I have thought about this carefully.
I do not think sooner would have been better, for the reason that the clarity I have now — about my own work, about what I’m worth, about the specific kind of arrangement I’m willing to accept — was built in those eighteen years. Not from the last two years, which were mostly a lesson in what I was no longer willing to smooth over. From the fifteen before that, when I was building something I was genuinely proud of and learning, in the most durable way, what sustained operations work actually requires.
The exception log at Pinnacle is good because I built the one at Morgan Freight. The protocols I developed for the Pinnacle team are good because I had fifteen years of refining them somewhere else. The forty-five-minute conversation with Owen Reed that led to a job offer was good because I could describe my work with the precision of someone who has done it long enough to know exactly what it is.
You cannot get that from five years. You cannot get it from ten. You get it from the full length of the thing, including the years when the thing is not fully working.
What I wish is not that I had left sooner. What I wish is that I had said, sooner, that the arrangement was not the arrangement I thought it was and that I needed it to be the one I thought it was or I was going to find a different one. I wish I had pushed when Victor said “we’ll work it out” and demanded a specific answer rather than accepting a comfortable non-answer. I wish I had negotiated my salary in the years when I had the leverage of being the person doing the work rather than the years after when I had the leverage of nothing except the evidence that I had done the work well.