Why I Quit Investment Banking to Travel the World

The short answer: an itch.

This article doesn't aim to look down on investment banking. It's also not going to try to convince you to quit your job to travel the world.

Looking back, the main feeling that emerges when I think back to my time at J.P. Morgan is gratitude. I worked with an amazing team, contributed to transactions that in many ways transformed the healthcare industry, and learned an incredible amount in a short period of time.

Don't get me wrong, as an analyst, I worked 70-100 hours a week and had to sacrifice many, many weekends to get the job done. My friends can attest. At its worst, I worked 30 straight hours on a financial model, and I'd venture to say I grinded as hard as any other analyst on Wall Street.

But I always knew that I was in an extremely fortunate position and that to complain simply meant I was holding the wrong perspective. There were a thousand other kids who'd gladly take my job, and yes, at times, things were tough, but I knew what I was getting myself into. I signed up to work hard and no one forced me to sign the dotted line.

So why did I quit?

That's me earlier this year at Salar de Uyuni, the salt flats in Bolivia where during the rainy season, the light layer of water on the ground reflects the sky from a distance.

For years, there was no other place in the world I wanted to go to more than Uyuni. It was my dream to travel there and experience the place with my own hands and eyes. But of course, my desires didn't end there. I wanted to watch the water rigorously trickle down at Iguazu falls in Argentina, motorbike from city to city in Vietnam, and scuba dive in the Great Barrier Reef in Australia.

For as long as I can remember, I had what proved to be an uncontrollable desire to one day quit my job and backpack across the world. A desire that I like to describe as an unbearable itch that wouldn't go away unless I "scratched it."

Whenever I got into conversations with friends about what I truly wanted in life, it would ultimately lead to this "itch." I would constantly daydream in my cubicle of how great it would be to travel from hostel to hostel, making new friends along the way and getting into unexpected adventures. It was something I knew I wanted to do during my 20's so badly that there were few other things in life I was more sure of. I also knew I was fortunate enough to have the means to do it.

The only thing stopping me? My career.

It wasn't just my current job. It was about my next job and my next next job and the one after that. When you're in a competitive, hyper-ambitious environment like the one in San Francisco, you're constantly surrounded by people who aren't just reaching for the moon - they're reaching for Mars. Quit your job and take more than 2 weeks off work? That's for the weak. Big opportunity cost there. Not a smart move.

Of course, none of that was true. It was all in my head. The plain truth is that there are an infinite ways to approach life. There is no right or wrong career path; there are only wrong perspectives.

I came to realize this when a close family member grew gravely ill. She had had dreams to travel to spend a summer in Spain, visit the pyramids in Egypt, and eat spaghetti in Italy. But with ALS, traveling is now a painful inconvenience rather than a luxurious pleasure. Even eating a meal is an enormous struggle when you can barely hold a fork. How are you supposed to carry a backpack and jump from plane to plane? How are you going to eat that spaghetti?

So, I quit.

I acutely understood from that point on that life can take a sharp turn in a direction you don't want it to go literally in any moment. I decided that doing what I truly wanted to do while having the means to do it was an obvious decision in that I essentially didn't have one. And I realized that if I ever felt that itch again, I needed to tend to it.

What does this mean for you?

If you have an itch to do something and you know you'll regret not doing it when you're old and gray, you've got to do it. That doesn't mean you should do anything unethical, put yourself in financial ruin, or drop everything you're currently doing to get what you want. It means working hard towards your dreams and setting yourself up to get to the cusp, and then, most importantly, having the courage to pursue them.

Like I said at the start, I'm not trying to convince you to quit your job to travel the world. It's not the right decision for everyone for a multitude of reasons.

But you might have the itch to move to another city. Or to start taking ballet lessons. Or to work on that startup idea. Or to change careers and start coding. Or to start painting again. The list goes on and on across a wide spectrum ranging from easy to challenging things to do.

So stop ignoring that itch, and scratch it.

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Questions? Feel free to contact me at [email protected]