The apartment was quiet. It was just before midnight in Brussels, rain tapping softly against the windows of my place in Ixelles. I was sitting at the kitchen table with my laptop open, reviewing performance dashboards for a campaign at Philip Morris. Revenue targets had been exceeded. Engagement was up. All indicators were green. From the outside, it looked like a textbook example of professional success.
About twenty minutes in, I realized I was looking at proof that I was doing very well at a game I no longer wanted to play.
At the time, I was Digital Lead for Reduced Risk Products. Four years into an international corporate career, with responsibility, visibility, and trust from senior stakeholders. It was the kind of role people work toward deliberately. Yet nothing in those numbers reflected how the work actually felt. There was no sense of building something meaningful, no creative tension, no excitement. The work had become about maintaining systems, optimizing within constraints, and avoiding risk, all while calling it strategy.
Earlier that week, I had presented a campaign I genuinely believed in. It wasn’t just an execution, but a strategic direction with a clear creative logic, designed to work across multiple markets. I could see how it would scale and how it could differentiate us. The meeting lasted just under forty minutes. During that time, the idea was steadily dismantled. It didn’t fit existing brand guidelines. It was considered too risky for the market climate. Legal concerns were raised. Eventually, it was suggested that we revisit the concept in a future quarter.
By the time the meeting ended, nothing remained of the original idea. It wasn’t refined or challenged into something better; it was neutralized. Walking back to my desk, it became clear that the issue wasn’t the quality of the work. The system itself wasn’t designed to create strong ideas. It was designed to eliminate risk. Every layer existed to protect something: compliance, hierarchy, precedent, reputation. No one in the room was rewarded for building something new, only for ensuring nothing went wrong.
That evening, back in my apartment, I began to connect patterns I had ignored for years. The moments in my career when I felt most alive had nothing to do with titles or promotions. They were moments of creation: launching a new affiliate in Curaçao, building digital strategies in markets where no framework existed yet, creating structure from scratch. The moments that drained me were the opposite: maintaining established systems, defending ideas in meetings, watching ambition get slowly reduced until it felt safe enough to approve.
A few weeks later, a conversation with a colleague crystallized the realization. Over drinks, he admitted that after more than a decade at the company, he had become very good at navigating meetings and internal politics, but could no longer clearly articulate what he personally believed in. It wasn’t said dramatically, but it landed heavily. I recognized that trajectory immediately, and it unsettled me because I saw myself on the same path.
The final confirmation came during a quiet Sunday dinner with my parents. When asked how work was going, I gave the automatic answer: busy, but good. My father pointed out, calmly and without judgment, that I hadn’t spoken about loving my work in over a year. Driving back to Brussels that night, the decision became unavoidable. I wasn’t going to leave because the job was bad or because the company was wrong. I was going to leave because staying meant slowly becoming someone I didn’t recognize.
I didn’t resign impulsively. I spent six months preparing quietly: saving money, building relationships, working evenings and weekends on what would eventually become Majortale. When I finally handed in my notice, the reactions were predictable. Confusion, concern, disbelief. I was told I was giving up security, walking away from everything I had built. They weren’t wrong.
The first months after leaving were difficult. There was no guaranteed income, no structure handed to me, no safety net. The first client was small, an €8,000 recruitment project. I approached it with the same seriousness as a large-scale campaign. It worked. People were hired. The client returned. Others followed. Not because the content was visually impressive, but because the strategic thinking behind it was sound.
Looking back, the decision didn’t come from bravery or dissatisfaction. It came from clarity. That night in Brussels, staring at dashboards that meant nothing to me, I understood something fundamental about myself. I am not built to maintain systems created by others. I am built to create them, to connect creativity with business outcomes, and to challenge structure when it prevents progress.
That night wasn’t a career crisis. It was the moment I stopped ignoring a pattern that had been there all along. Once you see it clearly, there is no going back.
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