Good Work: Reclaiming Your Inner Ambition - Paul Millerd

Partial Excerpts (antilibrary)

Introduction

Could it be this simple? Just do things you like?

How could I have missed it?” I thought. For years I had written for fun and always found so much joy in it.

But I never considered it “work.” At 33 years old, I finally realized that this act of creative expression was an essential part of me.

Channeling my curiosity into a newsletter post destined for just a small number of readers, I noticed a deep connection with my work, hyper-aware of it for the first time. I felt at ease, filled with a sense of abundance and possibility.

The moment was a stark contrast to my life up until that point.

When I quit, it wasn’t an act of defiance but surrender. I had been vanquished by the demands of a modern career and as I walked away, I saw work itself as my unofficial adversary. It had done this to me.

I saw work as something I needed to escape and my plan was to eliminate as much of it from my life as possible. I’d live simply and scrape by.

Without “work,” I spent more time doing things I enjoyed, like writing. No matter where I was I kept finding myself lost in flow, typing away, trying to find a rhythm with my words. But it was not until sitting at that table in Taipei that I saw it for what it was: work worth doing. I didn’t want to escape work; I just craved work I cared about.

Despite not having earned any money in months, and with no evidence that this ill-formed approach to life was sensible, I fully committed to this new direction

I was embracing what I eventually started calling my pathless path, which did not come with any semblance of a plan. This is the challenge of good work: searching for it might lead you away from what others view as “success,” and it might even lead you to question your own sanity.

Through writing, I started to find what I truly craved, and as a result, I completely lost interest in the outcomes of my work, namely making money and external achievements.

So I designed my entire life around creating the time and space to think, wander, and write

To get by, I experimented with all kinds of gig work, doing my best to find things that paid the bills without draining my energy or time.

Here’s the crazy thing too: my good work has started to generate some money. In the last few years, I’ve sold more than 50,000 copies of my first book, The Pathless Path, generating more than $200,000 in profits. This resulted directly from my commitment to good work. (and some luck)

the idea that you should be able to make money from your passions is a story that holds too many people back from finding good work.

2. Follow Your Energy

Angie... in Thailand on a trip that had been her idea, a way to celebrate quitting her job at a technology think tank to start a new path in the fitness world

was on a video call talking to a potential client about taking on my first consulting project in nine months. It stirred up a mixture of emotions. Staring at the laptop, listening to the details of the project, I felt my body contract

Since the moment we met, Angie and I had been inseparable

In Thailand, we deepened our relationship

The slowness and depth of everything we experienced were in stark contrast to my past attempts at dating in the U.S.

I told her I wanted to come back to Taiwan and live there with her while she started her new job as a personal trainer. This was the first longer-term plan I had developed in over a year.

Before returning to Taiwan to re-join Angie, I took a six-week detour to Bali in Indonesia. I was following another friend, Jonny Miller, who I had met at a conference the previous summer.

When he emailed me a couple months after we met, I was already in Taiwan, but I had not yet met Angie. He was trying to rally a number of people to join him in Canggu, a small village in Bali, for a “creative residency.” Reading the email, I felt an instant, full-body “Yes!” Let’s do this

The small village of Canggu in Bali was the perfect place to experience this confusing situation, as I was surrounded by many others trying to reinvent themselves too. When I wasn’t working on the client’s project, I attended events at Outpost and Dojo coworking cafés

I met a wide range of people: remote workers, entrepreneurs, digital nomads, and others just trying to escape some situation back home. There were people young and old and from many countries, but noticeably few Americans

One of Jonny's friends, Jay Dike, even motivated me to double down on refining a consulting skills course that I had created months earlier, which I had not yet actively promoted

With his help, I rebranded the course from Strategy Toolkit to Think Like A Strategy Consultant, moved the writing and videos from my personal site to a new platform I called StrategyU, and learned about digital marketing for the first time. Two months later, that course started generating income

I would later call this “good enough” work

The energy of Bali was intoxicating and it made me realize how receptive and responsive I was to the people around me. I loved this camaraderie of being surrounded by people on similarly uncertain, if not crazy, paths

when you find a path that is uniquely yours and you are able to fully inhabit it, you have no competitors