if you get 100 words in without closing the screen, i'd consider it a success. 

The Basics

Let's start with the simple.  I graduated from Purdue University in, what feels like a distant memory, 2012.  At the time there were two things I knew I wanted for my first big job.  I wanted to work in the tech field and I wanted to work for a big fortune 500 company. My only rationale for wanting to work for a fortune 500 company was that I wanted to be able to tell people where I worked without them saying "what do they do"?  So when General Motors offered me a position as an IT Project Manager, I was sold. 

Getting deeper

After two extremely insightful years, I decided to leave GM. Telling people why would prove to be difficult. If you've ever seen a Judd Apatow movie and kept waiting for the movie to end but never did, that's essentially what it felt like as I told people why I was leaving.  

But as I began to simplify my answer, there was always two recurring reasons.  First was that over time I began to sense an emptiness of creativity in my role, since all that I had time to focus on was deliverables and deadlines. Over time I became so occupied on managing schedules and deadlines that I could barely spend any time learning the applications that we were making. 

And secondly, as overly simplistic and generic as it sounds, I knew that I had no passion for what I was doing.  Managing a project provided me invaluable lessons and skills, but it also made me realize that I wanted to be on the ground floor and solving problems that mattered instead of managing schedules and deadlines. 

Final Stretch

It's been a few months since I left GM and the question I get most often is still, "why the hell did you leave without having another job lined up?" They had a point.  It was not as if I was dreaming of replicating my high school summer days, where sitting on your ass all day was not looked down upon.  With this time off I wanted to hit the reset button.