Podcast Update, Digital Course Experiment & Moving To Asia

[01:00] Paul: Hello, podcast listeners. So wanted to check in today and provide an update. I think some of you may be saying, why isn't there a new podcast every week? I will cover that and talk about a shift I am planning on making. Also want to give an update on a course I've been running called Solopreneur Shift. Been pretty fascinating, energizing, and rewarding so far.

Have to bring a participant of that on at some point and get some reflections and see how that turned out. Also just give a personal update on my plans, which involve moving across the world. And I'll update you more, a little teaser. So the first thing is the podcast. Over the last few months, the podcast has shifted in terms of the stories I'm most excited about telling. I think when I start any project, I probably tend towards creating things that give more freedom and flexibility to shift as I evolve.

You can look at just the name Boundless and say, okay, That is a perfect name for something that might have no definition or no bounds. So when I started the podcast, a lot of what I was thinking about was making sense of the future of work. What does that mean? I think the discussion, the public discussion on it is not very sophisticated. You have basically people screaming about all the jobs disappearing and then a reality in which a lot of the jobs aren't really starting to disappear. But what I was most interested in is telling the stories of the people who are carving different paths.

That's evolved to people that are questioning just our understanding of work. I've written a bit about that now. It's also the people who are unleashing potential. And I realized that the common thread among these is what is the human side of the future of work? That is a conversation I was most excited about. I'm not so excited about the conversation around technology, jobs disappearing.

It's a worthwhile discussion and something to understand, but I want to know about who are the people actually doing this now? How are they unlocking potential in organizations? How are people doing that for themselves in self-employed paths? Who are the philosophers that are questioning our modern understanding of work and what does it mean to live a good life? And those are the conversations I really want to have. So, look for a slight repositioning of this podcast, probably on a summer pause for now in terms of releasing new episodes, but have a bunch of people in the pipeline who I'm excited to share their stories, their perspectives.

Around the human side of the future of work. So the second thing I've been experimenting with, uh, you may have seen links in a newsletter I sent or other postings I've done online, but it's called Solopreneur Shift. And it's essentially a collection of a number of exercises I've collected over the last probably 3 to 5 years. That I've done on myself. And it's combining my interest in being self-reflective, doing these personal development exercises, and some PowerPoint and Excel ninja skills to turn these into tools that are accessible and actionable for people. So those have evolved into one-on-one coaching I've done, and finally decided to take my own advice to put the crazy idea out there that I might do a 4-week intensive course that is something modeled along the lines of an alt-MBA, which Seth Godin has done and has been an inspiration for me in terms of challenging my thinking.

So I sat down, I created a syllabus, a 4-week syllabus, put this out there. Here's my crazy idea. Come along with me for the ride. Ended up getting over— I think we had 10 people who were on board, ended up with 8 people. And we're about a week and a half into that. And it's been a pretty, uh, interesting experiment.

I think most people have gotten at least something out of it yet. It's been interesting to see how do you balance these online learning communities? How do you generate excitement, reflection, uh, connection, and actually build towards things that are going to help people in their lives after the course. So I'm still in the midst of it. Feeling very vulnerable with that. But I love the vulnerability because it forces you to bring your best self forward.

I don't want to embarrass myself. So I devote a lot of time, hours to pulling together material that I think is going to be meaningful for people. And it's been a good experiment so far. We'll touch base more on that. I think one of my goals would be to have one of the students come on the podcast. And share their reflections and challenge me a bit and how we could take that to the next level.

But look for some of the exercises we're using in that to be on the website soon. I'll be sharing those through newsletter and stuff. The third thing I teased it before was that I am taking a leap of my own. I have experimented over the last year in very Tim Ferriss fashion, to take extended travel trips. And in the past year and a half, I've done two one-month trips, one to Europe, one to Asia. And in April, I did Asia and really enjoyed the time I spent a week in Taipei.

So have decided I am going to experiment with a digital nomad life, I guess you would call it. I think there are a lot of different types of digital nomads, but for me, it's being someone that is not committing to live in a place over the long term. Perhaps they might over the short term and are going to do some combination of different work type things, either remotely, either full-time basis, part-time basis, or on and off consulting projects. So I'm going to try and figure out that I don't have a fully baked plan, but the, the goal is to start in Taiwan. I picked that because it was pretty amazing city when I visited. I have a great friend who I'm also going to be interviewing at some point.

Shout out to Irv Travels on Instagram, but he has lived in Taiwan for the last year after traveling the world for a year and quitting his job in the US. So I'll have somewhat of a support system there and excited to dive into that. So wrote a bit about this in an article that involved Beanie Babies, Bitcoin, digital nomadism, creativity, silliness, and other insane topics that I pulled together. I'll link to that in the show notes. But basically the main idea was there are things, there's so many things you do as a child that you just pursue because you're drawn to them. And I think it is, as an adult, we shy away from this.

We try to fit in more. We, and I think because of the way we're wired as adults, you are drawn away from discomfort because it's not how you're living day to day in life. And I've tried to really think about how can I recapture that spirit of collecting Beanie Babies with no purpose. And I think for me, traveling across the world is really doing that. It's kind of chasing things that don't make sense, but you know you're headed in some sort of right direction. David Whyte, the poet, has written about this idea of The Pathless Path.

Which I love. And I definitely feel like I'm on a Pathless Path right now, but it seems like it's a path I want to stay on, if that makes sense. So those are the 3 updates for me today. Look for updates on the podcast. I'm going to be rolling out new banner or new cover art on the pod, and we'll be doing some writing about taking the leap to digital nomadism. If you have guests you think I should talk to or interview, send me a note.

If you have other comments, feedback, love to hear it. And have a fantastic week and think boundless.