This Book Made Me Quit My Job (as a Doctor)

once upon a time there were two friends John and Jane who grew up in the same town they were inseparable always discussing their dreams and aspirations but as they grew older and started to build their careers they chose different paths to success John was a firm believer in the traditional route to success and he followed the default path he earned a prestigious degree he landed a high paying job at a well-known company and he quickly climbed the corporate ladder on paper he had it all a high salary job security and social status however deep down Jon couldn't shake the feeling of emptiness and dissatisfaction that often kept him awake at night meanwhile Jane chose the pathless path a journey filled with twists and turns and uncertainty instead of sticking to the conventional route she explored various career paths she took on projects that resonated with her values and she embraced a growth mindset she became an entrepreneur she started a social Enterprise and she even took some time off to travel and volunteer in underprivileged communities Jane's career was anything but predictable and she sometimes struggled financially however she felt a deep sense of fulfillment and purpose in her work knowing that she was making a difference in the world and living life on her own terms these two things the default path and the pathless path are to the concepts that Paul Millard contrasts in this book the pathless park imagining a story a new story for work and life which is the subject of this episode of book club which is the ongoing series that we've been doing now for three years the ongoing Series where we distill and discuss some of my favorite highlights from my favorite books now this was one of the most impactful books that I read last year and it really gave me the terminology and a few mental models and almost permission to explore a non-traditional career path and so if you've been feeling lost in your career or somewhat directionless in life and you're kind of thinking that that's a bad thing then this might be an interesting book for you to read anyway in this video I want to talk about 10 of my favorite points from the book The ones that most resonated with me and I hope that some of this stuff will resonate with you as well the first one is to appreciate the difference between the default path and the pathless path so essentially the default path is that thing that we get told when we're younger that like hey just go to a good school and get good grades and when you get good grades you'll be able to go to good college or university and then you'll apply for a good job and then you'll get a nice job at a nice paying job when you climb the corporate ladder and eventually you'll be happy whereas in contrast to that we have what Paul Miller called The pathless Path he writes that the pathless path is an alternative to the default path it is an Embrace of uncertainty and discomfort it's a call to Adventure in a world that tells us to conform for me it's also a gentle reminder to laugh when things feel out of control and trusting that an uncertain future is not a problem to be solved now I love the terminology here this idea of default path versus pathos path and it really kind of helped me in my own life because when I took a break from the the traditional default path of medicine to embrace this like more pathless path of being an internet entrepreneur youtubery type thing I was always kind of racked with a sense of like uncertainty at like I don't really know what my life is going to look like and I'd have conversations with my mom where she'd be like what's your plan son uh and I'd be like honestly I don't know and she'd be like there's a lot of uncertainty in this kind of entrepreneurial career path and every entrepreneur and Creator and author even that I've ever spoken to on my podcast or in real life has vibed with this idea of uncertainty when you're doing your own thing and what I like about Paul Miller's book is that it really explores where this fear of uncertainty comes from and even just having that terminology that's saying that like hey the default path is certain where you kind of know what you're doing you know what what corporate career you're on whatever field it might be in is actually very different to the pathos path where you're trying to embrace uncertainty as much as you can now speaking of uncertainty the next point that really resonated with me is the idea of the certainty trap and that's this idea that often we will suffer through kind of not really enjoying our jobs or not enjoying the thing that we're doing but we'll trade that lack of enjoyment for some amount of certainty like I don't enjoy the job that much but at least I know that I'm gonna be in this place for in the next 12 months we often value certainty and security over potentially following our dreams and doing the thing that most resonates with us now obviously if you have a family to support and you've got dependents and you've got people relying on you you there is an extent to which you have to go for that you have to optimize for security and certainty because you put a mortgage in bills and a family but if you're like me or most young people that I speak to and you don't really have dependents who are depending on you financially then in that context our default Behavior still seems to be for a lot of us to default to the default path and what Paul even says in the book is that with so many options out there with all these options that we have with all the different careers that we could do it can be tempting to pick a path that offers certainty rather than doing the harder work of figuring out what we really want now the other thing that we could want rather than certainty is prestige and that brings us to point number three which is the prestige trap Prestige broadly defined as the attention that you get when you do things that other people see as impressive and often when we're deciding what to do with our careers we default to the thing that is more prestigious and there's a nice quote from Paul Graham who's the founder of Y combinator which is a startup incubator he says that Prestige is a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy and this is so true like I've experienced this all my friends have experienced this when you're in a prestigious career it's very easy to convince yourself that you're actually enjoying the thing but what you're actually in enjoying is the social status that accolades the admiration the fact that when you tell your aunt at that party what you do for a living she feels she says oh that's interesting isn't it whereas the people who are more on this pathless path like I would struggle to explain what I do for a living I used to be a doctor and then I disappointed my mum when I became a YouTuber most of my friends who are entrepreneurs would struggle to explain what they do for a living and These Days In fairness the whole like entrepreneurship startup thing has become a bit glamorized to the point that there is some amount of like Old World Prestige associated with being an entrepreneur but like the point is prestige is a trap and one of the things I took away from the book is that whenever I'm making a decision that happens to also be in line with Prestige I need to be very careful about my motives now Point number four is about our modern relationship with work and the idea here is that a modern relationship with work is quite extrinsic rather than intrinsic we often view work as a means to an end whereas what philosopher Andrew Taggart says is that if we're actually optimizing for meaning and fulfillment those things don't come from chasing external metrics of success those things come instead from treating your work like a craft and treating it as an end in itself as a form of creative expression and so if you can view your work in this way you can view it where you value the work for its own sake rather than being a extrinsically motivated kind of striving for some kind of reward then you're way more likely to find meaning and fulfillment in that work now one thing that Paul talks a lot about in the book is the idea of traveling and doing the digital Nomad life if you're into that sort of thing and actually one of the tools that's really helped me when I've been traveling is in fact surf shark VPN who are very kindly sponsoring this video and there were a couple of areas of my life in which I really appreciated having a VPN the first one is if I'm trying to download scientific papers academic papers from scihub for example super helpful having a VPN to mask my internet traffic to get around any blocks or any filters anything like that and secondly when I'm traveling often in different countries they will just randomly block different sites or like Hotel Wi-Fi's won't allow you to access certain types of site Reddit is often banned in some of these Wi-Fi networks and so being able to connect through a VPN which kind of anonymizes and masks your traffic and encrypts it means that a no one can snoop what you're doing on the internet but B it allows you to get around to those sorts of filters and I'm going to be honest so surfshark actually reached out over a year ago and then wanted to sponsor some videos but at the time I said no because I didn't I honestly didn't use a VPN at the time but since then I've actually been using surfsharkvpn for all of these different use cases and so we reached back out to them and said hey guys would you be interested in sponsoring this video and they very kindly said yes and they very kindly offered an exclusive discount for our viewers as well and so if you go to surfshark.deals forward slash abdull which will be linked down below as well and you enter the promo code of dull at checkout that will give you 83 off the subscription and also three months of free access to surfsharkvpn there is a totally risk-free 30-day money-back guarantee so if you you can try it out and if you don't like it you literally get your money back it's completely risk-free so check out the link in the video description and thank you surfshark for sponsoring this video alright so idea number five is the challenge that we all have in overcoming our ought to self this is essentially about the Auto 2 or the should voice in our heads I should do this I ought to do that and on one hand this voice is clearly a good thing because it helps us follow through on our commitments but on the other hand this should attitude can stop us from making important changes to our life like I should keep working a full-time job it would be weird if I didn't work 40 hours a week at least I should stay in medicine because it's the more prestigious thing to do it's the thing that's more worthwhile for society even if it doesn't particularly fulfill me I should do it because I've spent all this time in training I've sunk six years into it whatever that might be and there's that quote that goes something along the lines of shooting yourself too often lead to a shitty life and the cool thing about this concept is that we don't have to eliminate all of the shoulds or twos from our life but it does mean that we should recognize their power and that means that if you do take a risk like if for example you start a business and for whatever reason things further down the line things don't work out your should self is going to be so powerful that it's gonna it's gonna help you get out of that mess now idea number six is the fear setting exercise now this is actually from Tim ferriss's book the four hour work week and you know Paul talks about the exercise in this book here and the idea here is that these are just seven simple journaling prompts this does not take hours to go through you can even just spend a few minutes thinking about it but if you genuinely answer these seven questions for yourself chances are you will make a significant difference in your life now this exercise has helped me so many times whenever I feel like I'm in a Crossroads in life I literally just type it on Google fear are setting Tim Ferriss I go on his blog I read through the exercise and I just do it and I spend like half an hour journaling through that and usually I'm like oh damn the thing the fears and stuff that I was saying in my head are way overblown under proportion yes the worst case scenario is pretty bad but like it's not even that bad and I could probably mitigate against the worst case scenario if I really wanted to so I'll put a link to Tim ferriss's blog post down in the video description 100 recommend bookmarking out of this thing all right we've got four more things to talk about but I'm just about to head to date night with the girlfriend LOL so I'll see you back later alright it's a new day and we're talking about Point number seven from the book which is the idea of sabbaticals now this whole idea of potentially like quitting your job and doing your own thing is probably Out Of Reach for most people but what is inreach for a lot of people is taking a sabbatical I.E a planned break from work he says firstly people become aware of their own suffering and really when you're entrenched in work especially if you're doing a job that's like okay it's reasonable it pays the bills you maybe don't enjoy it so much but like it's totally fine you kind of convince yourself that that existence is totally okay and then you take a sabbatical and you realize oh hang on the fact that I've now got space away from work has made me aware of like how much I didn't enjoy my job secondly when you take a sabbatical curiosity re-emerges when you have more spare time on your hands and I've got a few friends who are now on sabbaticals from work and for the first few weeks they were like damn I get to play video games and stuff and then after a couple of weeks they're like okay cool I want to dive into this kind of project or that project I want to really get into coding artificial intelligence stuff and thirdly after a sabbatical people often want to continue their non-work Journey there are some people that take sabbatical that are like cool I've decided on my sabbatical that I'm gonna know that I had time to think that actually the thing I was doing for my job in my career was in fact very fulfilling and they dive straight back into it but that's unusual mostly when people take a sabbatical and this was certainly the case for me you realize after reflecting quite a lot that actually hang on how do I really want to spend my life like what are my core values what are the things that are meaningful and fulfilling to me and then often that means that you know you change your approach to work so that you don't just dive back into that corporate ladder or whatever greasy pole you were climbing before your sabbatical and the way I think of it these days is like you know if you take a mini Holiday from where work maybe a week maybe two weeks maybe longer than that if you possibly can do you return to work feeling excited to get back to work or do you return to work with us with a scent of dread feeling like oh God I can't believe I have to do this again by the way if you enjoy videos like this you might like to check out the Sunday Snippets that is a weekly email that I send every Sunday and just has a few thoughts of the week along with some thoughts from books or quotes from books that I read recently and that's more of a real time kind of what's going on in my mind what am I learning and what am I reading and I share that with so far like 200 000 people on this weekly Sunday email it's completely free you can unsubscribe any time and that'll be linked down below or I'll leave doll.com Sunday if you want to check that out all right Point number eight is about experiments in living and in 1859 John Stuart Mill wrote a book on Liberty and he writes that the worth of different modes of life should be proved practically when anyone thinks fit to try them in which basically he argues that societies need people to embrace their own individuality and to conduct experiments in living there are so many different ways of living the whole you know wake up at seven go to your nine to five job get home one TV and get married get a house like all of that kind of stuff in a kind of first world country that's like one mode of living but there are so many other modes of living what would it be like to live in a man what could it be like to live in a cabin in the woods in the mountains what could it be like to spend a year traveling the world and like going doing the digital Nomad thing and really the way I think of it for myself is if I even have a vague curiosity of huh I wonder what it would be like to live in this sort of way it's worth running the experiment it's worth trying it out for a week or even a few days or maybe a month and just seeing whether my theory whether my hypothesis holds true all right Point number nine is a really nice quote from Amos taversky when he says the secret to doing a good research is to always be a little underemployed you waste years by not being able to waste hours I don't take this advice to Heart myself because I feel like my days are currently so chocolate block with stuff but I know that that's sub-optimal I know that I should have like more empty space more white space in my calendar to be able to think more creatively and to be able to actually to be able to actually think I'm always like doing something I'm trying to get more leverage on my time I'm like okay we're gonna film this video then we're gonna go to wework I'm gonna do some book stuff I'm gonna do this we've got a session here I'm gonna go gym now and I just don't allow the white space to happen in my calendar certainly one thing I'd like to do more of and that this book is encouraging me to do is to actually just not be so like on the hamster wheel of capitalism to try and churn out more and more videos to appease more and more sponsors and like make sure that every unit of my time is best spent maximally or you know optimizing for economic output and then finally the thing that I really took away from this book when you're on a puffer's path instead of being afraid or being concerned about the fact that your path is uncertain and that you don't know where you're going to be five years from now or 10 years from now you can instead approach it with curiosity and wonder I wonder what my career is going to look like five years from now let's see let's see what happens and we'll work towards it in a way that's enjoyable and sustainable hopefully and a correct course along the way and as long as I'm operating from that place of curiosity and wonder then I trust that the financial stuff will take care of itself or that something interesting will come about because I'm operating from a place of curiosity and wonder rather than from a place of fear so the pathless path was one of the most impactful books that I read last year um and if you want a list of the other 14 books that I really Vibe with that I think you could read this year then check out this video over here and that will have a few more summaries and you can see if you have any books if there are any books in there that take your fancy so thank you so much for watching and I'll see you hopefully in the next video bye

Channel: Ali Abdaal

Views: 580,007

Keywords: Ali Abdaal, Ali abdal, career, how to find the perfect career, career advice, find the perfect career, what should I do with my life, what career should I do, find a career you actually love, how to find a job you love, how to find a job that's not boring, which jobs aren't broing, how to figure out what to do with my life, how to figure out what you want to do with your life, personal devleopment, pathless path, default path, paul millerd, the pathless path paul millerd

Id: xxPdTjk7beo

Length: 14min 10sec (850 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 13 2023