The 40 Under 40 Year I Almost Quit
The recognition came the same year I nearly walked away from tech altogether. A story about burnout, timing, and what actually changed my mind.
The year I was named to a 40 Under 40 list was, privately, the year I came closest to leaving the industry. Nobody could tell from the outside. The work looked like momentum. Internally it felt like running on a treadmill someone kept speeding up.
What changed my mind wasn't a grand realization. It was a conversation with a mentor who asked me a simple question: "if you quit tomorrow, what would you actually miss?" Not the title, not the recognition. I missed the specific feeling of a hard technical problem finally clicking into place with a team that trusted each other. That was still there, buried under everything else I'd let pile on top of it.
I restructured my role around protecting that feeling -- fewer meetings that existed only to make other people comfortable, more time in the actual work with the actual team. The recognition arrived in the middle of that mess. It's a reminder to me now that external markers of success and internal states of wellbeing run on completely different clocks, and confusing the two is where burnout usually starts.