For years, you think about leaving your job.
You complain about it. You imagine doing something else. Once or twice, you look at job listings, but you never apply.
Then one morning, your manager says something that isn’t even particularly unusual.
You go home and update your résumé.
Within a month, you have another job.
Later, you might point to that morning as the moment everything changed. Maybe someone else would too. You finally had enough. You made a decision. You stopped being afraid.
But the decision didn’t come from nowhere.
Two years earlier, you had started putting a little money aside. A friend had left a similar job and done well. You had gradually become better at saying no to extra work. You had taken on a project that showed you that your skills were useful somewhere else.
None of those things made you leave.
But each changed something about what leaving required.
You had a little more money to fall back on. Leaving no longer seemed quite as reckless. You had evidence that people actually did leave jobs like yours. You had begun to see that keeping your manager happy wasn’t the only thing that mattered.
By the time that morning came, the same decision was not being made under the same conditions.
The manager’s comment may have been the last thing that happened before you acted.
It wasn’t necessarily the thing that made the change possible.