The night I decided to leave everything behind

The apartment was quiet. It was just before midnight in Brussels, rain tapping against the windows of my place in Ixelles, and I was at the kitchen table with my laptop open, going through performance dashboards for a campaign at Philip Morris. Revenue targets exceeded. Engagement up. Every indicator green. From the outside, it was a textbook picture of professional success.

About twenty minutes in, I realised I was looking at proof that I was doing very well at a game I no longer wanted to play.

Green dashboards, empty feeling

At the time I was Digital Lead for Reduced Risk Products, the part of the business focused on what the company now calls its smoke-free products. I was four years into an international corporate career, with responsibility, visibility and the trust of senior stakeholders. It was the kind of role people work towards deliberately.

Yet nothing in those numbers reflected how the work actually felt. There was no sense of building something, no creative tension, no excitement. The job had become about maintaining systems, optimising within constraints and avoiding risk, and we were all calling it strategy.

Forty minutes to dismantle an idea

Earlier that week I had presented a campaign I genuinely believed in. It wasn't just an execution but a strategic direction with a clear creative logic, designed to work across several markets. I could see how it would scale and how it would set us apart.

The meeting lasted just under forty minutes, and in that time the idea was taken apart piece by piece. It didn't fit the existing brand guidelines. It was too risky for the market climate. Legal had concerns. Eventually someone suggested we revisit it in a future quarter. By the end, nothing of the original idea was left. It hadn't been challenged into something better. It had simply been neutralised.

Walking back to my desk, I understood that the problem wasn't the quality of the work. The system wasn't designed to create strong ideas; it was designed to remove risk. Every layer protected something, whether that was compliance, hierarchy, precedent or reputation. Nobody in that room was rewarded for building something new, only for making sure nothing went wrong. Amy Edmondson's work on psychological safety describes the opposite climate, one where people can speak frankly without fearing the consequences. I had stopped expecting to work in one.

The pattern I'd been ignoring

That evening I started connecting things I had ignored for years. The moments in my career when I felt most alive had nothing to do with titles or promotions. They were moments of creation: launching a new affiliate in Curaçao (which I wrote about in what working in Curaçao taught me), building digital strategies in markets where no framework existed yet, creating structure from scratch.

The moments that drained me were the opposite. Maintaining established systems, defending ideas in meetings, watching ambition shrink until it felt safe enough to approve. Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer's research on the power of small wins found that making progress in meaningful work matters more to people's inner work life than anything else. Reading it later, I recognised myself immediately.

A drink, and a Sunday question

A few weeks later, a conversation with a colleague made it concrete. Over drinks, he admitted that after more than a decade at the company he had become very good at navigating meetings and internal politics, but could no longer say clearly what he personally believed in. He didn't say it dramatically, but it landed heavily. I recognised the trajectory, and it unsettled me because I could see myself on the same path.

The final confirmation came on a quiet Sunday. Someone asked how work was going and I gave the automatic answer: busy, but good. Then I realised I hadn't spoken about loving my work in over a year. Driving back to Brussels that night, the decision became unavoidable. I wasn't leaving because the job was bad or the company was wrong. I was leaving because staying meant slowly becoming someone I didn't recognise.

Six quiet months, then a small first client

I didn't resign on impulse. I spent six months preparing quietly: saving money, building relationships, and working evenings and weekends on what would become Majortale. When I finally handed in my notice, the reactions were predictable. Confusion, concern, disbelief. I was told I was giving up security and walking away from everything I had built. They weren't wrong.

The first months were hard. No guaranteed income, no structure handed to me, no safety net. My first client was small, an €8,000 recruitment project, and I treated it with the same seriousness as a large international campaign. It worked. People were hired, the client came back, and others followed. Not because the content looked impressive, but because the thinking behind it was sound.

Clarity, not courage

Looking back, the decision didn't come from bravery or frustration. It came from clarity. Staring at those dashboards in Brussels, I understood something basic about myself: I'm not built to maintain systems other people created. I'm built to create them, to connect creativity with business outcomes, and to push back on structure when it gets in the way of progress.

That night wasn't a career crisis. It was the moment I stopped ignoring a pattern that had been there all along, and once you see it clearly, you can't really unsee it.

If you're somewhere in that same quiet in-between, I'm always happy to compare notes. You can read more about how I work, see selected work, or book a 1-1.

— Joost