I Nearly Quit DJing - And What Brought Me Back

Remember that time I used to write about stupid boys and the trouble they used to put me through… not only me but my friends too?

Well, long before I met my fiancé, things got a lot worse before they got better.

And you're probably on here thinking, but you're meant to be discussing how you nearly quit DJing!

We’ll get to it… I promise.

Well, we all know how I started DJing. (Quick recap: guy breaks heart of girl, who decides to uproot her life to the other side of the world. Comes back to really make it work in the industry, and to be taken seriously I had to take some pretty shitty gigs.)

But that’s not the reason I nearly quit.

Flash forward a year

I meet a serial liar. The kind of liar they make Netflix documentaries about. But it wasn’t a meet cute. This guy was already in my friendship circle.

Someone like that can go unnoticed for a pretty long time... but that didn’t stop the warnings coming in from friends.

And by getting these warnings, I suppose I wanted to hold the medal for that heroine-like woman that changes a man…for the better.

But a zebra can’t change its stripes.

I guess he sold me the dream, with his slick tongue, dressed to the nines in Tom Ford suits, Rolex watches, a “very busy” work schedule working around the clock for one of the biggest sports companies in the world'“NFL”, to be exact. (And flash forward three years… I ended up with an NFL contract as their in-house DJ when they were in the UK.)

I never doubted his chat. He talked the talk. He was never a cash type of guy, so when I realised it was all a lie, I just knew it couldn’t be drug-related.

But when someone so successful in your eyes tells you to quit DJing and get a real job- because this stupid pipeline dream of being a successful DJ is “near impossible”-you think you can trust his word.

Hands up for every creative that has been told by a non-creative to “get a real job.”
Every self-autobiography has those exact words written by a now-successful artist… and yep, you guessed it, he used those famous words and I lapped it all up.

Seeing how successful this guy was, and I was struggling from paycheck to paycheck, living off my father’s legacy, not quite a nepo baby, 25 and struggling to be honest…

I got myself a new job as a real estate agent. And to be fair, it was the greatest decision I’d ever made. Not because it was going to be the job for the next 10 years (as I led myself to believe), but because it taught me how not to take no for an answer. There’s a lot of slammed doors and hung up phones, rude people, you gotta have thick skin. And getting a house over the line in a chain of 10 properties? That takes superpowers... and a sprinkle of magic.

So here I was…a 20-something-year-old, told to get a real job. I headed out with £500 to my name to buy three suits, threw the rest of my clothes out… and lo and behold, dumped the guy before my first day. (Aka he lied, never worked for NFL, and forged signatures to prove his case - Thank god I got out of that one)

And what company I hear you say, Greene & Co, offered a £20,000 starting salary, plus car expenses and a company car… if you could drive manual... I couldn’t. My dad once told me, “By the time you’re 20, manual cars will be a thing of the past.” He was always ahead of his time.

And as a DJ with little funds, that £20k plus a car was the ultimate dream.

First week of the job, I learn about cold calling. Go on the database of people who accessed Rightmove and enquired about previous properties. Find their criteria, match them with properties you already have, and poach listings that haven’t had movement in 3 months by offering a lower percentage and matching them with buyers.

And lo and behold, I came across a woman whose name popped off the page. She’d been inactively looking for a year. Me, being young, naive and passionate, looked at our roster of properties and thought. Boom. We have the perfect 5-bed, £2 million property. Absolute steal (in that current area) :/. Her budget? £1.5 million.

Her name? Barbie.

As a fanatic, almost cult-like fan of Barbie, it was only natural that her name would bounce off the page.

It was the best relationship I’d had. For anyone not in property, you get so unbelievably attached and passionate about your buyers.

I know I did, in the short 6 months I was there. And speaking of 6 months—we exchanged. Yep, I had sold the best property on our books. Pretty impressive for a junior estate agent, as they call it in the UK.

After that win, and then exchanging on a further two properties, and showing I was clearly very adept at the job, I asked if they could potentially waive the £20k starting salary. I had sold their most profitable homes within the year. I said if not, then I knew I wouldn’t be a valuable asset in the company, and they’d lose me.

And low and behold… they said no. And lost me in the process.

Let’s just calculate how much I made them:
£1.7M + £450K + £650K = £2.8M worth of property
Commission the company made off me? £42,000.
And they wouldn’t keep me on…

But to be honest, it wasn’t all the bells and whistles of commission that would’ve kept me. It was a quote by Jim Carrey that literally became the projector for my whole existence:

“You can fail at what you don’t want, so you might as well take a chance on doing what you love.”

In his 2014 university speech, he reflected on his father’s decision to pursue a “safe” career as an accountant, a job he never truly loved, and one he ended up losing anyway. It wasn’t even his dream.

In that moment I thought: What the hell am I doing?
My friends already thought I was crazy. And the craziest thing was, when I was freelancing as a DJ they’d say “I don’t know how you do it,” and when I chose a stable job, they then said, “Why? You’re a creative.”
Make it make sense!!!

To put the busy schedule into context—they expected your hair and nails to be consistently immaculate, and you had to work six days a week mon through to sat. And if your from the uk, hairdressers and nail technicians are closed on sundays… Make it make sense.

After months of enduring this crazy schedule and feeling extremely undervalued despite everything I had achieved at the company, I called my boss into a room, with tears in my eyes and said:
“There’s so much more to this life. My energy is precious. I quit something I loved to be here.”

But he was so right in saying:
“Jamie, you never gave up. You showed that you were capable of doing both, which has led you to the decision to do DJing and actually make it work.”

In that moment I saw how much of an asset I was to the company -and it gave me as much as I gave it. It pushed me to go after what I really want. Because why fail at something you don’t want when you might as well fail at something you do?

No matter where I looked, it always pointed back to DJing. I started doing after-hours parties on Wednesdays ‘til 1am, and getting back into the office at 7am.
Yep, it was that intense and the commute took 3 hours round trip.

But through this intense experience, I learned more than I ever imagined. I realised the graft behind success. I don’t think I’d be where I am today if I hadn’t built the resilience I did in that job-from cold calling, the confidence of cold emailing someone, to handling rejection and building on the “no’s.”

I wouldn’t be where I am today if I hadn’t learned from that job.

I wouldn’t be sitting on a plane flying back from Miami, writing this.

That whole nearly-quitting-DJing moment made me a better businesswoman and a better DJ.

So when you think you’ve failed or want to quit—it might just be the very path that makes you even better at what you’re already doing

I hope that all makes sense.

So, welcome to the jungle.

Jayli x