When I get jealous of people, I use that envy as a guidepost. Here's how it led me to quit my prestigious Big Law job.

• Cece Xie quit her six-figure lawyer job and became a writer. 
• She says Big Law's unpredictable hours and strong personalities could be mentally challenging.
• Xie says jealousy is a useful guidepost to navigate her career and true desires in life.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Cece Xie, a former Big Law associate at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett and Morrison & Foerster LLP. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

Growing up, I was pretty good at completing tasks laid out in front of me, like getting a or attending a good university. As an immigrant coming to a new country, there's a set of career expectations that tend to be based on income level, and my family envisioned a high-income path for me, like law, medicine, software engineering, or finance.

Among those careers, becoming a lawyer was appealing to me: I liked reading and writing, and there's no prerequisite to applying for law schools. Also, salaries are transparent at law firms, so I wouldn't need to negotiate — it's very much like a conveyor belt escalator through salary tiers.

Taking all this into consideration, choosing law as my career made sense to me.

Big Law's unpredictable hours and strong personalities were mentally challenging

While I enjoyed my time in Big Law, the working hours could be unpredictable, depending on who you worked with. Chances are you might end up in a weird ecosystem where people think it's strange if you disappear for an hour at 7 p.m. or aren't reachable within half an hour on weekends.

Besides strict working hour standards, there were also a lot of strong personalities. I once worked with people who were upset if I didn't respond within eight minutes, and some partners would hold 1 a.m. team conference calls. So, if I worked for them, I had to adhere to that schedule, too.

Sometimes, I went to work thinking it would be a normal day, but I'd get a lot of last-minute ad hoc tasks and would have to work late into the night.

Working without knowing what the exact hours were was mentally challenging. My brain was working 24/7, constantly checking my phones for fire drills or emergencies.

People may wonder why the average Big Law salary is $200,000, even for people with zero experience — it's because they're paying for our availability and ability to be very good administrators and facilitators.

I am, by nature, a dissatisfied person

Over the years, I found that whenever I hit a goal, I'd only be happy for that day. I'd think "Well, that's cool." But when the next day comes, I go back to my life like nothing has changed.

For example, after getting , my dream school, I had to go through , and after that, applying for clerkships. I realized in the end that I would never be fulfilled even as an equity partner because once I made it, I would become obsessed with the next goal — there's always the next thing I think I need to do, and I never reached a point where I thought, "I'm so happy; this is my dream."

The happiness I felt was so fleeting, and I quickly forgot it and returned to feeling dissatisfied. Sometimes, I wondered why I still felt lonely and even cried every day after getting what I wanted for so long. Then, I realized I wasn't tired of chasing goals — I was just weirded out by how unfulfilling they were.

This unfulfilled feeling propels me to chase prestige as a way for me to seek happiness. But somewhere along the way, while chasing prestige, I was prone to forget what the ultimate goal was. This left me wondering, "Where is this going?"

Knowing who I'm jealous of tells me a lot about myself

I often found myself following other people's goals or being told what I should do, and then I would just do it.

Recently, I've been evaluating how I truly feel about certain goals before working on them. This reflection led me to find a new way to perceive my life and goals, which helped me realize that it was the right move to step away from the corporate world.

Surprisingly, jealousy can be a useful guidepost to navigate my true desires in life. As much as I can't trust my feelings of "feeling happy," I can trust how jealous I am of other people. I don't feel jealous when I see my ex-colleagues become partners at their law firms — working 10 hours a day is too unrelenting. I also don't feel jealous when seeing some of my friends have babies.

It turns out I found myself jealous of people who are super creative. For example, Zoe Thorogood is an award-winning graphic novelist, author, and artist. I picked up her comic book "It's Lonely at the Centre of the Earth" while traveling once and devoured the book on my flight back to New York.

The moment I landed, I Googled her. It was worse than I imagined: she's been hailed multiple times as the future of comics, and at 24, she won the Eisner award, considered the Oscars of the comic book industry, for "Most Promising Newcomer." She was tapped to write the comic spin-off for "Life is Strange," one of my favorite video game series.

At 24, I was a summer associate.

Jealousy is a useful guidepost for my career — but I won't take it to the extreme

Many believe jealousy is a negative emotion that should be tamped down. But in my experience, I've learned to transform this emotion into a helpful indicator that guides me toward what I want to do in life. I like progress, and I like improvement.

However, progressing without direction is dangerous. Often, it results in following a path set by others, so you move forward anyway.

Understanding my jealousy of creative people helped me navigate and pivot my career, though it's crucial not to take it to the extreme. Let it be a useful signpost, but never an ultimate, end-all-be-all decision-maker of your life.

After my nearly six-year journey as a lawyer, and started writing my book about Big Law culture. I'm not sure if I'm happier now, but what I do know is that I like the flow of writing a lot more than answering emails all day.

If you have recently quit your job at a law firm and want to share your story, email Aria Yang at ayang@businessinsider.com.