I had been feeling disconnected from my work for some time. Truthfully, something shifted in me during the pandemic as we started working remotely.

I was spending my lunch breaks dancing to The Lion King soundtrack with my daughter, instead of shoveling down a plate of free Chuy’s in a conference room (shout out to the Jalapeno Ranch sauce though).

My wife, daughter, and I thrive when we are together and my daughter, at age 6, still thinks we are awesome and fun to be around.

As we came out of the Covid era and I started to see the return to office policy rollout, starting first with a gentle nudge (man it would be great if you guys came in) and slowly evolving to an iron fist (if you don’t come in exactly three days a week for the rest of time, you’ll never get another promotion in your life), I found myself questioning why I was doing any of this.

How did I end up here, sitting in some of America’s worst traffic on I-24 to make a 3-hour cameo appearance in a depressing office building, all so I could please the shareholders?

Why should I spend my time like this? Is the money worth it if you don’t have control of your time?

If the thing that matters most to me in life is being with my family, how can I craft a life where I’m doing more of the things that matter to me and less of the nonsense that I’ve accepted as a part of life?

That’s where the decision to create a life working completely remotely came from.

Sounds cool, but I’d never want to give up my career.

When I looked at the people doing the corporate jobs I would be doing the next 5 years, they were all paid incredibly well but they all just seemed so stressed out. I went to a dinner once where the VP who was taking us to dinner literally couldn’t do anything during the meal because he got a 7:00p phone call from an SVP, and the corporate hierarchy means you have to answer that call, no matter what time it comes through.

We sat through an ENTIRE meal with this guy on the phone with his boss. Is any amount of pay worth it if you can’t even enjoy a dinner with coworkers because you’re getting grilled about your performance in some obscure metric that doesn’t do anything to do drive business in the first place?

On top of all of this, I started to see massive layoffs happening at my company. People with 5, 10, 25 years of experience sat and watched it all come to an end with an impersonal script crafted by HR and Legal.

And that’s it—everybody is sad to see these people go and does whatever possible to help them, but the company moves on. I was in the unfortunate position of delivering that script to multiple people in my time as a leader. It’s the worst thing I’ve ever had to do in my career, and it never gets easier. No matter what your job is, you are replaceable.

Seeing the ease with which the Big Corporate Machine rolls on made me realize that I didn’t care to chase the status or the titles that came with promotions, because at the end of the day, a lot of it was artificial.

So you quit your job to travel, how are you going to make money?

When it’s all said and done, your time spent doing the things you love will be the thing you care the most about. I have watched so many interviews with elderly people who say their biggest regret is spending too much of their 30s and 40s chasing career status and sacrificing family time to do so.

I didn’t want that to be my regret, and this is why I made the change to work for myself and give up the salary in exchange for the ability to go anywhere in the world and be with my family.  

This is exactly why I started Pandas on Fire. It’s a humble operation that will take me some time to build, but I believe in what we are doing and our ability to help create profitable growth for small businesses.

My wife is an entrepreneur who has built her own remote business over the last 5 years. I’ve seen the ups and downs that come with entrepreneurship, but I’d much rather roll the dice with something like that and know that I control what I do daily.

If I want to go fly to London for a concert, I can do it. If I want to spend an extra week in Greece because the weather looks great, I don’t have to call my boss and ask for permission. This type of thing seems completely insane, but I’m living proof that it doesn’t take much to make it happen.

I’d love to quit my job to travel, I bet everything is like a big vacation now, right?

My days now are not vacation. We still have to figure out how to juggle my wife’s busy work schedule, parenting our child, finding time for me to run Pandas, and of course the eternal marital question of “what do you want to have for dinner tonight?”

I’ve been able to replace the daily bumper-to-bumper commute with morning walks through parks and beaches in Costa Rica, Greece, and now Spain.

My daughter and I love to play the Nintendo Switch together, and we have done plenty of that. Getting to eliminate all of the work-related stress and replace it with these small joys has made my mental health improve immensely.

At the end of the day: bet on yourself. Start your side hustle. Move to a different city. Take a new job if you’re sick of your current one.

In his famous Stanford commencement speech, Steve Jobs said, “don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

These are wise words and I think we could all take a lesson from them.