You’re not stuck. You set the wrong goal.
I had one rule before I ever applied for a job: the city and the lifestyle come first, the job title comes last. I wrote that rule in a notebook the week I decided to leave Europe.
Instead of chasing jobs, I wrote a list of the mornings I wanted to have.
Most people treat this as a philosophical question, but I treated it as a logistics problem: what does a good Tuesday actually look like?
I never understood how someone could spend a decade optimizing for someone else’s definition of a good life. It is the approach I never fully understood – why would you let other people dictate how to live your life?
I used to wait for clarity too, until I realized it was not coming and I had to manufacture it myself.
The regret isn’t usually about a bad decision. It’s about a life that happened to you because you never said what you actually wanted.
Get specific: do you want a house or an apartment, a city or a coast, mornings free or evenings free?
I wrote it down like a contract with myself: the timezone, the type of mornings, the kind of work that would not follow me to bed.
The most common version of this I see: people spend their best years in a city they hate, in a job they tolerate, saving for a retirement that may never feel as good as right now.
I understand the logic. I also watched it turn smart people into ghosts waiting for a future that kept moving further away.
When I returned to Europe from Australia, remote work became a non-negotiable promise to myself. I was okay with even earning less only to experience the remote-friendly job.
Obviously it was COVID-19 period, so things were slightly different, but I remember that this was the number one thing I wrote on my list.
In Australia I had been working as an engineer on site and I remember driving back home thinking that I would love to escape it. When I moved to Spain I knew that I would not find a well-paid job as an Engineer. Which was fine for me as I accepted that I didn’t want to work as a mechatronics engineer anyways.
Later, I began learning Spanish, a long-held interest I’d neglected.
I told myself that I would take a gap year from work but with my character I simply couldn’t stop working. I kept looking into new trends and technologies I could get into.
I stumbled onto Robotic Process Automation, and something clicked: it was software that did the boring computer work humans hated, and companies were desperate for people who could build it.
My instinct said this was the skill that companies would pay for before they even knew they needed it. I started courses, yet knew real-world application mattered more. I preferred to find a client, get the job, and figure out if I could fix stuff.
Within five months I had closed real contracts on UpWork. I was not practicing anymore. I was working.
I kept working in this field, feeling like I had finally found a thing that meets all my criteria.
I had found my fit. Then something I did not plan for walked in.
A crypto exchange found me through my online presence and offered me a marketing job I had no business taking. I said yes because the work was remote, the timezone worked, and I thought “how many times such a thing can happen to me”. I took it.
But this is a story for another day.
You’re not truly stuck – you’re following someone else’s script. By setting goals aligned with your own vision, every day becomes a deliberate choice, rooted in your authentic desires.