I Quit My $250K Job To Become an Author

0:00this guy quit his $250,000 consulting job with one goal to break free from what he calls the default path aka the rat race I sort of just like quit it was the first time in my life that I just let life emerge at 32 years old Paul quit Corporate America to build a new life but he had no plan so he did the only thing he knew how to do he started writing every day then he discovered something that would change his life forever he writes a book The pathless Path is really my way of making sense of my life after leaving the default path I

0:38flew out to Austin Texas to meet Paul and learn more about the pathless path in this video we talk about how he found his passion for writing why he chose to self-publish his book and exactly how much money he's made as a self-published author last year I went from Grand in revenue th000 and so far in the first 6 months of this year I'm on track to sort beat that but more importantly we talk about why everyone should consider exploring the pathless path you can't actually Escape work you ultimately need to find work that can sustain your soul and the pathless path is basically committing to that I'm Pat walls and

1:15this is starter story Paul I've been reading all about your story and it's amazing you went from a job that you absolutely hated or wasn't for you and now you've turned that into a very successful self-published author tell me more about you yeah so if you look at my income it really flows up and down but really this year is the first year that book income has been half if not more of my income in the first year I made about $50,000 for my book I sold about 10,000 copies about $5 a book second year so far the first five months I've sold about 15,000 copies of my book and

1:51that's been about $75,000 in royalty which is pretty wild last year I went from 100 Grand in Revenue that's Topline that doesn't include costs or taxes to$ 249,000 and so far in the first 6 months of this year I'm on track to sort of beat that though I probably won't because I'm mostly choosing to just spend more time with my daughter than work or try to make money yeah but I started writing while I was still employed one morning I don't know why about a year before I quit my job I just decided to come into work and I said I'm going to write on Kora every day before

2:25I start doing my work and I did that for like 100 days and something in that clicked I think I was a writer from that moment on but I was dealing with some health issues I was dealing with Lyme disease and a bunch of other stuff and I just started a Blog called lime sucks and I just started sending it to people as I quit my job I started writing about my path and it went from publishing every 3 months to every two months to every month to every week and now I'm just writing all the time when you quit your job when was that that was 2017

2:53okay so tell me about that time you were working a high salary job in New York City tell me about that yeah so I desperately want wanted to break into fancy and prestigious companies early in my career I wanted to feel special but that never quite fulfills and so before I quit my job I was still applying for other jobs one company offered me much less than my current salary and the other ones rejected me and I sort of just like quit it was like the first time in my life that I just let life emerge but the next few months were just really hard I started taking action and

3:26setting up my freelance firm and my company in informed me that I had not stayed 3 years and would have to pay them back the $24,000 signing bonus and relocation expenses it was like I had to buy my freedom yeah but I had about I think 50 60 Grand in savings and for me that was like permission to just wander and do nothing and even if I go to broke I'll figure something out what I love about your story is that you turn down a very big deal with penguin random house if you don't know they are one of the biggest book publishers in the world so

4:00you could go and self-publish tell me why you did that yeah they reached out and it was interesting because they do have relationships that can help scale a book to a wider audience but I think for me it's too high of a price to pay one creative control I'm not willing to pay that price I don't want to give up any creative control even if it means less book sales for me and two they give you 10% of list price for hard covers which would be about $2 for me paperbacks I make about $7 $ a book hard covers I make about $8 a book so it's highly

4:33profitable when you got the idea for the book tell me about the process of writing it from a high level and then also getting it into print and publication early on I realized the personal story felt like a powerful Edge to explore so I just did that for a few months and it felt so good to really just say here's what I believe here's what it matters and here's what it's all about and here's my way of seeing the world and then the whole process was basically right intensely for a month or two take a step back try to get the structure and just go back and forth in

5:03between those two modes then you just output a PDF upload to Amazon and you can start printing and sending out books in like 3 days quick break this is me 5 years ago desperate to start my own business but plagued with shiny object syndrome I tried building SAS tools freelancing affiliate marketing but none of these business ideas ever panned out to anything but everything changed one day when I looked inside and wondered what if instead I built a business around what I'm good at and what I'm passionate about well that decision led me to building a business that now makes over a million dollar a year and that's

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6:10description we're running a special for the YouTube family all right enjoy the video I'll see you around peace tell me about why you decided to write a book about this and what's the what's the theme behind the book The pathless Path is really my way of making sense of my life after leaving the default path the thing about leaving the default path is you realize how powerful of a story it is for everyone people still ask what's your plan how are you going to make money after I left my job it felt weird I didn't have a plan and I realized you can't actually Escape work you

6:43ultimately need to find work that can sustain your soul I call this in my book the real work of your life and the pathless path is basically committing to that without knowing when that will arrive if you can monetize it and if you can explain it to to your parents or others how do you search for the work and find the work that can be your life's work if you're searching for the work that matters you should remove money from it as long as possible like fight for that the key though is mostly just quitting things if it's not the thing lighting you up you need to get

7:15that out of your life you need to minimize it you need to automate it you need to delegate it you need to quit what I recommend to most people is to try to find a 1 to three month Block in adulthood to take a sabatical disconnect from worker mode reconnect with forgotten Hobbies because the only thing that will let deeper things you can commit to emerge is creating space in your life I think too many people are uninspired doing work that doesn't matter them and they've made a deal to keep doing it because well for the paycheck for the health care benefits I'm willing to light it all on fire go

7:46broke decrease my earnings pay a status tax to keep doing work that matters to me once you find that work you're willing to pay so much to have it Central in your life all right let's talk about self-publishing if I wanted to self-publish my own book what do I need to do if you really want to basically do what I did which is I want to create something that feels good feels like a book matches what somebody might expect from a traditional publisher you want to invest in a good editor somebody that can help you bring the pieces together stick the landing and how everything flows together and

8:20that's typically called a developmental editor that's probably going to be one of your biggest Spence designing a book cover I use 99 designs I picked a designer I really liked his other designs formatting you can either use Amazon's tools to format the ebook or you can use another tool called rezy that's what I used I used the default options and then at the end you might want to hire somebody to proofread here's the craziest thing though it asks who's your publisher turns out you can just write your name that's what I did and tell me a little bit more about the process of marketing a self-published

8:50book my Approach is like what do I actually like doing and I'll lean into that I like talking on podcasts I like talking about the ideas in the book gifting book has been my other fun Channel as well and it's super easy with self-publishing too I can in the US send them anywhere for 450 including shipping what did the royalties look like what are some of the numbers when I was looking at my royalty numbers I was looking at 8.24 for hard cover through Amazon $745 for paperback through Amazon $ 3.98 per audiobook $428 per Kindle and then if I look at my breakdown of sales it's about 50% ebook

9:3029% print and 21% audio can you break down the cost to create this book so editing and coaching is about $3,900 book cover cost me $742 publishing was $250 a fee to Ingram spark I now think that's free the Audi book was $1,280 to produce and as of today my royalties it's basically profit is anywhere from between 125,000 to 130,00 ,000 so far all right Paul so as a writer and a self-published author what are some other ways to monetize other than just book sales for me it was always make enough money to have the space and time to continue to write early on it was freelancing then it was

10:14taking some of the experiences from freelancing and turning that into a course I have a whole another sort of side thing I run called strategy U but on top of that I slowly and deliberately built a workshop business which was like I'll do EX exactly this training for this price teaching these things I've always had this weird balance of like strategy you and doing some coaching and freelancing as needed but I keep that minimal and writing and creating and doing my podcast until recently the writing and podcast and all those things were not making any money it started to even out do I have goals of becoming a

10:50full-time Creator I don't know I kind of like the weird mix all right Paul let's talk about writing how to become a great writer how to become a confident writer like you basically just is Brute Force you need to get in the Reps such that you can deal with the fear the fear of what will people say and then you'll quickly realize especially when you're starting is nobody says anything cuz you don't have any readers and then I think over the long term you really just need to develop an individual relationship with writing some people wake up and write 4 hours every day that's never been my style for me it's I need to

11:23create space in my life and a big thing I do is like I spend a lot of days wandering because it's that wandering mental time where I'm not really doing anything I let ideas percolate I'm usually reading a lot to I'm listening to podcasts that's when the creativity happens and the writing is only when I'm channeling that later you've chosen this pathless path tell me about what the typical day in the life is for you nowadays typical day in the life for me is waking up and spending time with my daughter she's a newborn now so she requires a lot of attention and I'm really just leaning into that the whole

11:57point of my path has been to essentially take time off whenever I want it does that mean I'm not working most days no I've typically worked a few hours most days for the past several years but I've always had the ability to just stop and clear my calendar that's what I've done for the past few months there's no morning routine I typically never schedule any sort of meeting before 11:00 a.m. I really just let whatever flows flow if you could go back in time when you're just starting out on your pathless path and sit on Paul's shoulder and tell him thing what would it be I

12:29don't know if I'd mess with the timeline but I might say something like just trust trust yourself I might say something about writing too I might just say like writing is important something silly like that cuz you don't want to give away the the fun of the journey the journey has been so fun for me because it's been so uncertain and that is Adventure for me I don't know what's going to come next even now I have no idea what comes next I'm excited to see what emerges that's the whole point of this journey in this book and this path all right you heard it here folks follow

13:03the pathless path and you will be one of the most successful authors in the world like

13:14Paul