Little Bill

I don’t think I’ve ever been much of a slave to self-doubt. My choices in life, my career, most of the decisions I make are mostly influenced by my own intuition — by my instincts. Every time I felt as if I were taking a blind leap of faith into the unknown, I really embraced the trust in myself that everything would work out all right. And for the most part it has.

Today I quit my job. Let me restate that more accurately: today I quit the second job I’ve had since moving to New York. Less than a year since my last job. You’d think I quit a dream job: work from home, set my own hours, sleep in as long as I want, fuck around whenever I felt like it, work as little or as much so long as the job got done. And I did it. I did it well. The thing is, I felt doubt before taking the job, while doing the job and even afterward, quitting it.

It’s because I’d quit my real dream job at Nerve for a perceived dream job. I was trading in a known for an unknown. All my instincts at the time were screaming to jump: my tenure at Nerve had left me feeling frustrated, angry and suffocated. So I took a leap, trusting that my instincts would be right, and I exchanged the things I loved most about my job at Nerve (pride in my work, friendship and a real working relationship with peers) for the two things I wasn’t receiving (creative control and pay commensurate to my talents and experience.) I flipped it upside-down. Now I was making the money and receiving the creative control I was due, but had no one with whom to share ideas, jokes, and camaraderie.

I was sitting in my room, alone.

Sure I had my cats, and instant messaging and Skype teleconferences. But there was no denying I was all alone. Every day. And, after a while, no amount of money or sleeping in could beat out the fact that I was even more frustrated, more angry and more suffocated.

My instincts said to jump. So I did.

Let’s see if it works out this time. I have faith in myself.

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(I still talk to my friends at Nerve daily. But it’s not the same. Not for me, not for them.)