Fired or Quit, You Become a Different Person

The first real turning point in my life came when I understood that the path my parents and the state had built for me wasn't going to work. The reason was simple. I sat down and did the math: how much I'd earn at my absolute peak if I followed that path all the way through, and how that stacked up against what I actually wanted. I think buying an apartment, owning a car, and supporting your kids should be the baseline for any adult, not some luxury you have to fight for. By my own math, I'd hit that baseline around age sixty. That didn't sit well with me.

This is the same ceiling I later wrote about in the piece on the millionaire mindset: everything looks fine on the outside, while on the inside you already know the road leads nowhere you want to go.

From the outside, everything looked perfect. Second year at Odessa Polytechnic, straight-A student, zero failed courses. Only five students on our entire class got the merit stipend, and I was one of them, the increased rate, a hundred and eighty hryvnia instead of the usual hundred and twenty. At the exchange rate back then that was about thirty-five dollars a month. For a student, that wasn't money, it was status: straight-A students didn't get expelled. And expulsion in those years meant one thing, a direct line to the draft office.

And underneath that picture-perfect image, I'd already been working for two years, delivering newspapers under signature, hauling construction debris out of renovated apartments. Nobody, not once, ever asked me for a diploma. I already knew more about programming than the professor teaching the class. On the side I was trying to build my first business through a network marketing company, and after two years I'd signed up exactly two people into my downline, but I never missed a single training session, and I learned the one skill that mattered: how to sell when nothing's selling. I understood that none of what they were teaching me in those lecture halls would ever be useful to me. But I couldn't pull the trigger. Dropping out would have been the hardest decision of my life, and it would tear down everything at once: the stipend, the status, the draft deferment.

One professor ended up making the decision for me. I remember him for the rest of my life, even though I can't remember his name.

"You Don't Need To"

I show up for my electrical engineering exam. I've prepared, I'm the straight-A kid, that's the only way I know how to show up. He asks me a couple of questions from the material, I answer them. Then, out of nowhere, he asks something that isn't on the exam at all.

"So what do you actually want to do with your life?"

"I'm going to be an entrepreneur. I've already figured out that's where I need to be."

"And what are you doing right now?"

"Well, I need to finish my degree first."

"You don't need to."

And he fails me.

I tell him he can't do that. He says:

"I can."

A failing grade meant losing the stipend. And I knew failing that particular class meant expulsion, this was the top engineering school in the country, no exceptions made for anyone. In one stroke of his pen, this man erased two years without a single B, my stipend, my status, and cracked the door to the draft office wide open.

There was no "well, freedom, I guess" moment. None of that. I was shaking. I walked out crying, going down four flights of stairs, I remember exactly how that felt, it was spring, right in the middle of exam season. I get down, I walk outside, and the campus is empty. You know how it feels when you leave a university building not during a break, but in the middle of class hours: empty hallways, empty streets, everyone's sitting in their lecture rooms. And the sun was so bright, cutting through the trees, through the grass, I remember that, that specific feeling of spring air.

And somewhere in my head, a voice says: I'm free.

Not "I'll figure something out." Not a backup plan. Just a state, my body understood it before my mind caught up. Classes used to run from nine in the morning until two or three, which left me two, maybe three hours a day for business and work. Now I had an entire day to spend on whatever I actually wanted to do. I walked across the empty courtyard crying and charging up with energy at the same time.

The Week of Freedom

What came next was a week I still consider the most important week of that spring. For the first time, I felt what it was like to give my business eight, ten hours a day instead of scraping together two or three between classes. Nobody handed me that week. I decided on my own that I'd been expelled, and I lived accordingly, as if it had already happened.

A week later, the phone rang. The dean's office.

"Where on Earth Did You Fall From"

A secretary calls, a woman in her sixties. "Igor, where are you?" I say, well, where do you think, you kicked me out of the university. She says, where did you get that idea? Come by the dean's office, there's a question about your file.

I show up and wait for the assistant dean in the reception area. While I'm waiting, two secretaries take it upon themselves to give me a talking-to. Igor, how could you just quit like that? I say, I didn't quit, I got expelled. So what, they say, you could have retaken the exam. Did you just give up? I say, I didn't give up, I just realized I'm going to do something else with my life. No, they say, you're making a mistake. Did you get scared?

I did not get scared.

Then the assistant dean brings me into her office, listens to my whole version of the expulsion story, and answers in five words: that's not how this works. She stands up and walks me straight to the dean. The professor's name is gone from my memory, but I still remember the dean's last name to this day, Nesterenko. He picks up my transcript, flips through it, and asks where I've been. I explain: I got an F, and an F means expulsion. And he says:

"Igor, where on earth did you fall from? That's not how any of this works. Students like you are worth their weight in gold. Nobody was planning on expelling you."

He keeps flipping through the transcript and reads it out loud: not a single C, not one incomplete, not one slip-up anywhere. And the first time something goes wrong, you just fold?

"I didn't fold, I just thought—"

"No. We're done here."

He grabs a pen and changes my grade to a B. Grade fixed, back to class on Monday.

Look at what actually happened here. The system didn't just crack the door back open, it sent four people after me in a row, a secretary on the phone, two secretaries in the waiting room, the assistant dean, and finally the dean himself, and all four of them made the same argument: I was wrong. With evidence. With my own transcript in their hands. And I believed them. On Monday, I went back to class.

What Am I Doing Here?

Monday was advanced calculus, a double lecture combining two full class sections into one packed hall. I'd been gone a week, and of course people asked, hey, where'd you disappear to, what happened, how are you. I explained the situation, sat down in my seat, and the lecturer kept reading straight from his notes. I sat there, cheek resting on my hand, staring out the window, and one thought wouldn't leave me alone: I already know what freedom feels like. I've spent an entire week doing exactly what I want instead of dragging myself to classes I don't care about. What am I actually doing here?

At the break in the middle of that double lecture, I stood up, turned around, walked out, and never looked back.

The Rite of Passage

USS ENTERPRISE · 1938

Much later, I gave what happened that day a name: a rite of passage. It starts the moment you say "I'm out" for yourself. When you stop waiting to be carried out and carry yourself out instead. It's the same idea I dig into in the piece "Give Yourself Permission", say it yourself, don't wait for someone else's approval.

In this story, I got kicked out twice, and here's what matters. The first time, a professor threw me out, and it wasn't my decision, which is exactly why it didn't change me: the moment they called me back, I went back. The second time, I left on my own, walking away from a warm seat I'd just been welcomed back into with honors, against the arguments of four grown adults. That one was mine. And after that, nothing ever pulled me back there again.

Mistake #1. Assuming that an identical situation on the outside means identical people on the inside. You get fired, you're out of work. You quit, you're also out of work. The difference is authorship, who actually made the call, you or the circumstances. It's invisible from the outside, and it determines everything that happens next.

Takeaway 1. The rite of passage doesn't start where you lost something. It starts where you said "I'm out," for yourself, about a business, a job, a relationship. As long as someone else is making the decision for you, nothing changes, no matter how different the scenery looks.

And this rite of passage isn't a one-time event. During the pandemic, I got stuck on Bali for nine months, and when the lockdown lifted and I went back to my five-bedroom apartment in Kyiv, fully furnished, towels for every occasion, it felt suffocating. I was standing at the exact same fork in the road as that fourth-floor hallway at the Polytechnic: either pretend I'm fine, or walk out. I walked out, hands shaking, dragging a whole list of "but what about the business, what about my daughter, what will my mom think." Seventy countries over the following years is what happens once you stop asking permission to leave.

The Tool: 5 Questions to Tell a Rite of Passage from Running Away

Not every exit is a rite of passage. Sometimes "I'm out" is just panic wearing a decision's clothes. I run it through five questions, and you have to answer them honestly, not the way you want to hear yourself answer.

1. Can you state the reason in ten seconds, without "I'm just sick of it"? Mine was: I did the math, and this path doesn't get me to a normal life even by sixty. Running away is vague: "everything sucks," "I need a change," no specifics.
2. Are you ready to be talked out of it, and leave anyway? My decision survived four people arguing with my own transcript in their hands. If your plan collapses at the first reasonable objection, that's not a decision, that's a mood.
3. Does leaving change you, not just the scenery? After a real rite of passage, you think differently and set different priorities. You're not the same person in a new location.
4. Are you walking toward something, or running from a specific pain? You can leave university to build a business, or to dodge the next exam. One moves you forward, the other just pushes the same exam down the road.
5. A year from now, will you remember this as the moment you became someone else, or the moment you gave up? You can only answer that honestly by picturing both outcomes ahead of time.

If at least three of the five answers point toward a rite of passage, that's the moment it's already begun.

The Paperwork Still Sitting in That Office

I didn't get officially expelled until a year later. The whole year, the dean's office kept trying to reach me, and I just never showed up. Then the real notice came, the one from the draft office this time, the exact door my straight-A status had been protecting me from. By then my father had already passed away, I was the oldest man left in the family and the one supporting it, so by law I got an exemption as the sole provider. My mom, actually, only found out I'd stopped attending classes when that notice arrived. I hadn't told her until then. To everything she said, I gave her one answer: it's my life, mine to decide. A year later I started my first business. Two years after that, I made real money for the first time. Nobody ever brought up that Monday again.

And my paperwork, my diploma, all of it is still sitting in the Polytechnic's archive. I could have picked it up any time and never did, and not because I forgot. It belongs to a person who could have stayed in that lecture hall that Monday and finished the degree with honors. That person never walked back in.

So, do you make the call yourself, or do you wait to be thrown out?