How long does someone have to sit still in a place before they’ve earned the right to want out of it?

I ask because it’s one of the questions that shows up most in the messages I get — from clients, from readers of the blog, from people who just needed somewhere to put the thought. Someone’s been at a new job for a short while, enjoying it, delivering, getting noticed — and still writes in asking if it would look “ugly” to apply somewhere else. That’s the word that comes up, almost every time. Ugly. As if ambition had an aesthetic, and the aesthetic of moving fast were always vulgar.

Short time on the job. People count it on their fingers before they even ask. And I find myself thinking about how many of them run that same math alone, in their heads, right before falling asleep, trying to work out whether they’ve paid enough dues yet to be allowed to want more.

*

There’s a magic number nobody ever wrote down anywhere, and everybody carries around anyway. A year is decent. Two is safe. Anything less is opportunism. You didn’t pick that number. Somebody handed it to you a long time ago, and you accepted it without ever asking where it came from.

Here’s the strange part: that number was never about the job. It’s about the explanation you’ll owe later. About what the recruiter will think, what the next boss will assume, what that one line on your résumé will look like to someone who’ll never know what actually happened in there.

You’re not counting time. You’re pricing in someone else’s judgment. And the trouble with pricing in someone else’s judgment is that it has no formula. It shifts person to person, mood to mood, day to day. You could stay two years, three, five, and there will still be somebody, somewhere, ready to decide it was too soon, too late, or done the wrong way.

There’s no right amount of time. There’s only the amount of time you have the nerve to defend when someone asks.

*

Here’s something nobody tells you about leaving early: the problem was never the timing. It was the permission.

You could be a month in or ten years in, and the question that really pins you down isn’t “does this make professional sense.” It’s “who do I think I am, already asking for more.” And right there the conversation shifts. It stops being about the résumé and starts being about your relationship with your own worth.

I notice it constantly. People show up with strategic questions — should I send the résumé, should I take the interview, should I negotiate the offer — but underneath, almost always, sits a much simpler, much more uncomfortable one: do I still deserve this?

Still. That small word carries an enormous weight. Still, as if deserving had an expiration date. As if every accomplishment were a credit you spend down, instead of proof that keeps accumulating.

*

There’s also a specific flavor of impostor syndrome that keeps showing up, often enough that it’s stopped looking like coincidence: the one that hits when the new role is broader than the current one. A bigger word in the job title, more institutional weight, people trusting your judgment on things that can’t go wrong.

And the logic flips in a way that feels almost unfair. Plenty of genuinely capable people, facing a bigger role, raise the bar on themselves precisely because they can see the complexity of what’s coming with more precision. They see it too clearly, honestly, for their own peace of mind. And so they sit there, turning it over, asking a third party for permission to try.

It’s not a lack of preparation. It’s an excess of demand on yourself. Those are two completely different things, and we keep treating them as though they were the same.

*

Here’s something worth knowing about bigger roles: nobody walks in ready for one. Nobody. The scope of it is exactly what’s missing while you haven’t yet held the position — because scope isn’t prior knowledge, it’s experience being built in real time, with the tools you already have plus the pressure of the role itself forcing you to stretch.

If there were a test that could confirm “yes, you’re already at the required level before you start,” nobody would need an onboarding period, an adjustment window, on-the-job learning at all. A bigger role doesn’t ask for someone already big enough to fill it. It asks for someone willing to grow at the speed it demands. And that, interestingly enough, is exactly the kind of thing that can only be proven once you’re already inside.

You don’t get ready and then apply. You apply, and the role finishes shaping you.

*

There’s a detail that tends to surface in these messages, and I wouldn’t skip past it: the person asks my opinion, but they’ve almost always already answered their own question before asking it. They’ll say the opening is closer to what they *want* to do. Not what they know how to do. What they want to do.

That changes everything. Technical competence can be built deliberately, with time and repetition. Genuine wanting is a different matter — it doesn’t simply appear because the role demands it. Either it’s already there, nagging, pushing you back to the screen again and again, or it just isn’t, and no amount of new responsibility is going to conjure it into existence.

Once the wanting has already shown up, the question about timing loses the grip it used to have. You’re not fighting the calendar anymore. You’re fighting the idea that wanting something too soon is a character flaw.

*

I want to sit with that word “ugly” for a second, because it didn’t come out of nowhere.

Ugly assumes an audience. You only find something ugly when you picture someone watching. Alone, in your own process, with nobody observing, you wouldn’t have called it ugly to want more. You’d have called it natural. “Ugly” is born the moment you imagine HR reading your history, your current manager finding out, the next interviewer asking why so soon.

And right there, a professional decision turns into an image decision. You’re no longer choosing what’s best for your own path. You’re choosing whatever looks most acceptable to whoever’s watching from outside. Those are entirely different standards, and one of them has zero commitment to your actual life.

Nobody is going to live the next few years for you. The people who might find it ugly will form a quick opinion some random Sunday afternoon and go on with their lives without remembering your name by Monday. You, on the other hand, will keep waking up every day inside the choice you made or the one you didn’t.

*

Rejection came up too, in that conversation, and I want to spend a moment there, because that’s where the real freeze lives — not in tenure, not in the size of the role, but in the fear of hearing no.

The fear of no has an interesting mechanism to it: it doesn’t actually dread the answer itself. It dreads what the answer would supposedly prove about you. In the mind of someone afraid of it, a no turns into a verdict on capability, on worth, on belonging. As if the job, by saying no, were issuing a final ruling on who you are.

It isn’t. A job chooses someone based on dozens of variables that don’t fit inside a forty-minute interview. Tenure at your current company, sure, is one of them — but it’s only one, alongside internal budget, succession planning, a profile the manager already had in mind before the posting even went up, coincidences that have nothing to do with your résumé.

Boiling all of that down to “I wasn’t good enough” means taking a process full of variables outside your control and signing your name to it as if it were only about you.

*

There’s a huge difference between not trying out of fear and not trying out of strategy, and people confuse the two constantly to protect themselves.

Strategy is when you look at the facts — tenure, the relationship with your current manager, what you still have left to learn in your present role — and decide, clearly, that now isn’t the time. That’s legitimate, and sometimes it’s exactly the right call.

Fear is different. Fear disguises itself as strategy, borrows the same words, cites the same numbers, but the engine behind it is something else. Fear’s engine isn’t asking “is this good for my trajectory.” It’s asking “what will people think of me if I try and it doesn’t work out.”

You can spot the difference through one simple tell: strategy leaves you at peace with the decision. Fear leaves a residue, a restlessness, a need to ask someone outside yourself if it’s really okay. And if you need to keep asking whether you’re allowed, maybe what you actually want to hear isn’t permission — it’s borrowed courage, which doesn’t exist. When it’s time to hit send on the résumé, the hand that does it is yours. The most anyone outside you can do is remind you the button was always there.

*

There’s maybe an even deeper layer underneath all of this. It’s not just that we ask for permission. At some point, we learn to outsource the legitimacy of our own choices.

You know you want to try. You see the sense in the opportunity. You recognize there might still be things to learn — the way anyone stepping into something bigger would. And yet, some part of you keeps waiting for a kind of stamp of approval: someone from outside saying your wanting is reasonable, that your move is professionally acceptable, that you’ve already banked enough time and competence to be allowed to want something else.

It’s curious how people perfectly capable of making complex decisions at work can turn insecure the moment the decision is about their own path. Maybe because deciding for others involves criteria. Deciding for yourself involves identity. When you’re evaluating a project, a deliverable, you can look at evidence, risk, possibility. But when the thing being evaluated is you, other things walk into the room: fear of disappointing people, comparison, old stories about gratitude and loyalty, whatever you learned a “good person” is supposed to do before asking for anything for herself.

And that’s when a career decision stops being just a career decision. It turns into a question about who you’re authorized to be. That’s exactly where tenure picks up a kind of power it probably never should have had. It stops being a professional data point and becomes a moral argument: it’s still early, I should be grateful, they’ll think I’m opportunistic, I need to prove more before I get to want more.

Notice the difference. One thing is asking: is there a strategic reason for me to stay? A completely different thing is asking: have I already done enough to deserve leaving? The first question produces a decision. The second produces debt. And plenty of people stay put not because they chose to, but because they’re still trying to pay off a debt nobody ever formally billed them for — the imaginary debt of having to justify your own desire before you’re allowed to take it seriously.

*

There’s a phrase I hear often, from people too talented to be this stuck: “I don’t want to seem.”

I don’t want to seem anxious. I don’t want to seem opportunistic. I don’t want to seem like I’m job-hopping. The verb “seem” has taken over the professional lives of a lot of people, and it has one structural problem: seeming is about how you’re perceived from outside, not about the reality of how you actually live on the inside.

You can spend your whole life managing appearance and never spend enough time actually building the real path. Those are two different projects, with two different outcomes, and only one of them takes you somewhere you actually chose.

*

There’s an even quieter version of this, and it tends to show up long before the application itself. It’s the person who finishes the résumé, reviews it three times, leaves the tab open on the screen — and doesn’t send it. Not because deciding took courage they didn’t have. While the résumé stays unsent, there’s a kind of quiet protection at work: the potential stays intact because it never gets put up against reality. Not trying preserves the option of thinking “I could do it, if I wanted to.” Trying introduces something far more uncomfortable: evidence.

And evidence doesn’t mean finding out, once and for all, whether you’re capable or not. A selection process doesn’t hold that kind of power, as we’ve already seen. It means finding out how you respond in that specific context, at that specific moment, against those specific criteria — and using that information to adjust your next move. I see this constantly in very young people: the piece of writing that stays “almost done” for months, the interview that gets scheduled and then rescheduled twice for “unexpected reasons,” the personal project that just needs “one more tweak” before anyone gets to see it.

Maybe that’s exactly what’s frightening. Not failure itself, but trading an imagined identity for real information about where you actually stand right now. Because as long as everything stays in the realm of “I could,” the potential never has to face any reality at all. The moment you try, you stop protecting a possibility and actually start building a path.

*

Let me ask you something: what would actually happen, in practice, if you applied and didn’t get it?

You’d have an awkward week. Maybe a bit of private embarrassment, the kind nobody else sees. And then life would carry on exactly as it was — same role, same salary, same routine you have today, no real loss whatsoever. The only scenario where you actually lose something is the one where you never try at all, because that’s the one where you guarantee, with absolute certainty, the outcome you fear most: staying exactly where you are, never finding out if the other place was even possible.

Rejection costs you one bad week. Regret costs you years of asking “what if.”

*

I want to close with an image I often use with people who spend their working lives evaluating other people’s work: the sign-off that’s still missing.

Someone who spends their life checking whether other people’s work is solid enough to approve almost never applies that same rigor to themselves. If they did, they’d quickly notice that their own delivery, the recognition that’s already come in, the clear wanting to grow — all of it is already solid enough to be approved. The sign-off just hasn’t been given yet, because the person is the one postponing their own review.

*

I don’t know whether this person will apply. That was never mine to decide. But I do know the real question underneath almost never was about tenure, or impostor syndrome, or how big the role is. It was about whether there’s permission to want something faster than you thought you were allowed to.

And that, look, nobody hands you. You grant it to yourself, the exact moment you decide your own wanting is reason enough.

Maybe, after a while, it stops being a question of granting yourself permission at all. Permission still carries the idea that some authority gets to decide what’s allowed — even once that authority has moved in and started living inside you. Maybe growing up professionally means exactly leaving that place behind. Not doing everything you feel like doing, not confusing impulse with direction, not abandoning strategy or consequence. But reaching the point where you can say: I looked at the facts, I understood the risks, I know what I still don’t know, and I’m choosing anyway. That’s no longer permission. That’s authorship.

So here’s the question, for whoever’s reading this and recognizing some piece of themselves in it: how much longer are you going to wait before deciding you’ve already waited long enough?

If this touched something you’ve been putting off, my blog has hundreds of other reflections on cognitive-behavioral development, career, and more conscious human relationships. Worth a visit: marcellodesouza.com.br

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