Summary

The Pathless Path is a journey through life and work without a blueprint. It’s full of uncertainty and figuring out what’s next. So what attracts people to embark on this journey?

The following quote from the book explains it well:

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.

The sentence: “It’s to actively and consciously search for the work that you want to keep doing.”, speaks out. Because, readers are now aware that they have the freedom, and full control over what they want to do, but they need to figure it out.

This contrasts with the default path. People are assigned a career path based on what they’ve studied and have little to no say in what they want to do as the scopes need to benefit the company instead of themselves.

The default path is one that society provides, and everything including a career path is laid out. People only need to execute without any questions. It’s usually:

• Study hard, and graduate with high scores.
• Find a company and work in the field you’ve studied in.
• Work hard, get promotions, and rise through the ranks.
• Earn big bucks.
• Work for 30 ~ 40 years until you retire.
• Try to enjoy the retirement you’ve earned through the decade with an aging body.

As stated above, figuring out what to do is the most important and challenging thing on the pathless path. If they don’t, people will struggle to take full advantage of it as they’ll feel lost and aimless despite the freedom gained.

People discover what they want by learning from experiences, which come from taking deliberate actions. In addition to taking action, here are some questions people can ask themselves to figure it out:

1. What are some works that deeply matter to me and bring forth what is inside me?
2. What brought me alive in the past?
3. Who do I want to serve on the pathless path?
4. How would you define success for yourself beyond just accumulating money?

Takeaways

Aside from the summary, here are my main takeaways from it:

1. Figure out what kind of work makes you come alive / internally fulfilled.
2. Experiment with different lifestyles on the pathless path, the freedom allows us to figure out what works and doesn’t work for us.
3. Uncertainty is scary, but don’t run away from it to the default path. Manage it by immersing and embracing it.
4. Don’t tie your identity to your work, it’s part of your life but it isn’t you. Use work to supplement the lifestyle you want, instead of a means to an end
5. Surround yourself with like-minded people, the journey is less scary when there are others. Find a community or create one by writing and sharing your journey online to attract them.
6. Writing about your fear helps transform vague worries into clear problems. It frees our minds from constantly thinking about them, as they become problems we can actively solve