Beginning January 2019, I am taking a 3-month, unpaid sabbatical to backpack through Thailand, Myanmar, Vietnam, Cambodia and Indonesia. I will be traveling alone with no plans for friends to join or visit me whilst there. I’m taking a single backpack. All costs, both direct and indirect (flight, NYC rent, health insurance etc.) will be financed by myself. When it is all over, I will be (gratefully) re-joining my job in New York.

This is how and why I have come to my decision.

When I first started my job, I had a habit of pulling people aside and asking them what I should do with my life. These were people who I considered to be successful and so I was convinced that they knew more than I did. And I wasn’t wrong. Each and every one of them knew multiples of what I did and yet, all their collective advice felt flat and unsatisfying. With each additional conversation, my frustrations, confusion and anxieties grew.

I would never receive a satisfactory response. I wanted others, mostly people who had known me for less than 2 years, to give me a set of instructions for the next 40+. Therefore, I could complete the steps required and blame someone if I didn’t get the promised result. It was comforting.

I wanted someone, anyone besides myself to give me an answer that would set me on a path to “success”. And at the time, success to me was gobs of money. Money to buy my family a beach house. Money to one day help my brother open up his own medical practice. Because I didn’t want money for “selfish” things (watches, expensive clothes etc.), I felt that my pursuit of it was fundamentally different than others. A more altruistic greed.

It was not until recently that I’ve realized my greed did not exist alone. For me, my greed has the following underlying ingredients: impatience, fear and comparison. By themselves, they are bad. When together, they are pretty much poison.

My impatience to be “ahead” of where I currently am, in my career, my accomplishments and a handful of other things has led me to constant distraction, in “what-if” scenarios when I should have been enjoying time with family or friends or learning new things at work.

My fear led me to despise the unknown, what would be and is the randomness of life. And in an attempt to guarantee my future, an impossible task, I read books I didn’t like, pursued certifications I didn’t need and prevented myself from developing any true hobbies (mainly because hobbies would only distract me from my goal of “success”)

And my peer-to-peer comparisons only added gasoline to this shitstorm of fear and impatience.

So, I made some changes. First in my thinking and then in my actions.

I no longer believe in money-retirement. I.e. acquiring so much money that you will never work again. This is for a couple of reasons. If my ultimate goal from the very beginning is to one day completely stop doing something, how enjoyable and fulfilling could this thing possibly be? And if nothing in life is guaranteed (future outcomes, my livelihood etc.), what sense does it make to spend the days I have doing something I want to stop? For the hope that luck is consistently in my favor when it comes to my health (no terminal illness), car accidents (avoiding them), business risks (working out in my favor) and everything else that could possibly happen until I hit my magic retirement number? I’ve realized that this is the path I’m actually fearful of and this is the kind of unknown that I would like to avoid. It’s not for me.

To be clear, I still have a strong desire and goal of being individually successful and wealthy. And I have no delusions about the hard work and long hours it takes to get there. I have just reset the standards by which I measure these goals. Because I no longer view things as a race to the end, I can take my time. And for me, taking my time means a lot of different things. Maybe I don’t need to change my job every two years to feel that I am moving forward. Maybe I can take the time to develop personal interests that will satisfy me creatively and unexpectedly help me professionally and financially. Maybe I can take (travel/sabbatical) risks that may put certain parts of my life on “hold”. And so, what? If I’m no longer only focused on the end or “someday”, can’t I take time to enjoy the ride?