These Three Things Convinced Me to Quit My Six-Figure Career

Two weeks ago, I handed in my notice and quit my successful career of nine years. This job did me very well; it set me up with a great life, and I was financially comfortable. I was by no means rich, but a six-figure salary is enough to make you consider sticking it out.

I had always wanted to work for myself. I couldn’t get on with the bullshit rules that came with office life, the same eight hours regardless of your productivity and being forced into an office for no reason. I work in marketing, so I was able to do my job whenever, wherever. I know many others feel the same as I did, COVID showed us a new way of life, and it was something I couldn’t unsee.

After many futile attempts to try and convince my boss to be more flexible, I gave up and started building my own consultancy. Forward a year, and I had something that paid me the same as my salary. The thing is, I was able to run this on the side, and now my income had doubled, so I was questioning whether I should quit but instead enjoy the extra income.

Now quitting your nine-year career is scary as hell, and to add on top of this, the additional money I was bringing in made it even harder to leave. Oh, and the cherry on top, we’re in a recession, and everyone is telling me now is a dumb time to do this. Trust me when I say, taking the leap was not this courageous and dramatic leap of freedom but an anxious baby step. When I doubted whether I should do this, these three things are what pushed me forward.

1 Time

• Time is more valuable than anything. More valuable than any additional income. With time I could do anything (in theory). Quitting my job was not just about being free to work when I wanted but about being free to create and build anything I wanted for the future. It wasn’t about where I was now but where I could be with the time to explore my ideas.
• I also did the numbers. As it currently stands, my commute was 1.5 hours a day, and if I worked until I was 65 (another 33 years or 8580 days), I would spend 12,870 hours commuting or 536.25 days! So not only did I lose 1.5 years of my life to commuting, but I had to pay for the privilege. Imagine telling someone on death’s door these numbers. Don’t get me wrong, I know they would fluctuate, and I could just get a closer job, but damn, at the end of the day, that’s enough time to push me out of the rat race.
• Another aspect of freedom was spending more time with my fiance, who fortunately works at home. So again, I did the numbers… you know what’s coming. So imagine I spent half of my working at home time, working next to Emily, that’s 4290 days I get back with her, almost 12 years!

Look, it’s obvious I’m biased here, but those numbers are nuts. How could I possibly ignore this for the security of a constant paycheck? That amount of time is certainly worth the risk.

2 Regret

I read this quote recently from Jeff Bezos:

“When you think about the things that you will regret when you’re 80, they’re almost always the things that you did not do. They’re acts of omission. Very rarely are you going to regret something that you did that failed and didn’t work or whatever.”

He is totally right. Worst case scenario, my consultancy fails, and I use up my savings to pay the mortgage and get a new job. I could always make more money, but I knew I would always regret it if I didn’t at least try.

3 Failure

Anyone who has considered making the leap has always been stopped by one thing, fear. And justifiably, the fear is REAL. We are programmed our whole lives to follow the system; get a good education, get a good job, work your way up, pay into your pension and retire. So going against this is a big deal.

Then I heard a quote from Jim Carey:

“You can fail at what you don’t want, so you might as well take a chance on doing what you love.”

And wow, it hit me. Even the ‘safe’ system has its faults. If I could fail there too, then why the hell wouldn’t I try to do what I want to do?

So that’s it. I quit. Not for money, but for time, for no regrets and because I could fail at anything so I might as well go for what I want.

“We live but for a moment”

Marcus Aurelius