Vishen Lakhiani argues you should schedule adventures now, not wait for retirement. He cites research showing Americans who take all 10 vacation days are 35% more likely to get promoted, and describes his own experiments: annual family road trips, safari weeks, and spending each June in a different city starting with Barcelona in 2017.
Questions this video answers
10 vacation days
35% more likely to get promoted
Barcelona
October 13, 2016
Chapters
So I'd like to share with you a really interesting experiment that I'm doing in life. In my book, the Code of the Extraordinary Mind, I talk about how it's important to look at our life in 12 different dimensions. And one of these dimensions is adventure. How can you create a life where you're consistently having adventure? Now, I learned about this from John Butcher, and I talk about John in my book. He's the founder of Lifebook, the founder of the Precious Moments Company. And John had a habit where every year for about three months, he would pick up his entire family, from kids to grandkids, and move to a different city and just live in that city and embrace that culture and have adventure for three months straight. And I asked John, like, what do you do? I mean, you're pulling your kids out of school. How do you do that? And I love John's reply. He. He said, now, at that point, they were going to Egypt. He said, look, I believe my kids will learn more haggling in the bazaars of Cairo than they will in the public education system. So agree or disagree, the idea that we can actually structure our lives for adventure is such a fundamentally beautiful thought. Most people wait till they retire to take those long, beautiful vacations. But what if you can set an intention, set a goal, and you can start small, maybe one week every year, go on an adventure of a lifetime? So I want to share with you a couple of interesting studies and some experiments which I'm currently doing now. The first was a study by Shawn Achor. Shawn Acher is that famous Harvard researcher behind the book the Happiness Advantage. So I was chatting with Sean, and this thing that he shared with me was mind blowing. He said that in a study, Americans who use up all 10 of their vacation days, who actually take all 10 days of vacation, get this, are 35% more likely to get promoted. Wow. I mean, we think that if we want to get promoted, if we want to prove our worth to the boss, what you want to do is show that you are the first one in, you're the last one out, that you're willing to sacrifice your vacation for work. Turns out this is complete BS. If you take all 10 of your vacation days, you are 35% more likely to get a promotion. Sean told me he was shocked when this research came out. He said, I was expecting 2%, 3, maybe 4%, but 35%. So please, take your vacations. But the fact is, rather than just take your vacations, why not set an intention to turn these vacations into an Adventure. So the first experiment I tried was really simple. I set a goal that at least once a year, I would leave the office for an entire week and go on a road trip with my family. And we did that in Australia, then New Zealand, then we did that in the United States. It was amazing. So this year, we just completed our first road trip, and now we're doing a second one. This time, we're spending a week in a safari in Africa. So now every six months, I take a week off, and I take my kids and my wife with me. Sometimes it does mean pulling the kids out of school, but we go on this beautiful adventure. So that has added an incredible level of adventure to my life. But the important thing is this. Right when I started out, this intention, I had no idea how I was going to pull it off. I was afraid that being able to step away from work and email for seven days would cause my company to collapse, would cause things to go haywire. But I set that as a goal. And I had given myself one year to fix my life so I could pull away like that. And in one year, I did. And what I found is, when I did pull away, nothing collapsed. So with that realization, nothing is going to collapse, no one is going to fire you, I decided to try another experiment. Now, starting in 2017, my family and I are gonna spend every June in a different city. We're just gonna pack up, find an Airbnb in a radically different city and. And just live there. And I've given myself one year to fix my life and change the way I work and hire the right people if I need to, to make sure I can pull that off. So this coming June 2017, we are moving to Barcelona. And I want to encourage you to start thinking that way. What if you could start by setting an intention to take all 10 of your vacation days and remember, 35% more likelihood of a race, then expand that. What if you could do a week and go on this incredible trip with your family, then two weeks every year, then maybe being able to live a month in a different city. Why wait till retirement or till you hit some arbitrary goal for you to finally be able to sit back and relax? There's this big lie in American society right now that you need to work hard and give up everything else and pour yourself into your project or your business? Well, look, I have an important project, and I have an important business, and I love what I do, and I wake up every day excited about going to work. But what I found is that when I'm able to pull away, experience life, and take people I love with me. I come back to work and I'm better than ever at what I do. And it's never too late. You should not be waiting to inject adventure in your life. Adventure fuels you. It makes you a better creator. It makes you a better entrepreneur. It makes you a better employee. So stop this bullshit idea of postponing a life of adventure. It's something you can do now. And I hope these experiments resonate with you in some level and that you're ready to try these experiments on your own.
