6 AM meant it was time to check voicemails. 11 PM meant it was time to check voicemails again. Every second in between reserved for hustling, fixing the thousand problems guaranteed to crop up that day.

That was my life as a Goldman Sachs VP, and despite what you might assume, I didn't hate it.

I didn't get there by accident. I'd worked that hard since my first job at KFC to get where I thought I should want to be, and by all accounts, I was crushing my goals.  Except they weren't my goals. Despite my success, despite the deep friendships I'd made at Goldman, I could never shake the sense that I was living someone else's idea of success.  At a certain point, it was time to leave.

Why it took me this long to walk away.  A lot of people feel trapped in their jobs for various reasons:

• They're afraid of losing the money.
• They've grown too comfortable.
• They think they don't deserve something more.

But none of those applied to me.  I lived well below my means on Wall Street and had a little money stashed away to feel comfortable taking the risk. I didn't know where it would lead me, but I knew I would figure it out.  I hadn't grown too comfortable in one position - in fact I'd changed my job 4 times at Goldman already.  And I most certainly did not fall into the third trap.  Too many people confuse their unhappiness with ungratefulness, and feel ashamed for wanting something more than what other people think they should want. On a base level, I always knew this shame was self-defeating and rejected it.

What had held me back, however, was the question that had baffled me since I began transforming my career and life, What Do I Want?  After all these years, job changes, moving countries, and cities, reading thousands of books and writing thousands of pages of ideas, I still didn't know what I wanted.  Whereas years earlier I was certain that I wanted to be at Goldman for the rest of my life, I couldn't point at something and say, "I am 100% certain that I want to do this for the rest of my life."

I could, however, do something else. Looking at my current job, I could say, I am 100% certain that I do not want to do this for the rest of my life."  So I quit.