1. Quitting. I realize this is not a big deal if you have a highly sought-after expertise (e.g. software development) and the local culture and employment laws

1. Quitting. I realize this is not a big deal if you have a highly sought-after expertise (e.g. software development) and the local culture and employment laws make it easy to change jobs (e.g. the US). But in my case, I was working as a department head in a big company in France in a relatively small town with a really small labor market for my particular skills and salary expectations. And I’d been working in that company since graduating, playing the corporate ladder game. Changing jobs meant moving (taking my family with me), making a gamble that I’d be able to make it in the new job and that it was all worth it — as the saying goes, you know what you’re leaving behind but you don’t go what you’re going to find. 2. Understanding and accepting that it’s more important to love what you do than to chase status and promotions. At my previous job, I was keeping track of success by how many people I had in my team and how much responsibility was given to me. But most days were spent in meetings and budget forecasts and PowerPoint slides, and it kinda sucked. Plus to reach the next rungs it was heavily hinted that I should move from engineering to marketing or customer operations (because “you will never manage a BU if you don’t have direct customer experience”), and I knew full well that I’d hate it. Accepting this gave me the impetus to look for a new job and quit, and I haven’t regretted it for a second.