Modern Wisdom - #460 - Paul Millerd - The Tension Between Success And Happiness

Episode Date: April 14, 2022

Paul Millerd is a strategy consultant, author and a podcaster. The old stories we were told about success and happiness no longer apply. We don't have to wear a suit or go to an office or have job for life. But do we even need success? Is there a simpler route to being happy? Paul has spent the last 5 years trying to find out. Expect to learn why the road between success and happiness might have a shortcut, how optimising for freedom gave Paul everything he wanted from his life, what the ancient Greek word for leisure tells us about the modern world, why following a "default path" is dangerous, why unplanning your work day might make you happier and much more... Sponsors: Join the Modern Wisdom Community to connect with me & other listeners - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Learn how to skip college and get Praxis’ free book on the success mindset at https://discoverpraxis.com/modernwisdom/ (discount automatically applied) Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and Free Shipping from Athletic Greens at https://athleticgreens.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Check out Paul's website - https://think-boundless.com/ Follow Paul on Twitter - https://twitter.com/P_millerd  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Paul Millard. He's a strategy consultant, author, and a podcaster. The old stories we were told about success and happiness no longer apply. We don't have to wear a suit or go to an office or have a job for life. But do we even need success? Is there a simpler route to being happy? Paul has spent the last five years trying to find out. Expect to learn why the road between success and happiness might have a shortcut, how optimizing for freedom gave Paul everything he wanted from his life, why the ancient Greek word for leisure tells us a lot about the modern world, why following a default path is dangerous, why unplaning your workday might make you happier and much more

This is a conversation that I've been having so much with my friends recently out here in Austin People that are playing with this tension between the fact that they want to achieve things worldly successes But they kind of get the sense that by working so hard they they're making themselves miserable, and the goal is to be happy, and they're making themselves miserable in the pursuit of getting success, which is the thing that's supposed to make them happy. And it's pretty prevalent. I really, really appreciate it. This conversation with Paul, I also get to talk about the three-minute Monday newsletter and something that I came up with on there, which I really hope you enjoy. If you do want to sign up to that, you can go and get signed up for free by going to chriswalex.com slash books and it will give you my free reading list, 100 books that you should read before you die.

But now, please welcome Paul Millard, welcome to the show. Excited to be here, Chris. I have been fully adopted by Texas now, So I went to a co-wetzel country music rock concert in a stadium last night. People unironically wearing cowboy hats. People unironically saying like dang and yeehaw. I'm one of the locals now. I think I'm the same. Me and my wife were saying, we still have to go to our rodeo and then we can probably say that.

There's like a sequence of qualifications or trials that you need to go through. Yeah, yeah, precisely. How many kinds of loan staff have you drank? How many times have you said the word dang? Exactly. Yeah, we love it here. It seems like there's a convergence of internet weirdos and hyper curious kind of creators that I've just really enjoyed.

Well, the first time that we met was at the less wrong meetup, which is that's the- That's the nerdiest place to meet. Oh, that's the synthesis. Yeah, that's the fucking epicenter. That's patient zero for the nerdyest people in Austin. And they'd even imported people from outside of Austin to make it significantly more nerdy. Exactly. Yeah, it's been great. I love it here. One of the things that we've both been

converging on was something that I put into my newsletter this week. And I want to talk about that. So I'm going to read the news that around for people that didn't read it. If you haven't read it, go to chriswalex.com slash books and you can sign up for free. So one of the most common tensions I talk about at the moment is between the desire for success and a desire to feel like we're enough. Success is a strange thing. Presumably, we want success because we think a more successful life will bring us more happiness, meaning and fulfillment. Here's the problem. We sacrifice the thing we want, happiness, for the thing which

is supposed to get it, success. Failure can make you miserable, but I'm not sure success will make you happy. One of the most common dynamics I see amongst high performers is this. Parents want their child to do well. Parents encourage their child to do well by praising them when they succeed and criticizing when they fail. The child learns that praise and admiration is contingent on succeeding. That lesson metastasizes through early adulthood into, I am only worthy of love and acceptance and belonging if I succeed. Now, powered by an internal feeling of insufficiency, this person is driven to achieve many things. They're prepared to outwork, outhustle, and out suffer everyone else, because they're not just running toward a life they want, they're running away from a life they fear.

Success and progress ameliorates the feelings of insufficiency, therefore, success and progress become prioritized above everything else. Now, don't get me wrong, many high achievers genuinely love the work that they do, and many are driven by a well-balanced, simple desire to maximize their time on this planet, rather than trying to fill a void inside of themselves. But if I was to place a bet, I'd guess that the majority of high performers are driven by fears of insufficiency rather than a holistic desire to be better. I think people who are high achievers, on on average are more miserable than the average person. So what does it mean that the people we most admire are the ones

with the least admirable internal states. If the pursuit of success is in an effort to make us happy and in the pursuit of success we make ourselves miserable, why not shortcut the entire process and just be happy? Is that even possible? Now external accolades do count for a lot. I don't think that recanting all worldly possessions and retreating to a cave in the woods is an optimal strategy. Some degree of external material success is important to make us feel validated and satiate our desire for status and respect. But external success won't fill an internal void. Insufficiency adaptation is this.

If your drive to succeed comes from a fear of insufficiency, and you continue to disprove those fears with success in the real world, and yet the feelings of insufficiency persists, what makes you think that the answer to this problem is more success. There's no clean answer here. The world is messy and we're hopeless, the irrational. You don't need to let go of all success goals, but spend some time working out whether there's a shorter route to the life you want by removing obstacles rather than just pressing harder on the accelerator.

I love it. It sounds like you're on the pathless path now, basically whatever it's written about, but I think this is such a fascinating topic because it sort of describes my own journey. I went from somebody that was what I call trying to get ahead. You're aiming at a future potential success and you're saying, okay, I'm willing to sacrifice in the now to get there. The problem is you never arrive. Right. And the funny thing is I didn't have the parents praising me or criticizing me for achieving or not achieving goes, I fully brought this upon myself in college. I was just around people who had those parents

and I was like, oh, they want all these things. I want what they want, right? Classic, memetic, desire. And I did that for the next 12, 13 years until I just slowly more reflection and more reflection realize, holy crap, this isn't me. I thought I was like 10% different than those people around me. Strategy, consultants, high achievers in the corporate world. I was probably one or two standard deviations,

little different in terms of what are the elements of life that are gonna bring me alive and connect me to who I am. What were the biggest differences? I think I have an unreasonable need for autonomy and freedom over my life, the things I do, the ideas I work on, and how I do it. Most people are willing to sacrifice a lot of those things in exchange for security

and a paycheck. I was not pricing that appropriately. I didn't get as big a benefit and I was paying bigger costs for like what I was giving up. The problem and the reason I stayed on my previous path so long was that I didn't have an imagination of a different possible life. My only model of the world was work hard, get ahead, keep working for the future indefinitely. There was no alternative path. So I think deep, deep down, I was seeking what you wrote about this past week

of basically just trying to be happier. And I didn't know how to get there or I didn't have models. I had like role models of like people I admired who embodied that state. People like Seth Godin, later in life, creative, fully alive and engaged with the world. I had no idea how to get there though.

It just his existence was like, that's possible that seems worth trying to figure out. How do you define success? Right now, it's something that probably doesn't make a lot of sense to people. It's basically the space in freedom and possibility to continue doing the things that bring me alive or connect me to who I am. The thing that's interesting, obviously, we're both in Austin, and Austin has its share of asceticism and sort of new age spirituality. And, you know, the pushback against the default desires, the

reprogramming of your wants and needs to be the things that genuinely do bring you alive. You know, this isn't anything new, but I do think that when you frame it within isn't anything new, but I do think that when you frame it within one-trapreneur, nomadic internet, the hustle culture world, I do think that it has a little bit of a new slant on it, even if perhaps it's moving in the same direction, the language is very different. Agreed. When I left my job, I just wanted to escape work.

I was very similar to fire people who just want to like solve life on a spreadsheet and hit exit, right? And then we're done with work. We've solved that. I don't think that's how life works. So I wanted to escape work. I kind of ran away. I tried to limit their amount of work. I was doing it first. I went to these digital nomad locations. I went to beaches where I'd meet like Bitcoin people who did solve the financial problems or people who had exited from startups and had more money than they needed. The thing is nobody actually wants to sit on a beach. I think what we really want is to be useful.

We want to do work that matters. We don't want to do meaningless work. It drives humans crazy to do stuff. We don't care about it. But we all have humans crazy to do stuff we don't care about. But we all have this desire to do stuff. We want to contribute, we want to help people, we want to do things that we feel like are important. What's your thoughts on the financial independence retiree early movement? It's not really caught on as much in the UK. It's not really caught on as much in the UK. I think it's probably because I think Americans often times don't get that our labor market is bananas, especially at the high end.

How do you mean? For like knowledge work, just like strategy consulting, for example, my friends I know in the UK doing the same thing at the similar level are just getting paid like 40-50% less. Right. So part of fire is emergent from just this excess capital both in like high wage knowledge for festins and also the tech economy where you're having people working at Google like making three four hundred thousand dollars a year. So they're just doing the math and being like, well, why am I even working?

But my take on the fire movement is overall net benefit. I think at a surface level, though, it sort of misses the point, which I think this is the biggest shift I've realized is like escaping work is not a Good motive for life Finding the work you want to keep doing is a more important motive. I Imagine no matter what success you have

You're not going to lose that curiosity of talking to people having Conversations exploring ideas. That seems so uniquely like you, right? You can't make it to 450 episodes unless that's like something like very authentic and emergent. Yeah, sometimes I do wish that I could switch it off. I think that my friends definitely do if they just want to chill out. And I'm like, dude, if you ever wondered

about why it is that the sky is able to be pink and sort of dark at the same time, I want to, have you ever considered about the reason why sugar tastes shorter spikes of sweetness is opposed to sucrose, which is like a long of it. So yeah, sometimes I do wish that I could turn it off. However, I think that one of the things I realized upon reading some of your work about the financial independence retire early movement is that some people don't want to stop working, they just want a break. They don't need to quit work. They've just maybe pushed it a bit hard for a while. And it does seem people have a very binary view of a lot of things. And it's like, I don't want to stop or I want to go. There's no in between.

Right. I think one of the biggest net benefits to the world might just be a mandated sabbatical of three months once you hit your 30s. Are you saying the moments have got it right? Perhaps, yeah. They're doing it like 18 years old though, right? Yeah, yeah, I have a point. But they're, I don't know, I always, there was seem more mature anyway, but we won't go down that rabbit hole.

Yeah, I think I didn't realize this at first. When I left my job, what I realized quickly was that I had oriented my life in such a way that work was the primary mode of which I thought of myself as a person and how I related to everything in the world, where I lived to hang out with what I did, how I spent my time when I was allowed to take time off was all dictated downstream of work. And when I left, I sort of have it a little more freedom. And in that space, like, I just had this hunch that like I needed to lean in even more.

And seven months into after leaving my job, I decided to create my own like non-work sabbatical where I wasn't going to pursue any paid work. after leaving my job, I decided to create my own like non-work sabbatical. I wasn't going to pursue any paid work. And when I discovered in that, that was when I started my podcast. That's when I started writing. That's when I started creating online. And I just found absolute joy in creating these things for the sake of themselves. And then meeting the people that were like, oh hell yeah. And that was the first, like, hunch I had.

And this is before, like, this whole current creator economy of like, there's all these paths to make money exist. It was like, I had this hunch that, like, if I'd lean in this direction, I could create a better life for myself. What, why do you think it is that so many people are disappointed with work at the moment?

So I don't even know if so many people are. It's sort of this catchy media headline of the great resignation. And the fact is, anti-work. You talked about this with Anna. I think she has a great perspective on this because she's gone deep into the history of this and has a much more nuanced perspective. But being anti-work broadly, there's like 35 on ramps onto that. Anyone who's ever had a bad experience with a manager ever can be like, oh yeah, work

sucks. And you can relate to that meme. However, when you ask most people, do you like your job? A high majority actually say yes. And people don't like to hear this. I remember, I'm not sure how recent the stats were, but 50, no, sorry, 70% of people are neither engaged or disengaged with their work,

and 15% of people are actively disengaged with their work. So 85% of people were either neutral or negative. Now that was a while ago, I think that's a Johann Harry stat. But I don't know, I mean, do you think in from your experience that people are more engaged with that work? So I think it's true, bro, out of a question. I've seen all the full range of stats, like, and are there many people doing pointless things? Sure. I think one of the things that put me on my path when I was 18 years old, I had my first internship in a corporation, had a big industrial manufacturing company. And I was just shocked at all these adults

sitting around doing the most pointless stuff ever. And then me bringing up this fact and them telling me I was the naive one. I'm like, this is a crazy world. Right? So I'm actually not interested in the question of like is work good or bad. What I'm more interested in is like this deeper level of like how did work become so central in our lives?

Because that is the ultimate key of like taking a sabbatical. Taking a sabbatical is taking a pause of existing in the world in the state of a worker. Right, so I think people want to break from living in worker mode and enable them to reconnect with the world, reconnect with those childlike things they do. Over and over again, people when they take breaks, they start doing things like they did when they were a kid. They start playing tennis or basketball or reading or volunteering or gardening. All these things they did when they had more time in space in their life.

And that reminds them, oh crap, I'm not a worker. I have these other things. And then that's when people often can start pricing their time and freedom appropriately and start making trade-offs and saying, okay, maybe work isn't going to be perfect, but I can at least figure out what are the things that matter and not compromise on them. Do you think that most people or a big chunk of people see their primary source of value to the world

as being their job or their title or the work that they do? Yeah. Why do you think that is? I don't think that's always been the case. Yeah, I think so we're always in relation to our economic system. In many ways, our economic system determines our consciousness. And whether we want it to be true or not, the way you acquire most things, food shelter, everything.

You have to pay for those things, right? So that's like an economic system you're part of. So that influences how we think of everything, right? We have all these phrases which we don't even think about, time is money. Don't waste your time, right? They're economic frameings. Like, even just I'm busy, oh, I had a productive Sunday.

Oh, what did you do on Sunday? Oh, I just did a bunch of laundry and stuff. It's like, why are we, where are we calling that productive? That's a little silly. Right? So we're so influenced by this. And then in Western countries, like, we've just had hundreds of years of this like refactoring of work being like a central aim of life. It wasn't until the Protestant Reformation that we started to look at work as the aim. Instead of this instrumental thing that helped us get other things. I think that's a really important point. That's a super important point. The fact that you can bypass work being a vehicle to get you the thing that you want

presumably, which is the ability to do what you want, when you want, with who you want for as long as you want, and no one can tell you otherwise. Money is freedom. As far as I can see, that's all it is. It's best best, or wealth is freedom, should I say. And it's best, most sort of pure form. And if work is a vehicle to get that, now some people love their work, and some people can be fulfilled by it. But for the people that aren't, you can forget the fact that you aren't massively

invested into this work, existentially or emotionally, and yet still give it the same sort of fundamental magnetic tie between you and it, right? You become inseparable from your work, despite the fact that it was just supposed to be a vehicle to serve you, not for you to serve it. And I would even say that's sort of a limited definition of freedom. So money is freedom, sure, but people say things like, oh, I'm financially independent. What does that really mean?

It basically means you rely on paying other people to do stuff for you, right? So you're only freeing as much as everyone else continues to operate in that way, right? But that's not actually what leads to a fulfilling life. What leads to a fulfilling life is like treating a friend for dinner and not expecting them to pay you back. You don't want to, you literally don't want to be paying for everything. If you're not receiving gifts and giving gifts to at least some people in your life, I imagine you're not as happy as you could be.

I'm still trying to think about why it is that we see work as so central to who we are. I understand that it's a vehicle to get us what we need, but it doesn't tell the whole picture as far as I can see. Well, it's not true everywhere, right? So there's Max Weber in his book, The Protestant Ethic. He writes about how before the 1500s, basically, like, a person did not desire to have work as the most central thing in their life. There was this what he called traditionalist view of work. It was, okay, I've done enough work to pay for what I need, and I'm done working. Early, when you read about the early evolutions of capitalism, you read that this was a huge problem.

So how do you set the wages such that people will continue to work? Because they were finding that they'd pay people and people would say, all right, I'm good. Thank you, I'm done with my job. Right, so, and then you have people like Joseph Piper writing after World War II, he wrote an amazing book, Leisure, The Basis of Culture. He's contemplating this question and he's saying,

okay, we just have these crazy terrible things happen in the world. And now everyone is just running back and throwing themselves in as like a worker and like pretending nothing happened. Like, why are we doing this? And his conclusion was that we's kind of lost touch with this more ancient version of leisure. So we sort of have these two modes in Western cultures especially. We have the doing mode and then we have being lazy. And he's arguing that like leisure is in the middle

of this sort of in between state. And I think this is what I experienced when I took that like first non-work break. And the definition of leisure is not laying around and watching Netflix. It's defined as like an active engagement with the world. And really interesting thing like I covered this in my book, if you go back to the Greeks, the definition for work or like the phrase they had for work was not at leisure. So before this whole flip in the Protestant Reformation, the evolution of capitalism, like leisure was the center of life. It was just taken for granted. And now we've sort of flipped that, but we've paired the opposite of work with this laziness. So you're lazy or you're working.

So then like when people say I'm terrified to stop working, they're terrified of being labeled lazy, but they don't know this in between mode of like active engagement with the world. I would call, I guarantee what you do with podcasting does not fit into one of those two buckets, right? It's like, it's almost like you have to do it. You're so pulled to do it. And I guarantee too, like, because I have this experience with writing, if you don't do it for a few weeks, you feel like something's missing in your life. Is that resonate?

Yeah, absolutely. That nodded leisure insight about the Greeks is phenomenal. And it highlights exactly how backward, I think, fundamentally, people have a sense that the work world is, I think fundamentally people have a sense that the work world is, that they're living to work, and that a lot of their time is spent obsessing over their job. Now obviously what you're trying to do, or what most people are trying to do is repurpose their job into something that they don't mind obsessing over, which is fine. If you can get yourself to the stage where my housemate, right? So he's a physiophony, Newcastle Falcon rugby club. So Premier League, rugby team, top flight, you know, one of the best in the country. And he gets up every day and gets to go and do that.

But even that situation, if he had unlimited degrees of freedom with how he was going to spend his time, he may choose something else. So it's the best of a good situation, but it's still within the framework of it being work. Now, I totally understand how not creating a, you're either working or lazy, world would be very, very bad for capitalism. I'm very hesitant around the conspiratorial, like Henry Ford and the Vanderbilt's got together in the 1900s and decided to do this thing. I would lean as an explanation for this much more toward either a mimetic or a status

built version of an answer that, look, you see it, the people working hard, other people get accolades and are in mind for working hard because you know that working hard is a proxy for future success. Therefore, people start short-cutting the desire for success or happiness and just go straight to working hard because it's a more obvious signal. You think I've got that right? Well, I think you're under something. I think the criticisms of capitalism fall short for me because capitalism isn't really a thing. Like it's continuously evolving

and people are reacting to the incentives that exists in the world. Like I think in many ways you can almost reframe it as like people like Henry Ford, what would they have been doing a thousand years earlier? Probably leadings, he'd probably be a warlord. A powerless something, yeah, yeah, yeah. Fighting wars with people, right?

Instead, he can like channel this like unbridled ambition into the economic system. Like, and people can disagree about that. But this is also the challenge with carving your own path, is you can't just, you can't just exit work, right? You can't escape the default reality. Existing in the way I am, like I'm self-employed, I make income in a number of different ways,

I do a bunch of different things, I don't work in traditional ways, I still feel the tension, like it's very obvious I'm a weirdo. That's why I come to Austin to hang out with all the other weirdos. But other people judge me based on like, people still say to me like,

and I make enough money to support my life and like I'm doing better and better every year. When are you gonna get a real job? It's like, what does that mean? And I think what I'm trying to lean into and open people's eyes to is like, we've sort of gone from this economic system in the 50s to maybe the year 2000, in which like the possibilities for our past like our lives were not possible then. They are possible now and the possibilities for creating different kinds of work and working in different ways, working remotely, part time, flexibly are so much more than they were even like 10, 20 years ago. But we don't have a script or way of orienting to the world to like unlock those possibilities. So I think it's actually a great thing right now. Some people don't realize

it's sort of low status to do this self-employed creator path, especially our parents often don't like what we're doing. They wish we do other things. That's sort of an advantage because there's just less competition right now. It's low status depending on who you're speaking to. Right. You know, if you if you rock up, I went to a the launch of a new magazine that was with a bunch of people doing some mad shit in crypto, the entire conversation was over my head. Everything was over my head. Everything was over my head. I finally managed

to find one guy that was happy to talk about baseball to me. I was like, you, you, it's not the decentralized baseball, is it? Right, cool, come on. I mean, you can have a conversation. But in there, the assistant AG for Austin was there and lots and lots of different people. But in that group, you know, me saying, what do you do? And you got to own a business in the UK and I'm a podcaster. Now, that's interesting. Tell me what you're podcast about. So it is very based on who you're speaking to.

However, you talk about the pathless path and the default path as sort of two different worlds. Are you hoping in future that the pathless path will no longer be pathless then, that it's going to be well-trot enough that people actually can see some alternate routes that are laid out for them archetypely, they can, the previous people have sort of laid

out a route that they can take. I think what I'm trying to convey to people is it's worse softening our grip on the default path. What is, how would you define the default path and what are the problems with it? So the default path is simply like the script we grow up with. Everyone in almost every country has a story of how to be a successful adult. And it's typically a very surface level story. Get a job, go to school, get married, have a family, get a job, and the problem with these scripts is that they often only involve events that happen before the age of 35 and are

categorically positive. So when anything goes wrong or you're thrown a curveball in life, we have no story to orient too. So people like double down on more security, more certainty, except the path, the default path, is not delivering the benefits it once was. It used to be this golden ticket. We had these two parent households.

We have way less two parent households now. Work at a company, they'll take care of you, they'll give you a pension. Nobody believes that exists anymore. Some people have it very few do. And you could kind of afford a home on a reasonable salary and buy it when you're 24, buy your next one and it's 27. That's not really possible as easily anymore.

So that path has gotten a lot harder. We don't have an alternative story to grip to. So we're sort of stuck with that and like I think as we're shifting to this information age like we have a lot of people and jobs that are like I want to escape but they're so scared because they don't really have a new story for like how to orient their life so like my bold attempt is like the pathless path can be your story. And I don't want to convince everyone to take this. I'm really writing for like the people already on the unconventional path and saying like, Hey, here's how I'm making sense of it and how in a way

that's the filling and feels sustainable to me. I don't know if this will work for you. Begg Barrow's deal from all the principles I put out there and remix it like write your own version of it too. But I've had many people tell me, oh wow, I felt like such an idiot for years and now I don't feel so alone. How can people tell if this is for them? The majority of people that reach out to me, and I've had hundreds of curiosity conversations of people over the last five years, I just have an open calendar on Wednesdays and people

can book calls with me. This is how I kind of learned. The majority of those people know that the default path won't work for them, and they just want information. They want different ideas, different paths, and them. And they just want information. They want different ideas, different paths. And a lot of people just want friends. Like the best antidote to feeling like you're crazy and not able to fit in the default path

is to find a few friends who are seeing the world in a similar way or moving in a similar direction. And that can be enough to kind of give you a confidence to move in a similar direction. And that can be enough to kind of give you a confidence to move in a different direction. But that's often what people are seeking. They just want to feel less alone and that they're not so crazy for trying to figure out a different way.

Is this solution then for everyone to just go work for themselves or work on their own or go freelance? I don't think so. I've talked to a lot of people, uh, surprising number of people who know, they know themselves, right? This all starts with self reflection. Through self reflection, I realized I needed an insane amount of autonomy over the work I was doing. Most people are willing to trade some of that for like, certainly in was doing. Most people are willing to trade some of that for like certainty in a paycheck.

Like jobs are freaking awesome. Our current iteration of jobs, think about people a hundred years ago, they would have been like, hell yeah. You're gonna give me a steady paycheck? I don't have to worry about like the next crop if it's gonna grow or not. This is great for a lot of people, right?

I think the challenge is a lot of people just kind of like go through life. They raise in this like the whole purpose of going to school for the first 15 years is to then get a job and then you work in a job for 10 years and then people are like, wait, this is just, we just do this forever. And then we retire and then what?

I think a lot of those people who do figure out how can I reclaim that space and start leaning into leisure mode, taking those sabbaticals, I even talked to one person who I challenged him. I was like, have you ever done anything unplanned during a work day? He's like never in my life. I was like, all right, here's the assignment for you. What is something you love doing as a kid? He's like, I love just like riding a bike around and exploring. I'm like, all right, Tuesday, block off your calendar, put important meeting, and just go do that from like two to five. And it was like a dramatic shift for him.

He's a friend. He has no desire to not work full time. He has big ambitions. He wants a big house. He wants like all the fancy things. He knows exactly what he's the cost he's paying. But that was like enough space for him that he was like, oh crap. I've just been been ignoring myself completely. Maybe I should lean into that a little more and I can be a lot happier.

What do you talk about the limits of ambition? Obviously, a lot of people are very ambitious. This is one of the things that drives them. And for all that, I can try to remind people that success doesn't equal happiness and that you can shortcut your route to get there, maybe. Ambition is seductive and it makes us feel fulfilled and meaning. It might not give us happiness, but it can certainly give us meaning.

But you talk about the limits of ambition as well. What are they? Have you ever read any of Agnes Callards? Never heard of her. She's amazing. She should be fantastic, yes. So she's written about, she's a philosopher at the University of Chicago. She's written about two different ideas, ambition versus aspiration.

And she says that ambition is basically aiming at something which we already value Right, so I want to be a famous YouTuber We already value being a famous YouTuber so she would argue and There is space to like learn new things along the way, but she would argue given that we already know what we value How we value that and that we value it currently, there's not as much to be gained on the journey. Whereas an aspirational journey

is like we're aspiring to be a certain sort of person, shift to a different life stage, shift to a different mode of being, it's a little more vague, it's harder to articulate. A lot of people have this, like a deep down, like gut instinct of where they're headed and who they want to be. And the values, instead, we don't really know what we're going to come to value. So one example is, like, I mean, you could say, like, I want to be somebody that appreciates wine.

Or, actually, let's go sports, because the nerdy tech people we hang around with don't talk about sports enough. Right, so I love basketball. I grew up loving basketball. Red everything absorbed it, played all the time, know all the players. I still follow the NBA closely. I just love it. When I watch a game and like, I remember, like, do you watch the NBA? I watch Madness a lot this month.

It's been great. So I watch a game and like, sometimes you just see freaking beauty on a court, right? And it's like, oh my gosh, this is perfect. Like I'm in love with watching this game. And I can't articulate that to someone. You would actually need to spend like an enormous amount of time learning to come to appreciate the things I already appreciate about basketball. And you don't get into learning to appreciate basketball knowing what you value already, right? So applying this to like our life like

Mark Maren and Bill Simmons, they were very early in the podcasts. Almost everyone said podcasts were stupid. Bill Simmons was at ESPN and they were like, we don't even want to support this or run ads on it. He was in that because there wasn't an outcome of being a successful podcaster. There was a lot of space for serendipity and learning to value different things. He probably had a really meaningful journey to become a podcaster. And he probably had a really meaningful journey learning to become a podcaster. Compared with like now, people are like, I want to be a successful podcaster. They're almost like short-cutting the space for what makes the journey fun. So I do agree, and I think that although it's not the default path, it's also not a pathless path.

It's a non-default but well-trotten path. That being said, not everybody, and I'm probably a pretty good example of this, man, I don't have an unlimited amount of creativity in me. I like orderliness in my life. I like a degree of predictability. It's why I'd never be a good trader Because if my financial assets were getting ragged around at the mercy of the market, I wouldn't be able to focus on what I was supposed to do so I think that what we're talking or what it sounds like to me where I've got my head is it's kind of like a spectrum So we have on one side we have default path on the other side, we have truly pathless path, right? Asperation, yes, aspiration.

But in between that, we have sort of varying degrees of people doing things that are non-default, but well-trotting, then even less default and even less well-trotting, right down to, I'm going to completely free flow my life into whatever it is that I want to manifest. Yeah, I think for me, it's like a journey of like, detaching from like, I'm gonna trade off everything for these future ideas or like, I wanna be an identity,

I wanna be a startup founder. Instead, like, just getting rid of all those scripts and memes and ideas, meaningful work and all these things and figuring out, okay, what are the things that I'm driven to do? What are the things I'm excited to do? What are the things that when I experiment and try them, I keep wanting to do them. Like writing is one of those things that emerge for me. I really love it.

Right? Now, then once you figure out what you want to do, you can then start leaning back in the other direction. And I think this has been my journey over the past couple of years. I've kind of, like I was so scared of creating another job for myself when I left my job. And I had to lean so far in the other direction to like distance myself from that. And then through that, I gained the confidence. It's like, okay, now I know like the mix of activities

and things that drive me and like the things I'm not willing to do, such that I'm probably not gonna burn myself out. Now I can lean back more into the ambition direction. Right, so I wrote a book last year, right? You have to be a little ambitious. No small task, man. It's a crazy thing to do.

But I knew I liked writing enough that it was a very natural next step. So I was starting with what I enjoyed doing. Writing the book was thrilling. I loved it. It's so much fun. One of the most meaningful creative projects of my life. I'm guessing that's kind of like a similar progression for you, like, I mean, I saw your video with Jordan.

It's beautiful. Like it's a work of art. Like that's ambition, but you're leaning into somebody you already know, like it was probably beyond where you were slightly, right? Challenge to. But you knew that was something you wanted to lean into. That was true to you.

Yeah. Yeah, it is an interesting blend. You mentioned there a word that you use a little bit, which is meaningful work. What do you think about the idea of meaningful work? I think it's not a useful meme for a lot of people. I think I was sort of trapped. So in 2007, when I was graduating college, Google came on the best companies to work for for the first time at number one.

And it was like, Google is this amazing place to work, bean bag chairs and free lunches in yoga. And I'm like, oh my gosh, that's so fun. Like I want to have fun and love my life. And for the next 10 years, I basically just kept jumping job to job, trying to find that dream job. What I didn't realize is that it didn't really matter

like what I did, it was the how. So it's like the being mode of like, how am I showing up and spending my time? I have no idea if I would have liked working at Google. I like technology, but would I have liked all the meetings and the kind of people I don't know? Some meaningful work, there's this amazing paper from MIT, the MIT Sloan Review, it's from the University of Sussex.

Two researchers looked at what actually gives people meaning at work. What they found was basically poignant moments, stressful moments. So poignant, powerful moments, very specific, stressful, often crises or things they had to push through. Often they didn't realize it was meaningful unless they reflected upon it. So this is not what we think of when we think of meaningful work. When a lot of people are thinking of meaningful work, they're thinking of Google, I just want to be happy.

I want to be loving what I do. What really gives you meaning is the book writing process was hard. It pushed me. It was uncomfortable. I felt like an imposter, a lot of times, but I pushed through that and kept figuring it out. That's like meaningful work. Meaningful work, I think it's hard to fit that in like a job container because in most jobs you have to do stuff you don't want to do. Talk to me, obviously that's a creator journey and you pivoted from being in a much more default path to one which

and you pivoted from being in a much more default path to one which, although it might be free-flowing, is still kind of create-ery. What are the trade-offs between time and money that people need to make when they get exposed to a creator journey? I think for me, the relationship between time and money flipped. So when you're working full-time, you sort of have a salary. And then you're basically an accountant for your life. You're like, all right, monthly salary, I'm going to budget this out. Whereas this seems so obvious now, but it was shocking to me a couple months after quitting.

It was like, my first couple of months I didn't make any money. And I was quickly realizing everything I spent I had to earn right it's like oh this great ramen place down the street I was living in New York City when I left my job it's like 22 dollars it's like maybe I don't want that like maybe I don't want to work the 30 dollars to earn that or a bowl of ramen right so I really value that bowl of ramen and like? Do I really value that bowl of ramen and like eating out every night? So it sort of made me like refactor and revalue everything I was spending my time, my money on.

So like instead of saying, okay, I have this bucket of money, I'm just gonna spend it. I don't care what the hell I do. It was like, everything was like, I was auditing every expense of my life. Okay, is this bringing me value? And what I started to realize is that I just really valued my free time.

I valued at such a high amount that I was willing to lower costs in other aspects of my life. And I just kept leaning into that space. So, and I still think this way, everything I do, it's like, okay, if I'm going to join a gym and pay $200 a month, what does that actually mean? That means I have to earn an incremental like three or four grand a year to pay for that. Is that worth the trade off? Or can I leave that space open? Of work I would otherwise have to push for, try to get consulting gigs for, to leave that for creative projects.

So the work we're doing for me is the writing. I love the writing, but writing doesn't really pay the bills. So I want to protect that space for the writing, no. And creating and podcasting and doing these experiments. Because over the long run, over the next 25 years, I know those are the things that are going to energize my life and make it worth living. Does that story from the Emeth revisited about a lady who starts baking cakes, I think? So there's this woman who loves baking, loves making cakes, decides that she's going to start doing it,

and then just the classic solo-prone-er journey. Some of her friends want her to bake cakes for both days, then she starts doing weddings, then she decides that she's going to get a little store, so she gets a store, and then she gets some staff because she needs some staff to work at the store, and she's baking, but then she spends a bit less time baking because she needs to manage to the staff, and she needs to make sure that the accounts are done. And then she gets super, super popular so she gets an even bigger store. And then she gets a deal to be able to start selling these to supermarkets.

And before you know it, she doesn't even remember what the smell of a cake is like. She hasn't baked in months and she spends all of her time managing and doing stuff. And I think that, again, this unbridled ambition that people have takes them, often takes them away from the thing that they actually want to do. And you even see this, like, forget all the existential meaning conversations, think about it from a pure business perspective that a lot of the time in a sales organization, a great salesperson naturally wants to move up, but that great salesperson might not be a tremendously good manager, so you lose a good salesperson,

gain a shitty manager, that person no longer has mastery over the things that they do, they're not built to do that, but because we have this sort of single vector of I need to be moving forward, I must progress like this. And I think that trying to offer people alternatives, I've looked, how can you take this skill set and perhaps move it elsewhere? There's never been as much opportunity for you to go and do things. And again, we're speaking to a very specific type of person here, right? You know, it's not the person who has a bunch of responsibilities and I need to, I've got

to put food on the table for the family and stuff like that. Like, you know, do what you got to do. Like, if you've got to get that grind done, then sweet. But for the people that this does resonate with, that say, I do think that maybe I'm built to do something different than I am now. I have this disgruntled, unsatisfactory burbling somewhere inside of me, but maybe they're lacking courage or bravery or direction or a first step. What would you say to those people, practical steps or just things to lean into in themselves that's going to give them that bravery and that courage to decide to do something a bit different. The reason I wrote my book is that the stories I read

about people quitting their job were fake. Like they were too simple. And I've noticed this impulse in myself and as why I started writing about it a few years ago is that when people ask, tell me about the moment you decided to quit your job. And then all of a sudden you're like, oh, maybe this moment and then you decided to quit your job. And then all of a sudden, you're like, oh, maybe this moment.

And then I had the courage to leap. My experience was a slow fumbling towards quitting my job of like slow and painful years of realizations, silly experiments that didn't quite make sense unless I looked back. And then all of a sudden, I reached a point in which it was like obvious to quit. But even like as I was quitting, I didn't have this like idea that like I was headed towards this something else, right? So I think what I often have people do is like I did this in a course. I used to run Have people do an action challenge?

What's something in a week that can get you out of your comfort zone that might give you some information about what to do next? So I call this approach ship quit and learn. So basically do something, design it for quitting. So you're not dealing with like getting caught up with like the end state or definitions of success. And the only point is to learn what to do next.

Give us an example. So if you want to start a podcast, buy a mic, sit down with yourself, and record an episode for 10 minutes saying why you want to do a podcast, and publish it. And then just see how it feels. And then figure out what do you do next? Right. And I think people miss this. Like they probably look at you with the podcast. And they're like, I have to have the same setup as him. It's like, no, go back to his first episode. He's sitting around with his buddies. Looks like I've got a bit. It's beautiful though, because that's how everyone starts.

This is the great thing about the internet is you can see the full trajectory. Yes, dude, I say this all the time. You can go back and watch Rogan on exactly potato. Exactly. Yeah, it's awful. The first 10 minutes of it is him trying to get the internet to work. They're looking at the, they can't work out if it's going on. You're way, way, way ahead of where Joe Rogan was

when he started and look at where he is now. Yeah, that's a really good thing. I also very much appreciate the open honesty around it, not being a fairytale penny drop about anything. People ask these questions, but I remember in Lov island, they used to say stuff like, so what's your type? And what they meant by what's your type is,

what are the narrowly defined physical characteristics that you look for in a girl? I'm like, dude, who answers this question with like, yeah, it's like, Brunettes with blond eyes, and she's gotta be a this thing. And I'm like, who genuinely who has this Like low resolution view of the world or the same for people who say man

So when did you know that you wanted to start doing club promoting or you wanted to start a podcast? I I don't know. I don't know like I we don't exist Maybe sometimes we encounter a situation which is so traumatic or so grand or so beautiful or so awe inspiring or so life changing that it causes us to just authorganally go, oh fuck, I wasn't ready for that. But it's so rare. It's so rare. Things we are the product of tiny incremental changes that compound over time, it's the same as asking somebody when did you get old, that one day the time. The thing is, I think people can prototype these changes too.

I think people mistakenly, like, to take a creator solo entrepreneurial path, even like exploring different kinds of work, the scripts of the default path tell us that we need to get access before we can do the thing, right? We need permission from a gatekeeper. We apply to a job such that we can then do the job. The reality of the world now is we can often just start. And instead of aiming at like an identity, a lot of people, like this whole creator path is like, now legible, whereas like I'm talking to people at big tech companies and like,

I want to be a creator. And I'm like, well, what do you create? It's like, well, I want to write. I'm like, have you written anything? They're like, no, I'm like, well, what do you create? It's like, well, I want to write. I'm like, have you written anything? They're like, no, only like, you should test that first. You should like give yourself a one-month challenge and see if you write every day for a month. You actually like that. And that was what I have been doing without knowing it on the side. Like, I was writing on Kora for fun and I was writing publicly and then people were reaching out based on what I was reaching out. I was really just practicing the things that

I would eventually end up doing, but I didn't leave with like, oh, I'm going to become a writer or creator. You're realizing the price that you pay to do the thing that you want to do is a pretty important insight because a lot of the time, you know, being a rock star sounds fantastic, but touring whatever shitty country you're from in the back of a cheap camper van for five years promise that this is going to work and having to master your own records and having to learn about mixing down like dude it's not standing on a stage and playing songs it's arguing with your bandmates over who's going to drive the van home like that's the reality of being in a rock band and I'm close with the guys from bringing me the horizon and like hearing them talk about the first few years of them and they got, they rose to pretty quick prominent fame. Even with them, the first few years are like unbelievably primitive. And they've just released a song with machine gun Kelly and Ed Sheeran in the space of a month.

Amazing. And that's the world that they started in. And you go, okay, like, to Conor McGregor as well, you know, maybe less or now because he's kind of gone a bit mental again. But the Conor McGregor of five years ago, when he was King of the world, people looked at that and said, yeah, I want that. And you go, okay, well, what do you think that was like for him living in his parents attic on Irish, like job seekers allowance with his misses, no idea if it was going to work, rolling the same sequences day after day, throwing the same combinations day after day, endless drills, endless

training sessions, living on benefits. Like, is that, that's what it is, that's his life. That's the life that it is and it's only in retrospect when you can see success that anything that the glory is to be found in those first instances so yeah I think working out trying to find that intersection of a price that you would be willing to pay yeah I was a good place to start I was calculating how much income I probably gave up over the last five years of stepping off this path. I'm, it's conservatively a million dollars. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, I proved like, okay, I can make money, I can make this work. And then I was quickly drawn to like this creator stuff. And over the next 18 months, I made about $20,000.

And I was like barely making ends meet, I was burning down savings, I moved abroad to save money, I was like so anxious about finances. But I in those months found work worth doing. And after that, I was basically willing to go to war to protect that opportunity. That seems like that matters. Like, and I think I wrote my book because I want to tell people that like, if you find this stuff and you think

it's important that matters, will you be able to get, will you be able to get paid for it? I don't know. I don't know how to do that. I'm not a rock star, hyper ambitious person. I can just monetize everything. But might it lead you to a life that is energizing where you feel alive, where you feel connected?

It might. And it might suck in the short term, but it might also be worth it. Two things that I've got in my mind. First one is a lot of people that I know are converging on this same stuff. You know, that blog post of mine was before I'd read your book and yet it converges perfectly. Look at Chris Sparks, man. Chris, former, same, yeah same online number four poker player on the planet productivity coach like he literally he sharpens the bleeding edge of the most ambitious people on the planet professionally that's his job and yet you speak to him and it's like talking to some zen master that's just come back from a cave all of us are

relinquishing the trappings that kept us imprisoned before, the things that we thought we wanted. Yeah, it's funny talking to Chris. He sort of hijacks you. He uses the language of like the default ambitious world. He's like goals. I've always had like an issue with goals.

I'm like, but then you read deeper, you're like, oh, Chris is saying the same thing. I'm slightly different language. And he's even deeper because he's going to these depths of values and what really matters. And using it to harness people's like natural drive. So there's nothing wrong with like ambitious goals. I know myself, I'm less ambitious than other people.

Like we both know Ali Abdel, right? I don't have his level of ambition, but I'm smart enough to know that I don't have that genetic setting. Yes. He's a machine, but like he smart enough to know that I don't have that genetic setting. Yes. He's a, he's a machine, but like he's so happy doing what he loves. Yes. Right? But it's figuring out like, what is that setting for you through like trial and error?

It's also figuring out, look, is that what I want or is that what I want because other people seem to want it? Because psychological contagion is a hell of a drug man and memetic desire will carry you a long, long way. Because it's easy to look at someone like Ali, whose, his course will be bringing in three mil, four mil, probably a year at fuck knows, maybe 85% margin, maybe more. You know, like it's all, it's internet stuff. It's all money. It's all profit. Plus, it's got his YouTube channel. Plus, he's got a book coming out soon.

Plus, all of the sponsors on his podcast and blah, blah, blah. And you go, dude, that's great, but like he is a one in a, one in 10,000, one in a hundred thousand freak who has a very particular blend that has allowed him to do this. Is that genuinely what you want and is that the price that you're prepared to pay for it?

And looking at success and what it means to you, starting from a value led, my contribution to the world, what I know about myself, that sort of reflection, starting from that position, I think it's very difficult to go wrong because you go, what you said earlier on, you know, a million dollars over the space of five years. I mean, that's like, tokellingly fucking painful. But the point is that if that's not what you value and if you value the things that you're doing now more, then that's a price that's worth paying. Here was the other thing I wanted to say about that as well.

In retrospect, a lot of the time, we forget why we did the things we did. So looking back and saying, I could have earned a million dollars over five years, a million dollars more, you can say, well, I would love a million dollars, but you forget why you didn't earn a million dollars. My point is that the person that we are in the moment and the person that we are in retrospect are very, very different. And that's so important. Like, I wish that I hadn't drank last night.

Everybody says that the next day. But you go, well, did you enjoy, did you, did you enjoy the party? Well, yeah, okay. Well, maybe you, maybe this isn't the case. Maybe this is just your frame of reference right now. Yeah. When I look back, I actually couldn't continue working in that job. I had reached a breaking point. I had burned out. And I think one of the advantages I've had on my current path is that I burned out. And I had reached some level of success that I sort of knew like that wasn't what I wanted. I didn't want to be trading my time

for some future payoffs in other people's eyes. I wanted to find that internal driver of success because I had a hunch it would be more sustainable. That has mostly panned out. And I now just like I mistrust, I don't trust like automatic success memes. I've been doing online courses since 2018. Then I see people like Dave and Tiago, Dave Perrell and Tiago Forte for people like they're hyper ambitious and they're amazing. Like they've really leveled up the whole ecosystem of like what these courses could look like. My wife's thing is that much money you can earn from

them from their side as well, not just the experience of the student but the monetization of the creator. Yeah, and so I've been doing courses and like I'm running a course teaching consulting skills and I'm making good money, but it was very easy for me to know, oh, I'm not them. I don't have that level of ambitious.

How can I design the thing to fit within my life? So I love like one-on-one helping people. I love it. So I designed like my course, before this podcast, I was on a one-on-one coaching call. Seeing that like individual improvement, it just like fires me up.

I love it. And that's sustainable for me over the long term. But if I'm running like a larger thing and like have to have employees and contractors and like, I'm going to light it on fire. Just like burn it to the ground after I do it. It's the emeth story. I think this is also an advantage of a solo, self-employed creator path.

If you do go into an ambitious mode that isn't your path, you'll probably burn out faster. Yep. Whereas in a job, I think where people get really stuck and can do harm to themselves is they maintain this low grade burnout for a long time. Whereas on the solo path, you're just going to blow it all up because you're either going to go too hard and you're ultimately responsible. There's no one to lean back on either. Yeah, exactly. I think this is something that I've been playing with for a long time and I might try and write about it this week after this conversation. Not having boundless ambition is so unsalibrated in the modern world. is so unsalibrated in the modern world. Everyone, and this isn't just your quintessential Gary V's, it's the subtext of how did you spend your Sunday?

Oh, I had a productive Sunday. I folded loads of laundry and got this done. It's there is always more ambition to chase after. Yeah. And increasingly, I'm seeing in myself and in the people that I talk to about this stuff that, realizing, matching the amount of ambition that you have with the sort of life that you live is the solution. That's precisely where your highest point of contribution can be deployed because

you're not going to burn yourself out. And just because David Perel can do three or four cohorts of right of passage every year and right, huge blog posts and create a documentary about Porter Robinson and be a teal fellow or whatever the fuck else it is that he's doing or Ali can do the podcast on YouTube and the courses and the book and whatever. Like if that's not you, fine. Like, honestly, fine because there are prices that you would have to pay to get yourself to that level and you're probably not prepared to pay them. And just because other people say that the that level of

aggression is something that you should aspire to doesn't mean that you should. And it doesn't always feel good. I know I'm leaving money on the table sometimes and I feel silly sometimes. I know I'm capable of more if I really pushed, but I'm sort of making a bet that that's not the thing. So I have an exercise for you too. You could try. Have you ever written like,

so in my book, like I'm inspired by Paul Jarvis, he wrote the company of one. He has this famous blog post called Enough. So I basically just wrote a paragraph of like, what is enough trying to like hold myself responsible? I grabbed, I can read it. If you want me to read that. So, um, yeah. So also Derek Sivers quote, amazing on this. Are you helping people? Are they happy? Are you happy? Are you profitable? Isn't that enough? It's like so good. But I, so like, I feel like,

okay, I'm leaving money on the table, which means I have two choices. I can either go do that because I feel bad, or I can go deeper within myself and figure out what I really want. So I try to just reflect, and I'm always revisiting these things and redoing it. So for me, this is like, enough is knowing that no amount in my bank account will ever satisfy my deepest fears. It's knowing that I have enough friends that would gladly open their door and share a meal if I was ever in need. It's the feeling that I've been able to spend my time over an extended stretch of time

working on projects that are meaningful to me, helping people with a spirit of generosity and having space and time in my life to stay energized to keep doing this for the long term. Enough is seeing a clear opportunity that will increase my earnings in the short term, but knowing that saying no will open me up to things that might be even more valuable and ways that are hard to understand. Enough is knowing that the closed fancy meal or latest gadget will not make me happier, but also buying such things won't mean I'm going to end up broke. Enough is having meaningful conversations with people that inspire me, people that I love

or people that support me. Dude, what a way to finish. Let's leave it there. Pull Millard, ladies and gentlemen, if people want to buy the book or find out what you do online, where should they go? Yeah, think-boundless.com or just Google Paul Miller. I'm pretty easy to find, only one within internet presence. Nice. Pathless Path will be linked in the show notes below as well. Dude, I really appreciate what you do. I appreciate you. Thank you for making me feel very welcome here in Austin as well. I'm looking forward to catching up soon.

Awesome. Thanks Chris. you