This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Nic Huzz, 28, who quit a Sydney-based venture capital job to run a silent disco business in Bali, Indonesia. It has been edited for length and clarity.
I was never one of those kids who knew what they wanted to be when they grew up.
When I was six, we were asked to draw a picture of our future job. I stared at a blank page until I remembered a weekend trip to the mall with my mom, where I’d wandered into a game store and decided the owner must get to play with the toys all day. So I just drew that.
That uncertainty followed me even when I was 18. When it came time for university, I did what everyone told me to do: choose something broad, keep my options open. I studied communications and entrepreneurship, took on unpaid internships, and worked my way into the startup world. Eventually, I got a full time role at what I thought was my dream job: working at a venture capital firm in Sydney.
I didn’t want the perfect job
On paper, it was perfect. I was helping founders build companies. I had a title people respected.
But within a month of starting full time, I realized I wasn’t happy. The job wasn’t bad, and that was part of the problem. I’d spent years chasing it, and when I finally arrived, I felt empty. I began to understand that what I actually wanted wasn’t the job itself, but the validation I thought came with it.
Most days, I sat behind a desk from 9 to 5. The parts I loved — facilitating programs, traveling, working with founders — made up a small fraction of my week. I realized I had too much energy to sit still in an office for that long.
Then, in 2020, lockdowns hit, and the job became even more soul-crushing because I didn’t have the weekends to escape it all. Even though I figured out that I wasn’t happy nearly right away, it took me more than three years to quit.
I tried everything. For the first two years, I went on this massive journey where I learned how I could start designing a life that feels true for me. I spent around 42,000 Australian dollars, or $30,000, on more than 50 self-help coaches, programs, online learning courses, and books. You name it, I did it. I had all the mental models and frameworks in the world, but little about my reality changed.
I feared change
I began to realize that you don’t rise to the level of your ambitions — you fall to the level of what feels safe. I was stuck because of fear: fear of judgment, failure, and not being good enough.
In the months before I quit, I challenged myself to do one thing every week that genuinely terrified me. At first, it was small — posting a vulnerable video online, dancing on my Instagram story, performing magic tricks for strangers in restaurants. Then it escalated to stand-up comedy and singing in public, with no background in either. Within five weeks of that challenge, I’d moved to Bali to work remotely for the firm.
About three months after working from Bali in 2023, I got a text from my boss saying we were opening a new office in Sydney and that it was time for me to come back. I remember my body physically froze, and I told her I could not do it.
She told me she saw it coming and was actually proud of me for finally saying it and wanting to move on to do different things.
I battled imposter syndrome
I didn’t have an alternate plan for months and was living off my savings. I went from earning 85,000 Australian dollars a year to earning nothing. For months, I lived on a few hundred dollars a week. Twice, my bank account dropped close to zero.
As part of my challenge, I had started bringing a couple of silent disco headphones to the beaches in Bali and Thailand and was asking strangers to join me as I danced. More and more people kept joining each time I did it, and a friend suggested I start taking donations. My imposter syndrome crept in, and I told them that I was just doing it for fun. I was so conditioned to associate work with suffering that it felt unfair to make money while having fun.
I finally listened to my friends about the donations. At the fourth or fifth disco, I remember making more money in an hour than I did in a day at my corporate job. I started running silent disco sessions and was even asked if I could rent out my headsets to others.
At one point, a club owner asked if I could provide them with 300 headsets, and I had to go to the best bank in the world — the bank of mom and dad — for a loan to buy 250 more headsets. The loan was worth more than I had earned in the past 12 months, but it helped me eventually support major conferences in Bali, such as AWS, Amazon, and IBM.
Last year, I made around 30,000 Australian dollars, which is a lot less than I made in Sydney. But I wake up excited every day and get to choose where I live and how I work.
My nervous system went through hell getting here, and I don’t believe anyone should quit their job overnight. But I do think most of us stay stuck because we think safety comes from a salary. I’ve learned that it comes from trusting myself.
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