I was a nerdy, straight-A student, but I was never forced to play piano or go to Kumon. My curiosity was cultivated through visits to the National Zoo and Smithsonian museums. I remember my dad would quiz me and other neighborhood kids on state capitols at the playground. I grew up in the suburbs outside Washington D.C. Where so much of our assumptions and beliefs were conferred and entrenched upon us. In order to explain, we’ll have to go back to the early days. The next week I would get money worries and back away from what seemed like a cliff. One week I would get fed up and want to quit without any foresight. Throughout the course of the year, my plan changed frequently. Yet, I was looking for the approval of my peers on the commonly trodden path who all believed they were stuck or not even aware of this other path. Here I was, already at the trailhead of the less traveled path. Two roads diverged in a wood, and I- I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. There’s that one Robert Frost poem that we all had to memorize in elementary school: Looking back, I was trying to seek consensus to justify a personal, divergent decision. They couldn’t fathom why I would willingly walk away from my six-figure remote job which made me feel like I was being naive, ungrateful, and delusional. But when I told my more conventional friends (the majority) that I wanted to quit my job, they would respond with skepticism and bewilderment. I leaned on friends who previously quit their jobs to take a career break, start a company, or pursue their creative passions. I was navigating an internal dilemma, but the external world was equally debilitating. The two parts of me whispered into their respective ear like the angel and devil on either shoulder. It was a constant mental jousting between my pragmatic, conservative left-brain and my free-spirited, open-minded right-brain. Once the seed was planted in my head, it was an arduous twelve month journey to follow through on the intention. I wasn’t sure what I would do after leaving. I left my cushy product manager tech job without another one lined up… to play, to hone my craft, to wander the unknown.īack in December 2021, during my Annual Review, I set the goal of quitting my job in 2022. After a year of toiling in the fields of my over-thinker mind and oscillating between preserving inertia and embracing uncertainty, I finally did it.
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