The Pathless Path: Imagining a New Story For Work and Life

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Life is. There is no one living it. It is not ‘my life’. There is no ‘me’ that lives. But I am Life. This ‘I’ is not a personalised ‘me’. It is not an assumed separate person. There is no implied separation between the writer and the reader. This ‘I’ is ‘you’. This ‘I’ is all that is. I am Life itself. My Top 3 Quotes Andrew Taggart believes that crisis moments lead to "existential openings" that force us to grapple with the deepest questions about life. He argues there are two typical ways this happens. One is the "way of loss", when things that matter are taken from us, such as loved ones, our health, or a job. The other path is the "way of wonderment," when we are faced with moments of undeniable awe and inspiration. As I started to feel better, a different kind of energy showed up in my life. Professors Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun have suggested that many people who face crises often experience "post-traumatic growth" and that this manifests as an "apprecaition for life in general, more meaningful interpersonal relationships, an increased sense of personal strength, changed priorities, and a richer extensial and spritual life. On the pathless path, the goal is not to find a job, make money, build a business, or achieve any other metric. It’s to actively and consciously search for the work that you want to keep doing. 📒 Summary + Notes Section 1 - The Default Path Chapter 1 - Introduction Paul looks at how the current generation enter the workforce with high expectations that we want work to be meaningful and fulfilling. 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.

So in a nutshell, walk carefully, use your noggin, and don’t buy into every non-duality speaker/teacher’s ideas out there – it’s got to be said! How to Practice Non-Duality Using non-duality to build a bulletproof spiritual ego to disguise an insecure and imbalanced human ego underneath, aka. what we can refer to as pseudo-enlightened megalomania (you’ll notice this quality coming out a lot in people on places like Reddit and YouTube, essentially arguing over who has a “more correct and awakened interpretation” over non-dual ideas) Understanding that there is more than one way to live than your current path. You can shift to a place where you can gain more freedom and where your path can become something you choose again every day. Paul investigates two examples of people who have successfully exited the default path. Examples include John Zeratsky who sailed around the world for 18 months and Diannia Merriam who as part of the FIRE community through little side projects eventually left her fulltime job to work her new life. The emphasis on this chapter is the importance of running small experiments to your future life and see where things go. Making small and deliberate changes to our life opens up opportunities, possibilities and connections that might illuminate the next steps of what comes next. Jim O'Shaughnessy: We made a mistake and by that, I mean my generation and my parents' generation. The mistake we made was thinking that the period from 1946 to 1980 was the norm. No, it was not! It was the anomaly! We had just wiped out the manufacturing capabilities of anyone who could challenge us. So, the idea that you had the job with the gold watch, and you could work there for your entire career and raise a family of four and all of that, that was an anomaly.The 4-Hour Workweek was a great book, and Tim Ferriss is someone I still follow and look up to. On his podcast, his most ubiquitous media property, Tim Ferriss starts most (or maybe all episodes) by saying something close to, " welcome to the Tim Ferriss show, where it is my job to deconstruct world class performers to tease out the routines, habits etc. that you can apply to your own life ."

People, including myself, have a deep desire to work on things that matter to them and bring forth what is inside them. It is only when we cling to the logic of the default path that we fail to see the possibilities for making that happen.In 2019, Gallup surveyed Americans about success. In response to the question, “How do you personally define success?”, 97% agreed with the following statement: A person is successful if they have followed their own interests and talents to become the best they can be at what they care about most. In response to the question, “How do you think others define success?”, only 8% gave the same answer. Instead, 92% felt that other people defined success as follows: A person is successful if they are rich, have a high-profile career, or are well-known. The fact that I had been so thoroughly impacted during the course of reading meant that by the end of the book, I had already crossed the major threshold of change that usually comes with finishing the book. So even though the “completion” of the book did not really impact me, I feel like this is not something I would hold against it.