A LinkedIn message arrived in Paul Millard’s inbox not long ago. It was from a former classmate at MIT’s dual-degree engineering and MBA program. The message asked one question: ‘Do you ever feel you’re not using all your potential compared to our fellow classmates?’ Millard had been eight and a half years into what he calls the pathless path by then – no fixed employer, no predictable salary, no plan for where the money would come from six months out. He read it, felt a small sting, and then came back to the present moment.
How prestige becomes the default compass when you have no idea what you actually want
Millard’s resume, before he walked away from it, was the kind that stops a room. GE leadership development program. McKinsey. Boston Consulting Group. An MBA and a master’s in systems engineering from MIT. Ali Abdaal, who sat down with Millard in Hong Kong for a lengthy conversation later turned into a structured road map, describes first discovering Millard’s writing and feeling something click. ‘I’ve read books from people who’ve never held a real job and they say you should travel the world and do your own thing,’ Abdaal says. ‘I could never take it seriously. But Paul had fancy logos on his resume and decided to give all of that up – that was much more relatable.’
Millard estimates he left approximately one million dollars of income on the table over eight and a half years by not staying on his corporate trajectory. He does not feel much when he says that number out loud. What he got back, in his own accounting, was a life he actually wanted to live. The conversation between Abdaal and Millard breaks the journey into ten steps, and the first – win the prestige game – is a prerequisite for everything that follows. The argument is that the people most suited to stepping off the default path are usually the ones who have already played it well enough to know what it actually costs them.
Step two is spotting the misalignment. Millard describes a self-assessment he ran roughly nine years into his career, holding his current behavior up against goals he had written down in graduate school. Three of those goals: don’t take yourself too seriously, don’t become narrowly obsessed with money, don’t lose your sense of humor. By the time he checked in, he was grumpy, locked in a silent battle with his manager, pushing for a promotion he resented needing, and showing up as a version of himself he did not want to be.
The private shame of hating work that everyone around you thinks you should love
Step three is facing the shame, and it is the part of the conversation that carries the most weight. Millard has now spoken with what he estimates to be thousands of people around the world who are in some version of the same position. Many of them had not told their spouse. Had not told their friends. Had not told their parents. The shame is specific: it is not just embarrassment about disliking a job. It connects to a deeper question of whether quitting makes you a bad person – a bad productive member of society. Millard uses the phrase ‘industrially necessary egg’ to describe how many people relate to work. The egg has to fit the carton, fit the system, generate value in a standardized way. When you step out of that, you become, in the language he borrows from Ben Hunt’s writing, a bad egg.
Abdaal describes carrying his own version of this shame for years after leaving medicine – not because he felt guilty about abandoning patients, but because the feeling of being a bad person attached itself to the act of leaving regardless of the specifics. He has since spoken to corporate lawyers, consultants, and investment bankers who report the exact same sensation. The logic underneath it, rarely examined directly, is that full-time employment equals contributing to society, and departing equals opting out of that contribution.
Step four is running the numbers, and Millard offers a prompt that cuts through most of the fear quickly. Imagine your income dropped by 75 percent overnight. You are living on a quarter of what you currently earn. How does that feel? If the honest answer is ‘relieved, and I could probably make it work,’ that is significant information. If the answer is ‘impossible, not even close,’ that is also useful – it just tells you that the bar for your experiment is higher and the runway you need is longer. Millard did not match his consulting salary until his sixth year of self-employment, according to his own accounting of those years. He made roughly 800-something thousand dollars across eight and a half years on his own – a similar total, he notes, to what he earned over the same period while employed.
Steps five through seven cover taking the leap without a finished plan, hacking a living through small sequential experiments, and following energy rather than chasing a fixed niche. On that last point, Millard draws a distinction that Abdaal finds useful: don’t aim at a niche, find a mode. A mode is a way of operating – the bundle of activities you keep returning to – rather than a single specialized subject you commit to forever. Millard’s own income sources have shifted the number-one revenue driver five or six times over eight and a half years, moving from freelance consulting to an online course on consulting skills to book sales, among other things. He has generated over one million dollars in total revenue across that period, according to his own figures.
Step eight is declaring retirement – not from work itself, but from bad work. Millard ran his numbers four years into his path and found that despite feeling financially reckless, his net worth had roughly doubled during a strong period for markets, because he had left retirement funds and investments completely untouched. The reframe he settled on: he was retired from the work that drained his energy. He borrows a test from Abdaal’s own framework – the skip test. Would you skip this task if you could just jump to the finished result? If the answer is no, that task belongs in the good work category. Millard found that most of what he was doing day to day passed that test.
Step nine is handling the people around you. Millard married his wife after leaving his corporate career, not before. He notes, with some humor, that he had struggled to attract partners while listing a McKinsey title in his dating profile in New York, because the expectations attached to that title did not match the experiments he was already running in his actual life. His wife Izzy was quitting her own job the month they met. They have since lived in seven countries with their daughter over her first two and a half years. The journey has not been frictionless – Millard describes watching his wife work through money fears he recognizes from his own earlier years – but it has been, in his telling, genuinely enjoyable.
The LinkedIn message from an MIT classmate that landed with a small sting
Millard is, by his own estimate, probably in the bottom one percent of earners from his MIT MBA graduating class. He has classmates who have sold startups for hundreds of millions of dollars. He has friends making millions a year. He knows what he walked away from. What keeps him grounded, he says, is returning to a simple question: would he go back? He runs through the list – would he have met his wife, lived in different countries, had the days he would not choose to skip – and finds the answer the same each time.
Step ten is playing the infinite game – staying in motion, holding labels lightly, not treating any single identity as something to protect or defend. Millard says he does not call himself an author, a creator, a YouTuber, or a podcaster. He is somebody doing a set of activities he likes doing. That set has shifted over time and will shift again.
Back in Hong Kong, after the cameras stopped, Abdaal and Millard agreed they would have a lot to talk about over dinner. The conversation between them, in the end, was not a pitch for quitting. It was a description of what quitting actually looks like – messy, uncertain, occasionally terrifying, and, for the people who cannot stop themselves from trying it anyway, worth the confusion.
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This article was reported in June 2026.
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