Have you read or are interested in reading The Pathless Path: Imagining a New Story for Work and Life by Paul Millerd?

Read on for the “Pathless Path” review! I share what I took away from the book and important insights for anyone considering leaving the default path.

A Brief Synopsis Before my “Pathless Path” Review

This book is about Paul Millerd’s story of venturing on “the pathless path”, a journey in which he questioned the default path that many of us take for a multitude of reasons. From safety and fear of uncertainty to familial and societal pressures, Millerd shares with readers the barriers that keep people living lives they’re unsatisfied with.

The book is far from a lecture on what everyone is doing wrong and what Millerd has mastered. Through his engaging storytelling and deeply personal writing, Millerd gently nudges readers to contemplate important questions about their lives and their relationship to work.

Part memoir, part philosophical treatise with touches of personal development throughout, The Pathless Path covers a wide breadth of content. Yet, the message, while being easier said than done, is simple: taking time to pause and reflect on what we truly want out of life—as opposed to what merely makes sense—can be one of the greatest gifts we give ourselves, even when we have no idea of what lies ahead of us.

What exactly is the pathless path?

Though it seems like the phrase the pathless path can first be attributed to Ram Dass (Millerd includes one of Ram’s quotes on the first page), Millerd explains how he first encountered it while reading David Whyte’s The Three Marriages. 

He describes how he was a year into his journey when he came across Whyte’s words: “We cannot even see [the pathless path] is there, and we do not recognize it….we are not meant to understand what it means” (Whyte, 2010).

For Millerd, this meant that he could finally begin to let go of all the planning he did and trust in the universe that everything would be okay.

According to Millerd:

The pathless path is an alternative to the default path. It is an embrace of uncertainty and discomfort. It’s a call to adventure in a world that tells us to conform….It’s also a gentle reminder to laugh when things feel out of control and trusting that an uncertain future is not a problem to be solved.”

(Millerd, 2022, p. 5)

“The Pathless Path” Review Was a Long Time Coming!

I am indebted to Paul Millerd and “The Pathless Path”, no question about that.

I first came across the book while listening to Millerd on The Deep Dive podcast with Ali Abdaal. That was back in December 2022, and I bought it right away. Based on everything he was saying in that conversation with Ali, and where I was at that point in my life, I knew it would be money well spent.

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“It took a year and a half for me to admit I did not enjoy my job. I had spent years crafting an idea of who I thought I should be and working hard to find jobs that matched this idea. It was hard for me to admit that the foundation that I thought I had been building was incredibly fragile.”

— The Pathless Path (Millerd, 2022, p. 56)

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Nevertheless, I had no clue it would impact me as much as it did. I’ve already read it twice and have recommended it to countless others.

The Pathless Path is what gave me the final push to create this blog.

It’s what helped me not feel insane for giving up comfort and security to pursue a life of travel.

And it’s also what I keep coming back to when anxiety kicks in about what the next few years of my life will look like. 

The Allure of “Good Eggs”

Since the moment I first contemplated an alternative life, almost two years ago, I thought there was something wrong with me.

Though my job was not paying me nearly as much as I thought it should be, I had it pretty well. I had a career and a future with an important role that was only going to get more important—and lucrative—so long as I climbed the ladder.

Before my imagination of what life could be, I was a “good egg”; an egg that was fit for the standards of society and its specifications. I didn’t have the vocabulary to articulate it at this point, but once I considered the pathless path, I felt like a bad egg, like something was wrong with me and that I was different. 

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“The pathless path is about ignoring the pull of needing to be a “good egg” and learning what truly enables you to thrive”

— The Pathless Path (Millerd, 2022, p. 128)

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Here is one of the many points in the book where I found Millerd to be incredibly inspiring and thought-provoking. He writes about our need to conform to what is expected of us by those closest to us but also by society.

Even when considering the pathless path, he writes, “people who leave the default path [sic] eagerly embrace new identities that are still recognizable as legible to the ‘traditional’ economy. They gravitate to titles like startup founder, entrepreneur, freelance consultant, or even the newly emerging ‘creator’” (p. 127)

I could not relate to this more!

Even now as I have officially embarked on the pathless path, when people ask what I’m doing here in Buenos Aires, I feel this weird pull to describe the different things I’m doing to not seem like I don’t have it figured out, like what I’m doing isn’t all part of some masterful plan I’ve created.

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“Part of the promise of being a “good egg” is that we not feel lost. But the “bad eggs” on the pathless path eventually realize there is wisdom in being lost.”

—The Pathless Path (Millerd, 2022, p. 129)

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Slowly but surely I’m coming to terms with the idea that uncertainty and discomfort is the way forward, whatever that looks like!

Uncertainty and Discomfort

The more I read books like The Pathless Path, the more I realize that uncertainty and discomfort are aspirational states of being. It is, by far, one of the most central themes in the book, and something I’m beginning to love in my own life.

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“Making life changes requires overcoming the discomfort of not knowing what will happen. Facing uncertainty, we make long mental lists of things that might go wrong and use these as the reasons why we must stay on our current path. Learning to have a healthy distrust of this impulse and knowing that even if things go wrong, we might discover things worth finding can help us open ourselves up to the potential for wonderful things to happen.”

— The Pathless Path (Millerd, 2022, P. 85)

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Millerd encourages readers not to completely ignore the voice in their head that says they “ought to” do this or that, but to be mindful of how this voice might be preventing them from being the person they really want to be and living lives they actually want to live.

I resonated with this so much and have a feeling many of you will, too.

What would it be like for you to actively pursue a path where you don’t know what’s on the other end; when the only thing you do know is that what’s currently happening is not something you’d be satisfied with looking back on your life?

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“In thoughts about the future, worry is traded for wonder. People stop thinking about worst-case scenarios and begin to imagine the benefits of following an uncertain path. They get curious about who they might be if they embrace discomfort and are filled with a sense of urgency that says ‘if I don’t do this now, I might regret it.’”

— The Pathless Path (Millerd, 2022, P. 83)

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This is largely reminiscent of what Bronnie Ware found in her work with terminally ill patients: people often regret the things they don’t do much more than the things they do.

New Ideas About Work

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“The challenge is not to find work to pay the bills but instead to have time to keep taking chances and exploring opportunities to find the things worth committing to over the long-term”

— The Pathless Path (Millerd, 2022, P. 167)

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What would it mean for work to simply mean something that we create, whether we’re paid for it or not?

Millerd contemplates this idea in his offering of new ideas about work. In conversation with other thinkers such as Andrew J. Taggart and Josef Pieper, he encourages us to reflect on the kind of world we want to build and to rethink work in ways that make it much more aligned with our interests.

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“My projects started to transcend my understanding of work. In my life as a full-time employee, work was a Monday through Friday thing I tried to minimize. Now it didn’t matter then I worked on my projects. They were energizing and rarely left me drained. For a long time, I had thought that if I wanted to be happier with my work, I just needed a better job. Now I saw that I just wanted a different relationship with work, one that, at least for not, didn’t come with a paycheck.”

— The Pathless Path (Millerd, 2022, P. 75)

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He makes a clear distinction between what he’s offering and Marc Winn’s concept of Ikigai, which means aligning what you love, what you’re good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for.

For Millerd, it’s the act of creating something you love, whether you’re paid for it or not, that sustains you. It is pursuing these creative endeavors that lead you to a world of possibility you might not have ever imagined if you limited your idea of work to only what you could be paid for.

“The Real Work of Your Life”

“The Real Work of Your Life” was, in my opinion, one of the most influential chapters. In this chapter, Millerd writes about the necessity of opening ourselves up to the world to discover the things we are meant to learn about ourselves. 

To be clear, this is not a cliché account of going out in the world to “find yourself”. Rather, it’s an intentional reflective, and contemplative process in which one contends with the things they’re after in life. In Millerd’s words, it’s “finding your conversation” (p. 138), asking yourself questions that are driven from the inner depths of your curiosity.

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“When you step off the default path, you will be thrust towards the frontier. Almost immediately, clues about your conversation will emerge from what captures your attention and questions will appear that give you a better understanding of what you’re really after.”

— The Pathless Path (Millerd, 2022, P. 140)

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Engaging in this conversation can only happen, though, if you truly open yourself up to it. In other words, if you’re still on the default path and are surrounded by all the comforts, habits, and norms of everyday life, it’ll be really difficult to pay attention to what you want and need in the way the pathless path forces you to.

Take Action and the Rest Will Follow

One of the best pieces of advice I’ve heard: Millerd tells readers to, essentially, take action and the rest will follow.

He reminds us that the only way we’ll ever find out what we truly want is by taking action. This means experimenting with our interests, leaning into what feels fun and energizing, and getting out there to do “the thing”, whatever that is for us.

For me, that was travel. 

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“Only by taking action do we learn and only by learning do we discover what we want. Without this, we will struggle to take advantage of the freedom that the pathless path offers.”

— The Pathless Path (Millerd, 2022, P. 171)

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Reading this on the plane to Buenos Aires, knowing that I would no longer be working full-time in 3 weeks, could not have been more surreal. 

I was doing it! I was taking action! All the things I once spent contemplating and daydreaming about were finally happening.

Over a week into my trip, on the precipice of not having the security that comes with a full-time job, I could not be happier that I decided to pull the trigger.

Borrowing from both Paul Millerd and Erich Fromm, I’m happy to say I’m taking full advantage of the positive side of freedom.

In just one week I’ve tried boxing classes, played rugby for the first time, put myself out there to meet new people, and have spent a good amount of time creating and doing what I find to be fun—this blog is a prime example of that!

Last Point of my “Pathless Path” review: A Call to You!

In the same way that I felt Millerd was speaking directly to me, I want to make a call to you who’s reading my Pathless Path review.

There’s no one “right” way to live your life, so implementing some of the principles mentioned above will look different for everyone. But the one thing I encourage you all to do is to question.

Question where you’re at in life and what brought you there. 

Ask yourself if you will be happy with the life you’re leading 20 years down the road. 

Contemplate if this is what you really want, or what those around you think is best.

If there’s one thing I got from this book, it is to question. Question intentionally and consistently.

Hope you’ve enjoyed my review of The Pathless Path.

‘Till Next Time Travel Friends!

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