I had to make a hard decision
What I learned about priorities by quitting (2025. 07. 25. - 2025. 2025. 07. 30.)
After my holidays, I had a tough and important conversation.
It made me question my priorities.
Hello!
I’m Zoli, the 16-year-old documenting the journey of building a tech business from scratch. I’m back from holidays and camp, and before diving into what I’m doing right now, I’d love to share what happened between the holidays and the camp.
What I got done before camp
Even with just 4 days to progress, here’s what I pulled off:
Continued learning React + Tailwind (first 6 days of learning)
Finished business ops course, started taking a sales course
Started my final Figma project
Wrote 2 Substack storytime posts (my business history & my coding journey)
Made an important decision with NexFlow
These were the last days of July (after holidays but before camp), and I was able to end this month successfully.
Why I quit NexFlow
While I was on holiday, I had time to think months ahead.
School will start in a month, and my free time will decrease drastically:
At best, I’ll have 4-5 hours every day to work on my business, socialize with my family, have dinner, do my nighttime routine, and much more.
I didn’t even count school homework, spending time on my hobbies, or active relaxation in this timeframe. I could already see:
I won’t have time for everything. I need to get my priorities straight.
So I did exactly that, and here is my thought process:
School? Non-negotiable.
The gym? Currently, the most important part of my life. Non-negotiable.
The app stacks? My future. Non-negotiable.
My family? Non-negotiable.
Working on someone else’s business, to which I’m not connected emotionally at all?
It wasn’t hard to understand that this was the right choice. You know what was hard?
Telling this to a teenager who is just as ambitious as I am.
Telling him how I chose my goals over him, and that without him being able to do anything, no matter what, I will step out when summer ends. I knew I did the right thing, but it was still really hard. I felt extremely selfish.
He tried negotiating, but as I said, this wasn’t a question. It was a decision.
What’s next?
These are the events that happened between my holiday and the camp. Since then, another week has gone by, and I’ll be back soon with another post summarizing what has happened since the camp.
For NexFlow, I’m currently helping the owner set up the business as much as possible while I still have time to work with him. We’ll still be in touch to talk, share memories, and experiences. We’ll still be friends, we just won’t be business partners.
A short takeaway
This week, I reinforced the idea that
Being able to make hard decisions fast is powerful.
Why agonize over a decision for weeks if you can make it in days? It won’t get easier, and I know just as well as you do: deep down, you already know the right decision.
If I had waited to tell him until the last moment, it would’ve hurt much more for both of us. Saying it early was tough, but better in all aspects.
Be brave, accept that some decisions are hard, and keep moving forward!
See you next time
Since I didn't post last week at all, despite being home all week (I’ll share why this happened), I’ll attempt to catch up to my delay this week. I’ll try my best to post about last week’s progress as well, so be prepared for another post!
See you in the next post, about the week I nearly lost it.