Failure and the life that's waiting for you
Why I quit my high-paying tech job, again.
Imagine you're old and reflecting on your life. Your younger self is at a crossroads, contemplating an important career move. One option is staying in your current job, providing financial stability but lacking inspiration. Alternatively, there's a vague but persistent intuition calling you towards a different path – one filled with uncertainty and potential. What advice would you give your younger self?
For so long, I wanted nothing more than for other people to respect me for being successful and not be seen as a failure. Through a series of hard conversations with a good friend and mentor, I learned what true failure is. Failure is living for something other than what the universe/your god/your intuition is telling you to do. This is a challenging truth for people to accept because listening to yourself and trusting that voice requires stepping far outside your comfort zone, embracing the unknown, and failing. It’s a long-term game.
Why willingly put yourself into this uncomfortable state when your life is fine (stable career, free time on weekends, generally happy life)? Personally, I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was more to my story. Not in the sense that I was ungrateful for what I had, but more that I was not listening to myself because it would be inconvenient.
The truth is that choosing to pursue your unique path is hard but necessary. People will call you lucky when good things happen to you. They will talk behind your back and lose confidence when they see you fail. People are scared of this. I am scared of this, but experiencing failures means you are living, truly living. It’s real-time feedback that your life is underway. Pursuing your path is necessary for your evolution as a person, otherwise you become someone else.
So now I’m 28, unemployed, with no real plan for the future. Why? Because I finally listened to myself and trusted my intuition. The initial results are promising. More energy. Less worrying. More building. I’m meeting interesting people and they are eager to help in any way they can. I’ve stopped thinking about the life that could be and I’m just living it. I know this sounds cliche but it’s true.
Once I started talking about it openly with others, I quickly realized I was not alone in feeling this way. There seems to be a shift among young people away from traditional paths. I believe this can be attributed to increased prosperity leading to more flexibility (more ways to make money, geographical flexibility, internet leverage) and to the fact that it feels harder than ever for young people to achieve the American Dream with a default path (high housing costs, rising cost of living, overreaching government). Either way, I’d argue that it’s a positive trend to see young people thinking differently about their life’s work. Imagine our world if more people pursued what they truly cared about.
So what would you tell your younger self standing at the crossroads? I would say enter the void. A well-lived life is nothing but the act of living intentionally in pursuit of your path, whatever that may be.
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Some people will read this as “quit your job and you’ll be happy” - to be clear this is not what I’m saying (although, you might). My anecdote at this particular stage in my journey involved leaving my current job to explore my interests, yours may be entirely different.
By the way, my sister is an example of someone who has been relentlessly pursuing her path for as long as I can remember, and she also happens to be the happiest person I know.