Most people talk about taking a vacation as a luxury that you get after you work your ass off for a certain amount of time. You slave away and save up money and then if you’re lucky you can get a few weeks off to go relax somewhere far far away. That’s one way to look at it. I think vacations are not a luxury but a necessity. A vacation is a lot more then just taking time off work. A vacation is a time to get other ideas and inspirations for things that you want to do. It’s a time to reconnect with yourself and look at things you have done and things you want to do.
To be good at what you do you don’t always have to work hard and slave away, but you need to work smart. It’s easy to get burned out, especially when you are trying to force creativity. This is one of the reasons why I could not work a 9-5 job. I can’t force my ideas to happen between 9-5; they happen at random parts of the day when I’m out with friends or listening to music. I maintain a very random work schedule. I do work a lot but at random points during the day. Sometimes I’m up early and stop working at 7; other nights I get up later and work until 3am. I work when I feel I can, when the timing is right, when I have the ideas and when I’m inspired to make things happen. Sometimes I also just take days off when I feel like I don’t want to work. I do this because I have to and because it makes me better at what I do.
Life is stressful and when you are stressed out it’s difficult to think and get inspired to do great things. Sure, sometimes it’s great to be under the gun when you’re working on something exciting but most of the time it’s not pleasant. I try to live a very stress free life and although I can’t get rid of all my stress, I can get rid of a lot of it. In my life I have found that money was the least cause of stress. I left a full-time paying job to go off on my own. I made a lot less money but for some reason I was ten times happier. My quality of life dramatically went up because I was able to do things that I wanted to do and work on projects that I wanted to work on. I’ve learned that quality of life is far more important than anything else.
I recently came across this video on TED. In the video Stefan Sagmeister talks about how every seven years he takes a full year off of work to go travel somewhere where he thinks of new ideas and is inspired by his new experiences and surroundings. What’s amazing is that these new experiences are then translated into creative ideas for his design projects. It’s quite a fascinating video and a great example of the importance of taking time off.
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