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How I Spent My Summer Vacation
Robbie travels with a Sport Kilt so that he can INSTANTLY change out of his bike shorts once his ride is done. I found the man-skirt pretty funny (it was 100F in the Valley of Fire) and wanted a photo to remember the moment... Nothing like dehydration, afternoon lighting and a full body shave to make a guy look shredded. I know all the tricks... It's been about a year since I watched the bottom fall out of my personal P&L and I consider myself very lucky to have gone through that experience. In 2009, I have seen people fall into bankruptcy, lose their houses, their jobs... I'm blessed to be able to handle my challenges. In the end, I didn't need to implement my total-disaster-survival plan. I do have it on file though... For what its worth, I expect that we will see a major shock in the next two years that's going to knock us back into recession. Goldman has never been representative of the financial sector (they are different, and smarter, than the rest). Dig a little deeper and you'll see a huge overhang of debts in all levels of our society. More on that in a future piece. We've achieved a lot in the last year. Enough that I decided to take a vacation two weeks ago. Last winter, I made a deal with myself that I wouldn't take a vacation until this website was up and running. After I made that promise, my financial life continued to fall so quickly that a two month delay turned into a year of sustained effort to rebalance my family's financial health. My vacations are different than most and (like it or not) provide a clear indication of my values as well as what truly motivates me. Similar to my personal workouts... I have two main types... me-vacations and monsy-vacations. I'm not on vacation unless I can completely pull the plug on email -- taking a break from the world provides me with some benefits: A - I get a chance to see who/what I miss Understanding who you "miss" is useful. Understanding who you don't miss can be even more useful - if you are able to take the difficult decision of removing choices that pull you down. Remember, the world just "is". Problems that we have with people and situations are results of our choices. Much easier to change our choices, than the world at large.
To get around this point, I let everyone know FAR in advance that I'd be off-line. I gave them the dates and made myself available to them, a lot, in the run up to my break. I also gave my clients two ways to track me down if something was urgent. Being "readily inaccessible" seems to sit much better in human psychology. As usual I was reminded of a few things... Most often a 'crisis' will resolve itself with time. With any large team of individuals, we're about 100 relationships, things will come up in a two week period. That's normal. However, my personal ability to resolve these items is limited. Most often, the best thing that I can do is listen and try to be a reasonably objective sounding board. We had a lot more successes than set-backs during my break. Wonder what that tells me about my importance in the scheme of things! I had a client tell me that he wished he could take a similar break. This brings up another point -- nobody is going to set your life up for you. We need to take responsibility for our own happiness. If you take responsible time for yourself, and come back energized for your clients, your wife, your kids... The smart ones (your A-Team) will see the benefit to themselves. Those are the people that you want to work for. The highly dependent folks... they may be better off without our involvement. Of course, that might be my self-sufficiency bias coming through... Robbie found that aspect of my personality entertaining. In a survival situation, I will place a large emphasis on not becoming a casualty myself. If you are in my team then, eventually, that may motivate you to think more for yourself, which in turn, benefits the group. This was put rather succinctly by my buddy (and Epic Vet) Randy... "Gordo will leave you behind" as well as Robbie... "Dude, now I know you are truly insane". Coming back from my break, things were about as I expected... a little over 1,000 messages waiting for me. That excludes spam (!). We run SpamSoap to reduce the amount of noise that hits our server. The service had a one-week payback for me in terms of efficiency.
Another tip after a holiday, break, training camp, or trip... wait at least one day before trying to plug back into your normal life. My first day "back" was spent with Monica, Lex, the EC Forum, a few telephone calls and writing my blog. I didn't download my email until the second day back. Hopefully, I'll remember that for next time. This strategy made me SUPER productive when I did jump back on-line. By the way, my transition day actions speak far louder than my words on who/what I missed. I was told that being a bit cold makes my warm actions more genuine... bit of a backhanded complement but still appreciated!
For those of you familiar with WKO+ I rolled up a TSS of 2,175 in six days and took my TSB to -98. If you are not familiar with the jargon then a better way to put it was that I out-trained 99.999% of the planet for a (very) short period of time... Some interesting things I noticed:
While I write about the above weekly, the tips really come into focus towards the end of a training camp. Nothing quite compares to being able to see, and compare, relative performances (and emotional fitness under stress). If you aspire to higher level athletic performances then living alongside athletes that are one-level-up can be educational. Just be careful who's wheel you sit on during training. Illness is quite common following big training camps. Take your recovery seriously and be VERY careful with sustained efforts over Half IM effort (LT effort). Larger men that "max out" during camp can see very pro-longed recovery. If you are fit, and don't mind riding solo, it's pretty easy to ride down the hammerheads, eventually! If you don't catch them then probably best that you didn't ride with them anyhow... The most powerful realization that I had from my vacation is that I don't think about dying when I am training big. Given my current choices, training camps represent the closest that I come to truly living. I have ten camps scheduled for the next twelve months. Choose wisely,
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Fatigue intoxication is showing through in this week's photo. 
It is not easy for me to take a break from the internet. My best medium is written communication and I can't fully support my team if I am not writing daily. 
With all these messages waiting for me I was reminded about time management -- we tend to be as efficient as we need to be; and I generate a lot of my own inbox. It took me three days to get my inbox under control. That struck me as a VERY good deal for 11 days off the matrix.
So what did I do with my 11 days? Well... six days were spent training all day; three days were travel days; one day was a not much day and the other was the transition day I outlined above.