"Never quit without a plan." Safest career advice you'll ever get. Also, maybe wrong.
One of my mentees is an analyst — the kind an agency ends up building its whole reputation on. Different clients, different industries, different tech stacks, and whenever someone's tracking broke — checkout events vanishing, a pixel quietly dying two days before a big launch — he was the guy they called. Not because it was technically his job. Because he was the only one who could actually open the raw JavaScript and find what broke.
"Good at his job" doesn't really cover it. He was the fix.
And for over a year, he was also quietly planning to leave. Nobody at the agency had a clue. He'd had the resignation letter sitting there, drafted, for weeks — and finally sent it right after our first mentoring call, of all things, about AI and the future of analytics. Not because of the call, though. The decision was already made. The timing's just a coincidence he still laughs about.
No new job lined up. No backup clients. Just... out.
Honestly, what surprised me more than the decision itself was what he told me afterward: the relief hit almost immediately. Less stress, no more midnight pings about a broken pixel, and the thing he was terrified to do turned into the easiest thing he'd done in years.
But relief isn't a plan, and he knows it. Now he's job hunting in a market where AI is quietly eating the entry-level work analysts used to cut their teeth on — and some days he genuinely doesn't know if leaving with no net was brave or just reckless.
So — is quitting without a plan ever actually the smart move? Or did he just get lucky?
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