The roller coaster of wanting to quit the day job.

Some days are a mental roller coaster. I want to quit the main job and build full time. I know, with full clarity, that it is not possible right now with a young family. Both things are true on the same day, sometimes in the same hour.

I am writing this down because the build-in-public feed tends to show the launches and skip this part.

What the feed says

The feed says the 9 to 5 is dead. Selling courses is dead. Digital products are dead. Every week something else is dead. If you believed all of it, there would be nothing left to do.

Most of that is people selling the next thing by burying the last one. I have a job that pays for a family. It is not dead. It is the reason I can build without needing the builds to work this month.

The three enemies

When the roller coaster is running, the thing pushing it is never the job. It is one of three things: fear, overthinking, or self-doubt. Fear that the window is closing. Overthinking the perfect moment to jump. Self-doubt about whether the builds would hold up without the safety net.

Naming which one is driving usually stops the ride. Fear wants a plan. Overthinking wants a deadline. Self-doubt wants a shipped thing, which is why I ship small things often.

What I do instead of quitting

I build at 5am. Weekends in the margins. I run security and AI adoption for a regulated fintech during the day, and I do it properly, because that work has real consequences if it goes wrong.

The goal is not to escape the job. It is to run both well, long enough that the options multiply. Two paid subscribers on Steady is not a reason to quit. It is a signal to keep going. Every real change in my life has followed the same shape: start bad, stay, transform, repeat. This one is in the stay phase.

If you are on the same ride, you are not behind. You are a person with responsibilities, building anyway. That is the harder version, and it compounds.