No More Escape Plans: Build a Life You Don’t Need a Vacation From
“Build a life you don’t need a vacation from,” is a quote that I recently came across, paraphrased from the original by Seth Godin … and it got me wondering about what kind of life would that be?
Like probably 80% of people in the world today, I work most of the days of the week (if not all of them), I take time off on the weekends and take one or two weeks a year for a vacation.
Talk to anyone today, and the likelihood is pretty high that you’ll hear they’re just back from a vacation and dreading going back to work, or in desperate need of a vacation. We’re in this perpetual state of escaping from something. But what exactly are we trying to escape from? Is it really work? If we didn’t have “work,” would our lives be an endless state of bliss? I’m not so sure.
Jordan Peterson talks about it this way:
“One forty-something client told me his vision, formulated by his younger self: ‘I see myself retired, sitting on a tropical beach, drinking margaritas in the sunshine.’ That’s not a plan. That’s a travel poster. After eight margaritas, you’re fit only to await the hangover. After three weeks of margarita-filled days, if you have any sense, you’re bored stiff and self-disgusted. In a year, or less, you’re pathetic.”
Are our lives so terrible that our idea of a “vacation” or “retirement” invariably ends up with us being happily drunk and lying on a beach? How does that even make sense? And yet, if we’re honest more and more people are doing exactly that year after year.
Is there an alternative?
Could we build a life that we don’t need a vacation from, that we don’t need to escape from?
I believe the answer is yes, and I believe the clue to how, actually lies in our work.
Why work? Well, let’s break it down. In a 24-hour period, we all sleep on average from 6-10 of hours a day – most of us aren’t going to say that we need a vacation from sleep. Of the remaining 14-18 hours, 4-6 of them would be eating, relaxing, spending time with family and friends, and again most of us wouldn’t say that we need a vacation from those activities either. That leaves 8-14 hours out of everyday where we’re doing some form of work: volunteer work, full time parenting work, studying work, side hustle work, or multi-national CEO work.
In the field of innovation, a general rule of thumb is that the quality of the solution is based on the quality of the question. Simply said: ask an unclear question, and you’re bound to get an unclear answer. So, let’s get a bit more specific and replace the more general word “life” with “work” in the quote so it now reads:
“Instead of wondering when your next vacation is,
maybe you should set up work you don't need to escape from”.
So how do we do that? By aligning our work to our purpose.
The first part of that is knowing your purpose. Purpose is our personal “why” behind the things we do, giving us a sense of meaning and motivation in our lives. Purpose answers the question of “why”. Why am I going in that direction? Why am I working where I’m working? Why do I want to become a (fill in the blank)?
The second part is looking at the work you’re doing – whatever it is - and assessing it through the lens of your purpose. This is the part that most people really struggle with, and eventually just give up on. Just the other day I heard a friend say: “My purpose is creating art that inspires and brings joy to others, but I work in an accounting office to pay the bills. My job and my purpose don’t align at all.”
At first look, aligning the two may seem impossible, because what the heck does accounting have to do with art? But that’s not the right question to be asking. We should be asking “how can my work align to my purpose?” We need to stop thinking about work as a means to an end, but rather as a journey through which learn and grow in our purpose. The question we should be asking is “what things in my work experience can I use to help me on the journey of fulfilling my purpose?”
Let’s go back to my friend with the art and accounting example. Cindy (name changed) works in an accounting office as one of the bookkeepers. She finds the work okay, she’s pretty detail oriented, but she longs for a day in the future when she can just do art. For now, she keeps her talent on the shelf and gets on with doing the tasks that pay her bills.
How can Cindy use her work to fulfill her purpose of creating art that inspires and brings joy to others?
She can start by taking a page out of the playbook of some of the most innovative and successful businesses in the world and use the golden ratio of 70-20-10 to allocate her most precious resource – her time. For example, of her 8-hour workday she could allocate:
70% of her time to her core job duties (e.g. 5.5 hrs); this will keep her on track with delivering what she’s getting paid to do
20% of her time (e.g. 1.5 hrs) to tasks that could help her company but with an eye to those activities that are more creative and could help her develop her artistic pursuits (e.g. learning graphic design)
10% of her time (e.g. 1.0 hr) to purely artistic endeavors (e.g. drawing the company Christmas card; painting something for the cover of the annual report)
And that’s just taking into consideration her actual job, what about the people she works with and interacts with, or the environment she works in? Every touchpoint and every experience at her place of work, could be an opportunity for Cindy to infuse her passion for art, and in the process, she would be shaping her work to align it to her purpose.
Rather than viewing “work” as a series of tasks we have to do, we need to flip the script and see it as something we get to do as an opportunity to grow in and fulfill our purpose. But we need to be intentional about it, because it won’t just be handed to us, we have shape our work to align it to our purpose.
Can we create a life, and more specifically work, that we don’t need a vacation from?
I believe we can: by purpose and through purpose.
#TGIM
