Why I Quit My Job (And What Happened Next)

Looking back on the best terrifying decision I ever made.

There are so many new folks discovering NFG lately (Hello! Thanks for joining me! ARE YOU HAVING FUN YET?!) that I thought I’d use this final “time is a flat circle” week at the end of the year to do a little [re-]introduction post. So here’s a story about what I was doing before I became an unlikely self-help guru peddling her sweary strategies on Substack—and why I stopped doing it. If you like what you read, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber!

Eight years ago, I quit my job as a senior editor at a major New York City publishing house, to go freelance.

At the time, I had just published Luckiest Girl Alive by Jessica Knoll, which would go on to be the bestselling debut novel of the year. Another of my authors,

Emily Nagoski

, was on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list with her book Come As You Are: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life. (Follow Emily on Substack and pre-order her new one! She is a treasure.) And a humor book I’d published by Daily Show alum David Javerbaum was just about to open as a Broadway show called “An Act of God” and starring Jim Parsons.

These were just the most recent highs in a fifteen-year career where I’d been privileged to work with some of the biggest names in the industry. I edited Dark Places by Gillian Flynn and acquired Gone Girl before leaving Random House for Simon & Schuster in 2010.

At S&S, I collaborated with Jeffery Deaver and the Ian Fleming estate on Jeff’s James Bond novel, Carte Blanche, and edited big house authors like James Lee Burke and Chris Cleave, while discovering new and brilliant talent of my own, including Cara Hoffman, Michael Farris Smith, Artis Henderson, and many more.

I believe I was on track to get my own imprint someday, and yet.

I quit.

(For reasons that shall be explained in a moment.)

Before I shut down my computer and left my office at Rockefeller Center for the last time, I posted the below piece to Medium. By the time I’d gotten home from my goodbye drinks it had taken off, peaking around 100,000 views.

It turns out that this outsized response was indicative of a couple of things: 1) that lots of strangers on the Internet could relate to my situation and 2) that the terrifying decision to walk away from the career I’d always thought of as The One would turn out to be the catalyst for a second career that’s been even better, in every way.

A couple of months after I gave notice (and I think we can assume, not at all coincidentally) I had the idea for my first book, The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a Fuck.

But more importantly, having left a job that was depleting me of both, I had the brain space and creative energy to WRITE it. And it did well, so I was able to go on to write a whole series of funny, practical sweary self-help books that I refer to collectively as the No F*cks Given® Guides, the content of which forms the basis for, you guessed it, No F*cks Given® with Sarah Knight.

I’m proud and honored to say that the NFGGs have now been published in more than 30 countries and been on bestseller lists around the world, helping millions of readers figure shit out and get shit done.

I never dared to imagine this next chapter for myself. All I wanted was to close the book on the desperately anxious, panicked, depressed, and burnt-out person who, it must be said, also really fucking hated commuting to 9:00AM marketing meetings.

Anyway, after reading

sam baker

’s excellent and thought-provoking “When Your Job is Your Identity, What’s Left When You Leave It?” I went back to that old Medium post, and I thought about everything I didn’t know back when I wrote it and how much more a leap of faith it would have seemed to anyone who read it then.

And it was that, for sure.

But today, I can also share eight years of further context—the results, as it were, that speak for themselves. So I thought it was time to move this piece to Substack, with that added context, and let it find a new audience.

Maybe it will inspire another 100,000 people to think about what they really want in this one wild and precious life, and to go after it. (Or what they don’t want, and to get rid of it, which was essentially the topic of my first book…)

Maybe it will give you the inspiration or permission you need to quit something—whether it be a job, a relationship, a practice or hobby that just isn’t making you happy anymore.

Or maybe it’ll just remind you that happiness can be a goal in and of itself, one that not all of us are accustomed to prioritizing.

All I know for sure is, my life got a whole lot better once I figured out that last one.

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I QUIT MY JOB TODAY. (And so can you!)

Originally published on Medium.com | June 10, 2015

Today was my last day as a senior editor at a major publishing company, a little over five years after starting in this particular job and fifteen years into a career I once thought I wanted more than anything else.

As it turns out, what I really want more than anything else is to be happy.

***

When I was fifteen, I tried to quit my summer job at a local surf & turf restaurant on the coast of Maine. My prickly, crazy-eyed manager was always hitting on my boyfriend, who also worked there. The owner was a squirrelly Jehovah’s Witness who made me uncomfortable every time he showed up on site. I was tired of sloshing pepperoncini into the salad bar every day for a bunch of Canadian tourists who never tipped.

(Sorry, Canadians, but this was an epidemic in Southern Maine beach towns in the mid-nineties.)

It was the tail end of the season, and my boyfriend convinced me we should both just quit and enjoy our Labor Day weekend—far from the reeking bus bins and the scallop-scented fry batter that clung like barnacles to our Gap khakis.

I was young and in love and this was the first time I had ever even considered railing against The Man. It was terrifying but also, liberating! I plotted, I schemed, I rehearsed my quitting speech. I mustered my cojones. I would march into my boss’s office, untie my dirty green apron, and announce that he could take his chewed-up Bic pen and cross me off the schedule.

PERMANENTLY.

Well. When our four-minute conversation was over I was near tears and shaking with what my thirty-six-year-old self now recognizes as panic, but at the time felt like imminent death. To add insult to injury, my mother was waiting in the parking lot to pick me up from my shift. Heaving my cojones wordlessly into her minivan, I couldn’t bring myself to tell her right away that I’d quit.

Somehow, I instinctively felt like it had been the wrong thing to do—even though my boss was a jackass and even though my manager was totally inappropriate and even though I really hated smelling like the bottom of a Fryolator every day when I got home.

The next morning, my parents were waiting for me on the couch.

My boss had called to inform them of my “rash” decision and asked them to intervene, saying I was too important to the successful operation of the restaurant to lose at this critical juncture. Lots of Canadians, it seemed, would be clamoring for the soggy, overpriced lobster rolls that only I could serve them.

(Let me be clear: this is like saying that a single fifteen-year-old in the Zhengzhou factory is critical to Apple making its quarterly numbers.)

I knew, my parents knew, and my boss knew that my presence or absence was not likely to alter the fate of his glorified-Applebee’s establishment during the dog days of August. I think he was just pissed off, suddenly down not one, but two able-bodied minimum wage employees (since my boyfriend had also quit), and he knew that he could ruin the paltry remains of my summer by pulling “parent rank,” letting mom and dad know I was not the future valedictorian they thought they’d raised, but rather a sniveling little quitter.

They calmly told me I had to suck it up and go back. I cried and fumbled to assert myself. This was so unfair! They held firm. I had made a commitment to this job, they said, and we do not just renege on our commitments when the going gets tough. Or fishy.

I didn’t have a solid argument. I wasn’t leaving for a better gig or more money. I wasn’t building a career in food service that necessitated a move up the ladder to Mike’s Clam Shack. I wasn’t moving to New Hampshire, nor had I been diagnosed with a severe shellfish allergy.

I just wasn’t happy, and I didn’t want to show up. Another. Single. God. Damn. Day.

But of course I went back, apron strings between my legs. Neither my life nor my summer was ruined (though I did break up with my boyfriend), but that incident drilled something into me that’s been impossible to shake until very recently: the idea that happiness should not take precedence over some amorphous sense of commitment.

And to be clear, I’m not talking about choosing happiness over responsible decision-making. This was a summer job, earning pin money—it’s not like I was walking out on the source of my entire family’s grocery bill or jeopardizing my college fund. Two dollars and forty cents an hour (plus tips from non-Canadians) was not going to send me to Harvard.

I’m talking about feeling like it was “wrong” to quit this job for no other reason than because I was unhappy.

I felt awful while I was doing it, and not greatly relieved when it was done. And when I got called out by my parents and had to go back, those feelings were reinforced. I was the bad guy in this scenario, and I never wanted to feel like that again.

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I’ve had a number of jobs since then that I wanted to quit.

For example, at the bookstore where I was routinely derided by my manager for “being a know-it-all” (also known as “having read the books I was recommending to the customers”). But I had signed onto work through the fall rush—students at the nearby college bought their textbooks from this shop—and so I kept my commitment, even when I got a career-track offer to work for a prestigious literary agent. I pulled sixteen-hour weekends at the store while starting my new gig as an agent’s assistant during the week.

Nearly a year into that job and I was developing emphysema from being confined to a townhouse all day with a two pack-a-day smoker who also turned out to be verbally abusive and very, very cheap.

Did I want to quit? Almost every day. But did I responsibly seek out a new job and then magnanimously offer my soon-to-be-ex boss a full month’s notice—during the holidays—before leaving? Yes to that, too.

(And still, when I showed up a couple months later to pay my respects at her mother’s wake, she introduced me to the gathered crowd as, “My assistant who abandoned me when my mother was dying,” ensuring that even after doing everything above board, I now felt retroactively bad about quitting.)

Now, as a fifteen-year veteran of the publishing industry, I can say that I have left jobs for better jobs and to claw my way up the corporate ladder, but I never, ever quit anything again just for the sake of my own happiness.

Until now.

I quit my job today.

I quit because I felt trapped.

I quit because life is getting shorter every day.

I quit because I fucking hate riding the subway twice a day during commuting hours.

But mostly I quit because I was really, really unhappy.

[Ed. I’m only now realizing how not ready I was in 2015 to go into public detail about the panic and depression that had overtaken me at this time in my life; I’ve since written much more about all of that in all of my books.]

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Are people—like my boss or my authors—disappointed in me?

Well, I’ve accumulated many sleepless nights, intermittent bouts of nausea, and a lovely pink rash worrying about precisely this issue, but I’ve determined that those who are, will ultimately carry on just fine without me. (I mean, I like to think I’m a pretty valuable asset, but it’s not as though I abandoned my post as the only doctor in town during a smallpox outbreak.)

Okay, but did I at least have a competing offer? Nope.

Did I win the lottery? Sadly, also nope.

I just wanted to be happier, and in order to achieve that I had to become someone I’ve always looked down on: a quitter.

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You know how we always ask little kids: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” And the answer we expect is something like: “A doctor.” “A hairdresser.” “A pilot.” “A ballerina?”

Maybe the answer we should all be looking for is much simpler and more universal.

“I want to be happy.”

Twenty-two years into my working life, from two dollars-an-hour to a six-figure salary, I finally realized I had to factor happiness INTO the plan.

And that my happiness was contingent upon a number of things, including spending more time with my husband, avoiding a soul-crushing commute, not working traditional 9–5 hours, and being my own boss.

I also realized that it was eminently possible for me to have all of these things—not some, but ALL—if I took the leap and left my current job.

But still, there was this little voice in the back of my head that said You can’t just…just…QUIT. Can you?

Well, as it turns out, you can.

I did.

And I’m pretty happy about it.

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Thanks for reading! While you’re here, feel free to check out a few of my top posts:

• 10 Tips for Saying an Effective “No” (without being an asshole)

• 5 Pieces of Advice You Should Probably Stop Taking

• Should You Give That Fuck? (a handy flowchart)

PAID subscribers can also access posts like these:

• Tonight You, Meet Tomorrow You: a magic trick for falling asleep when anxiety strikes

• Getting to Inbox Zero (or pretty fucking close)

• Give Yourself the Gift of Me-Time: advice for the overwhelmed this holiday season

You can upgrade at any time to get access to the full archive, plus everything else I do here at No F*cks Given®, straight to your inbox. Every subscription supports me in the time I spend building this new venture, and I appreciate it—and YOU!

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The aforementioned No F*cks Given® Guides. You can check them out at sarahknight.com