There’s the common reasons: you have another opportunity that comes up, you have to move, you’re getting married or having a baby and need some extended time off.

I didn’t leave for any of these reasons.

There’s the less common reasons: you’re going back to school or you’re having surgery or an illness that needs to be taken care of.  You and your boss are fighting, you and your boss aren’t getting along, or you’ve developed an unhealthy emotional connection with someone in your office and just need to get away.

I didn’t leave for any of these reasons.

Then there’s the rare and unsightly reasons: you’ve caught someone stealing from the company, sexual harassment claims, a family tragedy, an emotional breakdown or simply being fired.

I definitely didn’t leave for any of those reasons.

I had always thought that the idea of the “quarter life crisis” as so many in my generation are apt to call it, was ridiculous.  An excuse to quit your job and go teach English abroad or run off to a new city and become a waiter or a barista.  An excuse to go back to school and “find yourself”.  In the end, an excuse.  And as much as I hate to say it, I looked down on those people.

Well that was stupid.

Actually, it was beyond stupid.  I should have seen the signs years ago – that feeling of restlessness that every traveler knows means its time to move on.  An urge to become more involved, more effective, more known.  My entire being was fighting a pitched battle between putting down roots or jumping onto the next flight to Thailand.  I was conflicted by my need to make a difference in my community and my sense of hopelessness in being able to do anything of importance.  I felt trapped.

I was waiting for something or someone to change my own situation instead of forcing a change myself.  I was too scared to make the leap.

Stupid.

I had been at my job for the past two and a half years.  Originally hired on as a junior account manager I was quickly promoted four times in two and a half years and helped to turn a team of two into a team of nine, We went from bringing in tens of thousand of dollars into bringing in hundreds of thousands of dollars in a quarter.

I had never been challenged like this before: I was running full campaigns for clients that spanned from PR to advertising to events around the country and the world.  I was writing business plans, I was bringing in new business and helping to build a team and a company from scratch.

At 25 I was promoted to Director of Accounts, running the day to day of the company and its accounts and overseeing a team of five.  I was the youngest officer in the company and one of the youngest agency directors in Sacramento.  I was ecstatic.

Really, really stupid.

I failed in this position.  Miserably.

The reasons are less important than the outcome and the outcome was that I lost the trust and more importantly the respect of my team.  It was a slow realization but when it came it hit me hard.

Taking a step back, I looked at what I had been doing over the past few months and was shocked by the results.  Every bad habit, every distasteful trait I had seen in old bosses were present in my “leadership” qualities.  I was running on my own schedule, coming in late, running off to trips around the US for business meetings with little advance notice.  I sat in my office and rarely came out to chat with my team instead making them come to me.  I was trying to lead by instinct but when that instinct is based on a false foundation it was always going to be off-kilter.

You can moan over your mistakes or you can fix them.  I chose the latter.  I gave up my office and moved into a shared workspace with my coworkers.  I brought them into my calls and my work, showing them what I was doing and ensuring I always knew what they were up to; if anyone went on vacation I could seamlessly take over their projects.

Robert Greene notes that “at all times you must attend to those around you”.  I began taking a much greater interest in what my teammates wanted out of their jobs and the company as a whole.  Slowly but surely I turned things around.

I presented an overall restructure to the company that would address most of the issues I had heard from my coworkers.  I included a biz dev and marketing strategy for the company as a whole that would see incomes rise across the board.  In a role that had seen me challenged in more ways than I could ever imagine this was my biggest one to date.  It was wholeheartedly endorsed and I felt accomplished for the first time in months.

I had learned more and grown more from this job than other in life.

So why would I leave that?

Six moths earlier I had begun working through a thought experiment with friends.  It didn’t take long before we realized that the project not only had legs but would be able to run fast and far if we gave it the right attention.  All of the joy, the excitement and fear that you only experience in a start-up began to come back.

I left because for the first time in my life I had found a project that I was truly passionate about, a project that connected all of the things that I love doing the most.  It combined writing, events, community involvement and civic duty. I wanted this and I wanted it bad.

The truth of the matter is it’s ambitious, possibly even impossible.  But I knew that going into it, and I knew that when my I put my notice in two weeks ago.

So that’s where things stand: I’m putting the last two years behind me and focusing all of my energy and attention on this new problem.  I want to see what happens when you put everything you have into something, when you make it so public that you simply can’t fail because everyone is watching.  I want to see if I can stand it and if I can rise to the occasion.

I’m leaving in two days for Europe for two weeks to clear my head.  I have four months of funds saved up and no idea how to make money off of this thing.

Should be fun.