A few weeks ago I wrote about tennis player Monica Puig and about what millennials can learn from her. To me, her efforts during the Olympics became an example of everything millennials should be: non-conforming, non-postponing, strivers. As soon as I saw how positive the response was my hypocrisy hit me like a slap on the face. Here I was writing about how you should follow your dreams and not care about “the right way” to do things, while on the other hand considering a corporate job offer that I wasn’t fully satisfied with. It was a great, well-paying job at a great company with a culture that I loved, but it still somehow felt like settling; my heart wasn’t in on it.

You always read about millennials defying traditional careers and following their dreams, but I always thought those were other people. I never thought about myself as capable of doing that but after writing about it, it hit me. Why the hell not? I started thinking about my priorities and what I wanted in life and I realized that I am at a point where a stable job and a good salary are not as attractive to me as doing something that matters and that I can enjoy.

So I turned it down.

I felt a weight lifted from my shoulders after I declined the offer and for the first time in months I saw the world around me as full of possibilities instead of possible regrets. As soon as I hung up the phone I knew I had made the right decision because all I wanted to do was brag about it. But to most people around me (those who didn’t have to listen to me ramble about all my decisions for the past month) it looked like I turned down a perfectly good job that would strengthen my resume and allow me to stay in the U.S. for No.Good.Reason. But it was for reasons. Very important ones, and here they are:

I have different priorities right now

If I were married and was trying to buy a house, or if I had kids to feed I would have taken the job because it would have been the reasonable thing to do. But right now those are not my priorities. I want to enjoy myself, I want to travel, I want to get to know the world and different people and different ways to do things. I would much rather be somewhere where I will have an amazing experience, than somewhere where I can make a lot of money. I am not saying you can’t have a good experience in a traditional corporate job, but it’s not the experience I am looking for right now. I want something different.

There is more than one right path

Even though Babson is an entrepreneurship school, I got easily sucked into the corporate mindset. I began to think about personal and professional success as graduating with a job at a big company, but once I was in that setting, I couldn’t understand how I fit in the big picture. What was I really doing there? How was my work contributing? So I realized I wanted to be somewhere where I could have an impact, not only socially, but in the organization itself. I want to be somewhere where I use my brain power for more than creating excel templates. I want to be somewhere doing something I enjoy. This doesn’t mean I won’t work at a big company, but I want to work somewhere where ideas matter and where you can take action on them, and the job I turned down was not a place where I felt I could do that.

Life is too short

During my decision making process I heard over and over “this is not forever” and “you can stay for a couple of years and then do whatever you want”. This is completely true, I could have taken it and then left a few years down the road and it probably would have opened many doors for me, but what if I didn’t want to spend even a couple of years doing something I am not satisfied with? I came very close to taking the job because I was convinced that everyone’s supposed to “suck it up” for a while before they make it, but again, why? I know many people who decided not to suck it up and they are running businesses, working for great companies and doing what makes them happy. We have bought into a system that tells us to “suck it up” because it’s what we grew up in, but I decided not to do that anymore. I do think life is too short to sacrifice time simply building for the future. Now don’t get me wrong, it’s important to work hard towards what you want. I don’t believe you should just quit life and party perpetually cause ‘it might be your last day’, but I also don’t believe in living a life today just to prepare for the life you want in 10 years. I am confident I can find a place that I can enjoy where I can still learn and grow personally and professionally.

It is around the season when many seniors start posting their offers and acceptances and it is great! Comment on their status, tell them how happy and proud you are of them because they worked hard to get there and they deserve it. It is also the season when other people start making difficult life choices that might not be what was expected of them. I know people who after four years of school decided to join the army or go to grad school to study something other than business, I even know people who didn’t even make it through those four years before they decided to quit and start something of their own. Be happy for them too because they made a difficult choice and are following through. Sometimes what might seem like an “easy way out”, like you are not ready to take life seriously is actually a much harder path. You have to work twice as hard for the acceptance, respect and support for what you do from people around you; things that are almost granted when you take a more traditional route.

I am extremely happy that I followed my own advice and made the decision I made. If you don’t understand it and want to have an open-minded conversation about it, it’d be more than happy to explain to you why I think not making “the right choice” is the best thing you can do.