What no one tells you about life after quitting 9-5

Life After Quitting the 9-to-5: Lessons from a Year of Reinvention

Author

Ark
May 20, 2025

A year ago, I quit my banking job. I was burnt out, lost, moved countries, mainly for the plot and started life over with zero guarantees. All I had were YouTube videos, podcasts, and a vague idea of what life might be like after the 9 to 5. I thought I was ready, but I really wasn’t. I thought chasing freedom would feel like, well, freedom. But at times it felt like burnout, like loneliness, like doubt, confusion, and constantly feeling behind even though I was giving it my all.

No one talks about this part. The part where you question everything, where it’s just you, your thoughts, and the uncomfortable stretch of growing into someone new. But if you’re in that place, I want you to know you’re not broken. You’re just becoming. This is what I wish I knew before I walked away from the 9 to 5. All the important lessons that I’ve learned along the way, which have really helped me to navigate through the hard times and why, despite everything, it’s still the best decision that I’ve ever made.

Lesson 1: You Will Burn Out

The first thing I wish I knew before I quit my 9 to 5 is that you will burn out at some point. When you quit your job to pursue entrepreneurship or to start making content, you will work harder than you ever worked in your 9 to 5. And there’s a few reasons for this.

Firstly, entrepreneurship to begin with is a lot of freaking work. Another reason is you will actually want to do the work because it’s something that you’re super passionate about and you really care about it. And another reason why you’ll burn out is because when things don’t go according to plan or if you fail, then it’s a lot more personal.

On that first point, when you are first starting out in business, you essentially have to put on so many different hats and you have to play different roles simultaneously. In your business, you are the sales department. You are customer service. You are the one who is product design or service design. And you’re the one who is fulfilling on that offer. You’re the CEO and the CFO and also the marketing department. Like you are literally wearing every single hat. And if you’re also making content as part of that, then you are going to be the talent, the set design, the camera woman, the post-production. And it’s a lot and it can get pretty overwhelming at times.

On that second point, when I first quit my job, I was so excited because I suddenly had all of this spare time to be working on the things that mattered to me, to start my first business, to really go all in with making content. And what ended up happening was that was all that I wanted to do. And even though you can sort of categorize it as work, I didn’t view it the same way that I viewed corporate work. It was stuff that I really wanted to work on. And I just told myself like, you know, this feels good, so why wouldn’t I just keep going? Literally, weeks would go by and I’d finally realize like, oh, I didn’t take a single day off. And the only reason why I noticed is because my body would break down and I would need to like suddenly sleep 10 hours a night, and I would find it impossible to get out of bed and everything just felt like so much harder, like even basic tasks like cooking for myself and going to the gym. And I didn’t understand why, and I finally realized like, oh, this is burnout.

The other side of this is that because it’s my business and my channel and my project that I’m working on, when things don’t go according to plan or when something messes up, it feels very personal and it hits a lot harder. When you’re in a corporate setting and a project fails, let’s say, it’s rarely ever on just one person. Usually, the team will take responsibility and things like that. And often, you know, the whole point of the project was to be in service of the company’s vision, whereas when it’s your own business, it’s all on you. When my videos weren’t getting a lot of views, I felt super deflated. And when my business was a little slow, when I wasn’t getting as many clients, that was also very painful because it was all on me. You pour your heart and soul into something, and when it doesn’t work out the way that you imagined it to, then it hits a lot deeper.

In the past year, since I quit my 9 to 5, I’ve had not one but a few cycles of burnout. And in fact, I’m still resurfacing from one of those cycles right now. But here’s what I’ve learned from experiencing this. Productivity in entrepreneurship is not just about managing your time or managing your energy. It’s also about managing your emotions. And for me, this past year, I’ve really had to learn how to just detach myself from outcomes and to also separate me and my value as a person from my business and from my content, really drilling it into my head that my work is separate from me and my value as a person isn’t depicted by my monthly revenue or the number of views that I get on a video or my subscriber count.

Another thing that really helped me is to treat downtime like a non-negotiable. So, for me, I work pretty much every single day except for Thursdays. Thursdays is my nothing day where I just do whatever it is that I feel like; I don’t even touch my laptop. And I think if you’re the kind of person that gets carried away with work, then it’s really important to just schedule in that downtime, sort of like how you would schedule in productive tasks or work tasks. You also have to do that for when you’re going to take time off.

Lesson 2: You Will Feel Behind

The second thing that I wish I knew is that you will feel behind, firstly on the arbitrary timeline that you’ve created in your own head for when you should achieve your business and content goals by, and you’ll also feel behind on certain life milestones society says you need to achieve by a certain age.

On my own timeline, I feel like I am very behind. In my head, I told myself that by now I should have a certain number of subscribers and I should be earning a certain amount from my business every month. And I’ve low-key set this expectation in my mind that, okay, after I finish this one year in Australia, that’s the point where I’m going to achieve the financial freedom that I’ve always dreamed of and everything’s going to fall into place and I’m going to tick all the boxes. And I do believe that one of the reasons why I burnt out is because I set this expectation in my head and then, now that I’m approaching the one-year mark in Australia, I’ve realized that I’m not where I expected to be in my head.

I do question where this comes from, this expectation to achieve everything super fast. And honestly, I think it just boils down to the same culprit every single time, which is social media. And especially when you’re in the content game, the algorithm primarily shows you all the successful channels and all the successful accounts. And of course, with social media, none of it is real. People don’t necessarily show the ugly side of things, and you don’t really know how long it took for someone to get to where they are. With social media, it’s so easy to hide the ugly and unaesthetic parts of your story. And so, for someone who just stumbles across your account, it might seem like, oh, they were an overnight success when that couldn’t be farther from the truth.

You’ve got to remember that all these social media platforms are not optimized for your mental health. I will say that again: social media does not care about your mental well-being. All they care about is just getting eyeballs on the platform, to capture attention so that they can monetize it. And it’s not there to make you feel good. Really, what I’ve learned from this is that being behind is just a state of mind, and the timeline isn’t real. No one is exactly grading you for how ahead or how behind you are on the timeline, which doesn’t exist in the first place.

On the second thing that I mentioned earlier, you will feel behind on certain life milestones. And when you pursue your own path, you’re going to watch all your other friends getting engaged, getting married, having kids, getting promotions, and all those things. Even though I’ve largely tapped out of that timeline and don’t really care for the most part, when I do go on social media and I see or hear about my friends getting engaged, moving in with their partners, buying houses, and getting promotions, especially when it feels like literally everyone else is doing it except for me, I do start to question myself sometimes and think like, oh, am I doing this whole life thing wrong?

I think that’s perfectly normal to feel that way. And what I’ve realized that’s really helped me whenever I start to think this way is that I’ve actually been down that road before. Like, I followed that conventional path for most of my life. I checked all the right boxes, and I realized down the road that this wasn’t what I wanted after all, and that’s what led me to this in the first place. It’s because I realized I didn’t want to be on that path.

Reframing things has been one of the biggest mental hacks for me whenever I find myself having really difficult thoughts or emotions. So, in this case, I used to think to myself that, wow, paving my own way is actually really scary, and I feel like I’m free-falling through life, and I don’t know what the next step should be, and it’s all really hard and confusing trying to figure out the next step. But instead of viewing it as a bad and scary thing, I now reframe it in my mind as a privilege. Because one of the most beautiful things about tapping out of the conventional path is that you get to mold your life into exactly what you want it to be. So, I shift my mindset away from this being a bad and scary thing into a liberating and exciting thing instead.

What makes life really worthwhile and interesting is because we don’t know what’s going to happen next. And, you know, if you watched a movie and they told you how it was going to end from the very beginning, you’d think to yourself like, okay, then what’s the point in even watching this movie in the first place? And that’s the sort of mentality that I try to have around life in general. The whole point of life is to uncover the story as it unfolds. And if you were told from day one how your life was going to pan out, then what would even be the point in living?

Lesson 3: You Will Feel Lonely

The third thing that I wish I knew is that you will feel lonely when you go down this path. You won’t be able to relate to most people around you. When I was first starting out in my journey, especially, I did feel like I couldn’t talk to any of my friends or anyone that I really knew about business and content because they wouldn’t be able to relate. Maybe they weren’t super interested. They wouldn’t understand. And maybe they were just asking to be nice. But for me, it was all I really cared about. The conversations that you want to be having, you’re not really having, and it can make you feel very isolated.

What I’ve learned from this is that it’s so important to find your people. And what’s been a massive game-changer for me on my journey is meeting people along the way with similar aspirations or who are on a similar path. I’ve been so fortunate to meet people in real life in Melbourne, but also online, who are starting their own businesses or who are making content and have just paved their own way in life. And even though we’re trying to achieve different things, conversations just hit different. I feel so understood, and it’s so nice being able to talk to other people about shared struggles that we have. And it’s nice that we can root for each other. And also, meeting other people who are as ambitious, if not even more ambitious, and have even greater goals than I do, has really helped to set my minimum standard. And it’s really encouraged me to be even better and to strive even more.

If you’re at a point where you’re looking to meet more people on a similar path to you, one thing I would highly recommend is just to be open to socializing with people in real life, to get over your social anxiety, and just to yap with people that you meet randomly. So, for example, when I first came to Australia, I started working at a gym part-time, and I was working as a receptionist, and part of my job really is just to yap with people coming in and out of the gym. And in the wild, I’ve just met other YouTubers, other videographers, other entrepreneurs, people doing their own thing. And I’m so glad that I put myself out there and asked them questions like, “Oh, what do you do?” and actually tried to find out more about them and create genuine conversation because that was how I’ve met a lot of my friends.

The other way to find your people is to go online and find them. So, for example, with one of my really good friends, Joy, I found her through the YouTube algorithm. So, one of her videos showed up on my home feed one day, and it was this video about how she just quit her tech job in New York, and how she wants to pursue content creation full-time and to also build her own tech startup. And I remember I was like, “Oh my god, this girl is also Southeast Asian, and we’re around the same age, and our timelines are pretty similar for when we quit our jobs, and we’re on kind of similar paths.” And so, I got really excited, and I reached out to her on Instagram, and the rest is history. Since then, she’s visited me in Melbourne, and we are planning to meet up again as well in the future in whatever other country we end up being in.

I met one of my other friends through my YouTube videos. So, this was someone who had watched my videos and she commented, saying how she’s also Malaysian and how she also quit her job and that she is also in Australia for a whole year doing something similar to me. And I just sort of took the leap, and I responded to her email, and that was how we became friends. Another YouTuber also reached out to me in the past, and they were like, “Hey, you know, I really like your content, and I’ve actually started this mastermind with all of these other creators, and we have weekly calls if you want to join in.” And we started doing those weekly for quite a while. And I think this is one of the best parts about making content and posting stuff on the internet is that you get to meet all these amazing people that you would otherwise not meet in your real life. These are people that I can connect with on a level that I can’t do so with people I know in my existing circles.

Lesson 4: You Will Doubt Yourself

The fourth thing I wish I knew is that you are going to doubt yourself. Entrepreneurship is honestly such a massive mental game, and it is not for the faint of heart. You need to develop so much mental but also emotional resilience, the number of times you have to pick yourself up after being shot down, all the rejections, all the YouTube videos that you worked hard on that tanked, all the clients that you failed to close.

One thing that I’ve learned is that you can completely, in your heart of hearts, not believe that you can achieve something and still go on to achieve it. So, for example, I never truly believed that I could start my own business and actually start making money on my own terms until I took the steps and actually did it and created that evidence for myself. Most of the time, you just need to take the action, and then the results and the feelings and the confidence will come afterwards. So, for me, with my business, I just started taking little steps. I started applying all of the things that I learned from all the business books and podcasts that I read and listened to. And after a while, I would then start seeing results. I would actually get clients. I would actually be growing my business. And then it was evidence to me that, yeah, I can actually do this thing. Like, I’ve proven to myself now that it’s possible.

The thing with entrepreneurship is that you’re often being steered into uncharted territories. You’ve never done this before. And every step and every level up is new and unfamiliar and requires a different set of skills for you to master. And that’s exactly why you always feel like you fall short. At the beginning, it’s like, okay, what business should I start? Okay, how should I start crafting this offer? And then, now that you have this thing, it’s like, okay, now how do I get my first customer? And then you have to start learning this whole thing about sales. And once you actually make your first sale, it’s like, okay, now how do I generate consistent income every single month? It never ends. And that’s the beauty of it. I like to think of entrepreneurship as this game where you can level up each time. And that’s also helped me to not make it feel so stressful and daunting, like, oh, whatever, it’s just a game, and I just need to learn this new skill in order to unlock the next stage.

Why It’s All Worth It

And that brings me to my final point. I promised at the very beginning that this wasn’t going to be all doom and gloom. And I was going to share how, despite all the challenges, despite how rocky and uncertain the road is, there’s a reason why people still stay the course and why it’s all worth it in the end. And my final point is that I 100% guarantee you will not feel more alive and more fulfilled than you do now.

One of my favorite quotes ever is that entrepreneurship is just a self-development plan disguised as a financial opportunity. I swear nothing will make you level up and grow more as a person than starting your own business will. When you’re on this path, you end up developing really admirable traits like grittiness and resilience and discipline. I’ve had so many moments of self-doubt in my journey where I had to pick myself back up again and again after being shot down, after feeling like I’ve just failed. And I went through all those burnout cycles that I mentioned earlier. I’ve learned that resilience is not something that you either have or don’t have. Resilience is a skill that you can train. It’s like a muscle that you can hypertrophy and strengthen over time.

For me, I’ve had to dig myself out of some very deep holes in the past where I genuinely felt like I wouldn’t be able to get myself out. But every single time that I did, it built evidence that I was the kind of person that could handle these hardships, that could bounce back after difficult times. My capacity for hard has ultimately increased. On this journey, I’ve done so many scary things that I initially thought I wouldn’t be able to do, and I managed to overcome them. To this day, one of the scariest things that I’ve ever done in my life is quit my 9 to 5 to pave my own way. And I also moved to a whole new country where I essentially didn’t really know anybody. But since then, my threshold for what is scary and not doable has significantly lowered. Because when you do something scary and you overcome it, it actually provides first-party evidence that you are the kind of person who is capable of handling these situations. You come out the other side with this boost of confidence in yourself.

The other reason why entrepreneurship is so rewarding is that you are constantly learning so many new things. Like, when I first started, I needed to learn how to create an offer, how to sell to people, how to make my own website, how to start a newsletter, how to write persuasive copy. And that’s just to name a few out of the millions of things that you need to learn when you start your own business.

All in all, I’m so proud of the person I’ve become as a result of this journey. And I’m also really excited about the person I’m becoming. There’s truly no greater pursuit in life than learning and growing along the way. Truly nothing. I’ve genuinely never felt more fulfilled and more alive than I do now. And I guarantee you, anybody that you ask who is on this path, who is doing the thing, will also tell you the same.

Final Thoughts

So, that’s all my reflections of life after quitting the 9 to 5. I really hope that this helps you guys, wherever you are in your journey. If you’re still in your 9 to 5 and you’re planning to make the move, I hope that this helps you to give you an idea of what the room feels and smells like so that when you do get there, you’ll know how to navigate it. And if you’re already on this path, I want you to know that I see you. And I know you’re probably really going through it, and that it’s probably really hard, but all you really got to do is just sit in that room a little longer. Just sit in that discomfort long after everyone’s left in order to get to the next level, because the only way that you can really lose is if you quit.

#Innovation #Leadership #Entrepreneurship #DigitalMarketing #Technology #Career #Networking #Business #Motivation #FutureOfWork

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