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Hey everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Honey and Hustle. My name is Angela Hollowell. I am your host, and today I am reading to you a few chapters from The Pathless Path by Paul Millerd.
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I came across Paul Millerd many years ago. I think I actually discovered his podcast first and his book second.
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Um, it's been really interesting to see him post about his approach to life and writing and business on Substack, and I'm excited to dive into this book today for anyone who's wondering if there may be an alternative path, a better path for their life that may give them a better relationship with their work.
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If you're new here or returning here, I have been reading chapters of books related to business and creativity every day, almost, for the month of February, and this is today's book. So thank you so much for joining.
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[instrumental music] If you're a creator or entrepreneur who's been thinking about starting a newsletter or building a community around your work, I've got something for you.
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I created a course called Community OS, and OS stands for operating system. It's my full system for writing consistently, growing your audience, and turning your community into revenue online and in real life.
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That's communityos.xyz, and I'll put the link in the show notes. All right, let's get into it. [instrumental music] And let's dive in. First chapter I'll be reading from is called The Meaningful Work Trap.
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My generation entered the workforce with high expectations. We didn't wanna see work merely as an obligation. We also wanted it to be meaningful and fulfilling.
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We wanted the modern version of the calling that Oprah talked about. This idea gained popularity in the nineteen-nineties.
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In Jobs, Careers, and Callings, a famous study by Yale professor Amy Wrzesniewski and others, people were asked if they defined their work as a job, career, or a calling.
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People who defined their work as a calling saw their work as inseparable from their life and worked not for financial gain or career advancement, but instead for the fulfillment that doing the work brings to the individual.
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The researchers boldly concluded that if people could find work they saw as a calling, it would improve their life, health, and job satisfaction.
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Although Calvin argued that the callings were predestined, Wrzesniewski and her co-writers were offering a new path to fulfillment, and all it required was finding a better job or, even simpler, changing our mindset toward work.
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This idea spread, and many people, including myself, started to search for our own modern callings.
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In my first year at GE, in response to complaints from young employees, the company started building career pages on social media and investing in efforts to rebrand itself to potential employees.
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It wanted to present itself as a cool place for young people to build a career. One reason companies like GE were willing to start making changes was the emerging tech industry in California.
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The tech industry was offering benefits that seemed too good to be true, and this shift was led by Google, which gained attention by debuting on the two thousand and seven Best Places to Work list at number one.
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I remember reading the description and being envious of the benefits they offered.
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At Google, you can do your laundry, drop off your dry cleaning, get an oil change, then have your car washed, work out in the gym, attend subsidized exercise classes, get a massage, study Mandarin, Japanese, Spanish, and French, and ask a personal concierge to arrange dinner reservations.
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Naturally, you can get haircuts on-site. Want to buy a hybrid car? The company will give you five thousand dollars toward that environmentally friendly end.
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Google had made my list of prestigious companies, but it stood out from the rest. It was the only one at the time that promised that work could be fun.
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When I started at GE, my only understanding of a good relationship with work was work-life balance, a concept popular in the early two thousands.
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While the term is still used today, it feels like it belongs in another era. In the twenty-tens, the idea that work should be meaningful became a default expectation of college graduates.
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Young people no longer wanted to simply bide their time at a job, but wanted a job with passion, purpose, and fun.
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By twenty nineteen, a survey of workers in the United States and Canada found that more than offering good pay and benefits, seventy-eight percent of people thought employers sh-- have a responsibility to keep employees mentally and physically well.
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Companies do their best to keep up with these growing expectations, which can easily be observed by scanning the career pages of well-known companies.
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This is what I did in early twenty twenty-one, compiling a list of recruiting slogans from over a hundred companies.
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Some examples:
Load full transcript
Facebook, "Do the most meaningful work of your life"; McKinsey, "Have a career that fits your calling";
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Ropes & Gray, "Write your own career story"; Philip Morris, "Change the world"; Comcast, "Create the future with us"; Microsoft, "Do what you love"; Sears, "Jobs that transform your career";
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Citibank, "Discover your next adventure." When I graduated in two thousand and seven, Google's promise to make work fun was the exception. Now, every company is trying to be like Google.
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It's high stakes when an entire generation of workers not only thinks that work should be the most important thing in their lives, but also that it should enable them to thrive in all aspects of their life.
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A study from the University of Sussex by professors Catherine Bailey and Adrian Madden should cast doubts on whether these expectations can be met.
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In their research, they did in-depth interviews with 135 individuals in 10 different professions about the most meaningful moments in their jobs. Their conclusion?
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Helping people find meaning in their work is complex and profound, going far beyond the relative superficialities of satisfaction or engagement.
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Their research found that instead of joy, meaningful experiences were associated with mixed, uncomfortable, or even painful thoughts and feelings, not just a sense of unalloyed joy and happiness.
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Despite thinking I wanted fun and joy at work for most of my career, when I reflect on the most meaningful moments of my career, they involve overcoming obstacles or getting through setbacks to complete something I didn't think I could.
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This is much different than what most companies are promising and increasingly what many people have come to expect out of work. The next chapter I'll be reading is called We Want to Be Useful.
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Usefulness, whatever form it may take, is the price we should pay for the air we breathe and the food we eat and the privilege of being alive.
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And it is its own reward as well, for it is the beginning of happiness, just as self-pity and withdrawal from the battle are the beginning of misery. This is a quote by Eleanor Roosevelt.
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According to Robert Keegan, a psychologist at Harvard, we are shifting away from a world where we need to fit in toward one where we must develop the skill of self-authoring.
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Instead of looking to external cues to learn how to live, we need to have a coherent internal narrative about why we are living a certain way.
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This is the ethos of the pathless path, and if you don't know or understand your own story, you will struggle. One of the hardest questions people face when they think of their own story, however, is what should I do?
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A significant barrier to figuring out what we really want to do is the voice in our head that warns us to stop when we consider or do things that are not broadly seen as normal.
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Professor and author Brene Brown's clarification of shame and guilt helped me understand what's really going on when we struggle to pay attention to our intuitions and desires.
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She defines shame as the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging.
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She believes that most people give too much power to this emotion when making life choices. She doesn't think we can solve shame and suggests that people pay attention to a slightly different emotion, guilt.
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She defines guilt as holding something we've done or failed to do up against our values and feeling psychological discomfort. In contrast to shame, guilt is actionable.
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The disconnects between what we claim to care about and what we do or don't do points out what matters to us. Guilt drives many people to work, and this is a normal reaction to this uncomfortable emotion.
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Most people want to contribute, help, and engage with the world.
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However, sometimes this impulse gets hacked by our shame and we follow paths that aren't ours because we feel like the world's love depends on us doing a certain thing.
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We are afraid that if we step away or make a change, we might be cast out of our family or community. This is one of life's most terrifying feelings and keeps many from making changes.
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Yet, if we learn to recognize this reaction, we can quiet the voice of shame and use our guilt in a healthy manner to guide us towards things we claim to care about.
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In my travels around the world, meeting a diverse range of people who have left a default path, nothing has been more consistent than the reality that most people want to engage with the world and to be useful.
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Despite many people thinking that their ideal life would be living out the rest of their life on a beach, when given the option of following that path, few people take it.
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Author Sebastian Younger, in his book about soldiers who had returned from war, found a similar thing. Despite dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder, many of the soldiers wanted to return to dangerous war zones.
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Why? Because at war, they felt a part of something, deeply connected to the men and women they were serving with. Younger reflected, humans don't mind hardship. In fact,
they thrive on it.
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What they mind is not feeling necessary. Younger argues that modern society has perfected the art of making people feel not necessary. The need to feel useful is a powerful one.
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This is the hidden upside of the pathless path and a reason why finding work that aligns with what matters to you and makes you feel useful is so important.
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When you find the conversations you want to take part in and the work you want to keep doing, we start to feel necessary in the whole world. One quick thing before we continue.
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If you're enjoying this conversation and you want more stories like this, more insights from creators and entrepreneurs who are building something real, then you need to check out my newsletter, Please Hustle Responsibly.
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It goes out two to three times a week and it's where I share creator profiles, business strategies from a bootstrap perspective, and practical advice for building community without burning out.
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We've got over 1,600 subscribers, creators, entrepreneurs, and marketers who care about sustainable growth. You can sign up at pleasehustleresponsibly.com and I'll drop the link in the show notes.
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If this episode resonated with you, the newsletter will too. All right, let's get back to it. opens up. Those two chapters from The Pathless Path are,
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I think, really instrumental in illustrating, one, Paul's own journey to discovering that his expectations and associations with work were just simply
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Too high and probably heavily unrealistic, uh, given the reality of what it is to work for any company, uh, which is that their bottom line is determined by sales, not by worker happiness necessarily.
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The worker happiness doesn't pack sales. Yes, absolutely. It is not the only thing that they care about. People at those companies still get fired.
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People at those companies can still find ways to be unhappy and unfulfilled in other areas of their life. Um, and probably as quiet as it's kept, that expectation that people should be happy is probably what has
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ushered us into an era where not only are people finding that they are very unlikely to
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completely be fulfilled from their work and that they need to have things outside of work that also add to their fulfillment, but also that the majority of work should also be determined by how good you are at your job, not just how happy that job makes you.
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And when I say good, what I mean is, you know, how able are you to contribute meaningfully to that role, to that workplace, to that team, to that organization?
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And that, I think, kind of mindset and shift in mindset is reflected in the second chapter when Paul is discussing what it means to be useful and how people come across usefulness, whether or not they are necessarily happy or in a place of ease and joy within their workplace.
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I think it is so imperative to have a connection to the work you're doing and the people you work with. Yes, and we saw that in the usefulness chapter.
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Um, it feels good to know that the people around you trust you to do an incredible job and that you are doing an incredible job and contributing to something bigger than yourself in a way that feels meaningful.
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Um, but it is also the reality that you can do great things and contribute to a team and not have that be the entirety of what brings you joy and happiness in this life.
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I read a chapter from Roxane Gay about work is important, but it's not all important, and I think what she was trying to convey in this chapter and what maybe Paul Millerd is also by extension talking about is that the work you do is important because at the end of the day, most people are working because they need to pay bills, right?
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It's not because they don't wanna be on a beach somewhere, but it is also because they just want to have the financial freedom and the time freedom to say, "If I don't wanna work today, I can go be on a beach."
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And that they have something to look forward to outside of work, and they have a job that pays them enough to afford to be able to look to things outside of work.
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And as Paul was kind of sharing and writing about in this chapter, which is that even when the work itself is grueling, and it's difficult, and it's challenging, maybe not going to war challenging, but challenging in other ways that really push you to rise to a new level as a worker, as a creator, as an owner, whatever it may be, that that reward from that work and the knowledge and understanding of the impact of overcoming hard things can also be equally as important and, quite frankly, necessary to continue in doing the work that you find meaningful.
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Yes, this is written for people who maybe want to have a job and are maybe discovering that their career or their calling is maybe not synonymous with any one company, but even if that company is one that you own, but it does mean that you can find
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ways to be useful and necessary and needed, but that don't take away or encompass the totality of your joy or who you are as a person.
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I say that as someone who worked through grieving, who has worked through challenging seasons as a business owner, and has still had to remind myself and have other people in my life remind me that they don't love me because of what I do.
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They love me because of who I am.
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And while the work that I do is great and it's benefiting a lot of people, I'm sure, there's also a point where I need to understand that I'm able to do that work because of the life that I live and the people that are in my life supporting me and challenging me and pushing me to have different experiences and different perspectives that inform the work that I do.
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So I hope this is helpful with you thinking about not just meaningful work, but useful work, and maybe decoupling your relationship with joy and happiness with work and business. That's all.
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Thank you so much for joining me today on this chapter. I will see you guys in the next book reading in the next episode. If you've been getting value from Honey and Hustle, I need a quick favor.
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Would you take thirty seconds right now to leave a review? Reviews help other people discover the show, and honestly, they help me know what's landing with you.
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Whether it's this episode or one from a few months ago that stuck with you, just share what made it worth your time. You can leave a review wherever you're listening right now, and I appreciate it in advance.
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See you in the next episode. [upbeat music]