Good Life Project - How to Take a Life-Changing Break | DJ DiDonna

Episode Date: September 12, 2022

Let’s suspend judgment, just for a minute. What if you could take a few weeks, months, maybe even an entire year off work to do exactly what you wanted, whether traveling the world, considering your next career move or just taking a moment to step back and really check in with yourself? Would you go for it? Especially after the last few years we’ve had? Safe bet, most people would jump on that opportunity. But then comes the reality check. The doubt. The details. Sure, it’d be amazing, but I could never make it happen. Right?But, what if you could? What if it was actually more doable than you ever imagined? What if there were ideas, tools, and strategies that would help you step away and reset your mind, body, and life? Ways that might not even require you to leave your job, and know you had something to come back to. Even if, by the end, you didn’t want to anymore? What if your personal, life-changing sabbatical was not only possible, but necessary for you to not only reclaim your sense of self and purpose and aliveness, but to create the space to see more clearly who and what matters, and how you want to step into your life from this moment forward.My guest today, DJ DiDonna has been studying these real-life breaks, in all forms, showing why they matter and revealing incredible insights into not just how to do them in a way that truly gives you what you’re looking for, but also how to make them more possible than you ever imagined. DJ is the founder of The Sabbatical Project, a research and advocacy nonprofit that is on a mission to define, explore, and research sabbaticals and their impact on non-academics. On his own sabbatical, DJ walked 900 miles on pilgrimage in Shikoku, Japan and ran a poverty research lab at his alma mater Notre Dame. And today, we dive deeper into some of the ideas and stories that appear in his upcoming book based on hundreds of interviews with sabbatical-takers from across the world. DJ and I uncover more about the history of sabbaticals and their roots in academia. And also, he breaks down the essential components of taking an effective extended pause from work and even offers some ideas that might make you seriously consider taking a sabbatical in the near future—even if retirement isn't even in sight yet.You can find DJ at: Website | Learn About Your Sabbatical Style | LinkedInIf you LOVED this episode you’ll also love the conversations we had with Chip Conley about reimagining later-in-life contributions.Check out our offerings & partners: My New Book SparkedMy New Podcast SPARKED. Visit Our Sponsor Page For Great Resources & Discount Codes Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I feel like it becomes even more important to figure out how to take a sabbatical as you get closer and closer to your dream job or the work of your soul or whatnot. There are things that I want to do that don't fit into the container of regular life or regular vacation. And I will never get to do that if I don't take time for it. And so I look forward to a world where people can say, oh, you're taking extended leave. That's awesome. I can't wait for my next one. There are many things I want to do that I can't do. And that if you wait for retirement, you might never get to. Okay. So let's suspend judgment just for a moment. What if you could take a few months, maybe even an entire year off of work to do exactly what

you wanted, whether that was traveling the world, considering your next career move, writing your notes for a memoir, or just taking a moment to step back and really check in with yourself. Would you go for it, especially after the last few years that we've had? Well, safe bet, most people would jump at that opportunity. But then comes the reality check, the doubt, the details. Sure, it'd be amazing, but I could never make it happen. But what if you could? What if it was actually way more doable than you ever imagined? What if there were ideas and strategies, ways to not even have to leave your job and know you had something to come back to even if by then you realized you didn't want to anymore? What if your personal life-changing sabbatical was not only possible, but actually really important for you to not only reclaim your sense of self and purpose and aliveness,

but also create the space to see more clearly who and what matters and how you want to step into your life from that moment forward. My guest today, DJ Dadana, has been studying these real-life breaks, sabbaticals, in all forms, showing why they matter and revealing incredible insights into not just how to do them, especially when your work setting doesn't just organically provide for them, which most don't, but also how to make them more possible than you ever imagined. DJ is the founder of The Sabbatical Project, a research and advocacy nonprofit that is on a mission to define, explore, and research sabbaticals and their impact,

especially on non-academics. His work on sabbaticals has appeared everywhere from Time Magazine to Fast Company, Wall Street Journal, CNBC, Quartz, Fortune, so many other places. And on his own sabbatical, DJ walked 900 miles on pilgrimage in Shikoku, Japan, and ran a poverty research lab at his alma mater, Notre Dame. And today, we dive deeper into some of the ideas and stories that appear in his upcoming book based on hundreds of interviews with sabbatical takers from across the world in nearly every domain. DJ and I, we uncover more about the history of sabbaticals and their roots. And also he breaks down the essential components of taking an effective extended pause from work and offer some ideas that may make you seriously consider

taking a sabbatical in your near future, even if retirement isn't anywhere in sight for you, and think through how to make possible what maybe you had believed up until this moment would never be possible. So excited to share this conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist,

whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised.

The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun. January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him. We need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. And I'm just excited to dive in to this topic of sabbaticals. I have so many different questions for you. And I will confess upfront that part of this is because I know that a lot of our listening community is at a moment in a season in life where they're kind of, they're re-imagining. And if they're not now, they're about to, and they're kind of trying to figure out how do I step into that window of re-imagining. And I personally am square in that myself.

I find myself well into life running two different companies, also having a deep love for life, for relationships, for family, for art, and for doing different things and realizing that I'm in a little bit over my head right now. And funny enough, before I even was aware of your work, we've been sort of like figuring out for the last, probably the better chunk of this year. In fact, I committed to it on air in a conversation with Jenny Blake months back on this podcast where she kind of challenged me because I was like, you know, I've wanted to take a month and just write for years now and do nothing else. She's like, what's stopping you? Let's

walk through the process. Let's make this happen. And I realized that I started walking through the process and I kind of felt like I had to zoom the lens out a little bit also and say, what exactly am I doing this? Why am I doing, what is this thing that I'm imagining? And I didn't think of it in this term of sabbatical, like that wasn't the word that came to mind. But once I started learning about the work that you've been doing, I was like, huh, this is fascinating. And I had the guy who actually has been deep into this for a long time. So I want to learn more. So I'm putting that out there upfront. This is in part for our community and part, I'm very personally interested in the topic. That's great. Well, a certain Atlantic columnist can tell you that as part of interviewing me, you get free sabbatical

consultations for life. So I'm excited to help you walk through that journey. And I was actually looking forward to asking you a similar question just about how do folks like us, obviously you're many, many steps ahead of me, but how do you take sabbatical as you get closer and closer to your dream job or the work of your soul or whatnot. And so I'll be learning from you as well, because I'm coming up on it myself. Yeah. Well, it's interesting, right? And I think on the one hand, it's easier to take, the less you need it, the easier it is to take in a weird way, you know, because earlier in life, there's a lot less complexity, a lot less that you have to kind of unwind, put on pause, like create backups for, but also a lot of the things that would lead you to need to take that space probably aren't in play yet either. So there's, I feel like there's a really interesting

tension there. I'm wondering if you've seen that as a similar pattern in with all the different people that you've been speaking to about it. Absolutely. I mean, I think the dichotomy that you just mentioned, you know, I'll talk to young folks and they're just as stressed, if not more stressed about, there's no way that I could take a year off. My career is just getting started. You know, I don't have savings. And you talk to older folks and they're like, man, I wish I would have done that in my twenties. And you know, the, the other thing that I hear, and I just interviewed a woman that I met who took a gap year before Stanford. So places like Harvard, Stanford, UNC have, they encourage you on the letter of admission to take a year off. And UNC actually gives you a stipend and has a

program through global citizen year to do it. You know, at the same time, I feel like it's becoming more common because those folks who are entering university early in their career, even though you might think there's not as many things in the log jam that would make them need a sabbatical, they've been going at 120 miles an hour since middle school to get into those places or, you know, anything with sports and activities. So I think, unfortunately, it's available for everybody now and it's needed for everybody. And I think the pandemic lifted that up and made us realize it more than ever before.

Yeah. It's such an interesting point that you bring up also, right? The notion that a sabbatical used to be the same that you earned after working for a solid chunk of years, maybe if you ever did. But you're floating something that I really think about, which is that kids these days, there's so much pressure from the earliest days. And so often they feel like they're grooming themselves or trying to keep up in order to check this box, which gets them to the next, to the next. It's like by the time you hit college or graduate college, you've already accumulated the level of stress and weight and pressure that I think a lot of adults, it took a lot longer to sort

of amass that level of need to actually step back and hit pause. Would you consider then sort of like what would typically be considered like the classic gap year after college to be a form of sabbatical. Absolutely. And I would say gap year between high school and college, also gap year after college. So, you know, one of the ideas of my book is that there are these socially acceptable periods of time off in different cultures, companies, among individuals. And it's really about pulling those stories out and showing people that this isn't that unusual. It's just that the common story to date has been something very different, right? So I think a gap year is both the perfect example

of a sabbatical and also another unfortunately named term, right? I mean, sabbatical is this big heavy thing that folks feel kind of silly to use sometimes, but it sounds a lot better than saying, you know, my life is in a crisis and gap year. I mean, it's got the word gap in it, but in actuality, when you do the research and I've been heavy in this chapter for my book right now, tremendous amounts of growth and more importantly, kind of authentic growth. One of the things we found in our research was that we were very surprised with when we asked folks kind of some warm up questions for the interviews, we asked how they thought

about and how they came to the idea of how to work when they were growing up. And, you know, it's very much aligned or oriented away from how you saw your parents working, what you saw your peers. You know, if you're, I went to business school and if you do a good job in a business major, then you're going to go into consulting or banking. It's not really a choice for many folks. And so I think the opportunity for that gap year is one where you can actually step back and, you know, yes, heal and recover a

little bit, but really get a better idea of who you are and what you want to do versus what your parents pushed you towards or your friends are doing or your peers are doing. Yeah. That's so interesting. I think, um, a lot of times we would, you know, expect that to happen to somebody in their forties, you know, and, and we would call it, well, if you're in academia, you'd call it a sabbatical. If you're not, you would call it a midlife crisis. Like that was sort of like the classic frame for it, but like framing a gap year actually as a form of sabbatical, which is like healthy and constructive and actually, um, a source of, of growth rather than I'm just going to check out for a year, which I think is what a lot

of people look at. I just need a break. I just need to go and do my thing. I need to have fun before like actual quote life starts, but actually framing it as a very early in life sort of moment to plant some seeds that are really healthy and really constructive. I love that alternative frame. The first sabbatical was offered by Harvard in, I think, 1891. And the idea was that professors needed to actually go to Europe in order to exchange information. And so it was kind of like, they use this archaic terminology about like tuning up their machinery, which is, you know, really funny. And, you know, know similarly the first gap years were these what they call the grand tour and so it's these you know well-to-do folks of means in in northern europe who would travel down through italy and southern europe to see the arts and some of these

situations you're seeing these pieces that you could not see in England and wherever you were from. And you're hearing music that was not obviously able to be recorded. This is like 18th, 17th century. And so it was more for education and exposure to the world than it was for some sort of break. And I think now we think about it as a break. And then what happens in the process is that you're getting educated because you're traveling, you're meeting other folks, you're doing internships, trying things on for size that you just wouldn't have an opportunity to do in the normal routine of things. Yeah. It's almost like the intention has been flipped. You know, it used to be the primary intention was to get educated and do it in the space

of a certain amount of time. And now it's sort of like, I'm just going to take some space and time. And by default, if I do certain things in a certain way, I might actually learn a whole bunch about myself and the world along the way. Yeah. I mean, I feel like we're scared to talk about how being outside of the routine is a way of learning. I remember reading Tim Ferriss Tim Ferriss, four hour work week, and he talked about how he was kind of making the decision whether to spend 200 grand on an MBA or spend 200 grand on his own education. And, you know, I think we're in this rut of here's what I'm supposed to do. And so if I'm not doing that, I have to have an explanation that is not the same

as the routine thing, right? You know, our definition of sabbatical is an extended period of time intentionally spent not on your routine work. And so, you know, if you leave your job, your routine job is to get another job. But if you kind of set boundaries around that and take space to think about what do I actually want to do, maybe I should explore, heal before I make that decision. Then I think you're into sabbatical territory. Yeah, that's interesting. So let me ask you a question. In a very past life, a very, very past life at this point, I was a lawyer working in a large firm in New York City. Within a fairly short amount of time, I ended up in a lot of physical and emotional distress

in the hospital in emergency surgery. But I went back after I recovered and I spent the better part of the year at that firm. Now, I kind of knew in the back of my mind the whole time that I was on my way out. But I also knew that even about a year into that, that my pace of work was so fierce, so relentless that a voice inside of me said, before I make this choice about literally whether to walk away from not just the firm, but the entire field of law, the practice, something inside of me said, you are not mentally in a good enough place to make a rational choice right now. You need some space. And the firm and I said, can I take a quote, leave of absence,

which I did for a month before I made any kind of choice there. What's your frame on that? I mean, I think, I don't know exactly how old you were, but that's, it's kind of wisdom beyond its years. What we've seen in our research that we term functional workaholism as in functional alcoholism, you might not notice that someone's struggling with addiction because they're still functioning at a fairly high level until they aren't, right? And similarly, most of the folks, two thirds of the folks in our sample, they had a sabbatical happen to them. Right. So something extremely negative happened, whether they realize, oh man, these stomach ulcers I was having or my trigger finger that I developed was actually work related. And it wasn't just

life and unrelated to how I was working is very closely related. So I think knowing that you need to take space in order to heal yourself and get yourself in a proper frame of mind, as opposed to what we see in the past year or so with the great resignation, if someone leaves a job and goes directly into another job and thinks the job itself is the only problem, you're just passing along that issue to future employers. I worry, you know, the fact that employers don't offer something like a pre-batical, right? Where you sign on to work and they're like, hey, listen, we know that this is not part of the story to take time off. And we're willing to pay you a little bit and give you some time in order to get your head straight and heal and recover and be able to bring your best self to this new job. It's interesting, right? Because a lot of universities actually won't accept somebody into a master's program until you've actually taken some time off, until you've gone out, until you've

worked, until you've done something. Yet most jobs look at time off with a suspect eye rather than saying, oh no, this person has really hit pause for a moment to really understand what the intelligent next move is, which is interesting to me. Actually, I have never thought about that. That's a great analogy, you know, because I actually think about business school as the world's most socially acceptable sabbatical. I went to business school and not to say that you don't do a lot of work, but the work is

really meeting people from all over the world, learning about jobs that you didn't do a lot of work, but the work is really meeting people from all over the world, learning about jobs that you didn't even know existed, trying out entrepreneurship, trying out internships. And then when you get finished, all you've done is learn for two years and people pat you on the back and give you a raise. You know, and you see folks going back to mid-career MBAs

and fellowships and things like that. So I think, again, sabbaticals are in our midst. You just have to uncover them. I think you've helped me uncover yet another one, right? With an institution wanting you to have some different experience before going forward. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg.

You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot? Flight risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever,

making it even more comfortable on your wrist whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to

previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. Let's define what we're talking about, actually. You kind of offered a very short hint. When I'm talking about a sabbatical, I'm talking about this. Tell me more what you really mean by this. When you look at what are the defining qualities or characteristics of this thing called the sabbatical, walk me through this.

Yeah. So breaking down that definition a little bit more. So extended time spent intentionally away from routine work. So extended, it has to mean months, not weeks. I don't want to discourage companies that come to me or elsewhere and launch like a three to five week sabbatical policy, but you know, that's a European vacation and it's awesome. And I think they should do that. But really what we found in our research is that it can take people six to eight weeks to just feel like themselves again, especially if you get to the

point again, where you're burning out, something negative is happening to you and it's not your intention to take that time off. Right. And, you know, one of the key questions I'm seeking to answer with my book, and I have not answered it yet. I don't know if there is an answer is just what is the difference between extended time and a shorter amount of time? Why is it so important? You know, because everyone who has taken a sabbatical has taken a vacation, right? And all of those folks are saying, this is a peak life experience. This is something up there with the birth of a child, you know, getting married. And so there's something extraordinarily different with that extended period of time.

Intentionality, as I mentioned before, it's not like you have to choose to go on a sabbatical. Again, someone can get a sabbatical policy from their company. It can happen to them and they can still have a great experience. But you have to be intentional about not working, which is a lot more difficult for folks than I think you would assume. the time taking on consulting projects here or there to try to extend their sabbatical runway or, you know, like getting inbound job interests and finding themselves in a job interview process before they even know it. So getting the most out of it really requires very significant boundaries to say like, this is my time and this is what I want to do. You know, the third thing is this routine nature of work. So as I was saying, if you get fired or you leave your job, the job, the routine job that our society would have you think is to look for a new job. And so by not looking for that new job, you're kind of in this weird space, you know, like the unemployment statistics wouldn't even count you, right?

But it's not to say that people don't work on sabbaticals and that different types of work isn't extremely important. So folks might say, I'm thinking of an example where someone had assumed that when they retire, they'd want to run an eco lodge. And so they took the opportunity on their sabbatical to intern kind of like an eco lodge. So they were in the kitchen, they were in the back office and that was work. And they realized after doing it, that it was not going to be for them. And so sometimes different types of work, whether it's, you know, scuba dive certification, yoga teacher certification, or trying your hand at, at writing or, you know, some sort of entrepreneurial thing can be,

can be super important. But those are the three components that I think really make something a sabbatical. So I want to talk about those three a little bit more. The time one. So we start out with time, right? It can't be three to five weeks. It's got to be something longer. And I guess you're in the process of researching, well, what is that window? And I wonder, one of the questions that you probably get a lot and that you're probably curious about, I'm guessing as part of your research is like, given the sort of like the achievement oriented state of mind of so many of us, what's the minimum amount of time that I can take and still have it count as something that like matters and like does what I want it to do? Yeah. My favorite answer to that question is, you know, when you ask

someone from Australia or Israel about taking time off, they're like, oh yeah, everyone I know takes a year off to travel around the world, right? Israel, typically after the mandatory military service, Australia, you know, to kind of see, see the world. And he was like, it's almost as if you're asking someone, what's the minimum amount of time I need to visit Paris? Like, sure. I mean, I don't know. I feel like you're just kind of missing out on the richness of something as opposed to getting everything in a shorter amount of time. But it's a common question. And what I can say is that if you're in a situation where you know what your job's going to be at the end of it. You're not under financial constraints.

It's either a paid sabbatical or you're keeping your benefits or you've saved up for it, whatever. And you're doing it as part of a work culture where it's supported and common. Then I think you can slip into the zone pretty quickly. And you might have some personal issues going on that would make it difficult to fully kind of unwind. But those conditions, I think, allow for it to be a shorter amount of time. Again, as I was saying, six to eight weeks is pretty common, what we hear from folks really needing to detox and kind of take off that identity, that work identity. But yeah, it's an interesting question. I think about the difference between like a meditation retreat and like meditating for 15 minutes a day or even an hour a day. I gather you're a practice meditator as well. And there's just something different about a retreat. And there's something different about a month from 10 days. And there's something different about two months from one month. And so I'd kind of liken it to that. There's a depth and a being

of yourself as opposed to a doing concept that I think you start to embody with more time. Yeah. I mean, it's so interesting. And I found myself asking that very question, by the way, even though I'm somebody who like in theory, I've spent a lot of years in this space of understanding the value of space and time and not rushing things and being intentional and finding a place of grace and ease and letting things take as long as they need to take to get to a good place. And yet there is so much, part of what you're battling with the time thing, I think is, okay, so if you have a container, whether it's a company or the classic, every seven years in academia, if and when you ever hit tenure these years, which is a whole different issue.

My dad had one job for his entire life. He was a full-time professor. So he was one of the people that had that opportunity. He didn't stop working at all. He just chose only the things that he wanted to work on during that window. But if you don't have that container that says it's expected and okay and supported, I would imagine part of the, quote, rush to get it over with quickly is potentially financial for a lot of people. But a whole bunch of it also is just social expectation.

Because it's almost like the longer that you're in it, the more those whose opinions around you that you value, you start to feel like, oh, they're looking at me like, oh, he's just in a full-on meltdown now. He's never coming back to reality or she's never come back to reality. And just, I would imagine that social pressure, social environment, there's a social context to that that adds for certain people a huge amount of pressure to kind of figure the thing out that led them to the sabbatical in the first place. So they can get back to being a part of the culture that they want to be accepted by. Exactly. Yeah. You hit the nail on the head.

That's why I called it a sabbatical when I did mine, because it's pithier than saying, I'm having a midlife crisis. And I think that's also why it's really valuable to get geographic physical space away from your routine life as well. You've probably experienced this, and we all experienced it to some extent

over the past couple of years, but you might be gone for three months and you get back and people are like, what you were gone for three months. And, you know, yeah, you know, I mean, time just kind of flies. Everyone's actually just thinking about themselves. Um, you know, they're worried about themselves and their own issues. And so it's easier to be absent when you are absent, when you're not kind of around folks for whom their routine you've kind of left. And again, I think the great resignation and all the adjustments that we made to work over the past couple of years have given people more permission than ever to say, I'm going

to step away and that's okay. But I'm curious, did you all ever do a sabbatical abroad? Did you leave your hometown or just stay? We didn't, no. We were all, and my dad was, and even though he's retired from his, like, quote, official job, to this day, he is deep into his research. He is the classic person who loved, loved, loved research, loved his topic of research. He researched human learning, human cognition, and he's got 40, 50 years of data that he will be parsing and cutting and slicing and dicing and writing about and talking about forever. He never felt the need to pull out of that because it was his absolute passion. And I think if anything, it wasn't the topic. He was locked into what he loved. And that also, I think, is incredibly rare these days.

I think it's just not something you see very often. The only other published study that we could find on sabbaticals is by these Israeli academics who studied the difference between Israeli faculty members on sabbatical who went abroad and who stayed. And what they found was that folks experienced incredible gains in well-being by going abroad. And so the reason I asked about that was a lot of antecedents to people's sabbaticals are them having an example, either from their family or peers, friends, hopefully hearing people talk about on a podcast. And I talked to a lot of folks whose parents were academics, my partner included, who the impact on the spouse and on the children of academics who take a sabbatical abroad can be tremendous. For most academics, it's kind of just getting to put down

one of their three jobs and focus on the other. But for everyone else, it's like, oh, wow, you know, we probably have sacrificed where we're going to live to support the academic, right? And we get to be in a different place and we get to experience a different culture. And, you know, probably for an American academic going somewhere else, the whole family is going to get more vacation. So it can be tremendously enlightening, I think, for folks who are the kids of academics. So let's talk about more around structure. You talk about sort of like the inciting incident, the catalyst for a lot of them. And what do you understand? You make it this distinction between a push-based catalyst and a pull-based catalyst. Talk to me about that distinction more. Yeah. This goes back to whether you feel like you have agency overtaking a sabbatical or whether a sabbatical takes you, right? And so if you are planning it, if you are offered a policy and it's your choice to pick up, the chances that you're going to have a, like a much smoother entry, I think are much higher. But also, you know, if you have a sabbatical that's offered by a company, there is a little bit more pressure to return to that company. You might not allow yourself to open the aperture as

much to think about what you would do if you weren't kind of attached to that job and that, that identity, but most people get kind of pushed into it. And, you know, hopefully, and the reason why I'm doing the work I am is that it becomes more commonplace. There's more kind of equitable policies so that folks of all socioeconomic spectrum can kind of be able to participate in this. And we don't get to the point where a sabbatical is fixing a problem. You lost your job, you have a health crisis, relationship crisis, and more, you know, kind of as Michael Pollan talks about, like for the betterment of well people, right? So, you know, even in our conversation, right? It's very easy to say someone's having a midlife crisis or, you know, I've worked too hard or I need to

put this job down and pick this other job up. As opposed to just saying, there are things that I want to do that don't fit into the container of regular life or regular vacation. Like I did a six week long walking pilgrimage in Japan. And I will never get to do that if I don't take time for it. And it's just, I look forward to a world where people can say, oh, you're taking extended leave. That's awesome. I can't wait for my next one. There are oh, you're taking extended leave. That's awesome. I can't wait for my next one. There are many things I want to do that I can't do. And that if you wait for retirement, you might never get to. It's interesting. When I finally actually made that call to leave the law, there's the typical practice was you send a memo around to everybody in the firm gets it, you know, like from

administrative assistants to senior managing partners, they all get the same memo. And the convention was, you know, like, oh, so-and-so has left to lead people up mountains and explore the world and find more meaning. And I could tell the people, I'd walk down a hall and people who were sort of like my level, mid-level associates were just like snickering at me like, oh, what a shame, he couldn't hack it. Then I started to get private notes from senior partners who were basically saying, God bless, I wish I had done this when I was your age. And to me, that was the people where, these are the people where the carrot that was being dangled in front of all of us, they had it and they'd had it for years. And they're saying, looking back and saying, go do this thing. And it was interesting because

we're talking about social validation here. And I had to make a choice about if I was going to value anybody's external opinion, especially people who generally didn't know me and wouldn't even blink if I was gone, whose input was I going to put more value in making this decision? It was just a really interesting moment. Once you make that call, and once I was actually honest about the fact that I was leaving to do something that was not socially acceptable within the culture of both the firm and the practice. I love that. Yeah. No, I love the idea of sending out the memo and saying, I'm out of here. I don't want to do the thing that you're doing. Yeah. I didn't realize at the time it might have not been the most flattering thing for all

of my colleagues, but I have mad respect for those in the practice, by the way. It just wasn't right for me at that particular moment in time, the way I was doing it. I want to talk more about structure here. We've talked certainly generally about the idea of what it is, why we might do this thing and roughly some of the benefits here. But you've also sort of identified some, and roughly some of the benefits here. But you've also sort of identified some really interesting underlying structures and trajectories here and a set of, I guess you call them building blocks, these three essential building blocks, a period of, I guess, recovery, a period of exploration, a period of practice.

Talk to me about each of these three. So I think that what I've found in talking to hundreds of folks around their sabbaticals is that it kind of, every sabbatical is different, but it tends to go in the same direction, which is there is this, you know, stepping back to recover. There's this exploration and then there's this practice, right? Thing, you know, trying something. And it can become kind of like a design loop where you explore, then you practice that thing, and then you reflect and explore and practice. One of the things that we found that was interesting is if folks skip some of those steps or if they only do them in a different order, there's very different outcomes in that. So the most common that we see is,

you know, someone that I kind of call the achiever, right? Someone's like, I'm gonna go, I'm gonna write a book on my sabbatical, which I think is kind of what you're saying. And it's like, I'm writing a book, that's all I'm doing. And they go and they write the book. And as you know, and I'm learning, a book will take as much space as you give it, right?

So they write the book and it fills up all of their time. And then they get to the end and they're like, I'm not really feeling much more recovered. And I'm at the end of my time. I wish that I had taken some time to just kind of like rest and recover. Then you have folks that we call the seekers, right? And I would kind of gather that that was what you were doing when you were leaving your law practice. It's like, okay, I want to kind of seek on a deeper level of who I am and what I want to do and align those things.

And so, you know, those folks will typically spend a lot more time exploring and then practicing. And so they come out of it with, I think, a better opportunity to make fundamental transformational change in their life because they've healed, they've explored, and have actually tried some of those things out. I think one of the important things to keep in mind is that a lot of folks on sabbatical, as you were saying earlier, like you get towards the end of it and then people are asking questions and you maybe haven't figured out what you want to do next. And I think a lot of folks don't come out of a sabbatical with exactly the right thing that they want to do just then. But I think it kind of starts like a chain reaction of events that one, two, three jobs, one, two, three years in the future, you're kind of getting

there. So I think it like reorients yourself towards where you actually want to be. And it's more true to yourself. And then you might have to circle around it a little bit, but it's kind of pointing you in the other direction. going to take a month or a couple of months or a year to make this wholesale change in direction and get started on a new path to basically just say, I'm going to take a year to first recover. And I have no idea how much of that time it's actually going to take for me to just be able to be okay and breathe more easily and be sort of like in a more grounded state of being. And then most of it to just run experiments. And maybe I emerge from that with a little bit more insight that lets me shift the rudder in the direction of the next set of experiments. That takes a lot to basically say, I'm going to take a solid chunk

of time out of my life in the name of doing something where there's a pretty decent chance, I'm not going to have the quote, like capital A answer emerging from this. And I see profound value in this still. I'm somebody who looks at life as just a series of intentional experiments. The Good Life Project has been in existence for 10 years now. The reason it has the word project in the name of the endeavor is because from day one, it's like, oh, this is an interesting project. Let's see what comes out of it. And to this day, that's still how we hold it, even though it's become a substantial thing. But I think that's not the way that most people step into it. They're like, if I'm going to allocate time to do this, okay, I get the recover part. I'll allocate some reasonable amount of time

in my mind, which is probably way shorter than all of us actually really need. But then I want something out of it that's more concrete at the end rather than just having some sense of where I'm headed, but knowing there's still a ton more work to do. Yeah. Lots of things you brought up there that I want to respond to. And first of all, I want to set the record straight that I did not steal the name project from you, but you did give me permission to have such a long kind of clunky name as the sabbatical project. But yeah, I think people put a lot of pressure on themselves to come up with the answers, which is why I like that quote about kind of living the questions. Right. I think that's real good. It's like if are you living the questions in your life and are you OK with that being the process as opposed to always trying to seek the answers and always trying to achieve and move on to the next thing. And then I think the other way to remove pressure from yourself, Elizabeth Gilbert talks about instead of following your passions, following your curiosities.

And so these are just, it's just a lighter way of viewing it. And that being said, had you said this to me in the first week of my sabbatical, there's no way that I would have been able to heed that advice because like you're in this mode where for me, it was the first time I'd taken more than 10 days off, you know, since I don't know, middle school or something. And so you're spending your entire life without the notion that you could be doing something that is not productive for an extended period of time, like productive air quotes, lowercase p or whatever. So it's a fundamental change to how you think about yourself and how you think about work, which is what led me to wanting to do this research and launch this project. It's just

every person you talk to who has taken this amount of time off says the same exact thing. And I cannot, no matter how hard I try, find someone that's like, I regret doing that. I wish I hadn't done that. Yeah. It sounds like what you're talking about is it's less about what am I going to do? Like getting clarity around what am I going to do after it? And more about who might I become through it? Yeah. And you know, either who might I become kind of assuming that there's a different state you're morphing into. So we talked about a sabbatical as like a liminal state in one of our earlier papers, right? It's this like liminal state where you're feeling safe moving from one identity to another, or you can think about it as kind of being an archaeologist and really digging back under the layers of expectations and years of working in a law firm or whatnot and saying like, you know, oh, I used to be a creative career or I want to do it more, but I'm really glad that did a drawing class because it like re-energized and helped

me kind of have a learning perspective towards it. So yeah, it's, you could change. You could just realize that, that your, your priorities, like the dials need to be turned a little bit more family, more kind of autonomy, less prestige. That's typically the direction that I see folks move towards. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. It's more like, you know, who have I always been that I've stifled or set aside or like, you know, deprioritized, right?

Like turn that knob down and maybe it's time to actually, you know, like turn it back up, center it a little bit more because it maybe just takes the space and the time to understand how important it is to not deny parts of ourselves that maybe socially we were told, well, you have to kind of set that aside to do the thing that you have said yes to doing for this moment in life. And maybe or maybe that isn't true, but I think we all reach a point where we're like, I need to challenge all the assumptions. Yeah. I mean, one of the most common key word that I hear in our interviews is folks realizing and remembering their humanity. So looking at how they worked, I'm recalling an interview with a consultant who was like,

I wake up at six and I exercise and then I work through breakfast and I work all through the day and then I eat dinner with the team. And then I go to the gym again to wake myself up so I can work until midnight. And she kind of looked in the mirror at some point and was like, this is, I'm a robot. And so, you know, it's, it's recovering this humanity. And this is how I think what happened over the past couple of years is folks said, Oh, like my life is 20 yards lateral. I'm like waking up, I'm going to my desk and I'm working and I'm maybe preparing food and like chasing the kids around. And it really brought up to people's nose what their activities were in life. And they,

I think a lot of folks who had the privilege to do so said, I want to change this up a bit. It sounds like you, you moved out of the city. You know, I spent time out of the city and it just in the same way that all of civilization realized that a lot of things could be done in different ways. I think individuals said like, oh, okay, here's actually what's important. And here's another way to do things that I hadn't had the occasion to realize before this. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever,

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Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun. January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die.

Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot? Flight risk. We've been kind of focusing in on the recover and explore part of like the two of the building blocks of an effective sabbatical. But the third element is something you call practice. What do you actually mean by this? Like what deconstruct that a little bit for me?

I think practice is about, um, instead of theoretically thinking about what you want to do, you know, going through the motions. And so in a good way, um, you know, we, we talk a lot about what the best practices are for a sabbatical or how to, you know, how much time do you need and this, that, and the other. And the truth is that no matter how you do it, you're going to come out of it with learnings. I know a lot of people who, because they kind of messed up their sabbatical, who they, you know, they let themselves get into job processes too early, or they took consulting gigs in the middle of it. They learned about themselves that, oh, it's me that I actually

want to change. It's not like the job. I'm remembering a consultant who was doing back country skiing for a month and he found himself creating the same kind of spreadsheets he would in consulting about how many vertical feet he'd hiked and like this, that, and the other. Um, and so, you know, practicing is, is putting these things into place so you can have experiential learning, not conceptually, what would it be like to work in an eco lodge or what would it be like to be a yoga teacher, but saying like, I'm going to go and try to be a yoga teacher. And I might not think that that's going to be my job job, but you know, for me, it was like, can I rock climb like at a very high level? Can I mountaineer at a very high level? And I kind of came away from that thinking like, I really like doing this, but a, I'm physically probably not able to do this at the

level that I want to. And B, I kind of got my fill and now I'm okay with just doing it every once in a while. But that concern that I would have a regret that I never tried that is now gone. About another story of, it was actually my mom's best friend. You know, whenever I tell people what I'm working on, especially in the older generations, I'm worried that they're going to judge me. Like, go, you're writing about vacations. That's great. And, you know, so this is a 70 year old woman. And I told her that I was writing about sabbaticals and she's like, oh, my husband took one and it changed his life. So similar to you, he started out in law and, you know, he was an English major in college and he worked for 20 years. And at one point he said, you know, I always wanted to write the

great American novel. So like, I'm going to quit and I'm going to give it a try. So he stepped back from his firm and every day, instead of going into the office, he walked his kids to school, you know, got a cup of coffee, went upstairs and started typing away. And after two months, he just kind of balled everything in the trash and was like, nope, that's not for me. And he went back to work and he was just much happier. And, you know, he got to have a little bit of a different relationship between work and life, but he just got to tick off that regret because he actually practiced the thing that he wanted to do and saw like, not for me.

That's such an interesting idea, right? So it's like for some people, the notion of taking a sabbatical may send them back to doing either what they were doing before or something similar in nature to what they're doing before, but it sends them back differently. Either they've realized, oh, that thing that I thought I was leaving behind and I've regretted for my whole life, I actually really didn't want to do it. And now I can let go of that. Or maybe they actually realize that actually is just something that I get to do on the side and I just have to make a little more time for it. But it's interesting because you think, well, how are you going to emerge from that wildly different or deeply informed?

And how is the trajectory of your life going to change? It is interesting to think that you may end up not really changing the trajectory in a meaningful way, but just letting go of a lot of emotional angst that you were carrying beforehand. I think there's a lot of self-realization and self-love that comes out of it. And I'm thinking of a story of an entrepreneur who went on an RV trip across the Western US with his four kids. His wife was like, I really want to see the national parks. And they did it. You know, at one point in time, he just had this realization where he snapped at one of

his kids. You know, they're in a small space and no nanny, you know, no babysitters. And he snapped at his kids and he, you know, like a din kind of fell over the whole crowd. And he realized how much his kind of temper and his attitude affected the rest of folks. And he talked to his wife about it and she was like, Hey, you didn't know that you had a bad temper and that it impacted people. And, you know, just something. And so he went back to the same job and, and everything like that, but he got to see his impact on the people around him in a way that he, people probably told him he had a bad temper

from an early age, but he had to kind of experience that and see it close up. Yeah. It's so powerful to think that that may be what emerges from it. And that alone has tremendous value. When you think about the trajectories that form, and actually this is a word that you use, right? Because we've talked about the building blocks, but you also sort of identify like these blocks kind of, they end up often forming these sequences. They kind of come together in very identifiable ways. And you tease out three different trajectories where these blocks kind of fall into a certain sequence that it seems like across everybody that you've talked to, they fall into one of these three different trajectories. And the nature of the trajectory also really affects

the nature of the outcome. Yeah. And I want to give credit to Dr. Kira Shabram from University of Washington and Matt Bloom from Notre Dame, who kind of helped us condense the academic research part of this into, into these archetypes. So the first one is working holiday. And that's, that's what I think you're potentially your one month writing, writing month is, you know, you maybe do the recover, but probably just like practice your writing. And even if folks do that, if they do a different kind of work, they do come back and they, they have an occasion to think about work-life balance and kind of turning those dials again, right? The next is a free dive. And so that's someone who recovers and explores.

So I think about a person that I remember from the interviews. She was like, I've always just wanted to travel. I've always wanted to be a world traveler. I've wanted to see different cultures. And so there was no real third act for her. You know, it was like, let's go to the Philippines and lay on the beach for a couple of weeks and then let's just travel to 30 countries. And what that tends to do is have people change their work.

So they might change their jobs, thinking that that might ultimately have an impact or change the type of work they do altogether. The direction that we usually see that head is from less to more autonomy, right? So someone who works in consulting, maybe does independent consulting or runs a coaching practice. And then the final archetype, we call a quest, which this is what really results in this fundamental change. So it's doing the recover, doing the explore, practicing, and probably cycling that a few times. That allows people the confidence to come back to work and life profoundly different. And again, it might not

happen in the next job or they might not land it perfectly, but this is something that really gives people both the exploration and the ideas about what they could do and who they could be. And also a little bit of experience doing it to say like, okay, I'm interested enough in this. And I'm thinking of a person who worked in tech, who spent her time kind of exploring and really went deep into sound healing and meditation in the Himalayas and in India and came back. And ultimately a job later opened like a healing and meditation practice for people of color. They went the full way and they had a profound change in what they did. It's interesting for me to hear those three different things also.

The more I think about what I've been thinking about, like taking basically a month to write, falling into that archetype of the working holiday. Is that real? Is that actually a legitimate sabbatical? I guess is the question that's in my mind. Because for me, I'm going into this. I know what I want to write. It's just that I'm at a point where my days are so abundant with things to do running two different organizations and a lot of good things to do. I'm not really complaining. It's the volume that this other thing that I love to do, which is writing, which is a primal form of expression for me and development of craft that I love as a maker and a topic that I really, really want to share on that I literally don't have time in the day to do it while I'm doing this. And so my intention is, this goes back to the intention part of it, is I want to create a sacred space where everything that I'm currently doing

exists outside of a bubble for a window of time. And there's one other thing that I'm not capable of doing on anywhere near the level that I need to, to get into the rhythm and the ritual and build momentum towards this thing. Not that I have any delusions that I'm going, to get into the rhythm and the ritual and build momentum towards this thing. Not that I have any delusions that I'm going to finish a book in a month, right? But to bring that back in, that's sort of like the central thing for me, but I'm not creating space for recovery. I'm not creating space to kind of like wander and just breathe. Although the truth is, so the way that I'm looking at it structurally is let's say it's a month, right? I go in, I know what I want to write. I know

what the topic is. I know the form of the writing. I'm excited to do it. Plan the days. I also know that as a maker and having done the research on creating, that I don't have more than four, five, six hours tops in me to actually be in that mode on any given day. I'm really lucky if I actually get four to five. This goes back to Kay Anderson's research on greatness and the best of the best in the world at whatever they do generally worked no more than three 90-minute blocks a day intensely, but that was it. Then they were done. I know about myself. I'm the same. I'm just cooked after that. I can sit there and pretend that there's stuff coming out of my head and going through my fingers into a screen, but I know it's not good. I'm just trying to tell myself I'm working hard.

Part of my structure is to create blocks, but then mixed in with those to be somewhere where I can wander, I can be in nature, I can be around people and around good food and around good coffee and around good chocolate and just nourish and restore. So it's less of a sequential thing and it's more of, and I guess the question I'm asking is, can you mix together? Can you sort of like create these mini cycles that go through the different elements of it on almost a daily basis rather than saying, let me start with six to eight weeks of recovery and then let me move into this and then let me move into that.

And do you feel like that is potentially an effective way to structure it as well? Yeah, there's a lot to unpack there. So first of all, I want to make sure I'm not placing a value judgment on any sabbatical. I don't think that a quest is necessarily better than a working holiday because I think that each of these things are probably going to happen over different stages in someone's life. The point of my book is basically there's seven or eight kind of great adventures, like inflection points in your life where I think we can make these secular rituals to step back and reflect. And it's a lot easier to do the free dive when you're 20 and you're

backpacking around the world than it is when you're 45 and have kids or a mortgage or whatnot. And so I think it's important to do maybe some component of each of these in each one. And, you know, the other thing I would say is that a month is totally fine. I think that extended leave is kind of like a gateway drug. My assumption is that after you take this month, if I talk to you, you'll be like, that was great. I can't believe how much it flew by. I feel awesome. I can't wait to do three months or two months. And then over time, I think you'll get to a longer period of time. And to answer your question about, can you shorten the cycles? Sure. I mean,

one thing I would recommend is there's like concentrated healing that can take place or concentrated kind of boundaries you can set. So can you do a four day silent meditation retreat or seven day silent meditation retreat to really like get yourself out of out of everything that you're doing now? Right. And get yourself into that other kind of moment to serve as like a, you know, a transitionary point. And, you know, the second thing is I think you can have a completely healthy and transformational month by integrating, you know, keeping track of your health, doing things for your health, doing things for your family, doing things for work. You already have a lot of this self-knowledge that I think it can take people a lifetime to gain. So the fact that you know that about yourself, about how much you can work, so you're not going to beat yourself up if you don't work more than that. You know, I'm assuming you'll be more forgiving of yourself if you miss a couple of days on that. And I'm hoping that you're

integrating, you know, these other kind of health practices in it. You know, I don't want to be too much of a stickler about the definition of a sabbatical. And I want to discourage anyone from doing something that's shorter than, you shorter than two, three, six months. But yeah, I think it's going to be great. And you'll come back and you'll learn. You'll either say, I want to do that again the same way. I want to do it longer. I want to do it differently.

But it's not going to be wasted. Yeah. I mean, it's really interesting because you use a phrase, I think, step into or step out. And I feel like those are really two very different things. So you can have something which is designed to let you step out of the slipstream of life, of work, of expectation, of deadlines, of deliverables, so that you can breathe and actually get that metal lens of looking back in. And it takes space and recovery to get the metal lens and say, who am I really? And how do I want to devote myself and my energy?

And then I think what I'm talking about is something where I say like, I at least have a sense of that already. It's just that the structure that I have myself built in my life, and I'm raising my hand because that is entirely on me, and we are in the process of figuring out how to unwind and reorient and reimagine that. But it is what it is right now. And what I'm saying is I pretty much know who I am. I know what lights me up. And I don't so much want to step out of the slipstream as I want to step into one very narrow slice of it and really devote myself to that because I know how powerful and meaningful

and transformational it is for me and how it makes me feel when I do it. And my sense is like you're saying, it's a different way and a different lens and sort of like taking my unique background as I come into it. But there's value in that approach too, for the right person in the right way. Yeah. I mean, I would like to think that over time in my life, I will get better at doing the things that I know I need. They make me happy and healthy, right? I've never stopped meditating or doing yoga and been like, I shouldn't have done that. And so I hope I will get better and more efficient at it. So I have no problem assuming that you

could be more efficient and succinct with time off in the future. And I think that there's different reasons one would take time off. I would assume that if you took six months off, you know, after building all the amazing things you have and steering your life in this direction, you would probably find some things that you hadn't thought of that you liked doing, or that even if you knew you weren't going to do them in the future, you thought were great to do. You mentioned food and chocolate. Like imagine if you just spent like a month in Italy or Spain or Peru studying how to cook a different cuisine altogether, Japan, right? You would come back

and you would be enriched for having done so. Probably wouldn't affect your job, maybe. But just, again, that betterment of well-being of like, are you just, do you just feel better? Do you feel more enriched? Do you have fewer regrets over the course of your life? So I think different intentions. But I have no doubt that, you know, I think this month writing, and if you think back to observing your father, it's kind of like, it's like a slimmed down version of that. You're setting aside your departmental responsibilities, your teaching responsibilities, and you're

just focusing on the research. Yeah. And that's also not to say that, you know, so that would be a working holiday sabbatical for me. That's the archetype. That's not to say that a couple of years down the road, it doesn't also sound appealing me to take a free dive, you dive, like sabbatical for six months or a quest sabbatical for like a year. It almost feels like there's a moment where any and

all of these are going to feel right and you'll kind of know which is the appropriate one. Or maybe you start with one and that informs your desire to move into another or shape-shift it a little bit along the way once you get clarity over that process. If people are thinking about this, and you have to imagine that after the last few years that we've been through, the volume of people who are thinking about some, whether they call it sabbatical or not, who are just thinking, I need space right now to figure myself out, to figure my life out, to figure what matters, and to just breathe, to recover, run the experiments and try a whole bunch of things, right? Those three elements for you, recovery, explore, practice.

If you're going to talk to the typical person who's listening to this now or who comes to you and says, where do I even begin with this? And let's assume it's not somebody where this is built into the structure of their work or their job. They're going to need to actually proactively make this happen in their lives. What are sort of like the opening moves or considerations? So I think the first move has already happened, which is they're hearing about the possibility of taking a sabbatical, which I think, I don't know, five, 10, 20 years ago, most people would not have even heard.

And so they truly have to get to a point where it's a midlife crisis before, for pulling the chute. Right. I think that the power of this idea, once it's inside of you and you can start to imagine it for yourself. I mean, one thing I appreciate about this conversation is that you didn't ask me to like go through all the things that I did on my time off, because that's not really the point. Right. And that, that could really turn people off who couldn't take four months off by themselves and travel around or whatnot. The idea that this seed is now planted in people's head to say like, oh, I heard of

that thing about a sabbatical. And yeah, I would like to do some archaeology on my interest in arts or music or something like that is the first step. So check. I think the second step is primarily people's objections are around cost, optics, and responsibilities. So cost is obvious. Can you afford to do so?

How much is it going to cost? I just had a really interesting conversation with a coach, Katrina McGee, yesterday, who was talking about how, listen, almost no one can take a sabbatical tomorrow, right? Like saying that you can't afford to do it kind of misses the point because if it's important to you, you can say, I want to do it in 10 years and then you save 5% of your salary or something, right? So it's really about starting to be intentional and aware of what you're spending

and how you can reprioritize in order to make it financially feasible eventually. So that realization, I think, is a step. Ask your company. As you said, asking for that leave, I'm sure was really intimidating because once you kind of out yourself as someone who needs a break, you can't put the genie back in the bottle. But more people are surprised by asking their company and figuring out that, oh, they actually have a policy or I could retain my benefits. I wouldn't get my salary, but I think I could plan for that kind of thing. The second is optics. And so, you know, more and more people are taking sabbaticals. People are working in kind of creative ways. And I think

that's becoming less of an issue though. There are a lot of studies around, you know, the perception of, is someone going to take a vacation? Will they take, you know, parental leave, paternity leave if their boss doesn't take it, even if it's offered, all that kind of stuff. So that can be a real concern. You know, you mentioned earlier about what, you know, how are you going to explain to someone that you took time off? What will people think of you? And I think flipping that coin to the other side, if you're going to another job and someone is going to ding you because you took three to six months off and it was really important

to you, even though what you kind of described and how much it impacted you, that's probably a good canary in the coal mine that that's not a great place for you to work. And so I think you can actually work as a reverse job interview process. And I think more and more people are really excited and it looks courageous to take that time off as opposed to people holding it against you. And then finally, responsibilities. As I was saying, there's different sabbaticals for different stages of life. And it is a lot more difficult if you have a family and kids and a mortgage, undoubtedly, than if you're in your 20s.

But those are the stories from people that I've been the most inspired by. You know, people who are reorienting how they think about their kids, you know, going from being like a set of responsibilities and errands and chores, um, to understanding their personalities and creating really, you know, lifetime enriching moments and experiences with them. Um, people using it to, to really spend time with their spouse to figure out if they want to have kids, um, that sort of thing. So responsibilities again, are going to make it so it's more difficult to do it at the drop of a hat. But I think the benefits, um, way, you know, way outweigh the costs on that side. So start thinking about how to overcome those objections. Yeah. And, and like you said, those are three really real considerations. They show up in very

practical ways for a lot of people. And a lot of what I'm hearing you say is also like, when we're talking about this, we're not necessarily talking about it for tomorrow or next month or next year. For a lot of people, this may be a five-year thing. This may be a 10-year thing. And it's like, if you feel like it's important to you, how could you start to think about planning for it now? And then again, if you feel the burning need to do it and you don't, from those three criteria, you feel like it's not within your realm for five or 10 years, I would also have to imagine that would be a psychologically devastating thing to deal with. If you're at a point where you're like, I need this now and looking at my life, I literally cannot conceive of a way to sort of like check those three criteria boxes for years from now. That's gotta be a really tough experience. And I would imagine that there

are actually a lot of people in that moment right now. Absolutely. I mean, you know, again, we got to make sure we're comparing apples to apples. Like that's the situation that everyone is in right now. Right. I mean, for the super majority of folks there, the story of what work and a career is, is like you go to school, whether you graduate from high school, college, grad school, and then you work your entire life and then you retire. No breaks. I mean, I remember the first year after college, when you had to work through your first summer, I had jobs in high school and before where you work during the summer, but the concept of just working and not switching what you do for endless years is it's a crazy one. And so, yeah, that's, that's the situation most of us are in. And I think that if you're looking at it and you can do it, but it's going to take five, seven, 10 years, it's better to have a light at the end of the tunnel than to not have a light at the end of the tunnel.

And to, to realize that like, there is a way that you can do this. There is a possibility of, you know, living in a different way. And, you know, frankly, what we're working at at The Sabbatical Project is, can we do studies, collaborations with companies? Can we elevate people's stories of all different shapes and sizes so that companies and governments can enable people to take time off

and they don't have to worry about the financial impact? Every public servant in Australia gets long service leave. It's baked in because it used to take a long time to sail from England to Australia and back. Every person in Sweden gets six months off to start and examine something entrepreneurial. So this is possible. And these are countries that, you know, have the same, if not higher, you know, standard of living in the United States. We just have to be creative about it. And we have to say that it's important. So that's what we're aiming towards. Yeah. I love that.

Sort of zooming the lens out and saying, you know, like on a culture level, on a paradigm level, on a systems level, how can we show? And I guess that's your work, right? Like, let's actually create an evidence-based model that shows that this is going to pay you back many times over on the individual level, but also on a societal level. And I love that. That feels like a good place for us to come full circle as well in our conversation. So in this container of good life project, if I offer up the phrase to live a good life,

what comes up? I think living a good life is living a life without regret, looking back. And I think in order to do that, you have to be true to yourself. You have to live an authentic life. And in order to do that, I think you need to be constantly looking at yourself, how you're changing and adjusting. So it's about kind of being flexible. it's about being intentional and aware and working towards living a life without regrets thank you hey before you leave if you love this episode safe bet you will also love the conversation we had with chip connelly about reimagining later in life contribution you'll find a link to chip's episode in the show notes and of course if you haven't already done so please go ahead and follow Good Life Project in your favorite listening app.

And if you found this conversation interesting or inspiring or valuable, and chances are you did since you're still listening here, would you do me a personal favor, a seven second favor and share it? Maybe on social or by text or by email, even just with one person. Just copy the link from the app you're using and tell those you know, those you love, those you want to help navigate this thing called life a little better so we can all do it better together with more ease and more joy. Tell them to listen. Then even invite them to talk about what you've both discovered because when podcasts become conversations and conversations become action, that's how we all come alive together. Until next time, I'm Jonathan Fields,

signing off for Good Life Project. The Apple Watch Series X is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X.

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