The Pathless Path: Imagining a New Story for Work and Life
Paul Millerd, 2022
Education, a good job, promotion, a mortgage, retirement: almost everyone follows this road, yet somehow more and more people on it feel empty inside. Paul Millerd followed it all the way to the world’s most prestigious consulting firms, then left in 2017 without a plan. You will learn how to recognize someone else’s script in your own life, work out how much is enough, and start looking for work you want to keep doing.
Who it is for
For anyone whose life looks good on paper but who dreads thinking about Monday on Sunday evenings. And for anyone who has long wanted to live differently but does not know where to start or how frightening it might be.
The goal is not to find a job, make money, or build a business. The goal is to actively and deliberately seek work you want to keep doing.
The boy from Connecticut who left the best job
Imagine someone who has made it. A boy from a small town in Connecticut gets into a strong college, then business school, and works at McKinsey and Boston Consulting Group, the world’s most prestigious consulting firms. He is offered a salary of more than two hundred thousand dollars a year. Yet in 2017 he leaves his job without a single client lined up or any plan.
His name is Paul Millerd, and The Pathless Path is his book about what happened next. He borrowed the title from the poet David Whyte. In Whyte’s book The Three Marriages, the pathless path is described as a paradox: we cannot see that it exists at all, and we do not recognize it until we start walking it.
Millerd’s central idea is that most of us live by a ready-made script. He calls it the default path. Study, get a good job, climb the ladder, hang on until retirement. This script once worked, but increasingly hard work brings neither security nor joy. For Millerd, the pathless path is neither a profession nor a way to escape the office. It is the decision to stop living someone else’s story and start looking for your own.
Millerd is upfront that this is not a collection of life hacks but the story of his own search. It includes an illness that took a year from him, a move to Taiwan without a plan, learning to do nothing, and a simple question that changes your relationship with money: how much is enough for you? If you know that heavy feeling on a Sunday evening before another working week, much of this book is about you. Let’s begin.
The road someone else chose for you
Millerd remembers college. He and his classmates spent as much time finding loopholes that would get them better grades as they did preparing for exams. They read reviews of professors, went to office hours for useful hints, and questioned older students. It seemed smart at the time. Later he realized he had been learning the central skill of this road: jumping through hoops someone else had set up.
Millerd defines the default path as a series of decisions and achievements without which your adult life will not be considered successful. A degree, a good position, a promotion, a home of your own, retirement. It is like an escalator in a shopping mall. Step on and it carries you upward, while getting off halfway feels frightening and awkward.
Millerd shows that this script is far from timeless. The Protestant Reformation taught people to see work as a calling that pleased God. After the Second World War, full-time employment at a single company became the norm and the main road to prosperity and respect. In 1946, the United States passed a law making employment a government objective. By the 1990s, work was expected to provide not only money but also meaning and an answer to the question of who you were.
The trouble is that the escalator increasingly fails to deliver on its promise. Work does not match a person’s values, office life requires playing politics, and there is barely enough energy to make it to the weekend and dream about retirement.
There is another trap, too. The Harvard psychologist Tal Ben-Shahar called it the arrival fallacy. This is the belief that reaching the next milestone will finally make us happy for a long time. The promotion arrives, the joy fades after a couple of weeks, and another milestone is already ahead. The escalator never ends.
For Millerd, the first step is simple: notice the script itself. Look at your goals for the next few years and ask of each one: is this your choice, or the result of following convention? A goal you cannot explain beyond “everyone does it” probably came with the escalator.
About the author
Paul Millerd is an American writer and former strategy consultant who spent about ten years working at McKinsey and Boston Consulting Group. In 2017 he began working independently, self-published this book, and now runs a newsletter and podcast of the same name.
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