Hello & welcome to Out of Office— a Creative Living platform 🍇🪁🤸♂️🌞 and place that helps people live a more creative, inspired everyday life.🌳🎨 Through cohort programs, creative experiences, and seasonal inspiration, we help individuals and teams reimagine how they work and live. Creative Ways of Living: Paul MillerdAn interview with the author of "The Pathless Path" on how to embrace curiosity, experimentation, shift away from the default modes of success and embrace a life outside traditional work.
Hello! You’re reading Creative Ways of Living, an interview series from Out Of Office Network,where we’re widening our aperture around more creative (and gratifying!) ways of living and working. Ways that allow us to build our identities around all of the vibrant – and varied! – parts of ourselves, and bring curiosity into our everyday lives. In this month’s edition, we’re talking to Paul Millerd — writer, podcaster, and creative wanderer best known for The Pathless Path, a book that has quietly inspired thousands of people to embrace a different kind of journey, one focused on coming alive, embracing uncertainty, experimenting, and being open to possibility. As you can imagine, it’s very aligned to what we’re talking about here at Out of Office :) After leaving a traditional consulting career at McKinsey and BCG, Paul has spent the last eight years living and working in a way that prioritizes freedom, curiosity, and the kind of experiments that make no sense on a résumé. I came across Paul’s book a few years ago, and since then have been mentioning it many times to friends and community members, and especially lately have appreciated his honesty and humor he brings to navigating a life outside the convention. In this conversation, I also wanted to know about the way he balances fatherhood and a flexible, nomadic life across Asia, which was really inspiring and comforting for me to hear, knowing there are others exploring how work x parenthood can be reimagined, leaning away from traditional/formal work. In this interview, he shares glimpses of his days in Chiang Mai — slow mornings with his daughter, long walks, coworking adventures, and an openness to not knowing what comes next, even with the realities that come with family life. Hope you enjoy the conversation! What does life look like for you these days? How do you fill your days? For the last four months, I’ve been living in Chiang Mai, Thailand with my wife, daughter, and father-in-law. The experience has been beyond my imagination of combining travel, work, and family. For the previous two years, my wife and I were on our own, primarily taking care of our daughter ourselves in the U.S., without extended family, and we struggled to balance everything. During our time here, I’ve been working at a coworking place where we’ve made many friends, and have been spending lots of time exploring with family. I work four or five days a week from 9 to 4, so I get to spend quite a bit of time with my daughter every morning and every night and then every weekend. I’m still finding my footing, having more structured work blocks and mapping out what the future path looks like for me in terms of what might fund our life in the future, but given some ongoing book earnings and other income sources, I’m not in a rush.
In that first year, it was quite obvious how much I loved the freedom and autonomy of working on my own and from there, I became determined to build a life around time freedom, creative freedom, and not having to take another job. Tell us about the path that has led you to the life you live today. I blew up my life at 32 without much of a plan other than continuing to do consulting just as a freelancer. In that first year, it was quite obvious how much I loved the freedom and autonomy of working on my own and from there, I became determined to build a life around time freedom, creative freedom, and not having to take another job. I’m 8.5 years into this journey and am still having a ton of fun. For me, Creative Living is about living at the frontier of my own understanding and imagination, and daring to take one step beyond that. What does creative living mean to you? For me, it is about living at the frontier of my own understanding and imagination, and daring to take one step beyond that. I think for me, living creatively and doing creative work are inextricably linked. When I am rigid in my thinking, I am rigid in my work and vice versa. One thing I’ve struggled with since having a kid is a more structured workweek. I got stuck trying to force my writing to happen in set time periods. One thing that’s helped me is to see these times I’ve devoted to “work” as time I should devote to living more broadly. So if I feel called to wander, goof off, go for a hike, go to the gym, or just take a nap, I go do it. Leaning into the mode of what feels right rather than what I should be doing has been the fundamental creative practice that I’ve committed to on this path, and it’s something I want to continue for the rest of my life. Leaning into the mode of what feels right rather than what I should be doing has been the fundamental creative practice that I’ve committed to on this path, and it’s something I want to continue for the rest of my life. How do you sustain a living while traveling and living the pathless path? And how did you uncover what you want in life, rather than following the standard definition of success / the default path? When I quit my job, I had investments which I vowed not to use. On top of that, I had savings that would last me about a year if I didn’t earn any income. So the metric of success I used was simply to break even each year, which, on average, I’ve done every year. There have been a couple of years in which I made a lot more money than we needed, and all I did was invest more and build more of a savings buffer. My wife and I don’t really care about the material possessions that a lot of people want, like a house or car, so our costs have not really gone up dramatically after having a kid, and we aren’t really trying to continue increasing income every year, something I’ve realized many people have come to expect. Moving back to Asia has taken some of the cost pressure off, as inflation in the U.S. had been pretty intense over the last couple of years. I still have income coming in from an online course, some occasional consulting gigs I do for companies, and my book. For now, it’s enough, but these income sources are declining and probably won’t last more than another couple of years. But since I still have savings, I’m going to keep focusing on creative work and pushing the frontier of that rather than aiming at money itself. You currently live in Asia with your family… I wonder if you could tell us about that choice? My wife is from Taiwan, and after we met, I spent three years living there with her and in a couple of other countries. Asia broadly is a much easier place to live if you want to live nomadically, like we have been this year, as there is just much more of a housing ecosystem geared toward that kind of thing. Then, more practically, we are very close to her family, and they want to be more actively involved in helping with our daughter and future kids, so that’s really hard to say no to!  For us, we actually like the uncertainty. I see it as exciting and filled with possibilities. Do I know how we will be living in five years? No idea. But I’m excited to see where we end up! More broadly, living in Asia allows us to tap into an expat/nomad/unconventional path kind of family that is much harder to find in the US, and we end up really connecting with similar couples who married someone from another country, are raising their kids with multiple languages, and are still not sure about education choices in the future. For us, we actually like the uncertainty. I see it as exciting and filled with possibilities. Do I know how we will be living in five years? No idea. But I’m excited to see where we end up!
I think many parents worry about setting their kids up for success in the future. I’d say that’s just not our aim in life right now. How do you feel your flexible lifestyle shapes the experience of your daughter? And how does that mirror back, shaping you? I think the biggest thing is just the time we have with her, and also, since our lives are so flexible, we can create the space to deal with the inevitable ups and downs of parenting. In the first two years of my daughter’s life, I watched her 2-3 full weekdays myself and then with my wife every morning and night and the weekends. Which is to say, I probably spent a ton more time with her than most dads, and even moms do in this time. I wasn’t really doing this with any sort of egoic stance like I’m doing it better than others, but rather my own continued curiosity of, “what if I leaned more into this rather than work?” I’ve been curious about leaning away from formal work my whole life, and this is just one more experiment in that vein. The biggest thing I’ve experienced is really just a softening into myself. Through my daughter, I’ve expanded my capacity for love, joy, and silliness, and to be honest, I sense I’ve gained more from her than she might have from me. I feel so lucky that I was able to spend this much time with her, as I feel we have a beautiful foundation of a relationship which I hope will last the rest of her life. I think many parents worry about setting their kids up for success in the future. I’d say that’s just not our aim in life right now. I am much more worried about making sure we have a sense of connection to our daughter and that she feels loved. Everything is downstream from that. Do you have any rituals to break up your routine, stay inspired and be in the moment? When I’m feeling stuck, I like to go for random long walks, ideally in new neighborhoods or areas of the place I’m living where I haven’t been before. Writing is something I love doing and have been doing for over ten years at this point. I get more frustrated when I’m not writing than when I am writing continuously, so it’s pretty easy to realize, “Oh I just need to write more.” I don’t really struggle with showing up and doing something like writing the answers to these questions. It’s fun, I enjoyed it, I like your questions, and it feels like a good way to spend my time. I think working on my own has really allowed me to exist more in the present, as I don’t have to pretend to care about other people’s goals. My life is quite simple. I want to write a bit, hang out with my daughter, laugh, smile, cry, and fully engage with life. That’s all I need to stay inspired, and I’m lucky to be living it. Anything else you want to share? To the fellow weirdos who must find an alternative path in life, I am rooting for you.
💭 Resource of the monthIf you’re looking for more inspiration for non-traditional paths, check out For Starters — a weekly briefing for the next generation of small business owners. It’s full of inspiration and ideas for dreaming up a business, and hearing stories of how others made their ideas turn into a form of living, which is such an important part of the journey of leaning into our dreams! For Starters comes out every Friday – for free. It’s curated by Danny Giacopelli, formerly of Monocle and Courier magazines. 🧑🎨 Creative Ways of Living Cohort Early Bird AnnouncementIf you’re reading this and thinking, “I want to live a life that feels more like me, not fit myself into some mold,” I am reopening the doors to our next Creative Living Cohort! Starting Jan 28th, we meet weekly for 6 weeks:
Normally it’s 1450$.
Alice Katter is a Creative Work/Life Coach and Founder of Out of Office. Originally from Austria, she has lived in Vienna, London, and NYC. And in between, has spent months investigating work and life in Mexico, California, Cape Town, and Italy, to name a few. She is now based in Barcelona, her creative hub and haven. To access our full community practice with
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petak, 28. studenoga 2025.
Creative Ways of Living: Paul Millerd
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