Quitting $120k Job After Month

Shaan tells the story of how he quit a high-paying job right after college to pursue his sushi restaurant idea.

"I graduate from college and I got a job paying me $120,000 a year to go work in a boring industry that I knew nothing about, didn't really care about. I kind of stumbled into a job that I thought was too good of money to pass up.

Before I took that job, me and my friends had this business idea to create a sushi restaurant chain called Sabi Sushi. It was supposed to be the Chipotle of sushi - the way you have Subway for sandwiches and Chipotle for burritos, we were going to do that for sushi. We won this business plan competition and got $25,000 of prize money that the three of us were going to live on.

So I take the job. Within a month I'm like, 'This is lame. I just looked at my life and I was like, this is a lame choice.'

The good thing about me is I don't really make great decisions, but I make great reversals of decisions. Once I realize that I have made the wrong decision, I'm not one to linger in it. I just can't tolerate it anymore. I remember I was dating this girl and realized she wasn't the one. I called her and broke up with her ten minutes later after thinking about it. What am I supposed to do? If I go hang out with her now, this will be unbearable now that I know. I can't unsee what I've seen. I can't unknow what I know.

So I quit my job after a month and a half and I tell him, 'Hey, I'm going to go work on my sushi restaurant.' He's like, 'What? Okay.'

I fly back and meet up with my friends. We got $25,000 for three people, so we're basically $8,000 each for a year to live. I don't even know how much life costs. I'm a college kid. When you're in college, everything's just provided for you. You swipe this thing and you get things. My parents paid for the dorm. I just didn't understand what it's like to pay rent and bills and laundry and all that stuff.

I decided, okay, I'm either going to wake up every day and feel worried and shitty about money, or I'm going to commit and say I'm going to try to spend this year strategically broke. I looked at my friends like investment bankers and they were money rich, time poor. That's what I was when I took that job. So I was like, if I'm going to be money poor, I'm going to make a choice to be rich in other areas.

I'm going to be time rich. I'm going to be adventure rich - I'm going to travel with my friends, we're going to do fun stuff. I'm going to be learning rich. If I'm making 10 times less, 12 times less here, I got to be learning 12 times more than I would on the job there. The good news is that's not that hard of a bar. You don't learn that much on your entry-level jobs.

With the business we were doing, I'm learning about sushi and restaurant operations and how margins work and what a P&L is. I'm learning to pitch investors, then we're negotiating a lease and I'm figuring out how real estate works. I remember we went to the city area and we were looking up liquor licenses. While I was there, I learned that if you have a liquor license, your lease is on file. I found one place with a liquor license and I knew how much they were paying. Then I went back to the negotiation and I was like, 'We're only going to pay this.' She's like, 'We could never do that.' I said, 'You are doing that in these four locations. I know you could do that for us.' She was blown away.

We were just learning all these little core skills - sales, marketing, brand building, design. We were editing videos, we were blogging, we were doing just random stuff, but high action. We just decided to have a ton of action and DIY, just do it all ourselves. Hiring, firing, learn as many lessons as I could.

That year strategically broke was about learning how little you need to live on - sleeping on air mattresses."