As for you, young man, I can say only one thing. You’re gonna go far, trust my word. Goodbye.

I thanked him and wished good luck, and that was it. Let me explain, it’s not that I ever doubted myself so much that a simple one-liner turned everything in me upside down. It was something different.

Till that point, I heard such things either from my friends or family — people who clearly wanted me to succeed. But he had no interest in me whatsoever, being a guy who almost didn’t know me, and who will never even see me again. He had no other reason to say that but to simply spell out something that was on his mind at the moment.

When I went home that day I thought about it a lot, and then a single question struck me:

How can I make my own story when all I do is following someone? No matter how far I’ll go — I will always be but a companion in another’s man journey.

Before that, I never thought about what I did with my life. I’ve had a pretty decent career with a lot of room to grow. And I was under a strong illusion of ‘if I am getting better in what I do — I do everything right’. But in reality, how being good at something you don’t enjoy could make you happy?

That made me both sad and strangely motivated. I didn’t pack my things and ride off into the sunset — life is a bit more complex than that — but from that moment I was preparing myself and waiting for the right moment to start my own path.

A year and a half later I left my career behind to pursue my own goals.

What Went After

The fear of uncertainty, combining with the attachment to financial stability made me much more unstable and uncertain about my own self than the most unpredictable freelance life periods that occurred later in my life.

As I realized after, all that time I was silently angry at myself for inability to follow my own ambitions. I wasn’t able to stick to a single job for a long time because I didn’t care enough, not because I wasn’t persistent enough. I pushed myself to the limits not to achieve more, but to feel at least some satisfaction from what I did. It’s all clear and simple now, yet it wasn’t at all back then. And who knows where I would’ve been by now if not that quick, almost random conversation.

Now I’m 25. I didn’t have a stroke but my head is still about to explode from all the things I need to get done. My life didn’t become a tiny bit easier. Moreover, it became even harder. Now all my actions and decisions are totally on me, and when I screw up — there’s no one to blame or to cover my back. My income depends on me completely. No more luxury of knowing when exactly I’ll get money and how much it’ll be. Some of my ideas don’t work out as I planned, mistakes and disappointments are inevitable — but it all makes one huge difference.

It’s all mine. My mistakes, yet my victories. My fear to fail, yet my courage to fight. My struggles, yet my rewards. I’m following my own way, and there’s hard to find a more self-affirming feeling than that.

Life doesn’t need to be easy to feel good — it needs to be filled with the challenges you want to get over, not need to.

Over the past year, I became a Top Rated brand expert on Upwork, recently started my own US-registered business, and made it to Medium, for which I will be writing a lot from now.

I don’t know what waits for me next, but I’m certainly dying to know. Of course, in a figurative sense…

And in the end I’m left with only one thing to say: