Thread by @p_millerd

1/ Thread about my explorations of total work, my identity as a worker and the challenges of actually building a life that doesn't revolve around work.

This is a fascinating puzzle that many people seem to be dealing with as they are working from home out of their rhythyms

2/ The first question worth thinking about is one I discovered from @andrewjtaggart. It is "are you a worker?"
aeon.co/ideas/if-work-…

Seems like an innocent question but becomes profound the more you think about it.

3/ How many choices (spending, commute, location) are based on your employment and even scarier, how much of your personality is determined by the people and systems you are part of?

4/ I never really thought about these questions until I became self-employed in 2017. Until then I had been trying to optimize on the full-time job success path and was pretty good at it

5/ I was the first in my family to go to college and my default mode with everything is to understand things from a systems-level. In college I quickly realized that the game was trying to obtain a good jobs, the more prestigious the better, so that's what I focused on.

6/ I focused on optimizing my GPA as much as possible by taking easy classes, taking additional fun classes with easy A's and making sure I never missed opportunities to boost my GPA

7/ In college I did 3 internships at Fortune 100 companies. In each I was incredibly frustrated with having to sit in an office for 40 hours a week and doing work that for the most part didn't seem all that useful to anyone.

8/ Whenever I tried to talk about these things, I would get standard responses like "welcome to the real world!" or reminding me that "you gotta work to make a living!"

9/ I probably became a bit cynical about work at this age, but my experience shifting companies an opportunities in college showed me that moving domains and industries and functions was only challenging because everyone assumes you need to pick a lane.

10/ So from that point, I decided I would just aggressively try to get the jobs I wanted. In senior year of college, this meant going after strategy consulting jobs. Long story short: I applied to every firm in the country and got rejected from them all.

11/ So I ended up going to work for GE in the Financial Management Program. Although I had only taken four finance and accounting classes in college, they accepted me, helped by my previous summer internship in another GE business.

12/ My real goal was to work in strategy consulting though. So after six months at GE and losing faith in me ever lasting long in a large public corporation I started applying to consulting firms again.

13/ Long story short: I got rejected from all the firms again except McKinsey, who hired me in their research analyst program.

This changed my life...and it guaranteed my life would become centered around work for the next 9 years.

14/ I honestly didn't know anything about elite worlds until I worked there, but once I showed up it was clear that almost everyone there was in on a secret world I knew nothing about with its own languages, codes, assumptions, beliefs.

15/ One of those unquestioned beliefs is that one of the most noble things you can do is have impact at scale - in layman's terms, try to work for a large organization who is seemingly doing something positive even if the true impact is hard to measure.

16/ If you can't do that, you should find something you're passionate about. Corporations now try to sell you this in their marketing materials, promising "meaningful work" and work with "purpose" - this is directly catering to this knowledge class of people.

17/ I called BS on the impact idea (my systems thinking knowledge of 2nd order unintended effects is too powerful!) but bought deeply into the meaningful work idea.

18/ So after landing a job at McKinsey in 2008, I spent the next nine years trying to find that "perfect" job. Everything was always a bit off for me. I went to b-school for two years and then worked at three more firms.

19/ I liked the work at all these places, but as @khemaridh says, there was always that "pebble in my shoe" feeling that something was off. In my conversations with people this seems to resonate with A LOT of people (more on this in a bit).

20/ By 30 years old, I was working with CEOs & Boards doing consulting work and was pretty good at it making a great salary in NYC. I also had "work life balance" working 40-45 hours a week. In fact I had worked no more than 45 hours a week for most of my career.

21/ Yet, I was burned out!

I now clearly see the reasons for this, but did not at the time. Over the years I learned that to succeed in the corporate world you should bring less and less of yourself to work.

I was letting the side open to the deeper mystery of life die.

22/ The corporate world chips away slowly and gets the package it wants.

In my last job I even got comments about facial expressions, clothing, language and proper spelling to use to fit in better. Even if its not explicit, its very clear how you needed to look & act.

23/ Many people see this as perfect for someone like me - a straight, white man.

However, the men I saw leading organizations weren't my role models. I always gravitated to the other weirdos and outsiders in the organization - those with pebbles in their shoes too.

24/ This was always a very diverse group of people and usually more women than men.

One thing people miss in the discourse about leadership & CEO positions is from a McK survey, only "40% of women and 56% of men had any ambition to become a top executive"

25/ All of our work beliefs are based on the idea that you should always be moving UP and always progressing. The definition of a career puts this plainly:

“pursuit of consecutive progressive achievement”

26/ This idea was deeply embedded in my psyche in my twenties and it really fucked with me.

I was continuously restless and always looking for the next job. If I didn't keep showing progress, I was somehow a failure.

27/ The McKinsey research job was the best job I've ever had and I wish that I could have enjoyed it more, stayed longer and not worried about the next step.

28/ But if you keep moving and increasing your salary, everyone in your life deems you a success.

As you increasingly spend all your time with other "successful" people your imagination narrows to only the paths your friends talk about - full-time knowledge work jobs.

29/ Part of what made me look at things a bit differently in my late twenties was that I spent ages 27-29 battling a chronic case of lyme disease. It was a brutal fight that threw me into depression and forced me to step out of my identity as a worker.
think-boundless.com/conquering-chr…

30/ Laying in bed every day not being able to work during a leave of absence left me deeply confused and filled with anxiety. This is also why people don't take excess vacation between jobs or long vacations.

To not work is in some way to not exist.

31/ I looked at my life at 27 and realized most of my energy was spent trying to win external awards. Prestigious grad schools, elite schools, higher incomes. I was a worker but I knew I was more than that.

The seeds for a wondering what a different path could be were planted.

32/ When I returned to work full-time, I was filled with shame and scared to tell people some of the health issues I was still dealing with.

33/ It became very clear to me that this whole "worker" thing is only idea for young ambitious people without health issues, families or other things outside of work.

MOST people feel like they don't fit in the current system, but we never talk about this because it is hard.

34/ At 32 years old, I decided to finally take the leap. I made this decision after giving myself a self-evaluation and realizing how caught up I was with my salary and getting ahead relative to the things I claimed I cared about (learning, helping others). I needed a break.

35/ After quitting my job, I spent the first 2.5 months mostly "unemployed" - the first couple weeks I spent wandering around NYC and doing a gig for an investment firm that paid me $1000 to find people walking around NYC wearing allbirds and ask them 4 questions.

36/ I even made a sign and stood in union square park to find people to survey. It was the first time I really stepped out my comfort zone in a while.

Trying to land my first gig over the next couple months was equally uncomfortable.

I felt like a loser not making money

37/ This was also the first of many experiences that reminded me that there are many other ways to live life than going to an office building 48 weeks of the year for the rest of your life.

Seems obvious but I was blind.

38/ Over the past three years I've pursued many different types of work (writing, consulting gigs, coaching, teaching, volunteering, digital content, gifts) and many different ways of living life (travel & work, extended travel, extended leisure, month long vacations)

39/ Throughout this time I went from making a $150k salary to making $30-40k per year. Each year I've pretty much broken even or had a a slight profit. In the last six months, I'm finally feeling more secure that I can make this a long-term thing.

think-boundless.com/lifestyle-cree…

40/ Yet throughout this entire journey I've been filled with an unprecedented aliveness - a feeling that I was blind for so long and that I'm just starting to see the deeper sides of life.

A beauty and mystery that can't ever be named.

41/ All of this sounds a bit woo-woo and its really hard to talk about. All my friends and even family only see my lack of income as evidence that I am sacrificing or compromising on things, yet I feel none of that.

I'm willing to go broke to keep this journey alive.

42/ This has been the most open I've been in my life. Its also coincided with me meeting and marrying my amazing wife, making friends around the globe, learning things I didn't expect and becoming a kinder person (I think!)

43/ Yet there is no language to talk about this in modern culture, thus we default to looking at salaries and traditional status as markers of success. Economic success = well-being. Yet for me this has been opposite.

44/ Words like "growth" have become narrowed to only being seen through work. Even parenting, if one chooses to do it full-time is something relative to work (e.g.: "stay at home parent")

@vervaeke_john details our tragic loss of language here:

45/ In the modern world life has become mostly oriented around work. People hate the "what do you do?" question because it triggers this disconnect BUT we often have no alternative or different way of thinking about anything

46/ This is why people reach out to me. They know something is off, but they don't know what to do about it. It seems crazy to blow up your life or even tell anyone you think about this.

47/ In many cases people confide in me that they don't talk about this with their significant others! Instead choosing to share it with me (I'm flattered, but this is disturbing).

48/ It can be really scary for people, especially the "successful" - because "successful" just means you have less perceived life options as a trade-off for more work options.

You can live however you want as long as you work full-time.

49/ I try to help people remind themselves that they are not worker and that there are things they want to do independent of their job

it can be hard to remember these things and many people plainly tell me they don't have any interests (anymore at least)

50/ The best ways I've seen people awaken their hidden interests are:

1. extended breaks
2. making new friends outside current circle

Some % of people that will take these leaps on their own but most only after a crisis (health, job loss, deaths or even psychedelics).

51/ The hard thing about this is that the modern western life has become more expensive yet in many of the good jobs, you can earn a lot early in your career. This leads many people to have golden handcuffs. $500k house, daycare, cars, eating out habit.

52/ When I was in NYC I was spending $70k a year on just a "normal" young persons life. This is pretty crazy and if you factor in taxes it means I had to earn about $115k to break even. This kind of life makes it seem terrifying to move to one where you don't know what you make.

53/ But this is a mistake and this is the biggest truth I wish more people understood.
You are brave, you are courageous and you will figure it out.

You won't keep getting $17 cocktails if you don't know how much you'll make.

You'll be okay trust me.

54/ You'll start figuring out what you actually want to do with your life.

At 32 I decided to start.

55/ So this is what I've been doing. Trying to craft a life I'm excited about living while detaching from guaranteed salaries or status paths. It can be terrifying, but its also rewarding. With freedom comes responsibility and responsibility is the thing I didn't really have.

56/ The corporate world can be great early in your life, but over time you feel a bit powerless and are limited to the "legal" moves within the bounds of the business world and after ten years in the business world, I realized I wasn't pushing those boundaries.

57/ I had to do it myself...

...and it took me fifteen years to figure that out. I'm not sure if you can fast track this, but at least you know one other person might have experienced it!

58/ if you want to join this broader “conversation” follow along with my weekly newsletter boundless and let me know what resonates.
Boundless.substack.com/subscribe

Would love to hear from people like @profgalloway @chamath and @ariannahuff who’ve gone through similar journeys but after going much deeper down the success path than me.

Does this resonate with you?