Model answer
Written by 8020 teachers. Do not memorise it — take the structure and the way ideas are developed, then speak about your own life.
The decision I want to talk about is leaving a stable, fairly well-paid job at a bank about three years ago to freelance instead, which at the time felt like one of the riskiest things I'd ever done. The options, as I saw them, were basically two — stay where I was, keep the security, the predictable salary, the clear path upward if I wanted it, or leave with no clients lined up and no real safety net beyond a few months of savings. I chose to leave, in the end, mostly because I'd started resenting the job in a way that felt like it was seeping into the rest of my life, not just the working hours. It was difficult mainly because it wasn't a decision I could justify with numbers — everything on paper pointed towards staying, and the people I told, my parents especially, were pretty openly worried about it. There was also the fact that I genuinely didn't know if I was good enough to make freelancing work, which is a different kind of fear from just financial risk, it's closer to doubting your own competence in public. I gave myself six months as a kind of deadline, telling myself I could always go back to something similar if it completely fell apart. It didn't fall apart, as it turned out, though it took closer to a year before I stopped lying awake doing the maths in my head.