

Explaining to my Dad why I quit my job - ntrepid8
http://joshaust.in/2013/05/explaining-to-my-dad-why-i-quit-my-job/

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kyro
Cherish your dad, seriously.

I'm about to take a year off medical school to explore the startup/design
world. I'm doing it to finally pursue my real passion and interest, to take
some time to contemplate about whether being a doctor is something I want to
commit to (probably not), to get into shape, etc. Seems like a reasonable
decision, but to my dad and family, I will be considered an immense failure.
Being a Doctor is a disgustingly inflated status symbol in my community, and
deciding not to be one is about the worst thing you can do other than
murdering someone.

I won't be getting any support, emotional or financial, and worse is that I'll
be consistently criticized and told that I'm making a stupid, selfish
decision. It may very well be stupid, but I won't find out if I don't actually
do it. It'll be tough, but more than worth it.

You're incredibly, incredibly lucky, OP, to have an understanding and
supportive parent. There are many out there who'll never get to make the leap
that you've made because of familial pressures and criticisms. Best of luck!

Edit: If any of you have an interesting startup opportunity (particularly in
health), email is in my profile!

~~~
yabbadabbadoo
I've been through the exact same thing - med school dropout (1 year from
graduation) who got into tech, got zero support from family. It's tough but,
hang in there - things will get better.

~~~
anxx
Can I ask what led you to dropping out? The parent commenter is not so
irrational - he can always go back. But you, if you actually dropped out (and
not simply taken a "leave of absence") and if it was actually your choice (not
expulsion) seem to have made quite an odd choice - after bearing through
premed classes and 3 years of MD classes.

An MD has lifelong financial stability and the chance to do residency and earn
even more. You completely burned the bridge when, after just a year, you
could've done tech and preserved the bridge, no?

~~~
namank
Mike L, founder of Research In Motion (now BlackBerry) dropper out with two
months left in graduation (from a world-renowned electrical engineering
degree). So did, I think, Robert Downy Jr.

"preserving the bridge" only makes sense to an outside observer. It may never
be a practical option for the OP. In fact, it may be something that may taint
OP's identity for the future in that he/she may always be stereotyped as a
doctor. It'll be contested _every time_ he meets someone new. It's nothing
short of an identity crisis. It's the loss of freedom to do what he wants.

People like this usually try to live life in accordance with self-defined
principles rather than those defined by the social structure. They think
different.

------
Kiro
My dad keeps saying things like "there's nothing better than being employed"
when I hint about my plans. I think his reaction would be very negative if I
took the leap.

I once had a fairly successful side-project and when I showed him our first
big customer invoice (~$20,000) he got terrified and thought it was something
I had to pay. When I told him it was actually money people had to pay _us_ he
still didn't get it. It was like he refused to accept the fact that you could
make money without having a "real" job.

------
davidroberts
I like this dad.

I think the OP is right. His dad was a surrogate for his own fears. It's easy
to put parents up on a pedestal and see them as the voice from above, but in
reality the only difference between parents and children is age. A different
life stage might bring a different attitude about security and such, but that
doesn't mean forgetting about what it means to be young. The OP's dad himself
had the pioneering urge and acted on it. He understands.

I'm in my fifties and recently back to the security of regular employment
after quitting my good job 12 years ago to start my own business. It was a
long, hard time, without much to show for it, but I don't regret any of it,
and my three kids turned out fine.

As another dad to the OP: I wish you the best of luck. I'm sure you'll do
great.

------
kenjackson
My dad is the complete opposite. He is of the group that believes you can only
get your true worth by owning your own business. He preached this my whole
life growing up.

And it is kind of funny -- as he worked his whole life for the government
(military and civilian) -- but after he retired he started investing in real
estate (great timing -- around 2008). He's making more money now than ever in
his life (he doesn't flip, just rents), is enjoying life more, and it's nice
to see one of his lifetime philosophies validated (at least for him).

------
yarianluis
Something for everyone out there to keep in mind. Reactions are always
negative when you talk about doing something risky in the future and are much
more likely to be positive when you decided to actually do it.

I dropped out of college a few months ago. Through the different talks I've
had with family and friends about it in the past year, you would have guessed
that everyone would have criticized the decision tremendously. But the day
that I went from "dad, I want to drop out" to "dad, I signed a full time offer
and I'm dropping out", I received staggering amounts of support.

Suddenly people knew I was serious about what I had been saying for a while.
At least that's what I think the difference was caused by.

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asynchronous13
While my parents were generally supportive, my dad did tell me "That's fine,
but one day you'll have to settle down and get a _real_ job." It's taken a
while but he's finally coming around that what I'm doing now is, in fact, a
real job.

------
alashley
I have been in this position quite a few times. I think my family, as a whole,
comprises some of the most risk-averse and fearful people I have ever met.
Especially on my dad's side of the family.

Whenever a contract would end, or I would leave a job because I wasn't
satisfied, my family would automatically view me as less-than-successful. To
them, success is being at the same job J for X years and then retiring, where
the job is generally a government job.

When I was with my last girlfriend, I had just come off of a contract job and
I decided to build small business websites as a freelancer. She was of the
opinion that "I couldn't make much money that way." She also thought I should
get a job at a restaurant cleaning instead, to her at least it was stable.
Never mind I was working my ass off and feeding myself as a freelancer once
got going.

I think when it comes to these matters, the people close to you will always
have an opinion. I tell myself that they won't always be in my life, and if I
let them make my decisions for me then I will just grow to resent them and
myself. At least if I take a different path, I can be confident in the fact
that it was my own choice and I will live with the consequences of it.

~~~
MatthewPhillips
My mother is the same way. I hold off on telling my parents when I switch jobs
until I know things are going well, because if there is anything negative
about it at all my mother will have a panic attack (figuratively, of course)
and think I made a huge mistake. She'll think that anyways, like your parents
her measure of success in work is stability.

------
ChuckMcM
Nice post, as a dad I try to be supportive of the choices my kids make. My
philosophy has always been that everyone is the director in the movie that is
their own life (sadly they are not the screen writer and must work with the
material they are given :-).

------
mikekij
I would have thought my dad would have had a negative response too. But
instead he shared that he felt like decades of being a VP at a big company
earned him little, and he should have started something when he was 30 too.

Dads are unpredictable.

------
eksith
The coffee shop isn't really comparable business-to-business because that's a
whole different thing altogether.

There's a lot of effort and a bit of luck going into running a coffee shop
(which can still succeed), but you have to still _treat it as a business_
which sadly, a lot of people don't do because... well, it's a coffee shop they
run for love.

[http://www.slate.com/articles/life/a_fine_whine/2005/12/bitt...](http://www.slate.com/articles/life/a_fine_whine/2005/12/bitter_brew.html)

I think dad was wise enough to see the difference.

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athinggoingon
I noticed, on the following page (shortlistedjobs, one of the sites listed in
your portfolio), that the "Distiller" takes the employee data and computes a
list of factors that are then categorized into success and failure buckets. I
see that being an introvert is considered a failure with a significance of -5.
How do you quantify introversion? What method do you use? Something similar to
sentiment analysis? I'm just curious. <http://www.shortlistedjobs.com/how-it-
works/>

~~~
ntrepid8
Ha, this was one of my prior "failures" but being an introvert is not a
"failure" per se. Shortlisted was designed to consume any information an
organization had about an employee plus a 1 to 10 rating about the value of
each employee to the organization.

The algorithm would then perform a step-wise regression on all the data and
"distil" it down to a model of attributes that correlate with performance to
that specific business, not in general. So being an introvert might be great
for some business cases but may not correlate well with success in every case.

After the model was built, the second step in Shortlisted is to take another
huge chunk of data and look for new employees that had attributes that
correlate well with success for the business.

So a typical use case might be your company hires 10 engineers out of college
per year. Out of those ten you can rank them in approximately highest to
lowest in terms of value to the company. Shortlisted takes everything you know
about those 10 (plus any from previous years, it really takes about 30 data
points to produce meaningful results) and searches the University for more
people like the most valuable employees and tries to avoid people like the
least valuable.

Our goal was to help job seekers avoid situations that not going to be a good
fit, and help employers find new hires that had a high likely hood of success.

------
namank
Hahaha, this is great! 3 weeks ago, I turned down some fairly decent jobs for
my startup and let my parents know the fact. They were very supportive,
pointing out only that I be doing it for the right reasons.

One point of contention may be that we, or at least I, have much much more in
the way of opportunities in that I can realistically dream of an ambition that
my parents did not have access to. It's deceptively understanding of them to
be able to not only comprehend this but also support me in it and for this I
am thankful.

------
mariusz331
I quit my job in October. I made the mistake of telling my parents too soon. I
told them I was planning to quit on Halloween and I'm sure their parental
instincts kicked in trying to convince me not to quit.

I would recommend not telling your parents at least till the week of. Then
there isn't much for them to do but to wish you the best of luck because
you've already made up your mind.

My parents now support me a lot and I definitely dont think i disappointed
them.

------
quackerhacker
Failure builds character and determination to succeed! I like how the OP
acknowledges that he's tried before and failed. I believe that is more
motivation to stay up at night, drink coffee and red bull, and type away
furiously. You WILL succeed as long as you stick with it... YOU are your
greatest investment!

Thomas Edison quote: "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that
won't work."

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VLM
"(not risky) choices about my career."

The difference between salaried and self employment is the self employed guy
know his own burn rate and knows when he goes out of business if he just
coasts, perhaps to the very day well in advance and truthfully, but the
salaried guy just shows up to work one day and the security guard hands him a
cardboard box and see ya.

I think its also a cultural drag thing. The WWII generation would think you're
crazy, you work for the same bigcorp for 40 years and get a gold watch and
great pension, right? LOL that died before my dad's generation. I'm not even
sure if that cultural mythology was even true, most of those people are all
dead now. Certainly not like that now.

------
teeja
One of the advantages of being young is that you are unencumbered enough to
nurse a dream castle. If you put foundations under it, it might come down to
Earth. If not, you can always let someone else underpay you to help them with
their dream castle.

------
andrewchoi
Fantastic story. I really do hope that my parents are as excited for me if and
when I try to strike out on my own.

Tiny nitpick, the font is a bit hard to read, the letters seem a bit bunched
together.

~~~
ntrepid8
Thanks for the feedback. The site was designed using a high dpi display and
sometimes I am surprised at how different a font can look on another display.
If you don't mind me asking what sort of device are you reading it on? I'd
like to see if I can make it look good on everything.

~~~
andrewchoi
Firefox 21, running on Ubuntu 12.04! Nothing fancy for hardware, just the
built-in panel for the Dell Latitude series.

~~~
ntrepid8
thanks!

------
angersock
Reminds me of an old joke:

You know the easiest way to make a small fortune doing a startup?

Start with a large fortune, then create a startup.

~~~
Lost_BiomedE
That is an old stock market adage. I wonder how many would translate well:

"Pigs get fed, hogs get slaughtered"

"Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent."

"End trades that show a loss as soon as possible"

"Markets are NEVER wrong-- opinions often are."

"It's only when the tide goes out that you learn who's been swimming naked."

"A public-opinion poll is no substitute for thought."

"Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be
broken."

"Operations for profit should be based not on optimism but on arithmetic"

"Nobody ever went broke taking profits."

etc.

------
ntrepid8
The businesses are not comparable per se, but the emotions that the operators
feel might be.

------
wtvanhest
Multifamily listings is an area that could use another competitor. What is the
site?

~~~
ntrepid8
<https://www.rescour.com>

~~~
wtvanhest
email me, HN name @gmail I sold multifamily property for 5 years.

------
ianstallings
It's hard explaining your rationale to risk-averse people but ultimately each
person lives their own life. I just quit a great job to do my own thing but I
have no regrets. This will be my _third_ time trying to strike out on my own
and I hope this one is successful. But if it's not I will just get back up,
dust myself off, and try again. Because it's what I love to do. No one likes
to fail, but to me, the risk taking is addictive. What greater way to achieve
something in life then through creation?

