Here's what people said when I quit my 9to5:

As if I had renounced worldly life and moved to the Himalayas. Lol.

But here's what struck me later. All three of those statements were measuring the exact same thing: money. They saw my career through one lens, scored it on one dimension, and concluded I was destroying it. That's not their fault. That's the word ‘career’ doing its job.

I looked it up. Career comes from the Latin word carrus, meaning a wheeled vehicle or chariot. That evolved into the French word carrière, meaning a racecourse or road. From there came the modern word: the racecourse of your professional life, or the trajectory of your work.

A racecourse. One track. One direction. You run, you finish, someone wins.

Your professional life is not a racecourse. It's a journey shaped by many dimensions at once: income, title, freedom, rate of learning, quality of the people around you, location, toxicity of the environment, alignment with the work itself, and your health over time.

We can easily visualise trajectories in two or three dimensions. A line going up on a graph. A position on a scoreboard. But what happens when the trajectory needs ten dimensions? The human mind cannot intuitively grasp that. So the brain takes a shortcut.

Worse, in many cases, we compress it all the way down to one. Income. The career ladder. And that single dimension becomes the lens through which every decision, every offer, every life choice gets evaluated.

No. This is a deeply human pattern.

Do you see it? We instinctively shrink rich, complex realities into shallow numbers simply because it's easier for our brains to process information that way. We do it with people, with companies, with ourselves.

But when it comes to careers, this reduction can cost you dearly. It traps you into chasing the wrong metrics, optimising for the wrong life.

When I quit, people saw a salary disappearing. That was the only dimension on their radar. By the logic of the career ladder, I was going backwards.

But if you consider all the dimensions of a career, I was doing perfectly fine. The decision was deliberate and well thought out. I simply chose to reduce one dimension, income, to increase another, free time. In my first year after quitting, I worked about 600 hours the entire year and still earned around 80% of my old salary. I wake up without an alarm. I have a runway of 5+ years. I work 2-3 hours a day on things I choose.

Was I ruining my career? Only if career means income.

The real problem was not that people were wrong to raise the question. It's that the word gave them no vocabulary to evaluate anything else. The word career handed them one axis, and they used it.

This is the question I kept returning to after that experience. And it led me to build something I call the Career Satisfaction Score.

The idea is simple. List every dimension that matters to your working life — salary, learning, autonomy, manager quality, location, energy levels at the end of the day, alignment with the work. Weight each dimension based on how much it genuinely matters to you, not what you've been told should matter. Score your current situation on each one. The weighted average gives you a single number, but the real value is seeing the full picture at once.

It makes visible what the word career keeps invisible: the trade-offs you're already making, whether you acknowledge them or not. I have a full walkthrough in my book, including a calculator you can use on your own situation. It's not out yet, but the waitlist is open here.

When I took a 30% salary cut early on to move into a COO role at a startup, everyone thought I was making a mistake. But when I ran the numbers across all dimensions, learning, autonomy, upside, and context, the new role scored higher overall. The salary went down. Everything else I cared about went up. The CSS made that clear before I committed.

Quite a bit, actually.

You stop using other people's paths as benchmarks. Their weights are different from yours. The fact that a colleague earns more or holds a fancier title tells you nothing about whether their life is configured better than yours. The comparison becomes meaningless once you're no longer on the same track.

You become harder to pressure. The phrase "you're ruining your career" only stings if you believe a career is just one thing. Once you know your actual weights and scores, you can evaluate the claim properly instead of flinching at it.

And you start making trade-offs consciously. Every career decision is a trade-off between dimensions. The only question is whether you're making it deliberately or just reacting to the visible metric while everything else quietly deteriorates.

Thought exercise: You have a job offer with a 50% salary hike. But former employees warn that the work culture is toxic, and there is almost no learning on the job. Would you take it? Those who see only the salary dimension would, in a heartbeat. Those who understand the richness of career dimensions would pause.

That pause is the whole point. If you want the full system for making this kind of decision with clarity, it's what the book is built around. Waitlist is open.

What does your career actually look like when you score it honestly across every dimension that matters to you? Calculate that number. You might be surprised by what it says.