Unemployable

Michael Le · 17 July 2026 · 9 minute read

Back in 2022, I handed Great Aunty Three over to the team and walked away. It's still going strong without me, which is exactly how I built it to go. And walking away was still one of the hardest calls I've ever made. That business had my grandmother's name on it and a decade of my life in it. But somewhere along the way I'd stopped being a builder and started being a label. "The restaurant guy." A label is just a box with better lighting. I didn't walk away from Great Aunty Three because it stopped working. I walked away because I'd outgrown the version of me it was built for, and you don't find out what else you're made of while you're standing behind the same counter every day.

And here's the truth, said plainly because nobody says it plainly: I hadn't built a business. I'd built myself a job. A demanding one, with great reviews and no sick days. Worse, I'd made myself the bottleneck. Every decision, every fix, every fire ran through me, and I'd put all of it ahead of my own health for years without ever clocking I was doing it. Then my marriage ended and COVID landed in the same stretch. That wasn't bad luck interrupting a good run. That was the invoice arriving for how I'd been running the whole thing. You can't out-hustle a bill like that. So after all of that heartache, I stopped pretending I could push through it. I stepped away to rebuild the one thing I'd never put on the roster: myself.

But walking away from something you built doesn't come with an instruction manual for what you do with yourself next, so I chose familiarity. Real estate. Nine to five, a desk, a boss, a lunch break at a set time instead of whenever the chaos allowed it. On paper it was exactly what everyone said I needed. Stability. A break from carrying the whole thing on my own back. A pay cheque that turned up whether I was brilliant that week or barely functioning.

And before anyone writes the ending for me: the job went fine. I made real friendships in that industry, the kind that outlast a business card, and some of those clients still call me years later to look after their commercial portfolios. So no, this was never a story about failing at real estate. That would be a tidier story. This one's more uncomfortable: it worked, and I still couldn't stay.

But being good at something and being built for it are two different things. I lasted about as long as it took to realise I was watching the clock more than I was watching the work. Not because the job was bad, and not because I couldn't do it well. Because there's a ceiling in any role that isn't yours: a ceiling on how creative you're allowed to be, on how personalised you can make the service before someone tells you to standardise it, on how far you're actually allowed to grow before the structure around you quietly asks you to stop. I tried to want the familiar thing. I really did. I just couldn't do it, once I could feel that ceiling from the inside.

That's the part nobody warns you about. Once you've tasted your own vision, someone else's version of a good life stops fitting, even when it's objectively a good version of a good life, run by good people, with genuinely good clients.

2011, the first time I went mad

The first time I did this, I was in my early thirties with nothing to lose and everyone around me quietly certain I was making a mistake. No fallback plan, no case study to point to, no "people like you have done this before" to lean on. Just a gut feeling that the life everyone else seemed fine with wasn't going to be fine for me, and a stubborn refusal to find out the hard way at sixty-five.

I didn't have language for it back then. I just knew that staying felt like a slower kind of losing than leaving did. So I left. And for a long stretch after that, most of the people around me thought I'd lost the plot. Not in a dramatic way. In the quieter way, the "how's the job hunt going" way, the way people ask about your business like it's a phase you'll grow out of.

I didn't have a neat answer for them then. I had something better. I kept building anyway.

Forty-five, and doing it again

Here's the twist nobody tells you about doing this twice. It doesn't get easier. It gets scarier and more exciting at the same time, which is a genuinely strange combination to sit with before your coffee's kicked in.

Scarier, because I know exactly how hard the road is now. At thirty-something I didn't know what I didn't know, which is its own kind of protection. At forty-five I know precisely how many 2am nights this costs, how many quiet seasons with the people I love, how many times I'll doubt myself before anything starts working. There's no innocence left to cushion the fall.

More exciting, because I'm not walking in with nothing this time. I'm walking in with fifteen years of scar tissue that turned into skill, a decade of running a business that taught me what actually breaks and what actually holds, and enough failed attempts behind me to know which doubts are useful and which ones are just noise. The stakes feel higher. So does the ceiling.

The season where everyone thinks you've gone mad

There is a specific kind of lonely that comes with building something nobody asked you to build. It's not the lonely of being alone in a room. It's the lonely of being surrounded by people who love you and still can't quite see what you see. You try to explain it a few times, then you stop trying, because the explaining starts to cost more than the misunderstanding does.

You learn to just nod, say "yeah, it's going well," and get back to the work, because the vision doesn't need anyone else's permission to be real. It just needs you to keep showing up for it when there's no evidence yet that it's going to pay off.

Faith, in this context, isn't a spiritual concept. It's the very practical decision to keep acting on a belief before the results have arrived to justify it. That's the whole trick. Not certainty. Just enough faith to take today's action without proof that tomorrow's will matter.

The moment most people give up

There's a specific moment in every one of these seasons, and I hit mine again a few months into this current build. The doubt doesn't announce itself. It just quietly asks, at 11pm on a bad night, whether you should have stayed in that job. Whether the desk and the lunch break and the pay cheque were actually the win, and you were too proud or too stubborn to take yes for an answer.

I gave that question a fair hearing. Longer than the motivational posts would have you believe. And here's what I know, the hard way, twice now: that exact moment, the one where you're negotiating with yourself about going back, is the moment most people quietly give up. Not with a dramatic exit. Just a slow, reasonable-sounding retreat back into the version of life that never quite fit, because at least it's familiar.

I didn't go back. Not because I'm braver than anyone who does. Because somewhere in that 11pm conversation with myself, I remembered it had stopped being about me.

It stopped being about me

This is the part that actually changed things, both times. Early on, the whole thing is about you: proving something, escaping something, chasing something that looks like freedom from the outside. That version of the mission runs out of fuel fast, because "prove myself" is a tank that empties the second you get one win.

What keeps you going after that is bigger. It's the life I actually want to live, not the one I'm supposed to want. It's the quality of the days, not just the résumé of the years. It's what I get to hand to the people who come after me, and what I get to contribute while I'm still here to see it land. Once the mission became about the life and the contribution, and not just about me proving a point, it got a lot harder to quit. You can talk yourself out of proving something. It's much harder to talk yourself out of the life you actually want.

Maybe you're unemployable too

If any of this sounds familiar, I want to say something plainly, because I don't think it gets said enough: there is nothing wrong with you. It is not a character flaw that a desk job you're supposed to be grateful for doesn't fit. It takes a genuine kind of courage to question the path everyone around you has quietly agreed to accept, and an even harder kind to walk away from it without a guarantee waiting on the other side.

Going against the grain was never going to feel comfortable. That's not a sign you're doing it wrong. It's the actual texture of doing something real.

And if you can't find the job that fits who you're becoming, maybe that's not a problem to solve. Maybe it's a sign to build the job instead. Nobody handed me a role that let me be all of what I am. So I built four ventures that do. One at a time, rough at first, sharper now.

Never stop dreaming. But don't let the size of the dream talk you out of the small, unglamorous action sitting in front of you today. The dream doesn't move because you feel inspired. It moves because you did the one true thing you could do today, and then you did it again tomorrow. That's the whole method. It was in 2011. It still is at forty-five.

Wherever you are in your own version of this, unemployable and a little unsure of the road ahead: you're not behind, and you're not broken. You're just early in something that hasn't paid off yet. Keep going.