Book SummaryThe Pathless Path, by Paul Millerd

1-Page Summary1-Page Book Summary of The Pathless Path

The Pathless Path, published in 2022, encapsulates Paul Millerd’s non-traditional approach to career success and happiness. Millerd is a freelance blogger, business consultant, career coach, and online course creator. But he didn’t start out that way—like most people, he was taught to place conventional, full-time work at the center of his life, and he did so for many years until he realized how unhappy it made him. He argues that the traditional approach to work inevitably makes people miserable, so he encourages you to leave it behind, deprioritize work, and pursue a...

The Pathless Path Summary The History of Prioritizing Work

Before we jump into Millerd’s non-traditional approach to work, we’ll discuss the traditional approach to work. First, we’ll explain the historical events that made it popular to prioritize work ahead of everything else. Then, we’ll explain the negative consequences of prioritizing work and explore an alternative: freelancing.

How Work Became Everyone’s First Priority

Millerd explains that historically, most people understood work as something you must do to survive and believed that once your needs are met, it’s OK to stop working. However, during the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther and John Calvin introduced a new idea—that everyone had a God-given purpose and that working hard to fulfill this purpose would bring you closer to God. Millerd says that according to sociologist Max Weber in The Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism, this sparked a major cultural change in the West with long-lasting effects on the way people approach work: In capitalist countries, work became the first priority in most people’s lives.

(Shortform note: Weber explains further that while...

The Pathless Path Summary Millerd’s Shift in Priorities

Millerd provides historical and social context for our tendency to prioritize work, but he explains that he learned not to prioritize work primarily through experience. In this section, we’ll explore the lessons he learned from his career. First, we’ll discuss his beginnings in a traditional career where he prioritized work. Then, we’ll explain why his priorities changed and how he switched to freelancing.

Millerd’s Traditional Career Beginnings

Millerd explains that because his parents followed traditional career paths, he assumed that he would, too. In college, he joined the honors program, and the friends he made in that program taught him to prioritize the appearance of success over meaningful college experiences. He wanted to become part of the elite (recall that succeeding at political games opens countless doors), so he avoided challenging classes and internships in favor of easy experiences, like classes he knew he’d ace, that he could use to pad his resume.

(Shortform note: The pressure to appear successful often begins with the college application process—many high school students believe...

The Pathless Path Summary How to Deprioritize Work

Based on the lessons he learned from his own career, Millerd offers advice for anyone who’s looking to deprioritize work by becoming self-employed. This advice can be collapsed into three essential steps: altering your mindset, finding your niche, and adjusting to your new lifestyle. Let’s explore each step in detail.

Step 1: Alter Your Mindset

According to Millerd, since we’re all taught that prioritizing work is the best or only viable life path, to make a change you must first unlearn that idea and open your mind to the alternatives. He suggests that you do so by reinventing success, facing your fears, and discovering new values.

Reinvent Success

Millerd explains that most people hold two mistaken beliefs about success: First, they believe that they’ll only be judged as successful if they meet certain socially determined benchmarks, which usually represent the accumulation of wealth or social status (for example, some people define success as becoming debt-free). This is mistaken because studies suggest that most people care more about living their values to the best of their ability than adhering to social standards.

(Shortform note: In _[The Seven...

Shortform Exercise: Deprioritize Work

Come up with a plan for deprioritizing work in your life.

Think of a time when you prioritized work over other parts of your life. How did that impact your overall life satisfaction?