Stay Employed, Start Smart: The Low-Cost Test Before You Quit

You have said it out loud about four times, and every time it came out sounding like an excuse.

I can't quit my job.

Nobody has ever checked whether it is true. Here is what happens when somebody does.

Thirty-five per cent. That is how much less the median person earned, ten years after leaving a wage to work for themselves, than if they had simply stayed. Not the failures. The middle of the pack. James Hamilton published it in the Journal of Political Economy in 2000, and almost nobody quotes it, because it is the wrong shape for a stage.

Then the finding that reverses everything. Following thousands of people through fourteen years of employment records, the ones who built the business while keeping the wage were about a third less likely to shut it down than the ones who jumped straight out of a salary into nothing. A third. The job you cannot quit is not the obstacle. It is the cheapest test equipment you will ever own.

Fourteen chapters. Each one ends with something you can finish in a single evening, on paper, without spending anything or telling anybody.

Inside:

- The four things bolted to your salary that nobody itemised for you, and the two-year wall that stands in the same place in five different countries

- Why the founders of the fastest-growing companies in America average forty-five, and what actually predicts their success

- The ninety-six hours that are your whole trial, and the one number you write down before you start

- The paragraph at the back of your employment contract that took an engineer's twenty-one-year idea and then billed him a third of a million dollars

- The route into working for yourself that skips the building entirely, and what it costs at the median

- Why only four point one per cent of workers have ever asked their employer to change the job, and what happened to the ones who did

Every figure is checked. Where the research contradicts itself, the contradiction is printed rather than the tidier half. Sixteen figures were cut for having no author attached to them. One chapter admits it has almost no evidence underneath it, and says so before asking you to do the exercise anyway.

Diego Segura is an industrial engineer. He holds an MBA and a master's in Digital Technology from Boston University, and he wrote the international bestseller Everything in Excess Is Good. He has worked with Stanford, Harvard, MIT and Boston University. He has drawn a wage from somebody else exactly once. That is the hole in his authority, and he puts it in the introduction rather than letting you find it in chapter five.

This book might tell you to stay. One of the last chapters belongs entirely to the reader who does.

You are not deciding today. You are finding out what is actually attached to you, which almost nobody does before handing in the notice.