When I get worn out from working non-stop, I have this voice that whispers to me, “You just need a vacation. You’re exhausted, you’re overworked, you aren’t sleeping enough. The solution is 2 weeks off from work to sleep and recharge.”
See, I tend to throw myself into whatever it is I’m doing with my life, and rarely leave room for balance. That means I can run myself ragged for months at a time, always in the pursuit of something I think is essential. It’s just who I am. In 2011, I spent 6 months searching for a new job. Not just any job, I was doing work that would massively shift my career, so I had to seek counsel and support from lots of folks, and I had to work hard to create a springboard for myself. However, I still had my old job, so I was waking up early and going to bed late in order to get everything done. I remember morning after morning hearing my alarm blare at me around 4 or 5 AM, a shrill reminder of a breakfast meeting with a mentor or a networking event. I remember all the preparation that went into job interviews at Facebook (didn’t offer me a job), and Google (I turned the job offer down), and finally at Seilevel (accepted the job offer).
During that time, I had very little break in the action, and the voice in my head would whisper that I needed a vacation, or worse. Sometimes I would catch myself saying, “I’m miserable. I hate my life. I want this to be over.” I listened to that voice enough that I realized I had to start saying different things head if I wanted to soldier on, so I wrote new mantras for myself that I would repeat when the voice would start it’s chant. “Fuck this,” turned into “Thank you.” “I hate this,” changed into, “Thank you, God.”
I knew I wasn’t miserable. I might have felt that way, but it wasn’t the reality.
What I was experiencing, I think, was the sensation of dramatically changing life inertia. I was moving quickly to do something that I had never done before, and that I had no models for how to do. Misery was the best way to describe the feeling of coming unstuck from where I had spent my life up to that point.
It’s a little like getting out of a car after driving for 3-4 hours. Your entire body is stiff and hurts because you’ve been stuck in the seat for miles and miles. Every muscle screams out, but you stretch and start walking anyway. You know that it’s temporary, and you’re hungry and want to get inside the gas station to use the bathroom and then buy some food to get you through the next 4 hours of driving. The pain is an essential part of the journey of going from Point A to Point B, and you don’t think twice about it.
One of my favorite quotes is from T.S. Elliot in his poem “Four Quartets.”
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstacy.
It’s a brilliant quote that means the only path to arrive at your destination is a painful one. But the destination is worth the pain along the journey. Put the victory of finally arriving in perspective, and any pain you’ve endured along the way is a price worth paying.
I just think the trick is to redefine “pain” as just the emotional cost of doing something new or different. Pain is a currency that we need to learn how to invest in the right things, because the pain we invest now often has a 10x return in less than 10 years. I have to remind myself of this because I want to get lazy and take shortcuts along the way, just like everyone else does.
In my head, “I’m miserable,” has a lottery mentality associated with it that says, “A vacation” would be a magical cure to the pain that I’m in. I just have to wait for a vacation to come along and save me from my toil. But I think vacations are like lotteries. They never really change your life permanently.
I tried an experiment over Labor Day. Since joining WP Engine about 7 months ago, I hadn’t taken more than a day off from the work we’re doing. Weekends as a “2-day vacation” from a 5-day work-week haven’t really existed for me. Not saying I’ve worked more or less than anyone. I’ve just worked as much as I needed to in order to get things done. What’s more, I enjoyed working far more than I ever enjoyed most weekends. However, I started thinking about vacation time around Labor Day, and then Ben told me to take Labor Day off from work.
So I spent that weekend almost completely unplugged. I slept in, I watched TV, I hung out with my friends, and I threw a birthday party. And I also didn’t know what to do with myself. I had won the lottery of time, but I didn’t know what I wanted to fill it with.
Since I wasn’t “working,” what on earth was I supposed to do with all those hours in the day? I came back to the office early that Tuesday morning relieved to be back at work. My vacation hadn’t been what I had imagined, but I wasn’t surprised.
A part of me knew that I had the concept of “vacation” all wrong in my head. I was imagining a 2-week vacation where work never entered the picture and that this was somehow the right thing for me as a man, and the only way to recharge my batteries. What hadn’t occurred to me, and what I realized that weekend, is that huge chunks of time without something to work on are actually more taxing than having something to do and create. I may not have needed to be at work on my “job,” but maybe I needed to have a project that I was working on that weekend. Maybe I needed to start a new blog, or some sort of project that didn’t have a purpose other than engaging me creatively, and being something that I was still passionate about, but that was a departure from the work I would come back to in a few days.
Recently, Joss Whedon filming a black and white version of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing in 12 days as a vacation to give himself a breather between the filming and post-production of The Avengers. This article in Fast Company Create describes how Whedon didn’t slow his pace or avoid creative work for his vacation, instead he worked on a project that was a departure from The Avengers. Filming an interpretation of Shakespeare was something close to his heart that would bring him back to his core as a storyteller.
He didn’t try and win the lottery with a vacation to some tropical island. He spent his time close to home, with actors he knew well, and they filmed a simple movie with basic equipment. At the end of his 12 days, he had created something for himself, and had something to show for his time.
The direction he took his vacation wasn’t from work, it was to himself. And I’m sure that it was probably harder work, and a bit more painful in the short term than buying a plane ticket to Fiji for a few weeks. But I also think it recharged his batteries, and ultimately made him even more Joss than he was before.
So I’m sitting here on my bed tonight, completely unable to sleep and dreading my alarm clock in the morning. Sleep would be that escape for a few hours, but something else has happened instead. I’m writing. Somehow today I knew that I needed to spend a few hours writing for myself, so it looks like I’ve made that happen. I feel better. Tomorrow, I’ll have more to give. I’ll be more human because I spent my time producing something.
I’m thinking that a vacation is a fantasy we use to distract ourselves when our goals aren’t big enough to justify the work we put in every day. Maybe when our goals are big enough, we don’t need a vacation, we just need a place to be creative for a few days to recharge our batteries before we get back on the road again.
Maybe the creative outlet of writing this was all the vacation that I needed tonight. We’ll see in the morning.
What about you?
Is there a mythical vacation that you believe will save you from the grind? Is the vacation a better fantasy than the destination of your work?
I hope this helps.
Austin W. Gunter
The Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot
You say I am repeating
Something I have said before. I shall say it again.
Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstacy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.
