How Time Away Can Change Your Future | DJ DiDonna

**DJ DiDonna** (0:00)
So why don't we do this over the course of our life? The more time you spend on this planet, the more wisdom you have to reflect on, the more data you have about yourself to help inform that next chapter. But we all know that when you're busy and everything is urgent, you're not doing reflective time. So I think this kind of pre-retirement phase, taking a beat to kind of say, who am I now, apart from all these roles and responsibilities I've played, and how do I want to show up in this next chapter differently?

**SPEAKER_2** (0:28)
Welcome to The Midlife Chrysalis Podcast with Chip Conley, where we explore how midlife isn't a crisis, but a chrysalis, a time of profound transformation that can lead to the most meaningful chapter of your life.

**Chip Conley** (0:43)
Welcome to The Midlife Chrysalis, this is Chip Conley. Have you ever wanted to take a sabbatical?
Have you ever felt guilty about the idea of taking a sabbatical? Well, you're going to enjoy this episode. Have you ever wanted to actually have a bumper sticker that says, honk if you deserve a sabbatical? This episode is with an MEA alum who's done some online work with us, who's a Harvard lecturer, senior lecturer and has a new book coming out called Big Time Off. The idea of how do we weave unstructured time off into our lives, is a particularly important topic for people in midlife. As I say in this episode, midlife is like a run-on sentence that deserves some punctuation. A sabbatical or a vacation is a punctuation, but a vacation is different than a sabbatical.
In my three lessons at the end, I'm going to talk a little bit about some of my lessons and what makes for a great sabbatical. But let me just start by saying, if you don't think you need one, you probably need one.
So enjoy this episode. Hopefully, it will inspire you to maybe even come to MEA as the place to inspire yourself for how to craft a sabbatical. I'll talk to you at the end. DJ DiDonna. DJ DiDonna, you sound like some raver or something. You and your leisure life that you have with sabbaticals and all, but right now you're dealing with the fact that two weeks from now, you're having a baby or your wife or partner is. And two months after that, you have a book coming out called Big Time Off, The Transformative Power of Sabbaticals and How to Take One. So we're going to focus on that today. How are you doing?

**DJ DiDonna** (2:29)
Doing great. Excited to chat to you again. And yeah, the season of celebration, all the seeds you planted long ago come up in one season. So it's exciting, but it's a lot.

**Chip Conley** (2:40)
Well, let's start with how you, first of all, you're an MEA alum, you've taught online with us, you are a Harvard professor or lecturer, you're a guest lecturer, yeah, you're a guest lecturer, you're a professor, I don't know.

**DJ DiDonna** (2:58)
Yeah, they call us senior lecturers. So if you don't have a PhD and you're here full-time teaching, so I'm a senior lecturer here, it's my fourth year.

**Chip Conley** (3:05)
Yep, at the business school. So this idea of sabbaticals sort of came to you at a time a few years ago when you were burned out as an entrepreneur. Tell us your personal story and how the idea of a sabbatical got introduced to you and what effect it had on you.

**DJ DiDonna** (3:23)
I think the idea of a sabbatical came to me the same way it comes to a lot of folks. I think two-thirds of people enter what I call sabbatical land by accident. So it happens to them. It was the same for me. So I'd started my dream company. We were doing credit scoring all over the emerging markets. And so helping people get access to finance, it was mission driven, it was really my dream job. And after a while, after seven years, I just stopped being as fulfilled by it. And so I think there's a burnout story of being pulled into sabbatical land. But then I think there's also the story around having these things bubble up inside of me that I wanted to accomplish. The spiritual search, spending more time with my family and my loved ones that I was just increasingly aware. There was never going to be an off ramp or a pit stop to be able to attend to.
So these urgent things just kept taking place of what I considered to be. What I knew was important.
I just was not spending as much time on it as I wanted to. So I felt like that was the occasion that just made it no longer possible for me to continue doing what I was doing. And then chatted with my co-founders. We set up the company in a way that I could take a few months off. And that kicked this all off.