Don’t view a vacation as time off from your pursuit of the self-directed life, but as a time to recharge your batteries and thereby make quicker progress.
Pointer #1 on Using Smart Vacations to Recharge Your Batteries — Let Your Mind Wander
A vacation should not be an exercise in hedonism. The goal is recreation. That is, re-creation, a creating again.
The thing that you are trying to re-create is your Life Plan. You want to become newly enthused, newly committed, newly determined.
A vacation gives you the free time you need to let your mind wander and come up with new ideas for pursuing new life goals. There’s a time to limit yourself to coloring within the lines and there’s a time for a more freethinking approach. The purpose of taking vacations is to ensure that there’s time in your year for the freethinking approach.
Pointer #2 on Using Smart Vacations to Recharge Your Batteries — Give Your Mind a Jolt
What if you left your job? What would happen?
What if you moved to a different part of the country or a different part of the world?
What if you gave up television, or took up exercise, or changed your eating habits?
You can’t think about this sort of thing all the time. Life is too busy. A vacation gives you a long stretch of time in which to ponder such thoughts. Don’t just spend more time entertaining the same thoughts you entertain when you are not on vacation. Come up with a bold idea and see where it takes you.
Pointer #3 on Using Smart Vacations to Recharge Your Batteries — Do Something You’ve Never Done
If you have been wanting to begin running but have found it hard to work it into your schedule, you could run each day on your vacation. You certainly will have the time. After running seven days, you might be inclined to make more of an effort to find time in your ordinary schedule for daily runs.
Or you could begin playing cards on your vacation, if that’s an idea you’ve given vague consideration to for some time but not taken action on.
Or you could give up coffee for the week. You certainly can’t argue that you need the caffeine to wake up and be fully alert for your vacation responsibilities, can you?
Pointer #4 on Using Smart Vacations to Recharge Your Batteries — Talk with People Taking Different Paths
My wife and I take a lot of our vacations at bed-and-breakfast inns (at least we did in the Days Before Kids — I like that line in the Paul Simon song where he says “You are the burden of my generation, I sure do love you, but just get that straight!”) Some of my favorite memories from those trips are of conversations we had with people over breakfast. In theory, you could have the same sorts of conversations in regular life. In reality, you rarely do.
It’s an unfortunate reality of regular life that we come to associate mostly with People Like Us — people who do similar kinds of work, people who live in the same general neighborhood, people who don’t rock our boats too terribly much. There are often opportunities on vacations to meet people doing very different sorts of things and coming from very different sorts of places. These learning experiences are invaluable. You can learn so much from talking with someone with a different perspective that these conversations alone can make the many dollars directed to a vacation pay off.
Pointer #5 on Using Smart Vacations to Recharge Your Batteries — Think Back Five Years
I have much stronger memories of my vacation weeks than I do of the other 51 weeks of the year. If I am at the beach, I always take walks as one of my activities. I find it easy to think back five years and recall the life goals that I was pursuing at that earlier time and the obstacles that were then in my path. I can recall the songs that I dared to sing aloud on the deserted sections of the beaches too!
Thinking back five years is a good way to gain perspective on the problems you are struggling with in the present. It suggests to you the types of solutions that are possible. Sometimes things work themselves out by taking an unexpected path. There are lessons to be learned from taking a close look at those crazy paths from the past that can be applied in the construction of good paths taking you forward from where you stand today.
Pointer #6 on Using Smart Vacations to Recharge Your Batteries — Think Ahead Five Years
Think ahead five years too. Toy with different ideas as to how you will get from where you are to where you want to be.
Then jump about in the waves for a bit.
Then bake in the sun a bit.
Then toy with a few more possibilities.
“Rinse and repeat” really does work. It’s only when it comes to washing your hair that it’s not such a hot idea.
Pointer #7 on Using Smart Vacations to Recharge Your Batteries — Identify Your Life Story
I once read an article about divorce in which the author argued that one of the hardest things is that divorce requires us to rewrite our life stories. For one thing, all of those old photographs have to be hidden because they have the smiling face of That Other Person in them!
A life is not a series of random events. A life is a story, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. All sorts of pain and frustration and disappointment becomes bearable when it fits into a story that in an ultimate sense is meaningful. Our trouble is that we have only seen the early chapters and not the later ones. The point of the story shifts from one thing to another over time.
You need to go back from time to time and craft a new story line. Identifying the meaning of your life energizes you and steels your determination.
Pointer #8 on Using Smart Vacations to Recharge Your Batteries — Give a Title to Your Life Story
It takes a long time to come up with a good title for a chapter of a book. It needs to say precisely what that chapter is about.
Think up a few words that summarize your life story. If you were a corporation, this would be your mission statement. People make fun of mission statements because most of them are dumb. When it’s done right, writing a mission statement is not a waste of time.
If the title for your life story is “Helping People,” you need to work it harder.
If the title for your life story is “Freeing People to Live to Live Richer Lives by Doing High-Quality Handyman Work and Charging a Fair Price for It,” you might be onto something.
Pointer #9 on Using Smart Vacations to Recharge Your Batteries –Wake Up Refreshed
Aim to play hard enough so that you sleep well and long and wake up refreshed. You don’t want to be in a haze for all the important stuff you have planned for vacation week.
Pointer #10 on Using Smart Vacations to Recharge Your Batteries — Take One Practical Step
The idea of Passion Saving is to combine the dreamy with the practical. Your vacation week is not generally the week to be doing things; it is the week to be reformulating your thinking about what you should be doing. But you need to take one practical step to keep it real.
If you run one mile a day, you’ve taken a practical step.
If you go seven days without drinking one can of soda, you’ve taken a practical step.
If you remember to compliment your spouse one time each day, you’ve taken a practical step.
Take a practical step and all the thinking amounts to something.
Pointer #11 on Using Smart Vacations to Recharge Your Batteries — Read a (Completely) New Book
If you never read novels, read a novel.
If you only read novels, read a nonfiction book.
If you usually read stuff that relates to your work, read something about baseball or music or history.
Pointer #12 on Using Smart Vacations to Recharge Your Batteries — Go for a Long Drive with a Close Friend
Driving a long distance to get to your vacation spot can be a good thing if it is possible to do this without running into serious traffic. There are things that come to mind only after a conversation has been going on for some time. We usually walk away from conversations before they get too deep. You can’t walk away if you are only one hour into a five-hour drive.
Pointer #13 on Using Smart Vacations to Recharge Your Batteries — Go for a Long Walk Alone
First obtain input from others. Then think it over by yourself. You need fresh inputs. But you need to be the one integrating the new ideas into your existing Life Plan.
Pointer #14 on Using Smart Vacations to Recharge Your Batteries — Ponder Your Next Vacation
Planning vacations is half of the fun of them. You don’t want to get bummed when your vacation comes to an end. So starting pondering your next trip before the current one comes to an end.
Pointer #15 on Using Smart Vacations to Recharge Your Batteries — List Additional Practical Steps
You only have time on vacation to perform one practical step in pursuit of your new Life Plan. You can list others, however. That positions you to get things off on the right foot when you return home.
Pointer #16 on Using Smart Vacations to Recharge Your Batteries — Let It In
Don’t make the mistake of thinking great thoughts, getting excited about them, and then forgetting about them. You cannot take in new ideas all in a flash. Let you new ideas sink in over time. Expect that it’s going to take time to polish the ideas and plan for that.
Pointer #17 on Using Smart Vacations to Recharge Your Batteries — Fire Your Accountant (For a Week)
You don’t want to be counting pennies while on vacation. You paid a lot of money to get where you are, so take advantage of what is available to you for this one week of your life. Then return to the thrifty habits that permit you to enjoy expensive vacations.
Pointer #18 on Using Smart Vacations to Recharge Your Batteries — Don’t Get Swept Away
Don’t get so carried away with new ideas of what your life can be that you start thinking of yourself as an entirely new person. You want to take significant steps but avoid rashness.
Pointer #19 on Using Smart Vacations to Recharge Your Batteries — Don’t Get Divorced
Don’t get so caught up in the idea of making changes that you decide to change life partners. That would make old Farmer Hocus very sad.
Pointer #20 on Using Smart Vacations to Recharge Your Batteries — Eat an Ice Cream Cone (Or, if You Do This All the Time, Don’t Eat an Ice- Cream Cone)
If it’s been too long since you’ve enjoyed an ice cream cone, a vacation is the perfect time to experience the feeling again. If you have them all the time, a vacation is a great time to enjoy the feeling of denying yourself an ice cream cone.
It really can be an enjoyable feeling to deny yourself an ice cream come. Vacations are a time for testing ideas like this. If you return home with personal experience of the pleasure that can be had by denying yourself an ice cream cone, you will likely have accomplished more on your vacation than you would have accomplished by spending the week doing more of the same old thing.
Vacation time is not a time to shut down your mind. It is a time to engage in a different sort of learning experience, a less reliable one but a potentially deeper one. Smart vacations make the other 51 weeks of the year more productive, both for the company that employs you and for You, Inc., too.