Paul works across Asia during his trip and he starts to explore where his journey takes him. Chapter 6 - The First Steps ignoring the pull of needing to be a “good egg” and learning what truly enables you to thrive (what this really means is developing an appreciation for discomfort).

Paul contemplates the following question by Andrew Taggart. "If work dominated your every moment, would life be worth living?" and he answers the question is no. He references German philosopher Josef Pieper on the topic of work and leisure where leisure is a "condition of the soul". He reaches out to Andrew Taggart who proposes three more questions:

System Requirements

Most people, including myself, have a deep desire to work on things that matter to them and bring forth what is inside them.” We Want To Be Useful The need to feel useful is a powerful one. This is the hidden upside of the pathless path and a reason why finding work that aligns with what matters to you and makes you feel useful is so important. When you find the conversations you want to take part in and the work you want to keep doing, you start to feel necessary and the whole world opens up. optionality can pay consistent dividends (because you are not holding out for another job but leaving space for a little more life). On the pathless path, knowing you have enough is what gives you the freedom to say “no” to clear financial opportunities and say “yes” to something that might bring you alive and might even pay off much more over the long term. In our daily lives we should try to exist at the "frontier" of reality - by not pushing torwards our "frontier" we risk missing out on a "deeper, broader, and wider possible future that's waiting".

It’s a rare book in that it is tangentially about careers and being more focused and productive, but unlike almost every other book I have read about these topics, I finished this one and felt better about myself and my career. That’s not to say there are not areas of dissatisfaction or things I would change, but The Pathless Path gave me a new lens with which to view my work and life, rather than similarly marketed books which give a set of principles or a to-do lists which are invariably unattainable. The point here is to keep finding work that you actually enjoy doing. And you should always experiment with different types of work to find out which work you like the best and build your life around the type of work that you enjoy. On the pathless path, the goal is not to find a job, make money, build a business, or achieve any other metric. It’s to actively and consciously search for the work that you want to keep doing.The more experiments you can do, the more comfortable you can become, and this will give you more freedom to try new things without being afraid.