Ask HN: Those who quit their jobs without anything planned. How did it go?

No necessarily. It depends on a person's yearly expenses. If, for example, she was able to save 10 years salery in 20 years, it would mean that she consumes only 5 % of the total savings per year. This sounds quite sustainable, because you need only to achieve a 5 % return on investment (after inflation) on the savings to live just from these returns not touching the savings at all.

May I suggest that if there is a book you've always wanted to read now might be a time you could really enjoy it!

Mostly positive experiences here. Would be interesting to hear from some for whom it didn't go so well...

After skimming half the thread and only seeing one view (DO IT! It’s GREAT!), I’m going to throw this out there:

- You will have heavy selection bias here (people who did not succeed might be working at a crappier job and unable to comment at this moment)

- You will also have confirmation bias among those who willingly quit (“of course it was the right move”)

- You are asking a very unique set of people with very valuable skills in high demand (you may fall into this category, but worth keeping in mind)

- The last 10 years has been a historic bull market and hard to fail in if you fall into the last category. We don’t know what the future brings (Not knowing what the future holds has been true every year of the last 10 years, especially January 2020. But I bring it up to say past results from others in this thread do not guarantee future performance for you).

All in all, if you are financially stable or have a supportive safety net, it seems like a potentially good risk to take. It also looks like you should have a strong plan to do something (hobby, hike, or work in another capacity). If you don’t, you may just stagnate and waste some of your prime years for growth and development.

But absolutely - if you have support and a plan, you keep the downsides in mind (it will be painful at times, and not roses and butterflies the whole way through), then sure - give it a shot. If you are growing and developing skills in a field you don’t care about, you should definitely change it up.

Reframing it - nearly everyone who goes to grad school full time quits their job (or takes a leave). Quitting to do your own thing, as long as you show employers why you did it in a year or two, shouldn’t be a detriment for getting rehired. That said, hiring managers may question if you’d quit again in a year (depending on your past employment tenure)…

Note: I am not an engineer. I’m mostly skilled in telling stories.

I got fired from every job I ever had before I started working for myself. Each time I left I ended up in a better job until the last time when I got laid off from a telecom PM role. I went to look for another job and never found one. At the time I was living paycheck to paycheck (barely) so this was quite scary. I did have a small severance but that was it.

I decided to make a startup and begged my friends for enough money to get going (secretparty.io). It started to grow. At the same time, one of my dear friends told me to put all of my severance into ethereum. It helped that he said he’d give me the money back if I lost it, he just wanted me to see what was going to happen.

My severance 10x’d in a month. I stopped working on the startup and begged my friends for money to start a crypto hedge fund. That was crypto lotus and ended up being one of the first serious crypto funds.

While being at crypto lotus, I grew frustrated that no one was making a consumer-friendly crypto project. That’s when I started working on mobilecoin.

Now mobilecoin is worth over a billion dollars in equity and several billion in coins.

All I can say is that I never would’ve gotten any of this without an insane amount of luck. It all could’ve very easily have gone another way and I might be homeless right now. Life is a series of dice rolls. You’re lucky if you can avoid getting snake eyes every now and again.

If I had it to do all over again, I would’ve started working for myself much sooner despite all of the risk.