It’s Spring Break time in Texas now. I trust you have great vacation plans!
If you’ve already left, congratulations! Enjoy a wonderful week off, and I’m glad you’re taking good care of yourself.
But if you don’t have plans, I would like to know why.
Unless you have a fantastically good reason for working, like for instance no school age kids in the house so a school calendar means nothing to you, I will give you demerits if you do not have something exceptional planned for yourself soon.
Not Outcome Oriented
Some of the most rewarding work I do centers on arranging businesses so their owners can get away – or even to stay away for long periods of time.
In these cases, my contributions turn pipe dreams into dreams.
That extends to people who planned to sell their businesses but figured out it was a better deal to just retire in place and continue to own.
We have all read about those big shots like Warren Buffett and Bill Gates and their “thinking time.”
I’m not asking you to be that outcome-oriented on your vacation. Even my meditation instructors advise me not to meditate with a particular purpose in mind. They just suggest that I meditate and see what happens.
I feel the same way about having goals during vacation: Just take a vacation – either home or away.
What Might Happen
Some of these things will happen. You’ll find out which.
- Watch your people grow and strengthen because you aren’t on hand to answer their questions and take care of their issues.
- Stress-test your business and expose a gap you did not identify as reliant on you until you left.
- Come back refreshed with at least one valuable and significant new idea to implementing.
- On your first day back, change one habit or behavior that you never would have identified had you not broken the cycle by leaving work.
- On your first day back notice something that demands attention that has been in front of you every day for so long that you’ve ignored it.
- Or just reflect that you had fun with your family and friends, going to a new place or a place you know well. Either one turns out to be about a thousand times more memorable than any particular week at work.
If I felt a need to implore you to work harder, I would write that. But I don’t.
Email me at the end of your vacation and let me know which of the six outcomes above turned out to be the huge benefit from your break.
