How quitting my corporate job for my startup dream

messed my life up

Inspired by Ali MeseFaeez Mushtaq

I was working for one of the top three global strategy

consulting firms.

• The private car driver.• Fancy business-class flight.• Fancy five-star hotel.• The salary? It was fancy, too

There was something wrong with this consulting life,

though. I couldn’t stand this bullsh*t any longer and one

day I called my parents:

“Dad, mom, I just quit my job. I want to start my own

startup.”

• I don’t even see my family. • Its All about leaching out my potential• All those benefits the company promised

don’t exist.• I am working almost 20 hours a day and I

don’t even enjoy it.

“Sooooooooo, how is your business doing?! Is it

growing?!”

I knew that coming from a family with no entrepreneurial background,

It was my mom on the phone

No matter what I said, I couldn’t explain to her that a business needs more than one day to grow.

Girlfriend, Friends & Social Circle

I told everyone that I just quit my job to follow my startup dream. Some of my friends gradually stopped seeing me, probably because they thought there was something wrong with me since it was the second “fancy” job I had quit in a short period of time.While the rest of my friends were supportive, there was, however, still something wrong with my relationship with them:

I soon realized I was starting to pull myself away from social

gatherings.• Every time I met with those friends, I didn’t have many

updates to give them in response to their repeated questions.

• Doing a startup was a long journey .• I was putting myself under so much pressure about what

other people think.• Day by day, I was getting lonelier and more depressive as

I avoided social occasions.• I was fed up with telling people it took years for startups

like Facebook and Twitter to arrive at where they are now.

Cash, cash, cash..

• As if the social pressure and loneliness were not enough, I was meeting the mother of all stresses: running out of cash much faster than I had imagined.

• This was killing my productivity and ability to make proper decisions. I was panicking and rushing to be successful and to make money.

• One day, I even found myself asking my girlfriend for a few cents because I had no money to buy bottled water. I didn’t know it was just the beginning of such a difficult life full of ups and downs…

Today..

• Enough with the drama: more than two years have passed since those days. I am now writing this blog post in a beautiful resort in Phuket, Thailand, while enjoying my mojito.

• Wait, I am not selling a dream. No, I haven’t become a millionaire startup founder.

• However, my business has a constant stream of cash that allows me to travel the world and to work from wherever there is WiFi.