Paul Millerd Quotes

from Dolly Parton: "Find out who you are and do it on purpose."⁠10

There's so much more to who you are than you know right now. You are, indeed, something mysterious and someone magnificent. You hold within you – secreted for safekeeping in your heart – a great gift for this world. Although you might sometimes feel like a cog in a huge machine, that you don't really matter in the great scheme of things, the truth is that you are fully eligible for a meaningful life, a mystical life, a life of the greatest fulfillment and service.

It definitely wasn't a sudden realization. It's a little bit like having a pebble in your shoe, where you're walking and something is off, and it's mildly uncomfortable.⁠1

The word burnout was coined in the 1970s by Herbert Freudenberger, an American psychologist who studied workers in free health clinics. He found that the prime candidates for burnout were those who were "dedicated and committed," trying to balance their need to give, to please others, and to work hard. He noticed that when there was added pressure from superiors, people often hit a breaking point.

Oprah Winfrey channels a modern spin on Calvin's calling, arguing that "each of us has a personal calling." To her, the "best way to succeed is to discover what you love and then find a way to offer it to others in the form of service, working hard, and also allowing the energy of the universe to lead you."25

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.

Whereas money today embodies the principle, "More for me is less for you," in a gift economy, more for you is also more for me because those who have, give to those who need it. Gifts cement the mystical realization of participation in something greater than oneself which, yet, is not separate from oneself. The axioms of rational self-interest change because the self has expanded to include something of the other.

once you are on the pathless path, defining your own constraints and fixed points is not a choice, it's essential to thriving on your journey.

We like to think that once we "make it" we can finally be ourselves, but based on who the companies selected, it was clear that the longer people stay at a company, the higher odds that they would become what the company wanted. I realized I didn't want that to happen to me.

To her, the "best way to succeed is to discover what you love and then find a way to offer it to others in the form of service, working hard, and also allowing the energy of the universe to lead you.

the longer we spend on a path that isn't ours, the longer it takes to move towards a path that is.

While ambition does not preclude aspiration, Callard argues that ambition "consumes much of an agent's efforts and does not expand his value horizons."⁠8

I have a suspicion that a whole bunch of energy will get unlocked. I'll just start doing things, and creating things and talking to people, and going to places…that I cannot fundamentally imagine right now, and it will be that stuff that shapes my life going forward…I am curious what else will show up.

We are convinced that the only way forward is the path we've been on or what we've seen people like us do. This is a silent conspiracy that constrains the possibilities of our lives.

I have a suspicion that a whole bunch of energy will get unlocked. I'll just start doing things, and creating things and talking to people, and going to places…that I cannot fundamentally imagine right now, and it will be that stuff that shapes my life going forward…I am curious what else will show up.⁠3 He was able to take the leap because he had tapped into the power of wonder, enabling him to be excited about an uncertain future.