“Nobody changed the world working 40-hours a week.”
That quote changed my entire life trajectory, awakening a sleeping giant in me that wanted to do something meaningful. I don’t weaponize it against people working normal jobs because everyone wants something different in life.
Obviously it’s possible to change the world from any position, but when I read that I was in a position where I felt stuck. It resonated with my desire to reach my full potential, and I didn’t think I could do it where I currently was.
So I put a half-baked plan together to quit.
I’ve actually quit two full-time, well-paying stable positions over the last six years. In 2017, I left civil engineering to become a programmer… without any guarantee of a job waiting for me. Four years later, I quit my corporate IT job to launch a startup… with no product or customers.
I decided to build the plane while flying.
For anyone interested in doing the same thing, I offer the following advice grounded in my personal experiences:
Be stubborn about your goals, flexible with your methods
You have to know where you want to go. There’s no point in jumping off if you don’t have a clear landing in mind.
You don’t have to hash out all the dirty details of the new life you want – an arguably impossible task – but you need a rough idea of what you want. Clarity around your next endgame helps you see intermediate paths worth taking.
The first opportunity I hopped on when I wanted to break into tech was a corporate internship in IT – a stone’s throw from what I really wanted at the time (web development). I accepted the internship because inside the company doors were teams of people doing the job I actually wanted. Getting a foot in the door gave me a closer look at the life I longed for.
I was stubborn about becoming a web developer, but flexible with getting there. It didn’t have to be a straight line, and it wasn’t.
Some people get stuck believing there is only one way to get what they want, but success doesn’t play that way: everyone’s story is unique, and there are many different ways to win, even if some of them involve losing a little bit first.
How you reach the destination doesn’t matter as much as arriving there, but it’s easy to get stuck on the tactics because they’re louder.
Be a student
If you’re building the plane while flying it, it’s not because you had everything figured out at takeoff.
And that’s okay if you’re committed to learning, otherwise you’re going to crash.
I worked alongside a lot of really smart people in my corporate life. Unfortunately, a few of them had stopped learning about the new and disruptive changes going on in the industry.
I don’t harbor any negativity toward them – the corporation is what allowed them to remain past their relevance – but the stunted growth limits their upside in other roles.
Quitting your job without a parachute creates an incredible opportunity to take time to look beyond the bubble that work creates around you to see the world. When you’re in the thick of it, it’s hard to see what’s happening around you. Quitting created space from the daily worries, tasks, and politics of the workplace and granted me crystal clear vision of the market.
Take advantage of your time outside the bubble to study the latest trends, grow your network, and breathe fresh air into your next opportunity.
I spent the summer after quitting civil engineering learning code. Everything I learned was the latest and greatest because I bootstrapped my education with recent and relevant material (thank you, YouTube).
During my interviews, I came in hot with knowledge of the latest frameworks and languages in the industry, free of the industry fog that comes with having a full time job.
But don’t allow your student mindset to relax when you make the transition into a new job: prioritize learning.
When I accepted my first full-time job in tech, I was behind where I wanted to be. After work I’d study buzzwords and topics to accelerate the value I could bring to the company. It paid off, resulting in a few promotions and an ambitious reputation that carried my career for the next four years.
Be mindful of your lifestyle
There are two things you have to figure out before quitting a job with nothing on the other side:
- An idea of where you want to go
- Money
The exciting/scary part of pursuing greener pastures is the impact it has on your life. Freedom over my schedule was worth sacrificing a salary because I had a financial plan in place.
Money Strategy #1: Save up some money to buy yourself time.
Have an idea of how your financial situation translates into time before you quit your job.
When I departed engineering to learn code, I had roughly 4-6 months of savings to work through before I needed to land something. I landed a job in three months, but that may have had to do with the fear of running out of money before achieving my goal of an entry-level position.
Money Strategy #2: Side hustle money.
When I left my corporate job to launch my startup I had savings, but I also had passive income courtesy of my hobby blog – a revenue channel that took 2 years of work to build (hardly passive).
A recurring stream of money allowed me to build a money-making startup without dipping into my savings. Side hustles give you something to do while also paying you.
As noted in Morgan Housel’s book The Psychology of Money, happiness comes from having control over our time, and money is the gateway to control. A profitable side hustle creates money to create time; time creates space for opportunity.
How much money you’ll need depends on your lifestyle.
I’m an extremely frugal person. I can make $1,000 last for years if I need to. After leaving both jobs I made adjustments to my lifestyle to stretch my wallet and give myself the most time possible to get lucky.
The temporary lifestyle inconvenience was an investment in my dreams.
If I refused to change my lifestyle and figure out how to live on a smaller budget, I might not have had enough time to get where I wanted to go and it wouldn’t have been worth sustaining the lifestyle in the first place. Sometimes, temporary pain leads to everlasting joy.
If I didn’t give up a few things to buy extra time, I’d have to question if I really wanted what I dreamt about in the first place.