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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.
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