Why I Quit My Six-Figure Job To Travel The World [Podcast Ep. #2]

Transcribed from the episode audio by AI, so it may contain mistakes.

Ravi0:00I left my job, and a very well-paying job at that, in late 2013, to travel the world. In today's podcast, I'd like to share my experience, and the hope that it helps other listeners who are going through a similar situation to just make sense of it all. There's no one-size-fits-all answer to the decision for staying in or leaving a job, particularly one you care about. The decision must be made by each of us on our own. However, it can be helpful to examine the paths that others have walked before coming to your final conclusion.

As of the recording of this podcast, it's been about four years since I left my job at Microsoft. I started there as an intern, and I never left. While I was interning, I got an offer to join full-time, and despite, having not yet graduated from college, I decided to take the job, and I ended up flying home. I met with my thesis advisor at Penn State, and he agreed to let me finish school through distance education so I could get my degree while also working full-time.

Now, this was back before high-speed internet connections were very common back in the late 90s, so early 2000, so this was a bit of a new thing. But I ended up starting full-time, and Microsoft was an amazing place to work and still is, in my opinion. I truly was captivated during my time there. I spent about 14 years, about 13 years, 13-14, working in Redmond, Washington, and I did learn a ton. I ended up taking on more and more responsibility, and as the years ticked by, the promotions, started to accumulate.

Eventually, I became a people manager, which I really enjoyed, and I got to try out various jobs, ranging from finance to business development strategy work, to product management and marketing, which is where I spent most of my career. Along the way, I got married, I bought a house, we ended up having two dogs and built a great circle of friends, all told, spent almost 14 years in Seattle. And Microsoft was an integral part of my identity. I noticed that my family, they took great pride in my work there.

And at parties, my work also gave me an easy and engaging answer to the what do you do question that we all get whenever we meet people. The truth is I spent most of my time working, thinking about work, or hanging out with the friends I made at work. I did end up traveling all over the world, meeting with customers, and in the end up, it was a very fun and rewarding job, even though it did have certain demands in terms of hours. However, eventually, I realized I had to make a change.

I didn't leave Microsoft to join any other company. I didn't get fired. I didn't get downsized or right-sized, whatever word you want to use. I simply decided it was time to leave. And I get this question all the time. Why did you decide to leave your job. And the truth is, I still don't know the exact answer to it, but I did, after making the decision, write a blog post about it. And in this podcast, I'll just tell the best of my ability, try to explain my own decision process, thinking that if I explain my decision process, it might help some of you out there who are contemplating the same thing.

One thing I do know is, even though I don't know. my exact answer. I do know how I felt when I made the decision and how it feels now. And the decision, it felt right at the time. Even though I was very nervous and very scared, it felt right that I was going to leave this job and then I had to leave the job. And it still does feel like the right decision. And now with the benefit of hindsight, I can say, I have zero regrets.

And I'm also just confident it was the right thing to do for me. Even though, a lot of people who care a lot about me, including many members of my own family, extended family, that is, think they think I was and am insane to have left a high-paying job at the height of my career. I am in my 30s, and I left my job in my early 30s, and in the process give up a significant portion of my net worth in unvested stock when I made that decision to resign.

Many people who know me very well thought I was crazy and still think I was crazy for making such a decision. It was very common for people to say, hey, why don't you put in another five, ten years, accumulate a bigger nest egg, then you won't have to worry about money as much. And that was a very common thing. My family also could not understand how I would give up such a great job. It's safe to say that I cut my net worth in half the day I left my job, because much of my bonus was paid in the form of stock that vests over a period of years.

So when I left, much of my net worth was basically lit on fire that day I left. Now, for me, my decision was simply about doing the right thing. The right thing to do isn't always easy, but with enough awareness, it can at least become clear when it's the right time to act. And for me, it clearly was the right time to make the decision. four years ago. But first, let's talk about why you shouldn't leave a job. Leaving a job, and these are things I've always believed, you shouldn't leave a job as a cop-out to keep from dealing with problems that should or could be solved.

You shouldn't leave a job as an excuse to avoid seeing through on a commitment, or even worse, as an act of laziness. For me, I definitely felt stressed in my job. In fact, I felt very, very stressed at times. And I also resented having to spend the best hours of the best years of my life chained to a laptop and grew increasingly frustrated at having to play office politics and deal with people who might be operating with ulterior motives. But in spite of all of that, those weren't the reasons I left because the truth is I had to put up with job-related issues for a long, long time.

I mean, in my whole career and even before joining Microsoft, I had internships at top companies and there were always job-related issues. So those weren't the reason why I made my decision. Instead, it turns out that I just wanted to try my hand at doing my own thing and living without a career and living without a plan. I wanted to shed the identity of being that Microsoft guy, which is how my family always thought of me and how my friends thought of me is that Microsoft guy, and just be a ravi.

And I wanted to be more than just what I did for work. I wanted to travel and not just be limited to the three to four weeks of vacation I got every year. And I really wanted to see what life would be like without the type of responsibility that a corporate job entails. And most importantly, I wanted to do this together with my wife. And perhaps most important, I wanted to learn more and do more. without work being the thing that dictated any specific boundary. And I always knew at some point that when I was older, maybe 50, 60, 70 years old, that I would cut back on the sheer volume of time I spent working.

I never did know when this would happen, but it seemed for much of my life that I'd only cut back on work when I was forced to do so. And then, a few years ago, it hit me, why should I work? wait. Why not figure out how to live a better and more balanced life now? And I realize that while I could wait a few more years, five, ten years, accumulate more money, I realized that my health is not a guaranteed thing. And that I only have my health and my capacity to travel untethered without kids, but with my wife, for a short period of time.

And so, I decided to take the leap. Put simply, my motivation for leaving Microsoft was this. I needed to experience life in a different way. My job and working in a corporate setting had become too familiar. It wasn't boring at all. It was just far too familiar. I needed to do something different and throw my brain for loop. I needed to get off the linear path of a corporate uphill trajectory, and I needed to leave the familiar comforts of my corporate job to learn how to experience life differently.

And I also had what now seems obvious. But I had an insight that I can always go back to the corporate world if I wanted. And this is very important in something I now realize that very few decisions in our life are permanent, despite how permanent they might seem in the moment. So all this is to say I resigned from my job, my wife left her job, I sold my car, we sold half our stuff, we moved everything we owned into storage, we rented out our house and, just to paint the picture, in the few years before I resigned I had gotten married, gone from living in a small apartment to a large five-bedroom house.

I had bought a new luxury car and fully furnished the home. I mean, really went from minimal to maximal lifestyle. And so reversed all of those decisions, rented out our house and packed our bags, one backpack for each of us, and we booked one-way tickets to India. Now, we also had two dogs, and we had a very special arrangement with a, you could think of it as a dog boarding facility, but it's really a farm where the owner loved our dogs and was willing to watch them for the entire time we were away traveling.

And the dogs got free reign of the farm and got to really get a lot of personal attention. It was one of the very special arrangements we had and things that made us more comfortable traveling long term. And what we ended up doing is traveling all over the world. We then came back to the U.S. We picked up our dogs. and after six months of international travel, we spent what we thought would be a few months, ended up being almost a year, backpacking all over the U.S.

We visited dozens of national parks. We spent time with friends and family. We hiked until our feet were blistered. We spent a lot of time sweltering in the heat of the desert of the American Southwest. We spent a lot of time in the Rocky Mountains, the high sierras of California, and also the foothills of the Himalayas when we were traveling abroad. We got to dip our toes into the Atlantic Ocean, the Pacific Ocean. We made it to the lowest and highest parts of the continental U.S.

And I think all told, we spent almost three months camping during our travels. And so that was what we did when we left our job. And when I left my job, we spent over a year traveling around. And you might wonder what happened next. It's been four years after. all. Well, at the time of this recording, it has been almost four years since I left my job. Things have worked out very differently from what I expected. There are many things that were much, much harder than I expected.

There were some things that happened more easily, but in general, I guess the best way to sum it up is to say my experience has been very, very different. It's just different. I don't regret it one bit. I've had way more challenges than I thought, but I've also now in four years, gotten to a place in life where I really, really value every single experience I've had, leaving my corporate career. And what I've realized through travel and what my wife and I both have realized is we've been able to get in touch with what really matters to us.

We learned that sunshine and being able to spend a lot of time in the outdoors, particularly in big mountains for skiing and hiking, was really, really important to our quality of life. And it was also important to be close enough to a big city where we can have everything that a city has to offer while being in a place with enough natural beauty and the weather where we can enjoy the great outdoors. That ended up helping us make the decision to move to Colorado, selling our home in Seattle, and building up new lives and new friendships and new careers out here in Colorado.

We didn't know anyone here in Colorado. We didn't really have strong business connections here. My wife had a few, but I had none. But we decided that this was the right place for us. And we never would have made this decision had we not spent time away from work, traveling, and getting in touch with what we really wanted in our lives. So that's it. That's my decision. Why I left my job to travel the world, how I made my decision, and where I am right now.

Some of you are probably wondering about more info, more details about what I'm doing in my job, in my career, what I've learned along the way. And all I can say is there is a lot more to share. And in the next episode of the podcast, I'll share a bit more details on where I'm I am right now. I'll share what career I chose or more aptly put what career chose me and what I've learned in the process of starting my own business. Well, that's it for today.

Thanks a lot for tuning in. If you enjoy the podcast, please share it with your friends. If you would like to leave a review, I would really appreciate that as well. So click to leave a review on iTunes or wherever you're listening. Thanks again, and I'll talk to you soon.