually just say, yeah, that kind of sucks. But people are just very
00:16:13willing to dismiss sort of low-grade suffering at work just because it's a default script.
00:16:19Now, when I speak to people about this, this idea of like low-grade suffering, um, often the story that
00:16:26keeps people in a job for way longer than they should be in that job is this idea of, ah, I should
00:16:32be grateful. I should be grateful to at least have a job. There's all sorts of people that don't have
00:16:36a job. The economy is so tough, you know, et cetera, et cetera. We just sort of take it for granted
00:16:40almost that work is supposed to have this level of suffering attached to it. And we often don't view it as
00:16:46a reason enough to make a change in our lives. And this idea of shame that we're talking about in this
00:16:50step is going to come back later on when we talk to Paul about how conversations with his friends,
00:16:55his family, his coworkers, all of that kind of stuff, like this, this idea of the shame you feel
00:17:00at potentially quitting your job or actually quitting your job is a thread that goes through a lot of
00:17:05people's journeys on this pathless path. Interlude. Are you actually wired for this? And before we
00:17:10continue with the rest of the steps in this journey, it is worth flagging that, you know, this idea of
00:17:14living life on the pathless path is not necessarily for everyone. There is a certain kind of person,
00:17:19probably you, definitely me, that sort of eventually has to make it work, has to go do their own thing,
00:17:26has to carve their own path. And those people will eventually just sort of keep like by brute force
00:17:33or experiments, keep trying stuff, end up moving in that direction. I think increasingly the idea of
00:17:39quitting and doing your own thing has become a lot more popular. There's YouTubers with millions
00:17:44of followers promoting these ideas. And it's a good thing because I think it is more possible than
00:17:53people think. And so there's a couple ways I would challenge people to think about this. Do a pro bono
00:18:00freelance assignment before you leave. Right. And so this is something I actually did and was pretty
00:18:05shocking for me. Even though I was an employed consultant for nine years, I did a pro bono
00:18:11consulting project for a small startup in Boston. And I realized two things. One, there was a lot more to
00:18:17learn doing this on my own. And that was interesting and exciting. And two, wow, I was pretty good at this,
00:18:24even though it was kind of scary. How do I know if I'm intrinsically interested in this pathless path
00:18:30entrepreneurship, do my own thing thing, or because it's now sort of sexier than it once was, where
00:18:36everyone and the dog seems to be starting a lifestyle business or becoming self-employed or becoming a
00:18:41freelancer or doing their own thing. How do I know I'm not just sort of mimiting myself into thinking that
00:18:46I want to do my own thing, when in reality, I actually love full-time employment?
00:18:50A lot of people are hypnotized by stories of quitting your job and doing your own thing.
00:18:56These have become supercharged since the pandemic. More and more people are selling courses,
00:19:02writing books, promising the journey of succeeding when you do your own thing. I actually love what
00:19:08you're doing in terms of just make a thousand dollars, right? A really simple thing. And so that's
00:19:15really what I would focus on instead is try things before quitting or notice things in your life that
00:19:22might translate. Can I make money on my own? Can I do a project on my own? What do I do when I have
00:19:27free time? Am I drawn to do creative stuff, network with people, connect with people, start things,
00:19:33host things? Three years before I quit, I started doing all these things. It naturally happened. And I think
00:19:39when I quit, I had the confidence in knowing I could show up in a certain way. I didn't have confidence
00:19:45I could make money or that I could make it work at all. But I saw myself volunteering to do stuff. I
00:19:51saw myself doing a coaching business before I quit my job. I made money in a bunch of different ways,
00:19:57not a lot of money. I did an online course on resumes before I quit. And so I had all this like proof of
00:20:04energy, but not proof of making it. So I like this question of like proof of energy
00:20:08rather than necessarily proof of success. If you're thinking of maybe living life on the pathless path,
00:20:13if you look at your life to this point, do you have some evidence that you can give to yourself
00:20:18about how you've done experiments with stuff over the years? You know, people I know who've thrived on
00:20:22the pathless path are the people who started random side hustles when they were in school or decided to
00:20:27start a blog or a random YouTube channel or start posting on Instagram or like start like, I don't know,
00:20:31knitting as a hobby or something, even though it was uncool and no one was really doing it when they
00:20:35were when they were teenagers. Like, you know, have you got experience of doing stuff that would be
00:20:39considered a little bit weird? Or has your life really been a series of tick boxes where you've
00:20:43sort of done the conveyor belt thing that everyone around you was doing? That's not to say that if
00:20:46you're in that mode, you can't like change your situation or whatever. But often I find that the
00:20:51people that really have this urge to get onto the pathless path and that also tend to thrive on the
00:20:56pathless path tend to be more the ones who are like a little bit weird when they were younger.
00:21:01So this is just something worth keeping in mind. And I think this might be a way to answer that
00:21:04question of like, if you're concerned of sort of enamored by the idea of quitting your job because
00:21:08it seems cool versus is there something deeper underlying this that's like more core to who you
00:21:14really are or your personality or whatever insofar as your own personality is a sensible like barometer.
00:21:20So now before we make the decision to quit our job, we should probably do step four,
00:21:23which is to run the numbers.
00:21:25Step one with all of this is figure out who you are, who are you and what do you need?
00:21:31I am somebody that does not need a lot in terms of money and material possessions.
00:21:36And I've always known that, right? So that lowered the bar dramatically.
00:21:40That made it far less scary for me to quit and do my own thing.
00:21:44People will come to me and say, I have a mortgage and I want to send my kids to private school and
00:21:49I want to save for a college fund. But I also want to quit and do my own thing. How do I handle all
00:21:54this? And I'll just be like, I don't know. I'm writing from my experience. I have less desires.
00:22:01You need to find somebody with a similar path, right? And so for me, it was easier because
00:22:07I could live on less over a number of years. Hmm.
00:22:11I have a really great prompt for people in jobs. You can quit your job and not work for a year.
00:22:19And I'll give you 25% of your current income. How do you feel?
00:22:23Now, to me, if you had told me that before I quit, I would have been ecstatic. Two things.
00:22:30One, I have all my time back. That's so exciting because I always have things I could do with my
00:22:36time. I already have an appreciation for things I would do and things I'm interested in and how
00:22:41to spend that time. Second thing, 25% of my income. Start doing the math. Could I live on that? Yeah,
00:22:48I could probably hack a living. Even if I dip into my savings, it's not too bad. You start doing the
00:22:53math. And if that becomes reasonable, you can then just start looking at the question in a completely
00:22:58different way. Not how do I replace my salary or how do I create a successful path for myself?
00:23:04How do I hack a living on 25% of what I currently make over the next year? And if I can't,
00:23:10I'll go back to my job. Nice. So at this point, it's worth pausing this video and actually thinking
00:23:14about this question. If your income suddenly dropped by 75%, like you had to live on 25% of
00:23:20your current income, how does that feel? If your immediate reaction to that is 25% of my current
00:23:25income. Okay, I do the math on that. And like, you know, I'd have to downgrade my lifestyle a bit,
00:23:28but like, you know, I could certainly make it happen. And maybe you feel a sense of relief,
00:23:32but like, Oh my goodness, imagine what I could do with all that free time that I'll have.
00:23:35Then that's a very strong sign that maybe the time is right. But if you feel 25% of my income,
00:23:39like a quarter of what I'm currently earning, there's no fricking way I'd be able to survive
00:23:42on that for whatever reason, then that is also fine. But it's just like the more money you need to make
00:23:47to meet your life and your family's basic needs, the harder it is to do your own thing. Because
00:23:52obviously like the bar for success is higher and higher. So for you, that question of like,
00:23:57okay, how'd I feel if I didn't have a job anymore, but I did, I still had 25% of my current income.
00:24:02You feel excited about that. What are some other responses that people might have to that question
00:24:06in your experience? Yeah. So if your response is that's ridiculous, I need to replace my salary
00:24:12before I quit. That's a, that's just a much higher degree of difficulty leap you're trying to execute,
00:24:19right? I didn't match my salary until my sixth year of being self-employed to some people that might
00:24:27be failure, right? So you need to figure out what are the expectations? What does success look like?
00:24:33I often lead people through a series of questions. One of them is what is the lowest amount that would
00:24:39be considered successful if I made over the next year? What are the number of months you're comfortable
00:24:45earning zero income, right? And it's all around just reframing your fears because almost everyone
00:24:52is thinking, how do I make it work? How do I go from successful job to successful pathos path? And
00:25:00it's sort of a crazy thing. Why would you be good at self-employment if you have no practice doing it?
00:25:06I'm eight and a half years into it now. I just feel like I'm getting my bearings.
00:25:12Yeah. I think this is very true. I find myself kind of thinking of the same, uh, same sort of
00:25:16ways when I'm, I'm, I've sort of ended up becoming a pseudo coach to people for this exact problem as
00:25:21well. Cause people now come up to me being like, Oh, how do you quit your job rather than how do you
00:25:24be more productive and things like that? And I like the way you framed it, which is that if you're
00:25:28trying to replace your salary, that's a very high bar and it's a difficult game that you are playing.
00:25:33The lower your bar is like, if you can get by with 10 grand, 20 grand, if you have a year's worth of
00:25:38savings so that you can actually dip into it a little bit, the game just becomes a lot easier
00:25:41because now you're not trying to get a six figure salary from day one, which is really hard to do.
00:25:45And I get all these people saying to me, but like, Oh, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm making six figures in
00:25:49my law firm and I want to do my own thing. And I'm like, okay, cool. What, how much money do you want
00:25:52to be making? And they're like, Oh, you know, I have to be replacing my salary. I'm like, okay.
00:25:55Within what sort of time timeframe. Oh, ideally in the next six to 12 months. Like, okay, that's going
00:26:00to be hard. Like, you know, it takes time to train up, to do anything. If you want to be a neurosurgeon
00:26:06earning, earning the big money, you can't do that within like three, three to six months on the side
00:26:10and on the weekends and stuff. It's like a decade of training. Paul, how much money should I have
00:26:13saved up before I quit my job? I think the best thing to do is reframe that into a series of questions.
00:26:21So if I'm going to quit my job, how long am I willing to go without making money until
00:26:28I consider this a failure? What amount of money would encourage me to extend the timeframe from
00:26:34six months to 12 months to 18 months and just continue asking different versions of this kind
00:26:39of question and also run the numbers. I am shocked at how few people actually know what they spend.
00:26:46To be honest, I didn't actually calculate my spending before I quit my job, but as soon as I
00:26:51quit and wasn't making any money yet, I started going, oh crap, I need to analyze what I'm spending
00:26:56per month. And very quickly, I lowered that amount. I realized I could live on $3,500 a month. And so
00:27:04I had more than that to fund a year from savings. And for me, that felt good. That felt right.
00:27:09So again, I think this is worth double clicking on. Paul is not saying, hey, follow your dreams and the
00:27:13money will eventually come. Instead, he's saying something more practical, which is you should probably
00:27:16actually run the numbers on this. Do the maths, figure out how much do you actually need to live on? What
00:27:21if you lowered the bar to buy yourself time for that expiration? And so if you're going to go on this
00:27:25path, it's actually a lot easier to be on it when your lifestyle expenses are very low compared to if
00:27:28you have the requirement that you match your salary before you make any kind of decision. Because again,
00:27:32it's really hard to get there. Over my 10 year default path career, two years were in grad school,
00:27:37eight years employed. I made somewhere around like 800 something thousand dollars. On my own over
00:27:42eight and a half years, I think the number was about the same. And the question I was asking myself, and this sort of made me realize that this is a
00:27:50whole new skill is learning to work self-employed. On the default path, as you get more skilled, you earn
00:27:57more money. As you're on your own path, there's a skill associated with it as well. And so it was just
00:28:03really interesting that the numbers were very similar over those eight years. And so once you've run the
00:28:09numbers, we move on to step five, which is to take the leap without a perfect plan. What was your impression of
00:28:15self-employment or like entrepreneurship or like starting, but like sort of any of these like
00:28:19non, anything that's not full-time employment? It's so weird because I was sort of memeing myself
00:28:26into these things subconsciously without I think intellectualizing it. I was so firmly winning prestige
00:28:33bingo and on that successful path that I had a lot of opportunities ahead of me. And I was still like pretty
00:28:39good at what I was doing. But during my days I was listening to Tim Ferriss podcasts, but I didn't make
00:28:46the connection that, oh, I could be one of these people that could go do these things. But I was
00:28:52loving that stuff. I was consuming it. I was eating up everything Derek Sivers was saying, Tim Ferriss.
00:28:58But then I would just go to work and it didn't occur to me that I could do anything else. And so this is
00:29:04one thing I think people get wrong about taking the leap is a lot of people don't actually know what the
00:29:12plan is after they take a leap. And the idea that you think you need a plan or need to know what you're
00:29:17doing after taking a leap holds far too many people back. My plan for when I quit was to become a freelance
00:29:23consultant. You know what I did for my day job? I was an employed consultant. I lasted about six months
00:29:31doing freelance consulting. And in that time, I had enough breathing space in my life and work to
00:29:37realize, oh, I have this creative itch. I like these other things I'm doing. I don't know how to monetize
00:29:43those, but this is really interesting energy showing up in my life.
00:29:47Yeah, because I imagine an objection to that be, well, the terms of my contract say that I have a
00:29:53non-compete pull. Same with mine. But they're going to fire me.
00:29:58Yeah, no one's going to know you're doing a pro bono project for a friend's company.
00:30:03But I have to declare it to HR. You're not wired to take the leap, probably.
00:30:07So I feel like when it comes to quitting the job and doing my own thing, for some people,
00:30:12it's almost like a kind of they're being pulled towards it through like following their energy and
00:30:18stuff. But for others, it's like almost this, man, I fucking hate my job so much that I have to do my
00:30:24own thing. And it's sort of more this sort of like negative kind of thing, which I see increasingly in
00:30:29my YouTube comments where people are like, or in like Instagram DMs or people are like, oh, my man,
00:30:33I've got such a toxic boss at work, blah, blah, blah. I've never, I've never done anything on my own.
00:30:38Tell me, Ali Abdal, what is the simplest, most easy business you can start to become a millionaire
00:30:42in two years without having any skills? And I'm like, I think people should take a sabbatical,
00:30:48not start a business. I think the way I reframe it is take a three month sabbatical one time in
00:30:56adulthood. If we assume we work 500 months in adulthood, taking a three month sabbatical
00:31:04is a tiny, tiny percentage of that working adult life. What if you put taking a three month break
00:31:11first in priority and said that is the thing I'm going to pull off no matter what? I think it's
00:31:16more achievable for more people than ever before. And the task in those three months is not to start a
00:31:23business. It's just to get back in touch with yourself. So many people get so lost and absorbed
00:31:30in this system from going through school to college, to work. And I actually recommend doing this in your
00:31:35thirties because you sort of have some experience. You have some attempts at trying to make work work
00:31:41and you can just pause and say, okay, who am I? What have I learned? When I wake up tomorrow,
00:31:50what are my interests? Right? And you might have to do it again. You might have to take a sabbatical again,
00:31:54five years later. We actually have a lot of students in our Lifestyle Business Academy that are doing
00:31:59our kind of online business school as part of a sabbatical from work. Most of our students,
00:32:03I'd say probably 90% are trying to build a business alongside the day job. But for maybe
00:32:0710% of our students, like they've actually taken an active, like two, three, four month break from
00:32:10work. And they're like, you know, in this three to six month period of time, I'm going to commit
00:32:15all in on figuring out what it would take to actually build a business from scratch. So if that's
00:32:19a possibility for you, definitely something worth considering. Or even if you're just able to
00:32:22straight up take a sabbatical from work and not feel like you have to start a business at that time,
00:32:25just having that space to explore and figure out what you really want to do can be super helpful.
00:32:29And so let's assume you've done all these things, you've run the numbers, you've maybe taken a
00:32:33little bit of a leap. We now move on to step number six, which is to hack a living.
00:32:36The pathless path has visible costs, hidden benefits too, right? So the costs, everyone knows the costs
00:32:44of taking a leap and doing your own thing. Income, unpredictability, uncertainty, fear,
00:32:51all these things, everyone prices it in. But the thing you can't see is the invisible benefits,
00:32:57right? The invisible benefits all occurred for me and sort of radicalized me to my own
00:33:03pathless path a year in my first year after quitting my job. And it was, oh, I made a hundred dollars of
00:33:10my own. If I can make a hundred dollars of my own, I can make a thousand. Oh, if I can make a thousand,
00:33:14I can make 10,000, right? And these things build and you start to feel excitement, ownership, autonomy,
00:33:19belief in yourself, like possibilities start expanding. And so the formula for me was really,
00:33:25I quit. I didn't have any income lined up. I tried to get freelancing gigs. Over the first nine months,
00:33:31I made about half of what I had made, maybe a little less than that, 30 to 50% of what I had
00:33:37made the previous year. And that could fund my lower cost of living. And I was like, oh, wow,
00:33:43I've funded a year in nine months. I didn't have to tap into my savings. I can go another year. And so
00:33:51I just kept buying years. And the more time I had on this different kind of path, the more excited I was,
00:33:58I met more people. I started believing in myself more. And this kind of journey is possible for
00:34:05people too. I think this way of approaching it is much less scary than people normally think about.
00:34:09Like if you think about quitting your job, most people think about it as like this all or nothing
00:34:12decision. Like, oh my God, like I'm earning a hundred K a year right now. And if I quit my job,
00:34:17it suddenly goes to zero. And then I'll figure out how to earn a hundred K a year for the rest of my life.
00:34:21And it's like this all or nothing, I'm going to end up broken,
00:34:24homeless and alone versus I'm going to be okay. Like this, it's a, it's very sort of binary thinking,
00:34:30at least when our fear based brain gets involved with the process. But I like this idea of that,
00:34:35you're just sort of buying years of your life. Like you don't need to figure out your retirement plan.
00:34:39If you're thinking of quitting your job, when you're like 28, you just need to figure out like,
00:34:42how can I survive for the next 12 months? All right, cool. Or, or even the next three months,
00:34:47or even the next like three weeks, you know, that kind of thing. I think those of us who were, you
00:34:51know, did well in school and stuff, we're so used to being like, you need a plan for your whole life.
00:34:55Like medicine is great because it's employment for life and all that kind of stuff that we're so used
00:34:59to thinking like, oh, you know, the thing I'm doing as an employee right now is going to be the thing I
00:35:03have to do for the next 60 years of my life. We just know that that's just not how the world works.
00:35:06And yet that is the default way that our subconscious mind thinks about this because of all the stories and
00:35:12stuff that we've been told throughout our lives. And so it's really about running one
00:35:14experiment after another. Maybe you do it for three months and you decide how much money did
00:35:18I make in those three months? Am I still enjoying this? How do I feel? Maybe you try it for another
00:35:21three months. Then maybe you do a six month experiment and you're always just running one
00:35:25small experiment at a time. Like even with me, when I quit medicine, like it sounds like dramatic to say
00:35:30it like that right now, but I, that's not how I thought about it back in 2021 when I made the decision.
00:35:35The way I thought about it was, you know what, let me take a one-year break from medicine,
00:35:39kind of like a sabbatical from medicine, and then I'll see how it goes. Loads of people take sabbaticals
00:35:42from medicine. Some people go to Australia that was planning to go to Australia, but COVID, so they
00:35:46shut down their borders. And in the grand scheme of things, no one really cares about the gap in the
00:35:50resume, which is something that people are so worried about. Maybe in your case, your employer is
00:35:54different and they really, really do care about a gap in your resume. But honestly, I think it's one of
00:35:58those things that holds way more people back than it needs to. And so now we're talking about how Paul
00:36:02actually made money, how he hacked himself a living during the last eight years that he's been on the
00:36:06pathless path. My income sources over the years have shifted dramatically. The number one thing that's
00:36:12paid the bills has been different five or six times. Two years ago, book sales was the only year I made
00:36:19the majority of my income from books, even though that's what people know me for now. My first couple
00:36:24of years were freelance consulting on a much lower base. The next few years were an online course from
00:36:30teaching consulting skills. The next few years, I don't know. And so it's just sort of committing to
00:36:38this continued experimentation. And I like the experimentation. So you have to figure out who you
00:36:43are. If you don't like learning, experimenting, and connecting with others on these paths, doing
00:36:48something like a creator path can be very challenging. But what about the money, man? You've got to feed the
00:36:54daughter. Aren't you worried you're going to end up broke and then she's going to end up starving?
00:36:57I think confidence from earning money on your own is very powerful. So I talked a bit about early on
00:37:07making that first thousand dollars. That first thousand dollars warps your mind. It's like, wow.
00:37:14I joke that earning a thousand on your own is way better than making 200 grand for an entire year in a
00:37:20salary. It makes you realize, oh, I can just do stuff, put it out in the world and potentially fund a life
00:37:28doing those things, right? And so one year doing that, two years doing that, three years doing that.
00:37:34I've tried to prioritize making money in many different ways. I've generated over a million dollars in
00:37:40revenue over eight years. Now, would I've made more in my previous path? Sure. But the confidence
00:37:47underneath how I've generated all that money on my own is just so profound. And so I have some passive
00:37:55income sources now. So I sort of have like my own basic income that like funds the experiments and
00:38:02continued betting on myself. And so I just want to keep going. I don't know how long I can keep it going,
00:38:08but as long as I can continue to buy my freedom and buy time to spend with my family and buy time to
00:38:15create, I'm going to keep going. There was a concept I learned from my friend Dickie Bush,
00:38:19which I really vibed with me a few years ago. It's like, instead of thinking about financial security,
00:38:25instead think about financial confidence. For a lot of us, we're like so attached to this idea of
00:38:29security. And for a lot of us, security means you've got $10,000,000,000 in the bank so that
00:38:33at a 4% withdrawal rate, you never need to work again a day in your life. And like,
00:38:37good luck getting to $10,000,000,000 in the bank. It's probably not going to happen. You're probably
00:38:40going to die before you hit that number. However, if you reframe it, I don't need financial security.
00:38:44I just need financial confidence. I need confidence in my own ability to actually figure it out and make
00:38:48money. That changes the equation. That means you can take leaps like this without having to have
00:38:53zillions of dollars in the bank. And this is one of the reasons why I'm so bullish on everyone at least
00:38:58dabbling with entrepreneurship at some point in their life. Like it's not about whether you start a
00:39:03business that you then run for the rest of your life. You probably won't do that. But it is about
00:39:07learning the skills of independent income generation. If you are a normal person, if you're an employee,
00:39:12you have never learned the skills of what it actually takes to make money. Because the only
00:39:15way you make money is once in a blue moon when you campaign for a raise or a promotion at work,
00:39:20or when you apply for a job, which does not happen very often. But when you own a business,
00:39:24either as a freelancer or self-employed or having your own small team or whatever the thing might be,
00:39:28you are learning the skill of making money every single day. Because the hardest part about building
00:39:32a business is winning the work, not doing the work. Doing the work is easy. You can easily figure
00:39:36it out, especially with AI, once you have paying clients. But getting those paying clients in the
00:39:39first place, holy moly, it's like hard to do because it's a series of skills. It's a muscle that you
00:39:43haven't yet developed. Last year we ran this thing called the 1K challenge, which was like a six week
00:39:48live thing over summer where we sort of helped people make their first thousand dollars online. And we had a
00:39:53bunch of people who made their first thousand dollars and more online. And then one of our students,
00:39:56Kelsey ended up joining our Lifestyle Business Academy. She'd been on the default path, working
00:39:59fancy tech jobs in her whole life. And through doing the 1K challenge, she realized, oh, making
00:40:03money really is just solving problems with people. Huh? I could use my existing skills to solve problems
00:40:07for people that I know. And so she made her first thousand dollars during the six weeks of the thing.
00:40:11She joined our Lifestyle Business Academy. She's now made $40,000 over the last few months. And she did
00:40:15all of this without quitting her day job. She still has a fancy tech job, you know, working in tech,
00:40:19and I think has no plans to actually quit that job, but feels a profound sense of confidence at being able to
00:40:24actually make money. So when you start making money on your own, man, that's one of those massive
00:40:28unlocks. It's just a series of skills that you need to learn. And you learn those skills often by just
00:40:33trying to do the thing. Oh, and by the way, if you are interested in learning more about our Lifestyle
00:40:37Business Academy, which is our online business school, where we help corporate professionals
00:40:40build six figure lifestyle businesses so that it makes your job optional, there'll be more details down
00:40:43below and you can check it out if you like. One thing we sort of talked about earlier in the
00:40:47conversation was this idea of dipping into savings, which I've spoken to a lot of people who are like
00:40:53petrified of dipping into their savings. I have a friend who I know for a fact has like $80,000
00:40:59in savings. Her house has a mortgage that's like $200 a month. She's absolutely terrified of dipping
00:41:05into her savings. And for the last five years that I've known her has used that as a reason as to why
00:41:09she can't possibly like do her own thing, even though like clearly there's a lot of savings and
00:41:13like she hasn't got a partner or kids and doesn't have responsibility. So like all of the usual excuses
00:41:19can just be like cancelled out in that context. Money on a spreadsheet does not solve emotional
00:41:25problems. There's actually a study recently out that showed retirees will spend about 80 to 100%
00:41:32depending on the income bracket of their lifetime earnings. But the wealth they build, they spend far
00:41:37less of that. And many people die with a bunch of money, right? Behind that, I think it's just this
00:41:44rhythm of the paycheck reality. And so the paycheck reality says, one, I am a good person and a worker
00:41:51and contributing and part of society if I'm earning a paycheck every every day, right? And then the other
00:41:56side of that is if I don't, I'm a bad person. One powerful reframe helped me as well. A friend said
00:42:04this to me early on. He said, consider your savings a gift from your former self. He's like, Paul,
00:42:11your consulting self, he did grind for you. He built up a little war chest for you to go out in the world.
00:42:18I had 50 grand in savings when I quit my job. And so that was sort of a gift from my past self. So you
00:42:26can really like close your eyes and be like, oh, thank you, past self. I appreciate that. I'm
00:42:31receiving that. Another reframe is sort of labeling your life experiment as like, I've called it a
00:42:39freelance year. I'm just going to do a freelance year, an experimental year, limit it, like time frame
00:42:45it or just call it your life MBA or life PhD. I paid $100,000 tuition over two years to get my MBA and
00:42:53master's in engineering. I quit my job, broke even, made money on my own, didn't pay anyone for two years.
00:43:02And people thought I was crazy. Why not consider like a one or two year experience of betting on yourself,
00:43:09trying new things as equivalent to like going to spend your own money on a master's.
00:43:14Yeah. I love that way of labeling it. Another way that I sometimes think about it is, you know,
00:43:20all businesses require investment, just that, you know, the investment that you're getting is from
00:43:24a formal version of you. Conveniently, it's used so you don't have to give away equity for that.
00:43:27And that investment gives you the runway. So how much runway do you want? Do you want three months?
00:43:30Do you want six months? Do you want a year? Because it's like, you're basically, it's like
00:43:33raising money from a VC, except you're not giving away equity. And I find that that framing
00:43:38helped for me and also has helped for a few of my friends who have sort of like mentored through
00:43:41the process. Interlude about how work can be good without becoming a fantasy. So now that we've
00:43:47dealt with this money objection, which is often the biggest one of like, oh my God, can I actually
00:43:50survive? Or will I end up killing myself? Because like, I don't have any money. Once we've dealt with
00:43:54that kind of general sphere of objections, which often tends to be emotional rather than mathematical
00:43:58in nature, there is a deeper question underneath all of this that we have to contend with, which is
00:44:03what's the sort of work that you actually want to do? Because the danger with any kind of quit your job
00:44:07conversation is that it's easy for it to be framed as like, you know, job equals bad and
00:44:11self-employment equals good. And that the freedom to live life on your own terms means never having
00:44:14to do any hard things ever again. And that, oh my God, if you just find what you love to do,
00:44:17then you'll never work a day in your life. I know loads of people who are on the pathless path.
00:44:20A lot of them are super, super, super rich. Almost none of them view work as, you know,
00:44:25this thing of your, it's always sunshine and rainbows and roses and all that crap. And so this is a
00:44:30little interlude where Paul and I talk about the idea that work does not have to suck.
00:44:33There's a, I think the opening line of good work when I first read it was like, what is it?
00:44:40I'm quoting directly. Could it be this simple? Just do things you like? Question mark.
00:44:46Like when I read that, I was like, I can't remember when I first read it.
00:44:50You don't need to read the rest of the book now.
00:44:51I was just like, I was literally grappling with that question in my journals, like every morning being like,
00:44:56can I in fact just do things I like? And then I read this first line. I was like, oh, great.
00:45:01Paul's about to write a whole book about this. It's shocking to many people though,
00:45:05because many people have internalized the idea that work has to suck. Work is a sacrifice. Work must
00:45:10be painful. And so we internalize these things so deeply that we don't even question when we're
00:45:16suffering. Objection, your honor. Easy for you to say, work can be fun. Thank you, Paul Miller.
00:45:21Tell that to the gas station attendant or the person working at McDonald's or the person sweeping the
00:45:25floors or the single mom working three jobs to make ends meet. I would say that the default story
00:45:30in most cultures and most societies is that work must suck. Work must be painful. All I am doing is
00:45:37pointing to an experience I've had and saying work doesn't have to be painful by definition. Many people
00:45:45in many different kinds of jobs do find joy in what they're doing. And so all I'm asking is that the
00:45:53margin to consider small decisions around what might be possible. And so trying to fit something like
00:46:01that in which you have to do things you don't want to do, that is a job into this container of I want
00:46:07it to just be my passion. There are influencers that will sell you that idea. I will not sell you that
00:46:13idea. I don't think it's possible. What I think is possible is slowly moving more and more toward a
00:46:21larger part of that job-shaped container being things you enjoy. And so just back up and take off the
00:46:29labels and just notice what you're doing on a day-to-day basis.
00:46:33Yeah. I completely agree. Another line I found myself saying to a lot of people is that everything
00:46:38feels like work after a while. Everything is work, right? We're all just doing things. Humans work.
00:46:46When you change your daughter's diaper, you're working, you're doing things, right? But we don't apply
00:46:51special labels to that. It feels light and easy because you just do it. That's what you do as a parent.
00:46:58When we start attaching all the labels to work, when work has to be special, when work has to give me
00:47:05fulfillment, when work has to provide me infinite money, that's when it's just really hard to pull
00:47:10off. Now, I like this distinction Paul draws between good work and a bad work. And bad work being like,
00:47:16you know, the sort of stuff that drains your energy, the sort of stuff that makes you think,
00:47:18oh, I really don't want to do this. You know, that kind of stuff happening repeatedly is a good signal.
00:47:23Good work is the stuff that you're like, oh, you know, this was actually quite enjoyable. You know,
00:47:27maybe not every aspect of the thing was like that, like fun, but you know, broadly, I felt energized by
00:47:32doing this thing. And I can see myself continuing to do this sort of thing. And in every kind of job,
00:47:37there's some elements of good work, some elements of bad work, some elements of good enough work. In
00:47:42every kind of business or self-employed path or freelancer path, there are some elements of bad work,
00:47:46good enough work and good work. And what the whole game becomes once you've been doing it for a while,
00:47:50is it becomes basically a rebalancing the portfolio kind of game. For me, the question I always think
00:47:55about is if I had a hundred million in the bank, what would I actually end up doing with my time?
00:47:59And then I look at the stuff that I'm actually doing with my time and then I'm identifying,
00:48:02okay, cool. So what are the things that I'm just doing for the money that I wouldn't choose to do
00:48:06ordinarily? And I try and make that list as small as possible. And it's not an overnight thing,
00:48:10like especially when you're starting out a business or starting out trying to make money,
00:48:13it's like there is a little bit of a, shall we say, grind to it because you're probably not going to be
00:48:16doing stuff that makes money that like you're feeling super blissed out about all the time.
00:48:20But definitely over time, if you keep on like just continuing on the path, you start making these
00:48:24small pivots. And a few years later, you look at your calendar and you're like, damn, pretty much
00:48:29everything I'm doing is actually stuff I want to be doing. Whereas maybe a few years ago, 30% of the
00:48:34stuff that you were doing was the stuff that you actually wanted to be doing. And so to make those
00:48:37pivots, we move on to step number seven, which is to follow your energy.
00:48:41I did some of the freelance consulting work and I found I didn't really like it that much.
00:48:47I was good at it. I could do it. It generated good money, but there was this tension. There's
00:48:51this avoidance. I wanted to not take every project I eventually took. And so I was doing the consulting
00:48:57work just for the paycheck. And so one of the shifts I made in the first year was that
00:49:03I decided to do my best. I did fail at times. Do work that I actually just wanted to do for the
00:49:09sake of itself. Even in my first year of work doing consulting work. So before I did consulting gigs,
00:49:17I spent an entire month writing this essay called Crisis at Work. And it was this big long essay
00:49:24exploring the history of work. I hired an editor to coach me on my writing. I hired an illustrator
00:49:31to illustrate graphics for it. And it was just so fun. It was really enjoyable. But in my head,
00:49:36the story was that's not real. I can't make money writing, not something to take seriously.
00:49:42And so I look back now and it's so obvious to draw a straight line from that energy to what I'm doing
00:49:49now. Yeah. Well, one of the things I think I read in one of like Paul Graham's essays back in the day was,
00:49:53you know, what's the thing that you find yourself thinking about when you're in the shower?
00:49:58That question can often lead you to what sort of work would you actually be into?
00:50:02And I was like, I think I read this like 10 years ago. And I was like, huh, I've not once in my life
00:50:08thought about medicine while I'm in the shower. It was always about like the app that I'm building or
00:50:12like the software platform me and my brother trying to build or like, oh, I really want to be a YouTuber
00:50:17and try and do these like music covers or whatever the thing was. It was never about the thing.
00:50:21It was never about the main thing that kind of default path that I was pursuing.
00:50:24Yeah. I have this idea on the pathless path where I say, don't aim at a niche. Don't find a niche,
00:50:33find a mode. Right. And I actually gave you as an example in this essay. And I think one thing where
00:50:39you've succeeded is you found a mode where you can show up as Ali Abdel. You're not finding a niche
00:50:45because you change your mind every six months of what you're interested in. But that's how
00:50:52most humans are wired. Most humans are not hardwired for one niche throughout adulthood. For me,
00:50:59it was this proof of energy that it was like, I kind of like that. That might be some evidence.
00:51:05I could do stuff on my own. I don't know where that will lead, but that's sort of one pro in the
00:51:10list of maybe I'll go take a leap and find out. It's a cool way of approaching this, that it's not
00:51:16about finding a niche where you're sort of like just doing one specific thing for a very long time.
00:51:21It's more like finding a mode where the general mode of operation is figure out what I'm interested in,
00:51:26do some teaching about it and see if I can maybe sell something based on that teaching that I'm
00:51:30doing. That's sort of the mode that I've sort of landed up in. I'm going to give some context here
00:51:33because I think it's interesting or maybe useful. But like, so we've had this course that I've been
00:51:37running for the last six years, part-time YouTuber Academy, which is basically a course that teaches
00:51:40people how to build YouTube channels. And then like last year, I was saying to Dan, I was like,
00:51:45Dan, I really want to start my own online business school. And I really want to do this lifestyle
00:51:48business academy thing, because I'm no longer massively energized by teaching people how to do YouTube,
00:51:53at least not for like 40 hours a week. But I am really energized by teaching people
00:51:56how to start an online business that gets them to financial freedom. What do you think?
00:51:59And Dan's pushback on this was in general, there is a good principle in business, which is
00:52:04it is much easier to do more of what works than to do something that is completely new.
00:52:09So Dan was like, look, if you want to make money, why don't you just triple down on the YouTuber thing?
00:52:12Like you could do a YouTuber for businesses. You could do YouTube for teams. Every business wants to
00:52:17start a YouTube channel. You could do a thing there. You could do a service. And it would make so much
00:52:20sense because you've already got this multimillion dollar asset in this YouTuber Academy. Why would
00:52:24you start something completely new? And I was like, well, because it'll be fun and fulfilling. And he
00:52:31was like, well, okay, but then what, what, six months from now, are you going to start like a gardening
00:52:35academy because you're into gardening? And like six months after that, are you going to start a knitting
00:52:39academy because you're into knitting? And I was like, yeah, you know, that's probably not the optimal
00:52:44strategy to get you to zillions of dollars in the bank. But that kind of is the mode of operation
00:52:49that I enjoy for myself and for my business where the business basically follows the thing that I am
00:52:55energized about in the moment. Right now, I'm not massively energized by teaching people how to do
00:52:59YouTube because also because AI is taking over and I need to like dive into that rabbit hole at some
00:53:03point. And so that side of the business is still running and we're still like updating the course and
00:53:05making sure the AI tools are updated and all that kind of stuff. But I don't need to think too hard
00:53:09about it because I've done the hard work of creating the initial thing and now the team basically runs that.
00:53:13But I'm currently energized by this Lifestyle Business Academy thing. And so I'm spending all my time
00:53:17working on that. And at the point, you know, if it ever happens that I become less energized by that
00:53:21thing, then I'll hand that over to the team to continue running or maybe we'll shut it down like
00:53:25we've done with some previous products of ours or whatever. And then I'll move on to the next thing.
00:53:28And that's sort of like the mode of operation that I've at least found myself landing on that like
00:53:33actually just follow your own curiosity and make stuff around what energizes you, which for the record
00:53:37is not the optimal strategy that I would advise someone if they're trying to make loads and loads of money.
00:53:40On my current path, I have a set of activities I like doing that shifted over time. And I'm always
00:53:45noticing, oh, I have interest here. I'm going to spend time doing this or that. But there's no
00:53:50story attached to it. I am not an author. I am not a creator. I am not a YouTuber. I am not a podcaster.
00:53:59I'm just somebody doing a set of activities that I like doing.
00:54:03I really like that. This is something I've started doing recently where I've started to
00:54:09internally drop the label of YouTuber. Because when I have the internal label of YouTuber,
00:54:13I kind of think sort of there's always a subroutine running in the back of my mind of like,
00:54:16what's the next video? And like keeping an eye on the analytics and all of that stuff.
00:54:21Recently, what we've done is YouTube is sort of confined to a Tuesday. That's my filming day.
00:54:26And that's the day where I think about YouTube videos. And then the rest of the time, I'm not
00:54:29thinking about YouTube videos. So I have like some slots on my calendar where I think about the
00:54:32various apps that we're building, which is kind of fun. And the rest of them these days, I'm building
00:54:36this like lifestyle business academy thing, which feels really fun right now. And I'm sure it's not
00:54:40going to stay feeling fun and exciting for years because everything sort of, at least at least for me,
00:54:45sort of, I have a period of excitement and then it sort of slowly wanes over time.
00:54:49I found it very helpful to drop the noun and just focus on, yeah, I like the way you put it,
00:54:54like the bundle of activities labeled work or whatever.
00:54:58Yeah. If you're aiming at trying to be a creator, you're going to end up frustrated and confused.
00:55:04I mean, so many people have gone all in toward these labels, trying to basically just reinvent the
00:55:11default path off the default path, right? And so many people burn out and quit in a blaze of glory,
00:55:19right? Some people even shut down everything they've done, even though it's generating money.
00:55:23To me, that didn't make any sense for a while. But then I realized people are trying to kill off that
00:55:30identity they created for themselves, right? They're doing the same thing I did when I quit my job. I just
00:55:35wanted to get rid of that and start fresh, burn it to the ground, right? And so I'm trying to
00:55:41avoid that. So I hold the labels of who I am and what I'm doing lightly. I'm just trying to carve a
00:55:48path in which I can continue to do things I like doing. So now that we've done all this stuff, we
00:55:53figured out the portfolio of stuff that we want to do. We're not overly attached to the labels that
00:55:56we've put on ourselves. We now move on to step number eight, which is to declare retirement.
00:56:00But Paul, what if it goes to zero? And then you're going to struggle to get a job because
00:56:05they're going to look at your CV and they're going to see that you're this vagrant who's just been
00:56:08doing their own thing and you're a flight risk and then your family will starve.
00:56:13I don't have this insecurity of like a fear of going to zero. Many people have it.
00:56:18But one way I cured it is by actually just making less and seeing how I felt. At first,
00:56:24I felt terrible. For the first few years of my path, I made an average of 30 to 40 grand a year.
00:56:29I felt pretty bad. And so I did a pretty interesting exercise four years in. I sat down and ran the
00:56:36numbers of all the financial assets I have. And I'm somebody that's always been worried about like
00:56:43having enough money and saving enough. And I don't want to spend too much. I've always been very frugal.
00:56:48And in the first four years of my path, I basically just covered my cost of living. So I didn't save
00:56:54additional money. The money script I had in my head was that I'm reckless. I'm like uncontrollable,
00:57:02like out of control. And I just ran the numbers and I had retirement funds. I had invested in
00:57:09investments and I didn't touch those at all. It was like, I was so scared to touch those that I built my
00:57:14entire energy and life around just like making sure I made enough to cover my cost of living.
00:57:19In those years, it was like a huge stock market run and my net worth had doubled in four years.
00:57:24And so I had this huge moment of dissonance in which my net worth had doubled and I felt like a
00:57:30completely reckless person financially. A lot of why I write is self-therapy. And so I wrote this
00:57:37article in 2021, even before I started making more money from the book and stuff. And I just declared
00:57:43myself retired. What do you mean you declared yourself retired?
00:57:46So I called myself retired in the sense that I felt like I could keep going on my path and doing work
00:57:53I liked. I think I got this idea from you called the skip test. I love this idea. Would you skip this
00:57:59task if you could just get to the end result? So for example, this podcast, I would not skip this
00:58:05just for a finished product. I love this kind of conversation. And so I wouldn't skip it. And so
00:58:12in those four years, I had done a majority of the things I didn't want to skip. And so I considered
00:58:18myself retired from bad work. Bad work is the stuff that drains my energy, the stuff that incites all
00:58:24the tension in your body, the resistance, the things you don't want to do.
00:58:28One, one definition of retirement that I like is where I think I got this from Naval who I'm sure
00:58:33got it from somewhere else where it's like, you're no longer doing things for instrumental
00:58:36reasons. Like you're no longer doing a thing for the sake of something else. You're only doing things
00:58:40because you intrinsically want to do them. Right. And then if you can make enough money from those
00:58:43things that it funds your lifestyle, it's like, oh wow, now you're sort of, you've got this infinite
00:58:48game going on where you no longer quote, have to work. If we define work as things that I
00:58:54would, I wouldn't choose to do if I didn't care about the money kind of thing.
00:58:57And so we now move on to step number nine, which is to handle the people around you.
00:59:01You have a wife and a daughter. Paul, how could you be so irresponsible to leave a stable, high
00:59:06prestige, high status profession? Aren't you worried your family is going to starve?
00:59:10Yeah. So this is a very common question I get. It's actually pretty funny because before I had a
00:59:17kid, people would be like, oh, well you can say what you're saying. You don't have a child. When you
00:59:22have a child, it will be different. And so it is nice to have a child now so I can be like,
00:59:27same strategy. I had a kid for the story and the street cred. But two things. One is you can marry
00:59:39someone that is wired similarly and embraces uncertainty. I met my wife after blowing up my
00:59:46life, which was great because I was mostly failing at dating in my twenties. I would talk to people on
00:59:52dates and be like, wouldn't it be cool if we just like quit our jobs and traveled for six months? And you
00:59:57could see them get like a little disappointed. This guy's not going to cut it. Income's probably not
01:00:03going to keep up. I was dating in like New York and I had a fancy job on the Tinder profile. So there
01:00:09were certain expectations and yeah, just like no matches blew up my life, started living values that
01:00:16felt very true to me and aligned. And I attracted somebody that was wired very similarly. The first month
01:00:23I met my wife, she was quitting her job. And so she was texting me some mornings and being like,
01:00:30hey, I'm going to skip work today. Want to just hang out and wander? Fell in love pretty quickly from that.
01:00:37And so it's been sort of a beautiful journey to have her alongside me very early. That is a sort of
01:00:44cheat code to this path because it can get lonely. It can get very challenging to do this on your own.
01:00:49I've had her by my side. She's never laughed at me a single time. Every crazy idea I've had,
01:00:56she's supported me and I support her dreams too. And so we're sort of still figuring it out as we go.
01:01:02It's definitely harder and you do need a little more money with kids, but we've lived in seven
01:01:08countries with our daughter over the first two and a half years. And we've lived in many different ways
01:01:14over the first two and a half years, done a lot of different experiments with how we're working,
01:01:18living, not always thriving perfectly, but it's still fun and we're enjoying the ride.
01:01:25My wife, Izzy, hasn't had the years of wealth building that I've had. And so for her, it's like,
01:01:32I see a lot of my former fears about money from like three years ago in her today where I would just
01:01:37like fly business class because I know, like whatever. And she would be doing the calculation
01:01:41about premium economy and stuff and feeling bad that, oh my God, like this is unnecessary.
01:01:46And it's, it's interesting to see that mirror. Cause I think it took me about three years
01:01:50to realize that like, have more of an abundance approach to money, which came from the financial
01:01:56confidence of just having an internal sense of basic certainty that I'll be able to figure it out.
01:02:02Yeah. This is a really interesting thing. I have my money fears and future fears. And then I have
01:02:08Angie, my wife's money fears and future fears. We actually had a similar thing with me paying for
01:02:14a baggage overage went over a certain amount of pounds and I just didn't want to take stuff out and
01:02:20repack. She brings an extra bag so we can do that. I was just a few years ahead of her in resolving that.
01:02:27A few years ago, I would have repacked. I would have gotten angry. I would have gotten frustrated,
01:02:32but you know what? I was just like, here, credit card, pay it. I don't, I'm retiring from paying and
01:02:40worrying and micromanaging this expense. I know enough. I have the confidence that I'm going to
01:02:46be okay spending this small amount. This is why in my last book, one of the whole chapters, chapter four,
01:02:52is devoted to Angie's journey and her journey of trying to find good work. She's been years behind me
01:02:59on the almost same journey. And it's really hard because I literally wrote a book about this stuff
01:03:06and I'm a few years ahead of her and I just want to like solve her problems.
01:03:11It's like, just, just do exactly what I did. But she's a different person. She has her own journey.
01:03:16She has her own route. She has her own path to take.
01:03:19And we're going to have a lot to talk about over dinner tonight.
01:03:26In Izzy's case, literally this morning, she was like, lamenting a sponsorship that she had to do that
01:03:31had a sponsor deadline coming up. And I was like, ah, hello there. And over time, I've learned to keep
01:03:37my opinion to myself and just be like, yeah, it kind of sucks. Rather than, hey, there's a whole process
01:03:43for this that we've already figured out. Cause we've been, we've been through this over the last five years.
01:03:46It's like, yeah. How does that feel knowing that like your peers who went to MIT with you
01:03:53and were at McKinsey are now making more money than you and are more successful on paper with higher
01:03:59prestigious jobs compared to you doing your little experiments in work and writing on the internet
01:04:04books and stuff.
01:04:06Yeah. So I'm probably one of the poorest of my business school graduating class, almost guaranteed
01:04:12bottom 1% of that. And so I get this question a fair amount, especially from my business class peers
01:04:19to like, what are you doing? I actually get a message.
01:04:22How does it feel to be broke?
01:04:24I actually got a message the other day on LinkedIn.
01:04:28I can read the message.
01:04:29Oh yeah, please.
01:04:29And this is from somebody in my graduating program, the dual degree engineering MBA program.
01:04:35Do you ever feel you're not using all your potential compared to our fellow classmates?
01:04:42And so eight and a half years on this journey, I'm smart enough to know that's his insecurities,
01:04:47not mine, but still I felt a little something. I'm like, am I, am I a fool for doing this?
01:04:55Could I have made more money? I literally have friends making millions of dollars a year.
01:05:00I have classmates who have sold startups for hundreds of millions of dollars.
01:05:06And so I do ask, should I have done these other things, but then I just come back to the present
01:05:12moment, right? And it's like, would I have met my wife? Would I have lived in different countries?
01:05:19Would I have had all these experiences? Would I have so many days I didn't want to skip?
01:05:25And it just becomes so silly that I would ever go back to the previous life.
01:05:30So at this point, it's worth asking yourself if let's say you feel the itch to go on the pathless
01:05:35path and do your own thing. And then 10 years from now, you're at a reunion for your college or
01:05:41university or school or whatever. And you find out that you're actually in the bottom 10% of owners.
01:05:45Everyone's crushing it in their high status prestige jobs in hedge funds and investment banking and
01:05:50tech sales or whatever the thing might be. And you've been exploring this path where you're
01:05:55exploring your curiosity, exploring your energy, and you've just made less money than they have.
01:06:00How do you feel about that? How do you feel about potentially scoring lower on the scoreboard of
01:06:05status and prestige and money that the people around you are still using to judge the quality of their
01:06:10lives? Of course, if all the things work out super well, then you'll end up making way more money than
01:06:15them. But like I've got a friend, he used to actually work at a hedge fund. And so and then he switched to
01:06:21the pathless path. And so he, you know, he and I often talk about this when we see each other once
01:06:26every few years of like, you know, the gap between his net worth and his friend's net worth who at this
01:06:32point are now partners at the hedge fund and you know, all of that stuff. And he does say that it is
01:06:38difficult to deal with at times knowing that man, if I just stayed in my shitty corporate job that I
01:06:43absolutely hated, I would have a net worth in the tens of millions by now, like my friend Johnny does.
01:06:48But then he sort of reminds himself that, you know, he's able to spend his days basically doing
01:06:52whatever he wants. He was able to see his kids grow up, he's able to go surfing every day because he's
01:06:57into surfing. And he has to he always has to remind himself that actually, he wouldn't trade lives with
01:07:02his buddies who have been in, you know, who's who are overweight, whose hairs falling out, who've been
01:07:07in corporate hedge funds for the last like 20 years, and who have a net worth of 10s of millions,
01:07:10because he has found his good work, even though he makes a lot a lot less money than them. So I don't
01:07:16know, maybe it's just a cope. But it's worth like, running that thought, a thought experiment.
01:07:21Are you the sort of person who would be okay with making less money compared to your friends,
01:07:25knowing that you're doing stuff that energizes you? Or are you very concerned about how your
01:07:29situation looks like to the people around you?
01:07:30Various other objections I would like to offer for your consideration, Your Honor.
01:07:35Firstly, my parents will be disappointed if I quit without a plan. The aunts, the uncles,
01:07:40the cousins, the colleagues, people will laugh at me if I quit my job without having an answer to,
01:07:46So what's your plan, mate?
01:07:47They might. Are you okay with that? Is typically what I tell people. Almost everyone who's done
01:07:53something more unconventional or experimental in my experience has had at least one family member who
01:08:00said something extremely painful to them, either in the process of quitting or after quitting. And
01:08:06sometimes those relationships never resolve. The parents have their own stories about work,
01:08:12about responsibility, about what you're supposed to be doing in the world. In my first book,
01:08:16I wrote, Will They Still Love You? And really question that. Because I think in taking a leap
01:08:23to do an unconventional path, there are people who have parents who are like, "Hell yeah, I'll support
01:08:28you. I love everything you do." Most people have at least some critics in their life. And there's going to be a
01:08:34loss of something you can't anticipate. You're going to lose identity. You might lose status. I felt these
01:08:41things very powerfully. I felt like a failure. The thing I tell people is it might suck, but it might
01:08:48also be worth it. Sasha Chapin calls this, "Love the moat of low status." Because on the other side of
01:08:56the moat is sort of an arbitrage opportunity of most humans don't want to pay that tax.
01:09:02Yeah. Chris Williamson just put out an episode this morning titled, "What you want is on the other
01:09:08side of cringe." I was like, "Oh, that's nice as well." I love that. Yeah. Yeah. That's cringe is the
01:09:14stuff you feel embarrassed to do. Every content person, everyone who's done YouTube, everyone who writes
01:09:20online has felt ashamed, weird, embarrassed. It's so hard early on. You feel like the world is going to
01:09:31attack you. Then what often happens is nobody pays attention to you. Then you do try to get attention.
01:09:36Then when you get a readership, then the critics come and you get insulted and you eventually just
01:09:43learn to deal with it and you realize it's worth it. And now finally, we come to step number 10,
01:09:47which is to keep playing the infinite game. A lot of people like you and me who sort of,
01:09:52whether or not we explicitly or implicitly encourage people to explore alternative careers,
01:09:56the objection might be that there's a lot of survivorship bias here. It's like,
01:10:00it worked out for you and me. There's all sorts of people who quit their job without a plan,
01:10:04and then they end up riddled with anxiety, losing all their money, and then struggle to find a job
01:10:09again because the job market is really hard these days, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot. What's your take on that?
01:10:14I think what I've found is those people are really hard to find because most of these decisions are
01:10:19reversible. Getting a job again is much easier than people think. What's happening is people's fears
01:10:25are beyond the reality. Most people have families to come back to. They have alternatives to come back
01:10:30to their job. Tim Ferriss' fear setting, it's like, what are the steps you could take to get back to where
01:10:34you are now? Often for people, it's like one email. And you see this, there's data from multiple surveys
01:10:41I've written about in my newsletters. The regret rate for quitting your job and doing something new
01:10:47is so low. Career transitions, the same trend. People typically don't regret the decisions they make.
01:10:55People regret the decisions they didn't make. There's a nice line from Oliver Bergman that just
01:11:00because a given path is unfeasible for the underprivileged does not mean that it's unfeasible
01:11:05for you. And I think I do hear this objection from a lot of people where they're like,
01:11:09yeah, well, not everyone can just like quit their job and be an entrepreneur. It's like,
01:11:13okay, not everyone can, but you can. People will say to me, what if everyone did the pathless path?
01:11:18And I always reply, have you met the humans? Like most people hate the idea of what I'm doing.
01:11:28Most people are triggered by it. They, they're not interested. I'm mostly writing for the people
01:11:33that are already deeply curious. Okay. Final objection. I think, um, what about healthcare
01:11:38and retirement and responsibilities in that sense? There are hacks. So the advantage of a lot of the
01:11:46questions about healthcare come from the U S where healthcare is outrageous. So I've been uninsured
01:11:52for multiple years in the U S I've been on state exchanges and many years in the U S I've had a low
01:11:57income in the U S and had government covered insurance for me. It varies dramatically by state,
01:12:05but it's typically just a price I've paid for healthcare out of pocket and you can buy it. I
01:12:10haven't paid more than five to 7,000 a year for healthcare. So it's just a price. It's just another
01:12:17cost of your life. Throw it in your spreadsheet with your dining out or other things that maybe are
01:12:24more flexible and just figure it out. But, but the people that must take this path, they don't start
01:12:30with the excuses. They start with the, okay, I'm going to have to pay for healthcare. I might not have
01:12:36healthcare. How am I going to solve that? How am I going to take care of myself? How am I going to meet
01:12:41my needs? And so people are just denying their own agency. As soon as you take the leap and you
01:12:47don't have a job, you now have 40 extra hours of action per week, which you can figure stuff out.
01:12:53Even more than that, if you have a commute and all the time, the mental space, the whole, the whole thing.
01:12:58Yeah. Okay. Nice. So for anyone who's gotten to the end of this video, who's still feeling like
01:13:03resistance, like, Oh, I think I maybe want to do this, but like, I'm afraid because reasons ABCD,
01:13:09healthcare, retirement, pensions, privilege, success rates. Oh, what advice or rather,
01:13:15what would you say to that person? I think it comes down to getting to know yourself.
01:13:19One thing I've always told people is just to go spend time with yourself. So I often assign people a
01:13:25wander, go out in an afternoon without a destination. And many people rarely walk without a destination.
01:13:32And so really lean into this, just walk, take random turns and see where you end up after a couple of
01:13:38hours and notice how much your brain is just trying to aim at a certain destination or time or story of,
01:13:45I need to be somewhere. I need to be back and start with simple experiments like that. Host an event,
01:13:50have a call with somebody that's on a path that you're curious about, write something,
01:13:55try and experiment online, go to a meetup. That's a new interest. There's so many small
01:14:00things, right? And just start there. Don't think you need to solve everything in a moment and take
01:14:05the leap now, right? Just get to know yourself and continue asking, what is the life I want?
01:14:11One, I guess, objection I've heard a lot is, yeah, but I don't want to waste time
01:14:16trying something that might not work. Yeah. I've wasted tons of time experimenting in my life. And so
01:14:23if that's your prime motive in life to not waste time, then this probably isn't for you, right? Because
01:14:31it is very costly to do things on your own. You often waste weeks, months, years trying different
01:14:38things. We've experimented with living in different ways. Since having a daughter, we've had to reorient
01:14:43and rethink everything about how we're living. And it's very costly. It would be way easier if we just
01:14:49got a job and accepted the default way of setting up your life. But for us, there's more. There's that,
01:14:57we must find out. We must keep experimenting. There's that drive. And if you don't resonate with
01:15:03that, like maybe it's not for you. Nice. Love that. So Paul has left at least a million dollars on the
01:15:10table. He is in the bottom 10%, maybe even the bottom 1% of earners from his MIT MBA that he did many
01:15:16years ago. He does not have a plan for how he's going to make money six months from now. And he told me
01:15:20with basically zero irony that he genuinely considers himself retired. What I at least took from this
01:15:25conversation and what I take from Paul's reading and books and videos and podcasts and stuff that
01:15:28I've been consuming for years at this point, what I take from this is that it's not dreamy in the sense
01:15:33of like, oh, quit your job and then everything will work out great. It's more like you can totally quit
01:15:37your job. And if you do, it's going to be messy and it's going to be hard and it's going to be confusing.
01:15:40And you're going to cry yourself to sleep some of the nights because you're not going to know where
01:15:43money is going to come from. And if you have this requirement that you're going to replace a stable salary
01:15:47like overnight, you know, good luck. And that's probably not going to happen. But if you're
01:15:50okay with living this life of uncertainty where you do not now have a yellow brick road that is in
01:15:57front of you and you're having to figure it out pretty much all the time, then that's what it's
01:16:02really like. Honestly, this is one of the things I sort of miss most about having a real job in medicine.
01:16:08Like medicine gives you a yellow brick road to follow. It tells you that like, this is the path
01:16:12you're going to be on for the rest of your life. And there is profound psychological safety in at least
01:16:18to the illusion of control, the illusion that there is a path that you can follow for the rest of your
01:16:22life. In reality, it turns out not to be like that. You know, like the latest intake of junior doctors in
01:16:27the UK, there were actually more graduates than there were places in medicine. And so all these people who
01:16:32signed up for med school eight years ago, six years ago, being promised a job for life, are now suddenly
01:16:37unemployed or they've got to get a job in the middle of like Aberdeen or something where they don't want to go
01:16:41because their friends and family are all in London. And so like you do get rug pulled from time to time
01:16:45based on AI, based on the economy, based on recessions, based on layoffs, based on mergers
01:16:49and acquisitions, based on government policy, you can totally get rug pulled. But even so,
01:16:52the illusion of certainty is really quite nice. And that was one thing that I'd sort of underestimated
01:16:57when I went on this, shall we say, pathless path of figuring things out, that there's always
01:17:01a little bit of a concern around what's going to happen six months from now, what's going to happen
01:17:05a year from now. And it doesn't feel as stable as knowing you're basically guaranteed a corporate
01:17:09job for the rest of your life. Although to be honest, I would argue that that world is becoming a lot less
01:17:14and less secure and safe than it once was. Now, if you're at this point in the video and you haven't
01:17:17yet seen my video about how to build your own $100,000 a year lifestyle business in somewhere
01:17:22between 12 and 24 months, then this video over here is going to show you the exact roadmap. And that's
01:17:27maybe one option you can choose to follow if you decide to go down this pathless path approach.
01:17:32Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next one.
Community Posts
No posts yet. Be the first to write about this video!
Write about this video