Chapter 26 When You Just Gotta Get Away

Can you withdraw from the maddening crowd? I’m talking about going whole weekends without doing anything, taking true vacations, and spending evenings sitting on the porch, as the late John Lennon said, “watching the wheels go round and round.” These are not lost arts. Nevertheless, if you’ve spent too many anxiety-ridden days in a row—say, 10 years’ worth—or maintained some monomaniacal quest to fill up every minute with meaningful or worthwhile activities, your task is cut out for you. This chapter can help.

Who Sped Up This Merry-go-round?

The great paradox of being an ambitious professional functioning in an information-ridden society is that you tend to keep doing what you’re doing. If you’re working too long, trying to keep pace, and taking in more and more information, the impetus is for you to keep doing that—even when it isn’t satisfying or healthy.

Anyone can fall into this trap—it’s human nature. As your responsibilities mount at work, you may actually find yourself dreading the notion of taking a vacation because of all the work that would pile up when you’re away. (Sound too familiar? Thought so.) Entrepreneurs, in particular, find it hard to know when to drop back and punt.

Author and historian Arnold Toynbee once said, “To be able to fill leisure intelligently is that last product of civilization.” He is right on target; an increasing number of people have problems in this area. In fact, I could go so far as to say that the concept of leisure time is on the rocks. As I discussed in Breathing Space: Living and Working at a Comfortable Pace in a Sped-Up Society, it no longer means “total hours minus work hours.”

True leisure—when you get to enjoy rewarding activities, free from work and preoccupation with work—is absolutely vital.

Do the strains of the work week prompt you to place great emphasis on your weekends and other days off? If you seek to relax but are hounded by pressures, it’s hard to get legitimate rest, even when you’ve got the hours to do so.

Regaining a Little Sanity

Hope springs eternal, and I know that you have the ability to change. When I was in Boston visiting my best friend, Peter Hicks, I saw on his den wall the “diploma” he received in kindergarten. It was there as a kind of joke. I was in the same kindergarten class and had saved mine, too. His was fading. Perhaps he had exposed it to the sun. When I mentioned that I still had mine, he asked if I could make a clean copy and send it to him so he could reconstruct his original.

Back home, while I was looking for the diploma, I also found my first-grade report card. This is one of the lifetime treasures that you don’t chuck. Not having looked at it for years, I eagerly flipped it open.

Individuals Can Change

In those days (right after dinosaurs ruled the world), report cards came in booklet form. The teachers actually hand-wrote both the letter grade and the comments at the bottom. As I looked at each of the grades, I smiled, “A, B, A, A. . . .” Then I got to arithmetic and saw the “C.”

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 A Stitch in Time People can change, especially you. What’s more you can change in positive, dramatic ways.

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I didn’t remember being bad in arithmetic. In fact, I led my high school in SAT scores for math. I looked down at the bottom where the teacher had written, “Jeff has a good understanding of arithmetic fundamentals, but he rushes his work and sometimes makes careless errors.” I was aghast. Here I was, decades later, still making the same kinds of errors!

I resolved then and there to be more methodical in my work, whether it related to numbers, writing, or speaking. And I can report that since then, I have become much more astute.

Society Can Change

I am happy to report that all of society can change for the better, too. In late 1989, I sent a proposal for a book entitled A Layman’s Guide for Saving the Planet out to an editor at Warner Books. This book would tell readers how they could walk through their homes, room by room, and be more environmentally responsible. The editor sent me back a rejection letter saying he thought the proposal and book had great merit, but the editorial staff at Warner felt that no one in America realistically would change their “cozy, comfortable lifestyles.”

Four months later, another publisher released the book 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth. It quickly became a worldwide best-seller, endorsed at the highest levels of business and government, including the White House. Several other environmental books quickly followed, many of them doing quite well.

Since then, many organizations, including state and local governments, have initiated environmentally sound policies. Many recycling centers were created. People began to recognize the value of recycling newspapers, tin cans, plastic, and other materials. It turns out the editors at Warner were wrong. People can change. You can change.

Here are some suggestions for periodically abandoning the rat race, starting with small steps:

1. Give yourself permission to go a whole weekend without reading anything, as mentioned in Chapter 24, “Making the Best of Your Day.”
2. Decide to put your home phone answering machine on “answer,” flip the ringer off, and don’t play back any messages until the next day.
3. Collect all the magazines piling up around your house, and give them away to a retirement community, library, or school.
4. Go ahead and schedule that spa treatment you’ve been dying to take.
5. Exchange photos with a friend you haven’t seen in years. Mail your friend two or three photos of you and the family, and receive two or three in return, or spend one Sunday afternoon writing or calling friends and relatives with whom you’ve lost touch.

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    Time Out! When you force-fit leisure between barrages of constant frenzy, the quality of your leisure is going to suffer. For that matter, so are you.

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6. Unplug your phone each Friday night. Banish the beeper.
7. Get schedules of your favorite professional or amateur teams, and mark on your calendar the appropriate dates to sit back and enjoy the games.
8. Visit a botanical garden to enjoy the variety of flowers; let your sense of smell, rather than your eyes and ears, dominate.
9. Attend the graduation ceremonies of your local high school, even if you don’t know anyone who’s graduating. Recapture the spirit of what it’s like to complete an important passage in life.
10. Pick up a bouquet of fresh flowers at the grocery store or flower shop and display them somewhere in your home.
11. Walk around your yard barefoot, the way you did when you were a kid. Feel the grass between your toes. Stick your feet in dirt or in a puddle.
12. Visit a historical monument and let yourself become immersed in the challenges that people of that era faced.
13. Attend a free lecture some evening about a topic outside your professional interests.
14. Sleep late.

All About New References

In one of his monthly “power talks,” infomercial king and best-selling author Tony Robbins explains why it’s important for you to constantly get new references in your life. Robbins explains how people can easily fall into the same routines, travel to work the same way, and believe that the world is exactly the way they see it. The new references come from field trips you can take yourself, such as going to a small museum, a seniors’ home, a circus, a dairy farm, a soup kitchen, a daycare center, a municipal court, an open-air market, or any other place you find intriguing, inviting, or awaiting your help.

These references give you a different perspective on the world, and ultimately on your own life. All of them represent small steps—it’s not like I’m asking you to take a week away from your job or go hiking in the Himalayas.

What new references will you incorporate in the next week or month?

Replenishing the Energy Well

The value of periodically abandoning the rat race—or at least your personal rat race—is that it gives you the opportunity to recharge yourself. Think back to Chapter 7, “Money Comes and Goes—Time Just Goes” (on the value of getting more sleep)—what it would be like if you could recharge yourself like a rechargeable battery? What if you could have that old zip and zest or a twinkle in your eye when you came in to work? What if you could have the stamina to put in a full work day but still leave with lots of energy?

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 Time Out! How can you possibly exude high energy if you plow ahead day after day at the same old grind, short-changing your sleep, short-changing your rest, and perhaps never taking any true vacations?

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Legendary late-night TV talk show host Johnny Carson chose Robin Williams and Bette Midler as his last guests. Why these two people, of the thousands of possibilities? Many actors and actresses, comedians, and other types of entertainers would have given their eyeteeth to be on this celebrated show that attracted tens of millions of viewers. I brought this question up with friends; after tossing about several possibilities, we came up with what has to be the answer:

• Robin Williams was about the highest-energy male Johnny Carson could have had as a guest.
• Bette Midler was about the highest-energy female Johnny Carson could have had as a guest.

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 A Stitch in Time The more positive energy you offer, the greater your returns in terms of the wages you earn, the business you generate, or the synergy you achieve.

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Both performers exude energy. As a showman, Johnny Carson learned quickly that what you offer to your audience is energy. So it is with you and your career. What you offer to your employer, employees, customers, or coworkers is energy.

How can you recharge yourself and rev up your energy level, if you’re not willing to occasionally drop back and punt? Do you think Robin Williams, Steve Martin, or any other seemingly manic comedian can charge ahead at full throttle all the time? No way.

Fifty Days Away

Fifty Days Away—that’s what Joe Kita, a writer for Men’s Health magazine, took to recharge and renew himself (it’s also the title of an article about his experience). Kita feels that even if you get three or four weeks of paid vacation a year, you’re probably finding it difficult to take merely five consecutive days off. He arranged his life so that he could take 50 days away from work (see Chapter 23, “Not for Everyone: Taking a Sabbatical”). He found that this near-retirement experience enlightened him in a way that didn’t typically happen during one- or even two-week vacations. Here’s a summary of what happened:

1. He started dreaming again. After a few days, away he was having incredible dreams, as if he was directing major motion pictures. He found it amazing that all that dream activity was somehow quite restful. He’d wake feeling fresh and alive. During this time, he learned that everyone dreams every night. When you get highly restful sleep, and as much as you need, your dream-rich REM periods last longer; you wake up feeling more refreshed.
2. He lost track of time. With little reason to look at the clock or even at the calendar, time began to slow down. Kita said he felt like a kid again. After years of seeing his life speed by almost without control, the days began to pass at a gentler pace. He walked, rather than drove, to the store.
3. His memory returned. Being saturated with so much information had a dampening effect on his memory. He remarked that people today are bombarded with more daily intelligence than J. Edgar Hoover ever encountered. When the shelling subsides, even for a short period of time, your memory can spring back in full bloom.
4. He became more thoughtful. Kita recalls that during his hectic working time, he never truly read anything—he scanned. He never saw anything—he glanced. During his time away from the rat race, he began to chew his food and digest it properly. He even began to taste it.
5. He became calmer. He began to notice that he was more patient with his children. He was able to listen to his wife. He found that, in general, he was more tolerant in dealing with others.
6. He was able to re-divert energy. He discovered what amazing things he could accomplish with a little time off. He painted his entire house, analyzed and restructured all his investments, and even cleaned out his T-shirt drawer.
7. He gained new perspective. He began to see that few jobs in this world carry life-or-death consequences. He discovered that it’s productive to be unproductive sometimes. He gave up feeling guilty about occasionally doing nothing.
8. He rediscovered sex. The biggest obstacles to the sex lives of working men (and women), says Kita, are lack of time and fatigue. Because he had enough time now—and he wasn’t tired—his libido returned. Such a life.

Are there any downsides to staying away from work? Yes—you might lose a bit of your self-worth. What you do at work is often tied to who you are as a person. Predictably, you may start looking forward to going back to work. After all, you chose your work and remain at it (at least I hope you do) because you’re good at it and well suited to it. You get strokes from it as well as income.

Establishing Your Kick-Back Routine

When you feel ready to live life at a more leisurely pace, whether or not you’re taking time off from work, signs appear. You wake naturally without an alarm clock and have time to reflect each morning. If it is a work day, you leave the office on time at the end of the day, engrossed with what you’ll do next, without any thoughts of work.

If you’re ready to drop back and punt but aren’t quite ready to take a huge chunk of time away from work, here are some things you can do now to ease the throttle back on the pace of your life:

• Play with your child for hours on a Saturday afternoon, without any concern for time.
• Eat dinner early in the evening, and have time to take a stroll or whatever you feel like doing.
• Resubscribe to the local community theater’s fall series—and actually attend.
• Re-engage in one of your hobbies (as discussed in Chapter 22, “Time Out for Leisure”) with renewed enthusiasm.
• Make a new friend about once a month. From where? Who knows? They start showing up because you’ve allowed time for it to happen.
• Book a cruise or a cross-continental trip, maybe for the first time or the first time in years.
• Volunteer for a charitable or civic activity in which you’ve long wanted to help but, until now, have not taken action.
• View a sunrise at least once a month, and maybe even once a week. Also, view many, many sunsets each month.
• Frequent some of the area’s best parks. Occasionally feed the ducks.

Signs of Slippage

As the chapter comes to a close, here’s a list of indications that you have let things slide a tad too long (and had better reread this chapter closely):

1. You’re daughter is an intern at the White House and you’re not concerned.
2. You hear the word Whitewater in the news and think it’s about rafting.
3. You heard something about a sequel to Titanic but forgot that the ship was real, sank to the bottom of the sea, and two-thirds of the passengers died.
4. You recently drove to the local record store only to find that they no longer sell records.
5. You’re on the last notch of your favorite belt, and it’s still way too tight.
6. You’re looking forward to going to your 10th high school reunion, when you realize it’s actually your 15th (or 20th!).
7. You’re not only eating lunch at your desk, but you’re starting to eat dinner at your desk.
8. Your boss keeps asking you to take a vacation.
9. Your wallet is twice as thick as your index finger.
10. Your kid sees you walking up your sidewalk and asks, “Can I help you, sir?”