Can you learn to love change? A change of home, a change of job, a change of environment, a change in a relationship, a change within yourself. Change.
What do you feel just reading that?
Most people don’t like change. They associate it more with things getting worse than with an upgrade.
Is change really the enemy of a good life? Or is it something that takes us to a higher level — teaches us flexibility, helps us know ourselves better?
I love change. I’ll admit — sometimes in an almost unhealthy way. I get bored quickly, and even when a change is partly for the worse — as long as something shifts, I’m in. And long-term, that has given me an enormous amount. Actually — who I’ve become and the experience I’ve gathered is almost entirely the result of change. Often uncomfortable change, at first.
Below are a few stories — a fraction of what I’ve lived through. Each one demanded a lot. Each one gave a lot back. Though the results often took time.
Moving Out at 18
When I was 18 I spontaneously decided to move out. It wasn’t something I had to do — I had genuinely good conditions at home, my own space. I wasn’t working yet and had my last year of school ahead of me — so I knew I’d have to make do with modest living from savings I’d put aside, maybe pick up some extra work along the way.
I just felt — whatever the cost — I wanted to take my life into my own hands. It’ll work out somehow. I’ll learn something.
Was it easy? Looking back — no. But at the time I had a very positive attitude about it. I started by renting a room. A few months later I managed to find a small studio at a good price. I picked up a bit of work doing hairdressing, a bit of cleaning.
When I look back now… wow. That was a different dimension entirely.
Was it worth it? Completely. It was the first step toward the life I have now.
Leaving home and starting from zero taught me humility, patience, appreciation for small things, and a genuine respect for people at every stage of life. That change pushed me to learn skills outside of school — flexibility, creativity in finding work.
The Phone Screen Repair Job
My first “serious” job came after I finished school. I started running a phone screen repair kiosk — in a shopping mall. It might have looked unimpressive to some — but that place taught me the basics of sales, team dynamics, the value of actually caring about what you do. And people — I met a lot of them there. Got burned by quite a few of them in my naivety. It wasn’t smooth or pleasant. It was hard life lessons. But I still draw on them today.
250 CVs and Tears
After two years in a job I genuinely loved — a job I’d put my heart into — the relationship with my manager deteriorated significantly. After failed attempts to fix the atmosphere, I decided the mental cost was too high regardless of the salary (which I considered pretty good at the time). So I decided I wanted to work remotely — to be able to change cities, to be mobile. Ambitious. With literal tears in my eyes I started building a new reality. I think I sent over 250 CVs — different ideas, different conversations. I ended up leaving before I had anything else lined up. I joked to myself that I’d go from bad to worse — because the conditions there really had been good.
But along the way I started a Python course (which I never finished haha) — and that initiative showed a future employer I was willing to learn on my own when needed.
And that turned out to be the change that brought me into the world of real business. A world I had no previous exposure to — a team a decade or two older than me, completely different mindsets, complicated relationships, zero black-and-white thinking, manipulation and attempts to put me in my place, fake sincerity, getting used to being responsible for a portion of company revenue thirty times the size of what I’d dealt with at the phone kiosk, exposure to people shaped by corporate life. A lot to list. It was a window into a world I hadn’t even known existed.
I was 22. The only young and largely green person in a team of experienced players.
Was it nice and easy? Nice — maybe, but that was often a cover. Easy — no. That job threw a lot at me. I had to figure out how to navigate an environment I’d never been in before — and even the models I found to follow turned out not to be the right ones. I had to gradually build my own way of functioning there, based on experience I was only just starting to accumulate.
But the whole journey — it was incredible. It cost me a lot — but every challenge I had to face without anyone to lean on (I came from a different world — none of my previous friends could even really understand what I was dealing with week to week) — it built my confidence, my decisiveness, my assertiveness, my openness to new things, my instinct for reading people and their tangled intentions, my understanding of the world.
And it also gave me mobility and income that made it possible to keep up with charity work — and travel. Which wasn’t the goal in itself — but once I tried it, I felt how much broader perspective it brought.
The Friendship That Changed
A few months into that new job I started noticing that several of my closest friends weren’t behaving fairly toward me. People who had been a huge source of support — including a friend I treated like a mother, someone who had taught me so much about life — started showing strange behaviors. A kind of hidden jealousy that came out through subtle undermining of my confidence and decisions. Another friend — same age — went down a toxic path too. Though at the time I wasn’t ready to call it that.
And again — change.
Was finding out this “truth” about friends easy? No. It was the demolition of one of the strongest foundations of my life — because I’d long since stopped leaning on family. I was alone.
What helped me see the patterns in their behavior was a therapist I went to for the first time in my life — for development, not because of a crisis. I believed everyone should go at least once in adulthood — to examine whether ways of thinking inherited from home were blocking them somewhere.
And as it turned out — the problem wasn’t there. It was in the current behavior of my closest friends. Processing that information was a massive shift. I knew I had a choice.
I could stay with the old narrative — making excuses for their behavior, avoiding any topic that divided us. It would have been comfortable. Safe. They would still have been my support system — I’d just have had to give up part of myself.
Or I could choose change. A painful one. One that temporarily stripped away my sense of security. A shift in how I thought about people who had meant so much to me, who had been foundational. It hurt. But gradually I started building even more of the independence that — as it turned out — my older friend had actually accused me of when we were still close.
I did it. And quickly it opened the door to moving to a different part of the country — because I felt less and less was holding me to that city.
What did it give me? An enormous amount.
My therapist called the collision with the reality of those friendships a painful bursting of the bubble I’d been living in — but said he was glad it happened to me. “This will be a big lesson for you,” said Jacob. And it was. About relationships. About jealousy. About how when you start succeeding, you often have to rely on yourself. About how in the face of jealousy, even the people closest to you don’t always wish you well.
Am I glad it happened? Yes. It didn’t ruin the relationships — it clarified the truth about people. I’m glad I got to find out. Everything turned out to be so authentic.
And when building new friendships — I’ll admit — from the start I’m ready to share my successes. Not excessively, not in a boastful way. But enough to test whether the friendship being built can handle it. Whether I’ll be able to be fully myself in it — and whether certain people will be able to handle that without comparing themselves.
It was a beautiful lesson. And it meant that in a new city, I selected the friends I have to this day.
These are just a few changes from different categories. Everyone has many — big and small. But notice — all of these same circumstances could have been labeled “bad changes.” Many people, when they have to face the realities of life — workplace manipulation, being hurt by friends — ask: “why did this happen to me?” It was so good before. “Why did they treat me like that?”
They often don’t consider the full picture — that when we don’t give up in the face of difficulty, it frequently becomes a springboard for growth in relationships, success, and real experience. It tests us with what’s uncomfortable — and yes, you could live without that. But I’ve come to believe that the real fullness of life is letting uncomfortable things come into the light. To be tested. To show us something new about ourselves and our strength. We don’t come out the same. We come out better. More real.