Exploring Liminal Spaces with HBS's DJ DiDonna

**Morra Aarons-Mele** (0:00)
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I'm Morra Aarons-Mele and this is The Anxious Achiever.
What would you do if someone said to you, take the next four months off?
Don't show up at work. Do what you want to do.
Would it be exciting? Yes. Would it be a little bit scary? Maybe. Would you know what you wanted to do? Today, we talk about the power of sabbaticals. With DJ DiDonna. So DJ is a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School. He's an entrepreneur and he is the founder of the Sabbatical Project and the author of a really great new book called A Big Time Off. Sabbaticals aren't vacations. They are intentional and they take you away from your routine work. DJ and I talked today about the joy and the sometimes uncomfortable nature of being on Sabbatical. He's got so many stories of how people took Sabbaticals, people of all different life stages and economic stages. The key to Sabbatical, I think, is that it's intentional and it's planned for. Lots of us have breaks in our lives because of reasons that we didn't plan for. We get laid off or we have a family crisis. That's not a Sabbatical. A Sabbatical is a time when you actually ask yourself, who am I and what do I want? Which is a radical concept for a lot of us adults. So my conversation with DJ DiDonna.
Well, DJ, I'm really excited to have you on the show. I absolutely loved your book.

**Dennis DiDonna** (4:42)
Thank you so much. Great to be here.

**Morra Aarons-Mele** (4:45)
So you start your book with a sentence that I thought was funny and interesting. It says, I grew up terrified of having a midlife crisis. This seems to me like a weird thing to grow up worrying about.
Why did you write that?

**Dennis DiDonna** (5:04)
We all have our anxieties, right?

**Morra Aarons-Mele** (5:06)
Well, that is true.

**Dennis DiDonna** (5:08)
I think there's a lot of pressure. I felt a lot of pressure to get career right early on. And I see that with my students as well, right? You know, you have this idea when you're a kid of, you're going to be a fireman or a doctor or an astronaut. And this notion, I think, of preparing and making choices and having it be the wrong one, especially once everything else is supposed to be kind of ironed out and running well.