September 4, 2019: The Day I Stopped Working for Anyone

I remember the date because I have never needed to look it up.

4 September 2019. I called my boss at the Venice Ale House and told him I was done.

I was working one night a week at that point. One. The money was not material to my life any more. By every reasonable measure it was free — a shift with people I liked, in a bar I loved, on the boardwalk, that cost me almost nothing to keep.

I quit it anyway, and that is the entire reason the date matters.

The Ale House

Rose Avenue, Venice, California. Two years and four months.

I moved to LA at the very end of 2016 after a marriage ended, which is a polite way of saying I arrived in that city with nothing organised. In November I started bartending. It became one of the best stretches of my life.

I have the Ale House rose tattooed on me, because of the street. I met my wife there. Some of the closest friendships I have came out of those two and a bit years. The place has since been renamed, which is what happens.

I am aware of how this reads: the ex-athlete tending bar in Venice. That was not how it felt and it was not what it was. It was a job that paid for a period when I was rebuilding, in a room that gave me back to myself, and 2017 turned out to be the best year of my life.

Why one shift is harder to quit than five

Here is the mechanic I want to leave you with, because I think it is the whole thing.

A safety net you no longer need is more dangerous than one you do.

Five shifts a week is a job. You either need it or you do not, and the maths is loud enough that you have to look at it.

One shift a week is different. One shift is not income, it is insurance. It costs you almost nothing, so there is no forcing function, so it just sits there. And what it quietly does is preserve the sentence if the business doesn't work, I've still got the bar.

That sentence is not free. That sentence is the price.

I could not tell how much of my effort was being held back by that line existing until I removed the line. Scarcity had been making my decisions for years and this was the last place it was still living — one Tuesday a night shift, invisible, doing real damage.

So I made the call. Not because the numbers said to. Because I knew I was not going back to working for anybody, and I wanted the exit to be a decision I made rather than a thing that happened to me.

What happened next

MADE Baseball had been going reasonably well. After September it started genuinely working, and I am not going to pretend that is a coincidence, though I could not prove it to you either.

Then Covid arrived in 2020 and I had to rebuild the whole delivery model of a business that consists of standing close to people in enclosed spaces. I adjusted. It never once occurred to me to go back and pick up shifts.

That is the actual test, and it is the only reason I trust the date. Not that I quit — that six months later, in the worst possible conditions for my industry, going back was not in the set of things I considered.

Why I bang on about this to kids

I coach a lot of twelve-year-olds. I have a daughter. The thing I most want to hand them is not a swing.

It is the idea that you can build something and put it into the world, rather than take what most people take, which is a job working for somebody else. I do not say that with any contempt for jobs — I had them, I liked most of them, the Ale House was one of the best places I have ever worked.

But there is a default, and the default is powerful, and almost nobody explicitly chooses it. They just never encounter the other option at an age where it seems available.

I want the kids I work with to know that creating value — a service, a product, a thing people want that did not exist before — is a normal path, and not a thing that happens to other people who are somehow different from them.

I got there at thirty-four, on a Wednesday, by giving up one shift a week that I could easily have kept.

The floor you are keeping in case you fall is also the ceiling you are refusing to leave. I would rather they learn that at twelve than at thirty-four.