Last week my wife and I spent 7 days in Kauai. It was fantastic. Sun. Sand. Waves. Awesome golf. True relaxation. Delicious mai tais. It was the perfect, well-deserved break from the action that both of us needed.
While we were there I had plenty of chances to think about, well, nothing. And it was glorious!
For once my brain wasn’t preoccupied with things I needed to do, goals that I needed to meet, blog posts and tweets I had to write, and schedules of conference calls and meetings I needed to attend. Instead, if I allowed my brain to do any thinking at all it I thought about how important is is to get away from the every day grind of trying to run a business and do a total brain reset.
My wife and I travel a few times a year, but it’s usually to see family. This is the first time we had been away alone without anything to do since we got married almost three years ago. As we reclined at the beach or the pool (picture of the beach we stayed at in Poipu below) we kept telling ourselves, “We have got to do this more often!”.
On a related note, I wrote a post for the Outright Community about the right way to plan a vacation and leave your work behind. Check it out if you have time.
We entrepreneurs work hard. We revel in the challenge of the every day. We take our losses personally and we celebrate our victories harder than anyone else. It’s a life that only our peers can appreciate.
Here’s the big question: why is it that we don’t take more vacation time for ourselves?
Is it that we enjoy, as sick as it sounds, working rediculous hours every week? Is it that we think we can’t leave our baby alone for too long? Are we working so hard that we forget vacationing is a normal human behavior? Are we just acting like a lot of other Americans?
I’m not exactly sure what the right answer is. For me it’s probably a combination of all of the answers.
Kauai reminded me that we choose to be entreprenuers for a reason – to be free. Free from a huge office building full of drones. Free from a boss who doesn’t care about anything but his or her pay grade. Free from cubicles that restrain our creativity and career paths.
Shouldn’t we (including me) do a better job of taking advantages of those freedoms?
Thoughts? Comments? Let’s chat in the comment section below.