I quit my last 9-5 EVER this week.
The Creative Diaries, Vol. 4
Dear Creative,
This week’s letter isn’t from Georgie. She’s been incredibly unwell (don’t worry, she’s recovering), so it’s your co-Founder, Haavard stepping in. And honestly, it feels fitting, because this week something happened that’s been a long time coming:
I handed in my resignation to my last 9–5 job ever.
To understand why this moment means so much, I need to take you back to November 2023.
We’d just lived through the most extraordinary — and exhausting — year of our lives.
We criss-crossed Australia for work. We spent three weeks in India. We travelled to the United Kingdom, Norway, and the United States. We captured stories, worked with dream clients, and poured everything we had into building something that felt bigger than us.
From the outside, it probably looked like everything had clicked into place.
We had more clients than we could count.
Georgie’s business was growing.
We had just purchased our first home.
But there was one thing we hadn’t accounted for as baby first-homeowners — a little beast known as rising interest rates.
If we didn’t understand what they meant in early 2023, we definitely did by November.
Like an iron press, they kept going up, and up, and up — and we kept saying yes to more clients, more projects, more work… until the burnout became something we couldn’t outrun anymore.
And then came a night I’ll never forget.
We lay in bed, newly engaged, utterly exhausted.
Georgie had tears rolling down her cheeks.
She wasn’t just tired — she was depleted.
And truthfully, so was I.
We’d barely been home long enough to enjoy the mortgage we’d worked so hard for.
The weeds had become part of the garden design.
The renovation list was stuck to the fridge like a taunt.
It felt like we were working harder than ever but living less than ever.
So I said the words I knew needed to be said:
“I’ll get a job… until we find a way.”
And that’s how, after years of freelancing, I found myself back in the 9–5 world.
But after two years, we’re finally ready to take the leap again.
It hasn’t been impulsive or romantic or reckless. It’s been months of planning, spreadsheets, late-night conversations, and honest self-audits. We didn’t want to step out unprepared — we wanted to step out intentionally.
So today, I want to share how we made it work.
If you’re dreaming of quitting your 9–5 too — whether next year or someday soon — these steps might help you start mapping your own escape plan.
How to Quit Your 9–5 in a Year (The Honest Version)
1. Check the Alignment First (Before Anything Else)
When I was promoted into a Manager role in March — company car, phone, more responsibility — it looked like a “great job” on paper.
But it wasn’t aligned with me, with our values, or with the future we saw for ourselves.
The first questions we asked were:
Can we genuinely see ourselves building The Creative’s Toolkit for years to come?
Does this align with the lifestyle we want five, ten years from now?
What are we actually willing to do to make this work?
And the honest answers were:
yes, yes… and a lot.
It meant evenings, weekends, saying no to social things, holding the long-term vision even when it was inconvenient.
But the bigger question was this:
How can we have the greatest impact through this work — enough that it makes the hard parts worth it, for us and for the people we’re trying to help?
Once we knew the answer, the path became clearer.
2. Get Your Financial House in Order (This Was Everything)
I became obsessed with tracking expenses and income — and I don’t say that lightly.
The Money Mgr. app basically became my second phone.
When I started actually seeing where our money went, everything changed.
Here’s what we did:
Tracked every dollar in and out
Allocated money intentionally (not reactively)
Increased our mortgage payments to give ourselves breathing space
Built an “oh sh*t fund” — 3–4 months of living expenses, non-negotiable
That buffer alone lowered our stress by about 70%.
It gave us confidence, data, and the ability to make decisions from a grounded place instead of panic.
This was the moment quitting became possible — not hypothetical.
3. Build Something Exceptional (Not Rushed)
One thing we agreed on early:
if we were going to leap again, we wanted it to be toward something exceptional.
Not rushed.
Not patched together.
Not ‘good enough’.
So we committed to spending the time—the unglamorous, unseen, boring time—building something that genuinely stands above anything in our industry.
There’s an old saying:
“The person who spends the most time sharpening their axe can cut the tree down in one swing.”
That became our philosophy.
We spent a year sharpening:
refining curriculum
rebuilding systems
improving branding
creating frameworks
designing templates
planning long-term strategy
making everything better than anything we’d built before
We weren’t just preparing to leave a job.
We were preparing to step into a new era with intention.
4. Give Yourself a Timeline — and Permission to Pivot
We gave ourselves 12 months to be ready.
It ended up happening 3 months earlier.
That story is for another day — but let’s just say:
when the moment arrives, you’ll know.
Your body knows.
Your creativity knows.
And your life will start making room for the next chapter, almost without asking.
If you’re dreaming of leaving your 9–5 too, here’s what I’d tell you…
Leaving a stable job isn’t about being brave in one big moment. It’s about being steady in a thousand small ones.
It’s not the leap that matters nearly as much as what you do before the leap:
being honest about what you really want
preparing your finances so fear doesn’t make your decisions for you
building the thing you want to run toward, not just away from
choosing alignment over approval
and remembering that nothing changes overnight — but it does change
If you want out of your 9–5 someday, in three months, a year – start now.
Not by quitting impulsively — but by quietly building the life you want to step into.
Sharpen the axe.
Do the unglamorous work.
Take the pressure off your timeline.
And trust yourself enough to choose the path that actually feels like yours.
You don’t need permission.
Just a plan, and a future you believe in.
And if you’re anything like us…you’ll know exactly when the time has come.
Thanks for having me here this week,
Haavard
Resources of the Week
The app I mentioned is Money Manager Expense & Budget – I use the free version (which includes limited ads) but there’s also a paid version. Find it in the app store here.
I also mentioned our ‘oh sh*t fund, that concept was drawn from The Barefoot Investor by Scott Pape, which we fittingly read on our honeymoon after sinking all our savings (we’d just made after 2023) into getting married in mid-2024 (iykyk).
This article was originally sent out as an exclusive to subscribers on 11 December 2025.
