An email to Paul Millerd

Or how I spent over $1000 on a book, and it was worth it.

If you’ve been reading this blog for awhile, you may have noticed a trend in my life satisfaction or whatever:

To sum up:

• I was less than happy when I was working full time.
• Then I Retired Early thanks to Financial Independence and shit was awesome. Honeymoon phase!
• Daycare went to shit, and I abruptly became a full time stay at home dad. And though I rationally knew it before retirement, the reality that I was now completely responsible for the quality of my life also set in. Nosedive!
• You may not know it since my writing has been sparse lately, but shit is actually quite a bit better now. In retrospect, I can now see I turned the corner around March of this year, and steadily got better.

What happened this past march? Oh yeah, that Econome thing or whatever. Looking back, I made the same mistake with that conference, that I made with FI, that I made with retiring, which I’ve made with plenty of other shit.

I banked my future happiness/contentment/whatever on some external thing.

The first time I can remember doing this was with a motorcycle. I wanted a motorcycle all through high school, but my parents wouldn’t let me buy one (because death- I will 100% do the same thing to my kids). I thought for sure I’d finally be happy when I could finally have a motorcycle. Finally I legally became an adult, supported myself so I didn’t have to abide by their rules, and worked my ass off to buy a motorcycle. And holy shit, you guessed it, it was fun for a few months and then it was whatever. It didn’t magically make my life awesome.

I had a general plan for retirement, and rationally I knew my life wouldn’t be automatically 1000% better. But subconsciously I thought…well shit, life must get better without work, right? Yes and no-you’ve got to work at it.

Lo and behold, shit didn’t get automatically better. In fact, I learned that being a stay at home dad was much more stressful than I thought, even when compared to my previously crazy stressful job. So ensued months of me stumbling around trying to get better and claim the awesome post retirement life I’d slogged so hard for. It felt like I was barely treading water half the time.

But I had hope. I’d already gotten a ticket to Econome, which many had reported was a life changing conference. And I sure could use some help. Yet again, I told myself that I was responsible for making my life better. But deep down, I sure hoped somebody at that conference would show me how.

I went, and it was ok. No life changing event for me. After my less than stellar review of the conference got (comparatively) lots of traffic, I spent a lot of time thinking about what was going on there. I came to:

1. Negative stuff always attracts attention, because that’s how humans work. This made me want to blog less if that’s how you “win” or whatever. I’ve had enough negative shit in my life already.
2. The root issue I had with Econome was of my own making. Yeah, it was fun and all, but I didn’t get any life changing experience, and I had a hard time relating to some of the people. Well duh. That’s life yo. I put that event on a pedestal, and relied on it to magically show me the path to making my post-retirement life amazeballs. Of course I was let down.

And that was the turning point on the above graph. Because at that point I finally fully grasped that it was completely up to me how good or bad my life is. My rational Spock-brain had known this for years. But my hippy/emotional brain finally got on board. I realized what the best and worst thing was about early retirement was, and doubled down on figuring out ways to make the most out of it instead of waiting for someone else to tell me how.

But like the teacher appearing when the student is ready, I actually got something at Econome that really helped.

Some dude named Paul Millerd donated a bunch of copies of the book he wrote, The Pathless Path, to the conference. Being a stingy fuck, I of course snatched one up even though his bio initially me turned off. I have about zero in common with this guy, and experience makes me suspicious of people’s true intentions when they describe themselves as a coach, creator, or consultant. Luckily, I’ve been wrong about so much shit now that anytime I get this kind of suspicion, I look deeper. Many times my spidey sense is correct, and it’s somewhere between a scam or at least someone who’s trying to monetize way beyond the value they provide. But plenty of times it turns out I was being paranoid, their shit is legit, and I end up learning something. This was the latter.

I read Paul’s book, and I was right. On the surface, we don’t have much in common. But holy shit, the book was good. And I learned a lot. I’ve even reread it to underline stuff and explore his source material.

Ultimately his path was different from mine, but it was similar in that it was different than most everybody else’s. And he reports back on what helped him figure out what he actually wanted out of this unconventional life, how he worked to make his life into something he wanted to be doing, and how he deals with living a life that’s way off the mainstream. You know, basically going through a different version of what I’d been going through after retirement, and showing some ways to deal with it.

Reading the book helped me right when I needed it. It didn’t offer me a solution to my problems, or outline a specific process on how to improve my life. Instead, it made me realize that it was ok to be where I was, and helped me see that shit would be better if I worked at it. There was no set path on how to make shit better, hence the title of the book. Accepting this was the first step to progress.

Look, this dude’s book isn’t life changing. Fuck man, what book is? But it’s what I needed when I needed it. And that’s pretty special and stuff.

I wanted to send this Paul guy a thank you email, but I felt that wasn’t enough to repay him. As good as the book is, I’m betting he gets a lot of thank yous. I wanted to at least help him a little bit in return. So I started diving into his stuff to see if there was some way for me to return the favor. After listening to his latest podcast, I think found something.

Finally wrote him an email, and in doing so, I realized that maybe someone else on the internets would get some value from the two points I offered him. So I’m putting it here, in the hopes one of the seven people that read this thing know someone who would benefit from The Pathless Path, or the two things I recommended to Paul. How about that for a lengthy lead in?

Here’s the email:

Hey man. I’ve been meaning to email you thanks for awhile, but never could think of anything that I could say that would reciprocate the value I’ve gotten from your work. I got your book for free from Econome earlier this year, and it really helped me navigate this weird post work space I’ve been in for over a year now. I was at risk of going back to a job(despite going hardcorde in the FIRE stuff for 10 years so I could leave) just because this space felt so squishy and unconventional, but reading your book gave me a reference point that helped me embrace the weird and be cool with it. Definitely something we’re missing over in the FIRE community, and I can’t thank you enough for donating so many books to people like me that really need it.

After getting so much from your work, sending you an email thanking you didn’t seem like enough, and I felt like I had to at least try to pay you back in some way. For months I couldn’t think of anything worth your time. After listening to your latest podcast with Erin Doppelt, I think I finally arrived at a few things that may return the favor a little bit.

1. Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts. 

Erin mentioned this, and you said you haven’t read it. Given, I’m sure it’s been weeks or a month since you talked with her, but if you haven’t picked up this book yet, I must echo her recommendation in hopes that you do. Such a beautiful book, and like other great fiction the story is really more a way of educating the reader on different philosophies and perspectives. The writing is amazing, and has helped me to understand people in a deeper way. One small example-at my old job I used to interact with people that were on heroin daily, and would occasionally narcan them when they’d OD. I thought I understood why they live that life, and how difficult it was to break that addiction, but Shantaram showed me how wrong I was and gave me even more empathy for those sucked into opioids.

2. Daughters, and girl fiction written by Women.

So I’ve got a 6 year old son and an almost 3 year old daughter. With my son, I feel like I have a pretty good grasp on male culture with its pitfalls and good points. Sure, I don’t have everything figured out, hell, nowhere close. But with him I feel like I sorta know what he’s going to have to deal with so I can help him along the way. 

When my daughter was born, I realized I was completely lost. Yeah, I have friends and family that are women, but if anything this has shown me how much I don’t know about the female experience. And while I know I will never fully grasp the world through a woman’s perspective, I wanted to at least gain some more understanding so I could better help my daughter navigate her life. 

Something that has helped with this has been reading young adult fiction written by women and geared towards girls. This has been huge, and has at least turned unknown unknowns to known unknowns. I’m super lucky, my amazing wife is also a big reader and I’ve been going through her childhood favorites that meet this criteria. We’re both big nerds, so I’ve been reading sci fi and fantasy by Tamora Pierce and Anne McCaffrey, and now I’m going through the Harry Potter series(which is interesting in that you get to see a woman’s perspective through writing male characters). You’re a smart guy and well read, so it’s possible that you’ve already stumbled upon this technique of gaining more understanding of women. But if you haven’t, I can’t recommend this enough. Reading girl fiction written by women has definitely opened up my eyes to the world my daughter will be swimming in. 

Thanks again for the book. I’m passing it on to others; I know it will help them too. I hope you maybe get 1/10th the value I got from your book from the two things above.

And that’s that. To sum up, I recommend checking out that Pathless Path book, and Paul’s other stuff is pretty good to. Do read Shantaram, and if you’ve got a daughter, check out some girl fiction. Furthermore, if you’ve got any recommendations on how a dude could better expand his perspective of the female world, lemme know.