I cannot quit my job.

Three weeks.

Three weeks is long enough for work to actually leave your head. Not the holiday where you check email twice a day and call it disconnecting, but the other kind, where somewhere in the second week you notice you have stopped rehearsing conversations you are not having.

We spent it in Yekaterinburg, my home city, where I finished school and university and where most of my family still is. One afternoon I went out on my own for a couple of hours. Rain, heavy enough that the coffee shop filled up with people who had not planned to be there, shaking water off their jackets in the doorway. I had a flat white in front of me and nowhere to be for the rest of the afternoon, and with nothing pressing on me my brain finally handed over the question it had been holding.

Isn't this exactly what you tell your clients not to do?

I have been advising people on their careers since 2022. Individual clients first, then a Telegram channel, then group courses. A good part of what I say comes down to one idea: if you believe you have more to deliver than your current role lets you deliver, do not sit in it and wait for the feeling to pass, because it does not pass, it just gets quieter.

I was sitting in it. I had been for a while.

The version with nothing after it.

I know what that sentence feels like in the bad case, because I have said it before. Moscow, the job before Sweden, sitting across from partners who needed a decision that day from a side of the business that was not ready to make one. I told myself I could not move. There was no second half to that sentence, no reason attached, just a wall. I stayed about two and a half years and then I left.

So when it turned up again in a coffee shop in Yekaterinburg, I did not trust it. I had the time to take it apart, and taking it apart is where it got uncomfortable.

Because the honest answer to the first question is yes. Is there a better role out there for me, something with more scope, a bigger title, a steeper line? Probably. I work on a large industrial build in Sweden, I am good at it, and I can see the version of my career that pushes harder in that direction.

I am not going to do it.

Four things.

Work has not been the only pillar in my life for years now. There is my daughter, who is three. There is running, which I do not enjoy the way people enjoy a sauna, more the way where I want to be sick after a hard session and swear never again after a long race, and then cannot find anything else that produces the same feeling afterwards. There is the advisory business I have been building on the side since 2022. And there is the job.

Four things, and I am not going to be the best in the world at any of them while I keep all four. It took me longer than it should have to say that out loud.

That is the part that was hard to swallow, and the city made it worse. I finished school in Yekaterinburg with top marks in every subject, and my honours degree is from a university in the same city. I was raised, like a lot of people, on a scoring system with one column. Be top of the class. The class was never specified.

Sitting there with the rain going, what I was admitting is that I have chosen to be somewhere below my ceiling in four columns instead of at the top of one. That was not an accident. I chose it.

So the advice I give is not wrong. It is built for a life with one load-bearing wall, and it works properly there. What I had not noticed is that mine has four now, and optimising everything around the best available career move stops being an optimisation once that is true. It improves one number and charges the other three, quietly, without asking.

Is there a better role for me out there? Probably yes. Am I willing to trade this particular combination for it? Definitely no.

That afternoon I knew that after the coffee there was a walk with my daughter, and later a long run. That was the whole of the day.

The sentence I started with was "I cannot quit my job." What I walked out with was "I am choosing this, for now, and here is what it costs." Same position, completely different place to be standing, because the second one has an expiry date on it and the first one does not.

This week.

Write down your pillars. Not your goals, your pillars: the things that would materially change your life if they stopped. Most people have between one and four, and the list takes about ninety seconds.

Then take the last significant career decision you made, or the advice you are currently following about your next move, and ask how many of those pillars it took into account. If it was built for one and you have three, you have not found a better answer yet. You have found out why the answer you were given did not fit.

I only got to that question because I had three weeks with nothing pressing on me, and most of the year does not look like that. So put a date in your calendar, once, somewhere in the next few months, and ask it again then. A decision you never revisit stops being a decision.

Until next Saturday, Vitalii

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