Quitting My Job To Pursue My Dream
Part 12 of a Multi-Part Series “Towards Religion and Meaning”
Note: This is a multi-part series, if you haven’t read the previous posts, I highly recommend checking them out to catch-up before proceeding, here.
- Part One: Why I Turned Away From G-d
- Part Two: Declaring My Atheism
- Part Three: The Repugnancy of Religion
- Part Four: The Superficiality And Thoughtlessness of Religion
- Part Five: The Silencing of Religion
- Part Six: It’s Cool To Be An Atheist
- Part Seven: “Culturally Jewish”
- Part Eight: I Am The Seeker
- Part Nine: Stealing Fire
- Part Ten: Phish — The Ultimate Spiritual Experience
- Part 11: Chained to the Loom
In 2015, while working at Patient IO, I began to stalk one of the prior engineer’s online code contributions via Github. I admired the quality of his work and wanted to keep tabs on what he was up to. One day, I stumbled upon him commenting on a thread relating to ‘Ethereum’. I had no clue what this was, so I began to search around.
Eventually, I came upon some videos of an alien-like figure of seemingly remarkable brilliance explaining the system. A few months later and I was completely enthralled by the project — to me, it seemed like the second coming of the Internet. This was huge.
So, I began to engage in the online forums, chat rooms, etc… to learn as much about it as possible and begin to build things atop it. It was very early for Ethereum, so building anything on it was a complete nightmare. To add to this, the main tools for building on it (testnets) were basically always broken (DDoSed).
I organized the Austin Ethereum Meetup, began giving technical presentations, and even pitched the leadership team athenahealth on a “patient-owned healthcare record”. While the leadership team didn’t budge much, myself and another co-worker did get the opportunity to speak on the matter at a company-wide developer event.
Around this time, Ethereum began to catch fire as the ICO craze picked up and its price began to 10x, 50x, 100x in just one year. It was impossible to not talk about it — there was a technological revolution going on and my co-workers / employer were just idly sitting by and disregarding it despite all the traction and interest. It drove me insane.
The fun I was having outside of work eventually grew to be too much of a juxtaposition with the job, itself, causing me to leave and focus full-time on a side business that a few friends and I had started which was based on Ethereum. The business was created as a means of being able to aid refugees fleeing their native countries by providing them with a digitized version of their government-issued identification documentations which could not be stolen, destroyed, or lost.
Quitting was a huge sigh of relief. I felt like I could take mask off and work on something truly meaningful for the world. Sure, I would miss out on the huge bonus payout from the golden handcuffs, but I was trading it in to pursue something that I truly believed in. And that, was worth way more than the money.
The rewards that I would come to reap from this decision would cement in my mind the idea that pursuing something you are passionate about will reward you much, much, more than staying at the good-paying job you’re currently at.
Note: Not everyone has the option to leave their jobs to pursue a dream. There are bills to pay, mouths to feed, etc… If you really don’t enjoy what you’re doing — quit. You will figure it out. People love passion and energy — if you can bring more of that with you elsewhere, it’ll be highly coveted.
