When Enough Is Enough: Stories of Radical Reinvention

In 2024, over twenty-two hundred CEOs stepped down globally. That’s the highest number ever recorded. And the average time they spend in the job is shrinking. It’s down to just over seven years. In the first quarter of 2025, it was 6.8. Last week, in our episode on bold goodbyes, we talked about that exact turning point. This story… this feels like the blueprint for it. It’s about a CEO named Mori Nishimura. He’s 34. And he was on a very conventional, very successful path in Japan. One of those paths that’s basically laid out for you from birth. The right schools, the right companies. The pressure is immense. Exactly. And he’s in this life, succeeding by every external metric.

But he keeps having this memory. As a kid, he lived in New Zealand, and he’d escape into the woods near his house to build huts. Just him, the trees, the quiet. And I'm guessing his office in Japan did not feel like the woods in New Zealand. Not even close. He described this moment, this feeling of total disconnect. He’s surrounded by glass and steel, looking at spreadsheets, and all he can picture is the feeling of wood in his hands. That was it. That was the 'enough is enough' moment. He walked away from all of it. This is a pattern we're seeing everywhere. It even has a name now: "job-dropping." It’s not just quitting. It’s a conscious step down or away from a high-pressure role to reclaim your life.

Seventy percent of people now say they'd prioritize mental health over a bigger salary. So what did Nishimura do? He went to the Japanese countryside and started building tiny cabins. The exact thing he dreamed of as a boy. He traded the corporate empire for a literal cabin in the woods. But that’s the part that always gets me. The "after." Because leaving is one thing. What you find on the other side is another. Look at former GE CEO Jeff Immelt. He stepped down and then wrote about this "bad personal cycle" of sadness and isolation. He lost his entire identity. So walking away from the title doesn't magically fix the person. It’s not a clean escape. It's never a clean escape.

And what’s happening inside these C-suites right now is… chaotic. Box CEO Aaron Levie just coined this term, "AI psychosis." He says CEOs are so distant from the actual work, they're overestimating what AI can do and firing people prematurely. Wait—so they’re disconnected from the work, and also disconnected from themselves? That feels like the same root problem. It’s the same disease. One version leads to mass layoffs, the other leads to a CEO having a breakdown and moving to the woods. Both come from being in a position so high up you can no longer see the ground. Which brings up the other side of this simple life fantasy. Apeksha Jain, a product manager in Bangalore, quit her job to open a café in the Himalayas.

She said she did it to trade "stability for peace." A beautiful story. But as people pointed out online, running a business in the mountains—dealing with supply chains, weather, finances—is its own special kind of stress. It might not be corporate, but it's not simple. Right. You’re not escaping pressure, you’re just choosing a different kind of pressure. One that feels more authentic to you. A former Bloomberg journalist said she realized she had to quit when she threw up in the bathroom from anxiety right after her podcast aired. She left to become a baker. She said, "Baking brings me alive." And that’s the core of it. The CEO of Kickresume, Peter Duris, said it perfectly.

He said that for many people, making a decision for their own wellbeing might look, from the outside, like a step down. But it’s not a step down. It’s a step sideways. It’s choosing a different mountain to climb altogether. One where the view from the top might actually be something you want to see. The question is what happens when more people decide the corporate ladder is leaning against the wrong wall. And what kind of world do we build when the most ambitious people are all trying to build cabins in the woods?