Should You Quit Your Job and Start a Company?
How understanding your top needs can help you answer life’s most important questions.
One of the most valuable things I’ve learned from our partner, Tony Robbins, is his 6 Human Needs framework. They’re an incredible tool for understanding what drives your own behavior and fulfillment, or lack thereof. As Tony says, your top two needs are the driving force of your life. After reflection, I can now say with certainty that my top two needs are Love and Growth. This post describes my journey to pursue Growth. I hope it will prompt you to identify your own driving needs and use those to help answer big questions in your own life.
Tony’s 6 Human Needs
1. Certainty: assurance you can avoid pain and gain pleasure
2. Uncertainty/Variety: the need for the unknown, change, new stimuli
3. Significance: feeling unique, important, special or needed
4. Love/Connection: a strong feeling of closeness or union with someone or something
5. Growth: an expansion of capacity, capability or understanding
6. Contribution: a sense of service and focus on helping, giving to and supporting others
One of the most consequential decisions in my life was deciding to quit my first job out of college to start a company. When I graduated early from Villanova University with a finance degree, I had a singular focus: make as much money as possible and pay off my student loans. While I’ve known since I was kid that I wanted to work in “business,” I picked finance because, according to Villanova, its average starting salary was $52,000 versus accounting at $48,000. I had a very simple view of the world at that point.
Things took an unexpected turn when I applied to what I thought was a finance position called Capital Asset Trader, but in fact was a sales position — buying and selling used capital equipment. I flew out to San Francisco for an interview and they offered me a job on the spot and wanted an answer in 24 hours. I had never considered working in sales and I don’t remember it ever being discussed as a career at Villanova. However, there was something palpably exciting about their sales floor and it didn’t hurt that one of my interviewers, who had graduated the year before, shared that he had made over 5x that starting average finance salary in his first year.
I took the job and moved to California the next month. The position was a true high-intensity outbound sales floor. People who missed their quota were promptly fired and people who did well were greatly rewarded. There were all the hallmarks of a “boiler room” — trips to Vegas, 5 to 6 figure monthly bonuses and a lot of questionable motivational techniques. I learned that I had a knack for it. I learned that sales isn’t about convincing someone to buy something. It’s about building trust, learning about their problem and helping them solve it with your product or service. And I loved the high-pressure environment and direct accountability of the role.
After an incredibly successful first year, I was able to pay off my student loans and began strongly considering quitting to start a company with two friends. It was an agonizing decision between the excitement of building something from scratch versus continuing to collect an amazing paycheck. I hadn’t grown up with that type of money. We immigrated to the US from Ukraine when I was three and, to my parent’s immense credit, worked our way up to the middle class. It felt wildly irresponsible to walk away from that type of money. On the other hand, I saw that there wasn’t much more that I was going to learn in this role and my coworkers who had been there for years were still doing the same thing. In retrospect, it was obvious that this was an internal battle of my need for Growth and Uncertainty versus my need for Certainty. Thankfully, I had a fantastic girlfriend (now wife), inspiring co-founders and a mentor to guide me to the right answer for myself. I chose to quit and start my first company — it was the best professional decision I’ve ever made. I spent the next 7 years constantly pushed to the limits of my abilities and grew an incredible amount as a result.
So is the takeaway that you should quit your job and start a company? No, of course not, only if it meets your needs. The point is that understanding your top needs, as well as your values and beliefs, is an amazing tool to help design your life and navigate these types of difficult decisions. If you’re uncertain after reading this what your top two needs are, I’ve found it helpful to reflect on the times in my life where I’ve felt most fulfilled and unfilled. Jobs, hobbies and even people are all vehicles to meet our needs. For example, why did that job make you so miserable, which needs was it not meeting? Then, once you think you’ve identified them, backtest them across the past major decisions in your life and see if it explains why you did what you did and if you were happy with the decision. Does this give you a new clarity on why you chose to quit that job or leave that significant other? Finally, I can confirm that if you are driven by Growth, starting a company is an amazing way to meet your needs!
Prime Movers Lab invests in breakthrough scientific startups founded by Prime Movers, the inventors who transform billions of lives. We invest in seed-stage companies reinventing energy, transportation, infrastructure, manufacturing, human augmentation and computing
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