Reimagine Work & A Short Update From Paul

[01:12] Paul: Welcome to the Reimagine Work podcast. This podcast is pretty much still Boundless, but I wanted to give it a new name. Reimagine Work is something that's really emerged for me over the last year in the discussions I've had with people through the podcast, through some of my writing, through some of my research. Basically, a belief that our modern conception of work does not need tinkering, it does not need more initiatives. It needs a shift in how we think about it, how we imagine how work can play a role in our lives, the economy, what we need to do to make a living in our future. The format of the podcast is mostly gonna stay the same.

I'm going to be having discussions with freelancers, self-employed people, people carving different paths in the world, and diving into how they manage that complex relationship of how work fits into their lives. Always open for podcast suggestions or guests, so definitely email me if you have any ideas. I'd love to hear who who people want to hear me talking to. But in this episode, just want to give a brief update. So I am recording this from Taipei, where I am living now. Over the past 6 months, it's been pretty amazing and pretty surprising as I've kind of made sense of what I'm doing.

I still am not really sure, but as I'm going, I was living for 3 months in Taipei. I ended up meeting someone in Taipei. We are still dating, and I went to Thailand with her. She ended up leaving her job as well. I went back to the States for a bit to spend time with my family and then ended up going to Bali where I met up with a couple other nomads who were living unconventional lives I had met at the World Domination Summit last year. And now back in Taipei and really trying to double down on things like the podcast, the conversations, my writing, and really try to figure out this year how I can make these things even more sustainable, how I can design my days around doing the things that matter to me.

I'm still doing a little consulting work. I'm finding that the consulting work is still just something that doesn't completely fire me up. It's kind of paying the bills right now. And I'm trying to grapple with what that means for me. I'm finding it's just much harder to do projects that you're not a 10 out of 10 at in the freelance context compared to the full-time context. So when you're going to an office every day, I always found it, it's much easier to do a project.

Okay, I'm not that excited about it, but I'm here. I might as well do some of the work. When you have a little more freedom designed around your day, I'm finding it a little more challenging to um, motivate and stay energized around things that I, I am not, um, deeply excited about. So still trying to figure that out as I go. Next, I just want to share a couple ideas that are kind of lingering around in my brain. What do I mean by reimagine work?

So I think I've stumbled upon a number of different ideas and I'm just gonna kind of wing it and go with it here. Would love, love, love, love feedback. What you think of an episode like this, a little less preparation, but some off-the-cuff thoughts based on some notes I was jotting down on the subway before. But what have I learned? I'll run through it, probably about 7 or 8 things. We'll see if that stays true, but I think one thing I've learned is just that the modern work is deeply painful for many people, and it's not a pain people are comfortable sharing or even have the language to share what they're feeling.

And I'm finding with a lot of people reaching out to me that they're finding that I'm either writing about in a certain way that makes a little more accessible, or they're saying, oh wow, that story you shared, or that way of framing it is Spot on. I didn't know how to say that before. One of the things I've realized is that a lot of the work we're doing is so complex. It's knowledge economy work, and it's really abstracted from what we're actually doing, right? So you're often— you're an accountant in an accounts payable department trying to manage cash flow, right? And that is totally removed.

You're part of this big multinational organization. The things are being made overseas. It's being sold to customers in all over the world, and you don't really get to see what's really happening. We're kind of lost in spreadsheets and numbers and these goals that don't really mean anything to anyone. I think a second thing which jumps out that makes a lot of these things uncomfortable for people is that we started calling attention to the fact that we don't have meaningful work at work, we don't have great cultures, and we don't have environments where people can thrive. I think this has almost had a counterproductive effect.

It has undermined a lot of people's ability to do that because it's one, just calling attention to the fact that people don't have this. So I was talking to somebody at McKinsey and they have this new training program for junior analysts and they talk about how these people should figure out what's important in their lives and one of the people said to me, "I went to this program and I realized that work was not the most important thing in my life, but I was spending all my time as a consultant." A lot of these training programs, they really still just need to grapple with the status quo that work is pretty central to many people, especially in some of the more well-off countries across the world. Building on that is a third point. I talk to people in companies and everyone talks about, yes, everyone here wants to learn. We want to help people learn. We want to help people grow.

I think a lot of companies would be better off if they just stopped pretending to care about this stuff. If they really cared about it, they would design around motivation. They would design about around learning, right? What are some of the fundamental things you need for learning and growth? One is challenging work that pushes you beyond your comfort zone. What does that mean?

That means you often need to leave your role once you're comfortable or not challenged anymore. Two, it means you need to design a lot of things outside of work, getting sleep, exercise, eating well, that enable you to even have the base level motivation to want to come to work and learn things. I've challenged people in companies to say, "Why don't we design a first week of training that actually teaches people how to learn?" There's an amazing course called Learning How to Learn. It's one of the number one courses on Coursera by Barbara Oakley. I'll link to it in the show notes. I wish I had this course at the beginning of college.

It's pretty crazy. You learn that you basically need spaced repetition. You need to practice things. You need to recall things. You need to write them. You need to use different modes of your brain.

You need, basically, Sleep, exercise, fundamental things, but we don't really frame work around this, right? It's you're at the office X number of hours and you just need to do, do stuff. It's not really designed around doing great work. Item number 4 that has really popped out for me is that I'm seeing that work is so narrowly defined, right? right? There are so many types of work, and I think work has gotten a bad rap, mostly because it's caught up in what a full-time conception of work can be.

Now, anyone who's, uh, taking care of somebody who was going through a health crisis, taking care of an elderly person, um, volunteered, knows there are other types of work. Similarly, anyone who's created something, been drawn to create a podcast, been drawn to write knows that is almost a different type of work, right? But the only types of work we talk about, especially in the more well-off nations, is the kind of work that results in GDP growth. The magic double GDP of if a mother says, "I don't want to stay home with my kids," or a father decides he doesn't want to stay home with his kids and they hire a nanny, right? Double GDP growth, right? I call this magical double GDP of abandoning your kids.

Trying to be a little provocative there, but GDP doesn't go up if you decide, hey, I want to take on the work of raising my kids, which I mean, I was the lucky beneficiary of just an incredible mother who really made that a quarter of her life and sacrificed a lot to do that. A fifth thing I've noticed that's really jumped out is that, especially as an American, we grew up in this culture which is very individualistic, right? It says, "Do what matters to you. Follow your passion. You should do what makes you happy." Then as an adult, that kind of goes away. The general consensus is, "Well, you should kind of be employed.

You should get a job. You can kind of do what makes you happy, but a better way would be to earn enough money to enable you to do do things outside of work that make you happy. And then to compound that is we work in these large organizations that are centrally controlled and take away a lot of your power, autonomy, and freedom to really achieve some of those individual aspirations that we were raised with. So, there's definitely a tension there. I talked about this a bit on the podcast with Luke Caniz, and he was saying we live in this market economy, right? And then we have these centrally controlled, almost like socialist organizations that are controlling central resources, planning when people work, how people work, how much money they make.

And it makes everyone feel a little icky because we're kind of pretending that, at least with our career mindset of people that are pretty well educated, that you have freedom. But in a lot of cases, day to day, you realize that you don't actually have a lot of freedom. You need to navigate bosses and managers who have a lot more power and control than you. The 6th thing that has emerged is that meeting our basic needs is basically not something we think about. I think people have written about this for a long time about how things have shifted from meeting basic needs to meeting conspicuous consumption needs, which is you're basically buying stuff to either signal I am this type of person or have I have achieved this kind of, uh, path in life. I think this is fine.

I think people should be able to spend money on whatever the hell they damn please. But we lose touch with what really makes us happy deep down. And I find that a lot of people, when they take a self-employment leap or go to work on their own, the equation flips. And I've written about this before. Basically, it's every dollar I spend, I need to work more to do that. Therefore, if I just spend less, I could work a little less.

And that option is not always there. If you have a full-time job, you can't just go to your boss and say, well, I kind of made enough, I'm going to take the rest of the year off. About 100 years ago, about 90 years ago actually, John Maynard Keynes wrote an article that I wrote about it. I forget what the title was. It was something about dreams for our grandchildren. And he said if the US GDP increases somewhere between 4 and 8 4.8x from where it is now, we will have solved our basic needs problems, and we will be gifted with this large amount of leisure where we can kind of do what we want with our time.

And the first part has become true. We've grown about 6x from 1930, and we've increased productivity dramatically. But what he didn't predict is One thing was just the conspicuous consumption. A lot of that has kind of kept pace. The things people want are just more than they used to be. And the second thing is a weird thing I want to dig into a little more over the next 6 months is that industries, when they either tap into efficiency, certain industries don't actually pass those productivity gains on to the economy or customers.

In manufacturing, we manufacture cars with way less people, way more productive, way less money than we did 50 years ago. Just go to any manufacturing plant parking lot and you'll realize it's half empty because it used to be full at some point. There's also some outsourcing there, but if you look at the total supply chain, it's way less people than it used to be. Compare that to something like the finance industry, which I was listening to a recent podcast of all these improvements that have happened in the industry, they've decreased costs for consumers in some aspects, especially if you're a little craftier of carving your own portfolios. But what the industry has done to respond is basically add more complexity to its product so it could keep prices at the same or even higher.

So when mutual funds decrease their costs and improve their services and returns to customers, they don't just say, "All right, let's just get everyone in that. It's good for the world to be doing this." They actually think, "Okay, how can we create more complex products to keep getting people to pay us those high fees?" That's a weird phenomenon that happens in our economy where services you're also getting costs driven up by, you can't be more efficient with certain labor in service, right? One person can deliver one service and you are, but you have this second factor of things just getting more complex and then the price is going up with that. So that's definitely going to be something I want to dig into over the next 6 months. Would love to hear if anyone has any ideas around that. Especially.

The 7th thing I've been thinking about a lot is just the idea of a career. Now, career is basically something that always needs to be improving. You always need to be showing progress. It's kind of a narrative about yourself. And I think if not questioned or not thought about in finite terms, maybe in terms of, okay, I'm going to do this for 10 years, it's kind of this never-ending race. That never really ends, right?

There's the next goal of the promotion, the raise, the new job or the new company or the increased responsibilities, especially within the full-time context. But there's never really a sense of like, okay, you kind of made it, right? Even if you're CEO, you're then thinking about board seats or trying to climb the next rung in influence and politics and things like that. I used to work with this level people and they're constantly thinking about how, how can I further my personal brand, my career? And I'm not sure what the antidote is to this. I know a lot of people who are working on their own who are in non-business fields don't have a lot of this sense.

It's more about, okay, how am I doing the work? How am I going to make ends meet over the next year? And I'm excited to dig into how can we reframe the idea of a career. I've been playing with the idea of maybe there's a finite 10-year career, right? I'm gonna have a 10-year business career and then I'm gonna go off and do my own thing. And that 10-year career, the whole point is to develop skills such that I can have a little more autonomy to do my own thing at the end of that.

A lot of people I talk to, they'll tell me, oh, my goal is to run my own business one day. but a lot of people, how they're spending their time in their careers in the business world, they're not actually developing the skills to do that. I talk to a lot of college students and they say, I want to work on my own eventually. How do I do that? And what starts out to be a great option can quickly turn into something else. Uh, when you start out in the corporate world, those first few years, you're learning so much.

You're learning how to communicate. You're learning how to write. You're learning how to talk to people. You're learning what happens when you put things into the world and people are honest with you with their feedback. A lot of times it's pretty brutal for people those first few years in the working world, but then it quickly morphs into you're pretty good at what you're doing, and then you're trying to play these status games, these political games, and really just trying to figure out how to navigate the corporate world. At that point, you're losing a lot of touch with those things you were developing at the beginning and starting to play a different game.

So if we can reframe the career or even things in terms of, okay, these next 5 years, here's what I'm focused on doing and how I'm doing it, and here's how I know I'm succeeding. So definitely going to be playing with these kind of models, and that's what I'm thinking about. So this was perhaps a rambling podcast, but wanted to kind of just sit down and challenge myself to do it and get it out there. I love having conversations with people about these things. If you want to jump on a call and talk about these things, let me know. So let's keep learning together.

I'm going to be writing every week still in the newsletter. Love feedback on that. And also just thinking more deeply this year around how I can interact more deeply with this community of crazy people who are following whatever the hell I'm doing and see how we can come together maybe in a deeper way and how I can challenge myself either to perhaps think about building a business around this. Even though I'm scared of saying that phrase, it's— I'm realizing that doing something like that can force me to just allocate my time and focus more deeply, create at a higher level, and able to help a lot more people. Thanks for listening to The Pathless Path podcast. I really appreciate you listening and spending time with my show.

If you want to support my work further, you can do that first and foremost by checking out my books, The Pathless Path and recently published Good Work. Good Work. You can find that at paulmillerd.com/goodwork. And you can also check out links to my book, Pathless Path, there as well. In addition, if you're somebody that is on a weird path, on a pathless path, or even just wants to meet people outside of your bubble, you might enjoy the Pathless Path community. It's an emerging group of over 300 people from around the world who are sharing ideas about how to fit work into their lives in different ways.

You can also find that on pathlesspath.com or in links in my newsletter or in the links in the show notes below. Thank you for listening and have a fantastic day.