Making The Decision To Quit My Job

The rich invest in time, the poor invest in money. –Warren Buffet

For the past year I’ve been inching towards the decision to quit my job. I’ve been too scared to quit even though I was feeling dissatisfied and bored with work. I would think about all the possibilities of what I could do with my time if I took the leap to quit my job but couldn’t commit to making that decision. I was clinging to the safety of receiving a paycheck. I wanted someone else to make the decision for me. If work laid me off it would force me into the world without work that I had been too scared to make the decision to go into.

For the past year, I have been feeling bored and disengaged at work. I could have tried new things at work or tried getting a different position but I never had the desire or energy to do it.  I respected the work the company was doing but it didn’t interest me. I wanted to spend my time and energy writing, learning about healthy aging, teaching, and helping older adults. I would be grumpy on workdays when I had a lot of meetings. When someone would send me a meeting invite I would think NOOOOO. It was not how I wanted to spend my time.

The worrier in me would justify working it’s just a job, you’re making a good salary it’s a good company, you get to work from home. You can do this job and pursue your other interests. I felt like all of my brain energy went into work and at the end of the day I didn’t have the energy to engage in my interests like writing and reading about health and longevity. After work, all I wanted to do was go outside and give my brain a break from thinking.

I would listen to podcasts and read books that reinforced the message of finding my passion and reminding me that life was too short to not pursue what I love. I would see quotes that would speak to my soul.

That what you seek is also seeking you –Rumi

Some people die with the light still inside

And you? How much time do you have? That’s right, you don’t know which is why you have to be firm, you have to be strong, which is why you can’t let people steal the one thing you can never get back: your precious time.-The Daily Stoic

I would ponder these things and it would push me closer and closer to the edge of quitting. I knew I wasn’t doing what I loved but it was a paycheck and the status of having a “good” job that had me clinging on. 

In the background of pondering my decision to quit, my husband Brandon was no longer working full-time and took a sabbatical from work for a few months. He resumed working doing part-time freelance work. It gave him the time to spend his days trail running, writing, learning new things and I became resentful of his freedom. He would come home from a trail run and I would be stewing over the fact that I had been in meetings half the day and I didn’t feel like I had enough time to do the things I wanted to do because of work.

We set a financial goal for ourselves to be financially independent by the time we were 40 so we didn’t have to work full-time if we didn’t want to. We attained this financial goal but I was still clinging on to the paycheck. I believed my paycheck was giving us more freedom to travel and do things but it was actually giving us less freedom because I was spending 30-40 hours a week tied to my computer doing something I didn’t love.

I loved that I could travel for work but traveling for work meant spending time working someplace other than home. I would fly in, stay at hotel, get up the next morning conduct meetings then fly home. There were times when Brandon would join me on my work trips and I would extend my time there so we could explore and it was fun but the work part wasn’t enjoyable. I would find myself sitting in a meeting room at some corporate building, wearing business clothes, prepping for a presentation thinking what the hell are you doing? You’re not the girl that wants to be making presentations in conference rooms, you’re the girl that wants to be active and outside wearing workout clothes. When travel was put on hold last year due to Covid, Brandon and I decided to go on road trips. We traveled to places we wanted to go, when we wanted to go, and do the things we wanted to do and it was so much more enjoyable than traveling for work.

Money is a renewable resource. I can make more money but I will never get my time back.  I turned 40 last year and I’m staring down the second half of life and I’ve decided I don’t want to spend a large chunk of my time doing something I don’t enjoy when I could be giving my time and energy to things I find more meaningful.

I would hear stories of people quitting their corporate jobs like Artemis Scantalides, The Minimalists, Sam Plavins, and Christine Reed and I admired their courage to leave behind the safe path of a regular job and take a chance on themselves. The work they’ve done crafting their own career is admirable. I wanted to be like them and take a chance on myself but I felt too scared for too long.

Once I made the decision to quit I was all in. When I gave my notice I was so excited to move on to what I really want to do which is teach and train that it’s been hard staying engaged at work. I’ve had oh shit moments where the reality of my decision scares me. I did my exit interview with HR and was thinking people are tripping over themselves to work here and you’re just going to walk away from it? I saw my last paycheck after getting a promotion and thought, not sure when you’ll see another paycheck like that again.

The excitement of paving this next path in life outweighs the moments of fear. I’m anxiously awaiting having more time to travel, hike, hang out with friends, volunteer, teach senior fitness classes, read, learn, and write.

When I look back on my life I want to be able to say I took some risks, I took a path less traveled, I explored and took a chance on myself. I don’t know what this new path will hold but I trust that good things will come when I put my time and energy into the things that I love.