Anytime you’re looking to make some sort of a drastic change in your life, there comes a point when you have to take a leap of faith. The title really says it all. Today, I’m going to tell you about the time I quit my job from a Walmart parking lot in Montana.
I started working for a home staging company in 2018. Basically, we would go into a house that was on the market, looking to sell, and spruce it up, and that could mean anything from bringing in new couches and rugs to hanging art on the walls and adding decorative soap dispensers to all the bathrooms.
It was a well-paying job with flexible hours, and it put me in a lot of really nice homes. As someone who’s interested in design, being able to work inside of so many different environments and observe new styles was really interesting. I still remember some of the homes I worked in, the glass floors, the palm tree and swinging chair in the living room, the view of Manhattan from the master bath. It was an eye-opening experience in a lot of ways.
There was always a part of me that wanted to be my own boss. I contemplated becoming a teacher or working for an interior design firm in Manhattan, but I remember thinking to myself, ‘I’m going to really have to love and believe in whatever or whoever it is I work for’ because the idea of dedicating so much of my time and energy to something or someone else was bizarre. I had things that I wanted to do and how was it fair that I had to put those things aside for someone else? Why should I invest in anyone besides myself? Imagine the things I could do if I dedicated all that time and energy to my ideas, the things I’m passionate about?
These ideas were all reinforced when my little sister was growing up. She was always a performer. From a very young age, she was involved in musical theater. She would have six shows in two weekends and smaller shows or performances in between the two main musicals each year. It was always really important to me, especially when she was younger, to be there, in the audience for her, and there were a few times my older brother couldn’t make it to a show because he had to work. I remember thinking to myself there’s no way that another human being, an equal of mine, would ever tell me that me working for them was more important than being there for my sister. It was all the more reason to become my own boss.
Not long after Brandon and I met, we learned that we shared that mentality, and so it wasn’t long before we started throwing around business ideas to one another. The more Brandon and I developed these ideas, the more I felt like I was wasting my time fluffing towels and putting fake succulents on a stack of books on a nightstand. It was becoming harder and harder for me to go to work and focus everyday.
I told my boss about our road trip well in advance, that I would be away for 2-3 weeks. Two weeks into our trip, I get a text from her asking if I was back and telling me that she could really use me the next day. We were in Montana. We had just crossed the border from Canada and were posted up in a Walmart parking lot for the night. Burger King, if I remember correctly, was on the menu that night.
The next morning I answered her text. I told her that I appreciated the opportunity to work for her, but that I would not be returning to work when I got back from my trip. Now, from an objective standpoint, this was a pretty risky move on my part.
Brandon and I had just leased and built out the shop. We spent most of what we had left on gas and food, traveling 10,000 miles across the country, up the coast into Canada, and I was voluntarily giving up my only source of reliable income. Wild.
Quitting my job that day was a lot like signing the lease for the shop. I was lighting a fire under my own ass, not giving myself the option to fail. One of my favorite little phrases, which really came into play here, is ‘the only way to make your plan a work is to have no plan b.’ I understand that this doesn’t apply to every situation. There are times when preparedness is everything, but there are also times, and this happened to be one of them, where you have to throw yourself into something and not look back.
By quitting my job, I blew my schedule wide open. Every hour of every day, all of my time and energy would now be focused solely on how to put my ideas into practice, how to make rent on my own, with my own skills. That was the driving force of the success of Path, urgency, necessity and complete dedication.
I can say with 100% certainty, if I continued to work that job when I got back from that trip, Path would not be what it is today. I worked while I had to, I saved what I could, but, when the time came to jump, I jumped.
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