I quit my first full-time job three weeks ago to start a company. At the time this felt like a really monumental decision but now, looking backwards, it wasn’t really that big of a deal. I’m more convinced than ever that, at this stage of my life, time is the most important thing to optimize for and that it pays off in dividends to be thoughtful about where and how my time is spent. Me quitting my job was a deliberate choice to dedicate my time solely around my goals and my growth. I’m thankful to have savings from my past jobs and internships to keep me going for a bit and for friends and family who are always a great source of support.

I’ve always lived my life in a (relatively) linear fashion: in high school, I worked hard to get into the best college possible. In college, I worked hard to get the best internships and first job possible. In my first job, I worked hard towards the promotions that everyone else was working for. In all of these instances I’ve constructed my work around what others found important. In the absence of strongly held values of my own, it was all too easy to adopt the desires of others around me. Now, out of a stubborn desire to chase solely what I want to, I’ve decided to forge my own path. After all, we only get a limited amount of time to build the world that we want to live in ;-)

And so, for the first time, what’s next for me isn’t so clear. Progress on my company isn’t linear, so I take each day one at a time. In a funny way, it kind of feels like working on a massive assignment for a CS class: in just ten minutes I could set back all the progress I’ve made in the past ten hours by discovering some flaw in the logic. Case in point - just last week I felt like I discovered the one idea to end all ideas, and then the next week I talked to a few more people and discovered that what I thought was a huge problem wasn’t actually a big deal at all. Reflecting on my own pain points and experiences has been a helpful way to re-orient myself in times of confusion, especially when I talk to two people who experience the same problem but say completely different things about it.

So…yeah. This is my life right now, and while it’s definitely not all roses (yes, it’s often lonely and yes, I’m often frustrated and lost and confused), I couldn’t be happier about it.