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It was December, I was bored to death staring at my four screens and thinking the weather really sucks in Europe in winter, and some guy calls me out of the blue asking me if I want to move to the beach. I had a chat with a few colleagues, one of them told me he spent a year in Australia and loved every second of it; his wife refused to move from Europe as she liked to be close to her parents, so he was stuck in the miserable weather and resigned to his fate. I took the Skype interview at 6am in the dark of my flat, wearing my suit for work, and he made sure to tell me about how he had just gone surfing that morning. I had to do three trades from the train platform due to the delay and a time change in South Africa we forgot about. My boss was busy making a lot of money on a volatile morning and took a couple hours to process my verbal resignation, at which point he jumped ("you WHAT?") and told me to go see HR. They trusted me, and were relatively busy, so they let me stay til the next day. We had a chat in a conference room where he told me that his biggest regret was how his career kind of "just happened", with positions of ever increasing money and responsibility keeping him in the game until he was life-locked (kids, house, cars, skills, network...). He encouraged me to go seek adventure, he had wished to go to Asia at "my age" but never got round to it. Sydney was even more awesome than I imagined. The rest kind of followed naturally; that and I never managed to get back in, so had to keep going, self-teach, moved companies, etc. But it all comes down to a cold, miserable day in Geneva and an executive trawling LinkedIn for suitable hires for his team downunder. I sometimes wonder whether I'd have eventually quit to do my own thing, or whether I'd be, like some of my friends from university, debating whether to go for the DBS or the F-type this season. |