Hey everyone,
This week marks exactly 2 years since I quit my corporate management consulting job.
I wanted to share what I wrote in this Sunday Night Review email 2 years ago, because it was the most difficult decision I’ve made in my life to date.
Luckily, it turned out to also be the best decision I’ve ever made.
Up to that point in January 2022, the majority of my life decisions were made for me. School, uni, graduate job. But this to me felt like a clear rejection of that default path, and an embracing of a more uncertain path.
Career decisions like this are some of the most challenging that we have to make, and they ultimately play a ridiculously large part in how we actually spend our time each week.
Had we made a different decision at any moment in our life, we might be doing something different today. I find that both scary and beautiful.
If only I’d just made 1-2 different decisions when I was a teenager, and I would have been a professional footballer for Arsenal and be playing in the Premier League right now. I was a mere whisker away from that 🤥
Anyway, I’m not encouraging people to quit their jobs, especially without thinking about it, but I like to share my story hoping that it might inspire reflection and action in some of you.
23rd January 2022
“So I decided to quit my job...Friday was my last day.
I was working as a graduate management consultant for a really great company, but the work didn't particularly resonate with me.
I loved the people I was working with and the atmosphere in the office, but I was never won over by what we were doing.
Quitting did happen fairly quickly in reality (about 3 months after starting YouTube), but it was not without serious reflection and consideration that I actually ended up handing in my notice.
I have been incredibly stressed about it at times because it felt like it was stupid to turn away from a good job with clear career progression.
Ultimately though, the thing that did it for me was that the risk of not quitting was greater than the risk of quitting. Staying and losing time now felt worse than trying something that I wanted to try, and failing.
I needed the graduate, suit wearing, corporate job to learn about that world and to give me the courage I needed to do something different like start this email newsletter and a YouTube channel. Because no matter how strange it felt to post stuff online, at least I had a normal, traditional job.
But as soon as it had given me that courage to act, it had given me what I needed. I had to move on.
Finally, something that reassured me about this difficult decision was a note that I found in the diary I keep on my phone.
I was re-reading things from 2019. I wrote this whilst I was working in the library at university, revising for my final year exams.
This really surprised me because it was exactly how I felt about my consulting job.
When people asked me about my job I always said "yeah the work is ok but I really love the people I work with" and this screenshot just reminded me that I felt this way before, I wasn't acting impulsively.
For some people, I'm sure working with your friends would be enough, but it just isn't for me it seems.”
Over the past 2 years since I quit, nothing has been as hard as that.
I was taking a step towards living a live that I wanted, not one that I felt society wanted for me.
Alex Hormozi had a similar experience, which he shared in a recent podcast:
“All the stuff that I described that was really tough, that I went through, was not as hard as me quitting my job. It was by far the hardest decision of my entire life, bar none. Because the things that I was actually caught up with were the opinions of other people.
The opinions of my father, the opinions of the people I went to school with who I thought would judge me for leaving this good job to probably become a failed gym owner and how lame that would sound, compared to a consultant and going to Harvard. I was going to go from peak white collar, to a very blue collar profession making significantly less, because I “loved it”.
And I’ll say this again, sometimes you have to let other people’s dreams for your life die, for yours to live.
And for me it was when I continued every day to not want to wake up, that was my “wake up call” and it was the hardest decision of my entire life, by far”
That’s some hot shit for a Sunday.
Let’s get it this week.
hell yeah, proud of you!!