I Quit My First "Real Job" After 2 Days and It Became the Best Decision of My Life

The headline to this article is a little misleading. My first job after graduating from college was an amazing experience working for the University of Maryland baseball team. I had interned for a few years with the team as an undergraduate. I was fortunate to finish up school a semester early in December 2012 and my good friend and mentor Matt Swope found a way to keep me on staff in a full-time capacity for the 2013 season.

A "pay your dues" type of experience like this--working 7 days a week, long hours, travel, etc.--is exactly what it takes to get your foot in the door in the sports world, which is what I wanted and what has shaped so much of my career and my life outside of it.

While I loved every moment of that experience, what was supposed to be my first "real job" (a salary, benefits...a tried and true "9-5") was set to start a few weeks after the conclusion of the baseball season.

Just so we are on the same page: Very few people in my life know what I am telling the LinkedIn world below.

I had accepted a position in the Macy's Executive Development Program. It was (and still is) a prestigious accelerator for preparing talent to grow into key decision-making roles for an iconic American department store brand. For the track I was in, participants spend their first two years taking on a management role within a store directly before moving on to other opportunities.

Based on the headline, you already know...I lasted just two whole days.

If it isn't obvious from what I have written so far, it was the only job offer I had, so I took it. I was 22 years old and didn't have the slightest clue as to what I really wanted to do with my life, and even though I was excited about the opportunity, I quickly realized that it was not going to work for me. So, I quit.

That is no knock on the good people at Macy's that I had the pleasure of meeting throughout the recruitment process or in that short time on the job. In fact, they had structure, great leadership, a dedicated staff and all the things you would want for a company to run smoothly. The retail landscape may be changing, but the people there are still very good at what they do. There's a reason why Macy's has been around for 162 years.

And, I'm not advocating that you should just quit something because you feel like it. This was one of the rare times in my life I quit anything. But, something unexpected came out of my short-lived experience.

I definitely did not know it at the time, but sometimes you have to follow your gut, even if someone could easily argue that it was the wrong decision. Only recently have I come to realize that what transpired over the course of the next month in June of 2013 has everything to do with what I am doing with my life and my career today.

Sometimes you have to follow your gut, even if someone could easily argue that it was the wrong decision.

That month is when I started Brooktide Sunglasses. This was my first experience in the world of ecommerce and it was a business that I dedicated a ton of my time to even as I took on other full-time work opportunities. It was store ~#41,000 (I don't remember the exact number) on Shopify and the platform now boasts over 1 million merchants. Brooktide became an incubator of sorts for all of the services that I offer today--social content strategy, ecommerce website optimizations/builds, email marketing, paid advertising, etc. It was also the first domino in the process of becoming a certified Shopify Expert, from which I have now helped over 150 businesses grow.

If I hadn't quit my job at Macy's and started Brooktide, my life may be entirely different than it is today. What I know now is that I am fortunate to be my own boss and have the freedom to structure each day exactly how I want it to be, which is kind of what I have wanted my whole life, but have not always known it.

When I was growing up, I was not really aware of what a "corporate" job was. My father owned (and still owns) a business that he started, and as long as I have been alive, my mother has been right alongside him helping it grow every step of the way (she was a teacher before I was born).

Dad has always humbly told me that balloons are nothing glamorous, but they have allowed him to have the freedom of being his own boss (notice a pattern yet?).

A quick shameless plug--he started Life O' The Party out of his bedroom in my grandparents' house. The company, now in its 40th year, is considered one of the preeminent party decorating and entertainment companies of its kind.

So, I remember things like this photo (that's me on the left--age four--standing on a box, so that I wasn't hidden behind that pot of gold). There were late nights, stressful times, plenty of work on the weekends, and even the Zettler family traditions of New Year's Eve party preparations and middle-of-the-night Thanksgiving Eve balloon deliveries for the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade (ironic, right?) that still continue today. But, the freedom that gave my parents allowed for things like taking vacations when everybody else was in school (that always seemed fun to me), coming to basketball and baseball games at 4 pm on a Wednesday, and despite working long hours, still having the ability to come and go as they pleased.

The great fiver-year run I had at Steiner Sports is about as close as I'm going to get to a "corporate" job. That experience in itself was tremendous and even in that job I was afforded a certain level of freedom and runway to create, so it's been another huge pillar in preparing me for what I do now. But, would I have ended up there had I kept my job at Macy's? I have no idea.

I am not advocating for people to quit anything. My two-day stint at Macy's is not something that I'm necessarily proud of, which is why almost seven years later this is the most I have ever talked about it. But, I'm more comfortable now with what transpired, so why not share the story?

The point is that through both highs and lows opportunities are everywhere. Whether that means quitting a job (that's more rare), putting in the extra effort for a promotion, learning about something on the side to make yourself more valuable to the company where you work, or anything else, there is always something to be learned from every experience.

For me, I have grown to want the freedom of being my own boss, so that I can have the rewarding feeling of building something, so that I don't have to spend hours of my day sitting in a car commuting, and so that I can be there for Stacey and our (one day, but not now) growing family. Now that I have that freedom, I could not be happier.

I did not know it then, but now seven years later, I know that quitting my first "real job" after just two days kickstarted the process of finding that, which is why it has become the best decision of my life.