Eric Siu reflects on why entrepreneurs struggle to truly disconnect on vacation. He shares two Hawaii trips with his wife: the first relaxing because business was calm, the second stressful because he couldn't stop thinking about work fires. He contrasts periods working 10-12 hours daily with lighter stretches of just 3-4 hours.
For people like Eric and I, and we're not saying this is wrong or right, if something's going wrong and we go on a vacation, all we're thinking about is what's going wrong and how to fix it. And so we don't really enjoy a vacation. And I remember my wife told me, you know, the first time we were in Hawaii, we had such a wonderful time. This is when we were dating. And then the second time we were in Hawaii, she's like, it wasn't as good. You weren't there mentally. And I'm like, yeah, because my business had a lot of fires that I had to put out. So I couldn't think about anything. Yeah. And I was like, the first time we were dating, I was having not just a good week or a month, but I was having a good year in business. So there really wasn't tons of fires to put out. Mm-hmm. So I could focus on her and having fun in Hawaii. Yep. And I would still work each day. Yep. But the work was crammed down to maybe like 3, 4 hours in a day versus like 10 or 12.
