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Paul Millerd wasn't always this free. Prior to building a writing life of creativity, curiosity, and ruthless independence, Paul found himself living the kind of life that looks great on paper. But when the MIT graduate who'd spent a decade in strategy consulting at firms like McKinsey decided to quit, what he found was not freedom but disorientation, a weightlessness he hadn't expected—call it the unbearable lightness of being unemployed.
Leaving NYC for Asia, Paul started writing online to make sense of it all. When the pandemic arrived a few years later, the questions he'd been asking and the answers he offered up connected him with a growing body of readers who were making their own sense of our evolving relationships with work, identity, and meaning.
Whatever literary success Paul Millerd has built, he built slowly and on his own terms. He grew his readership the inefficient way: by holding hundreds of free one-on-one "curiosity conversations" with readers, who spoke candidly with him about their hidden dissatisfactions and unspoken dreams. Those exchanges crystallized into The Pathless Path (2022), a book Millerd self-published and barely launched that went on to sell tens of thousands of copies by word of mouth alone. When Penguin-Random House eventually came calling to buy the rights—offering distribution he did not need, in exchange for control he was unwilling to surrender—he turned them down.
Leaving a prestigious career to write online, selling time for free, turning down a $200K book deal from a Big 5 publisher—none of this makes a bit of sense if you think of your writing as a commodity. These decisions mark the trail of a writer who treats his work as a gift, and one who guards the freedom to keep it that way at almost any cost.
I came into his orbit in much the same way: by following my own curiosity without much of a plan. Last year I made a video about The Pathless Path because the book had gotten under my skin and I wanted to explain why. Paul reached out to tell me it was the best explanation of his work he'd heard. Knowing he lived somewhere in Asia, I invited him to drop me a line if he were ever in Korea. When he mentioned that he'd soon be in Busan, the city I happen to live in, it was clear that we'd have to arrange a curiosity conversation of our own.
The conversation that follows is the result of that unlikely overlap—which, when you think about it, captures something of its own thesis: make the thing only you would make, send it out as a gift, and be delighted with the connections it may spark.
Reject the Label
Writer Science: You've sold over 80,000 books and have 25,000 newsletter subscribers. But you say that you're not a writer. Why do you reject that label?
Paul Millerd: I am not a writer. I'm not an author.
Early on, it was very important to me to avoid the trap of overidentifying with any of the paths I was pulled to. I realized I love creating online. I loved writing. But I had spent ten years in a career in which I felt increasingly stuck, and at the end I was running away from that.
When I started doing things online—writing online, and eventually writing a book—it was very important to me to literally not do what almost everyone else around me was doing.
The reason was that I saw the same trap I had fallen into in my twenties: overly identifying with a path, and with the identity of the successful worker and consultant, and not seeing the possibilities beyond it. I never wanted to be that stuck again.
So a lot of how I've designed my path is to create optionality—psychologically. There's this boundless opportunity and possibility, while at the same time I can consistently commit to the things I actually like doing.
WS: How does not being a writer help you do that?
PM: What is a writer supposed to do? A bestselling author does talks, promotes their books, spends a lot of time connecting with other bestselling writers, worries about what people in the publishing industry think. And these are all the things I got caught up in during the first chapter of my career—what are the best companies to work for, what are the next best offers, how do I keep making more money?
After I quit my job, I fell in love with writing. And I saw that the biggest risk to actually losing that love was identifying with the identity of the writer, rather than staying focused on the enjoyment of the activity.
So while I'll introduce myself as an author or writer—mostly for the benefit of other people to understand where I fit in their world—I write because I love writing and creating.
I am not a writer or author.
Reject the Book Deal
WS: You turned down a book deal that many writers only dream of. How did you make that decision?
PM: In 2023, The Pathless Path started taking off about a year after I published it. I had sold around 10,000 copies in the first year. The book was selling faster and faster, and Penguin reached out about acquiring the rights. Economically, it's very hard for a publisher to buy a book that's already selling well—the economics are already good for the author, and publishers usually pitch authors who aren't yet in the world by saying, We can help your book get in front of a lot of people.
The week I talked to them, I had just finished a month in which I'd sold around 5,500 copies across all formats and earned about $30,000 in royalties—profit, direct to me. They were offering $70,000 for the lifetime rights of The Pathless Path—for my life plus seventy years. That's copyright. You never get those back; not even your great-great-grandchildren can get them back.
Most people take a deal like that for a two-week shot to be in a big bookstore and ride the launch energy. Maybe it's worth it. But what I was looking for was: what are the creative and weird ideas they've come up with? What did they learn from reading my book? There must be some interesting pitch, some collaboration they want to do. There were no ideas. So I said no.
Writing is this beautiful home I found, and I'm going to pursue things that bring my life energy. At all costs. I'll do other things to make money to fund this work.
Reject the Writing Rules
Paul protects the work and lets the money sort itself out. And to build the kind of writing life where that kind of decision feels simple, he had to reject six rules that most writers treat as non-negotiable.
So let's go through them in turn, because these six rules of writing sound like common sense. But these rules, if you follow them, almost guarantee you end up writing for an algorithm, an editor, or an audience—instead of for yourself.
RULE 1 — Build an Audience Before You Publish
WS: Before publishing, writers are told to build an audience. Start a newsletter, grow a following, that kind of thing. Is that true?
PM: You do need an audience in the modern world. But what does a good audience mean to me? It means I actually like the people I've attracted. I want to talk to them, engage with them, hear back from them in newsletter replies.
To get a good audience, you have to create in a way that's genuine and aligned with what you believe—not leaning into hot takes or hustle tactics to force growth.
What that's mostly meant for me is that I've grown slower than almost everyone I started writing with. I could easily hire a content person to pump out a weekly newsletter. I could run ads and funnel people in with generic "here's how to quit your job" content. It just doesn't interest me.
You do need an audience in the modern world. But what does a good audience mean to me?
I've never scheduled a post more than a day or two ahead. The ideas are live, emerging from what I'm actually thinking right now.
When I published my book, I had a couple thousand subscribers. At that level I never could have gotten a book deal. Publishers look at list size as a proxy for book sales. But what they don't know is that I'd had hour-long conversations with five hundred of those people. I'd been in this beautiful dance of sharing ideas, hearing back, riffing—creating this little ecosystem where a phrase like "the pathless path" unites people who have a lot in common.
RULE 2 — Play the Platform Game
WS: Each platform has its own incentives and rules it wants you to play by. How do you see early writers getting caught up in that?