You may have noticed that I disappeared for a week. I had the opportunity to whisk the family off to Maui for vacation. I felt a little guilty about missing a Monday, but then I realized the family vacation is the exact thing I'm living for. With one kid going off to college in a few weeks and the other starting senior year in high school, these vacations are going to get pretty rare.

Last issue, I told you I'd landed a global role back in corporate. Global means what it sounds like. Meetings with Asia at night, meetings with Europe before sunrise, meetings with the Americas team filling up everything in between. I got thrown straight back into the exact grind I'd sworn off, and it took exactly one week for the dread to fully reintroduce itself. Meetings about meetings. Staff calls. Get-to-know-you calls so twelve strangers could ask me the same three questions about my background. It was like returning to hell after finally escaping.

What kept me showing up was the money. Smaller paycheck than my last corporate stint, but no mortgage meant it went further than it ever had before. Dad could say yes again. Two things still held me back from going all in though. First, I know the fastest way to raise entitled, bratty kids is to hand them everything they want, so I kept the parental structure intact. Second, every extra dollar I spent was a dollar I wasn't saving toward getting back out of that hellhole.

I put on my this-is-the-smartest-financial-decision hat and got back to trudging through life. Home office this time, so I actually saw the kids most days, but always with some eleven PM meeting sitting on my chest like a weight I couldn't put down. I spent ten hours a day in meetings and then had to scrounge for actual work time in whatever cracks were left. I hated that job. Not frustrated-hated. Actual hated.

And most likely, that's exactly what got me laid off. They had handed me a project that was dead on arrival. Go save a million dollars, they said, like it was a scavenger hunt. Only they'd already decided how I had to save it, by trying to optimize numbers that had nothing left to give. I did the work my way instead. Real analysis, real vendor conversations, an actual good idea to outsource pieces of the operation to people who already did it better than we did. Clean PowerPoint and everything.

No budget for that, they said.

Fine. Spend two hundred thousand to save ten million? Still no?

You sure?

I kept pushing that rock for months. Sharpened every number, shaved every process I could find, and watched the potential savings shrink every time I did it. Nothing moved anyone. The answer was always do it the way you were told. Eventually I stopped even pretending to do it their way. I'd like to tell you that was integrity. Mostly, I'd just stopped caring whether I kept the job at all.

So it wasn't really a surprise when my boss called first thing on a Monday morning with a mandatory one on one. That's code for pack your stuff at that company. Sure enough, I got the layoff speech, dressed up as "we're downsizing and your role has been eliminated," but I knew exactly what it was.

For about two nanoseconds, I panicked. I pictured going home and telling my wife and kids that Dad had lined up another failure. Back to beans and rice. Then they said twelve weeks of severance, and the weight of that job slid off my back like a stack of bricks. Twelve weeks of pay to stop being miserable. That wasn't bad news. That was the best offer anyone had made me in two years.

I walked in the house that night grinning like an idiot. My family looked at me like I'd lost it, because this is the part where Dad's supposed to be devastated. I couldn't fake it. That job had been eating me alive, and somebody had just paid me to stop letting it.

I got my mojo back and immediately fired up the side hustles again.

Next week, I'll show you how I started an eBay store with zero dollars and free inventory sitting in plain sight. It's out there for anyone willing to go get it.

It's not too late. Let's move.

— Dave Otani.