1169: Tapping into the Transformative Power of Sabbaticals with DJ DiDonna

Pete Mockaitis
DJ, welcome!

DJ DiDonna
How are ya? Great to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Doing well. Doing well. I’m excited to talk sabbaticals. First of all, we’re going to use that word a lot, what are we talking about here?

DJ DiDonna
So it’s funny, when I first took my sabbatical, I instinctively called it a sabbatical and I didn’t know what that meant. I think a lot of people use it because it lends this prestige from academia. It lends this prestige of, like, here’s an identity that you can have when you’re doing something very uncertain and you’re oftentimes giving up your identity.

And so, you know, I created one, take it or leave it, but intentional extended leave from your job. So, “When you’re away from your job, are you not looking for another job?” which is what we tend to fill in the space with. “Is it a time that’s hopefully measured in months, not days or weeks?”

And you can do work, but it can’t resemble your routine job. So no little consulting projects, nothing similar, but people will do things like try to write a book or get certified in yoga or scuba. I remodeled a kitchen, which might sound like work to folks, but it’s like intrinsic work of your own choosing.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, that sounds nice, and we’re going to get into the practicals and the pushbacks and the constraints and the difficulties soon enough. But, first, let’s hear, tell us, I mean, they sound like a swell time. Can you share with us any surprising discoveries or key benefits that we should know about?

DJ DiDonna
I think anyone who’s been on a vacation knows that vacations are great and you can easily imagine that a longer vacation would be even better. The reason I set out to do this research and write this book was because the profundity of the kind of changes that I experienced, identity changes, life changes, the joy, the density of memories from that time were such that I was like, “Okay, something very different is going on here.”

And so when I spoke to other people for the research, I realized that there’s something deeper on a personal identity, “Who are you? What do you value?” that is changing in a way that just is not happening with shorter breaks. So that was surprising that it wasn’t just, you know, my personal experience, but universal across everyone that I spoke to.

But the other thing I think that’s counterintuitive based on how you framed it is that sabbaticals can be really tough. I think, a lot of times, you’re getting to sabbatical land burnt out or it’s catalyzed by some crisis, like a personal crisis, a work crisis, a relationship crisis, a health crisis. And so you’re having to work out a lot of stuff, and the vacuum of your responsibilities and how you spend your normal day allows a lot of big thoughts to come in.

And so people will look and say, “Oh, my gosh, you’re off for three months. You must be having the time of your life.” But, oftentimes, personal development and identity change is hard work and it’s difficult and uncomfortable. So that’s what I would say some of the surprising things were.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, identity change sounds big and it sounds like that can go in very many, many directions. Could you give us an example? And is that a good thing? Maybe I love my identity. I don’t want to change it.

DJ DiDonna
I think that the most important thing is that you are looking at who you are and what your identity is from the perspective of someone that can change it and is in charge, right? I think one of the things you see in the research is that there are some debate about whether you have like a fixed identity.

And so you want to return back, you know, to your identity that might have been obfuscated by, like, hard work or stress or taking a job you didn’t want or being in a relationship you didn’t want. Or is your identity constantly shifting and it’s your job to kind of guide your life towards how you change and shift as a person?

And so I think, in sabbatical, what is being offered is you’re stepping away from your life long enough. People have talked about it as like a near-death experience. You’re zooming out from your life. You’re looking back at how you’ve lived it and how you feel living it now, and what you would like for your life between now and when you die, and getting to say, like, “Do I want to make changes or not?”

And some people are like, “Love my life. Love my work. It gives me meaning. I don’t love going in every day, but that’s a job. But I would like to have stronger boundaries between work and life.” And that can be enough to change your identity, right?

Like, do you see yourself as someone who is a super committed father that picks their kids up every day and coaches the teams? Or do you see yourself primarily as a person that’s doing work and not really of your choosing?

So I think that’s the invitation is just to say, you know, really pick yourself out and say, “What am I doing? And how does that align with who I am and who I’ve wanted to be?”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s intriguing as you describe it in this way. It’s like the sabbatical provides a context or fertile soil for epiphany or revelation, and we sort of have the time for it, as opposed to, a lot of times, epiphanies, even the word implies, “All at once, I realized, ‘What am I doing?’ Or, ‘I had a panic attack and I… no, no more of this.’”

So with the sabbatical, it seems like we don’t have to get lucky or have a strike of divine inspiration in order to come to these major realizations that perhaps we would really benefit from coming to.

DJ DiDonna
Yeah, I mean, I would think about it also as imagine if you could manufacture a scenario that would produce an insight that would change your life forever, right? So if you look at what’s called peak life experiences, like a lot of those are fomented by negative things that happen.

So a health crisis, you know, we’ve all heard about “The Bucket List” or seen it. Like, a health crisis makes you think, like, “What have I been doing and how do I want to change?” And what a sabbatical says is, you know, you can basically carve out time, you know, six months off in the scale of a 40- to 50-year career is like 1% of your working life.

And you can carve out 1% percent and say, “I want to try something on that I’ve always wanted to do. I want to write a book. I want to, like, become fluent in a foreign language or live in a foreign country with my family.” And then just have that experience as opposed to it being an emergency or something that happens to you.

I mean, another surprising thing from the research is that we found that about two-thirds of sabbatical takers, a sabbatical takes them, right? And so it is this fomented by a crisis as opposed to something that’s regularly planned.

And my intention is to identify these kind of inflection points across your life, from gap year early on in your education, to like a twilight career where you can take a pause and figure out if you’re heading in the right direction or not.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so I think, already, brains are firing off, it’s like, “Oh, it sounds nice, DJ, but no way that I could pull that off.” But even before we dig into some of those particular practicalities, I’d like to get a sense for some examples of these identity-shifting perspectives, insights. Like what kinds of things have popped up for people and how does it go down?

DJ DiDonna
You know, Pete, for the skeptics, just to make sure they get through the episode, right, like take the word sabbatical away and just think about it from the perspective of you, upon retirement, or upon your deathbed, or with your grandchildren, you know, bopping up and down on your knees, like, what is something that you would like to do in your life that doesn’t fit neatly into vacations, that certainly you’ve thought is important so far, but you clearly haven’t made time for?

And so it takes this, like, grandiosity around, like, “Taking a sabbatical is difficult,” and makes it more personal around, like, “I want to go on a road trip with my family to see the national parks.” Right? That’s an often one I hear. Like, how are you going to do that without a bigger container of time?

So I think I would encourage folks to think about, actually, what’s passionate for them as opposed to getting hung up on the term or the amount of time. Because, I think, once you start having this idea and it becomes concrete, it grows and germinates.

As far as the actual tangible outcomes, what we saw is an increase in confidence. So people come back having done a thing that is pretty rare. It’s certainly not the typical story of how we work, you know, at least in the States. And they come back stronger, you know, having healed personally and mental health-wise. And found out a little bit more about their capabilities outside of work.

A lot of people will do some sort of physical expedition, right, like a long hike or get in shape for a marathon or something like that. And that lends confidence about what’s possible. Creativity, so one of the cool things about a sabbatical is instead of doing like a vacation, you’re just being yourself. You’re just being.

And a lot of times that means you’re picking up some hobby that you used to have, you’re tinkering with something that is just for fun, there’s no purpose. And that kind of spurs our creative brands. Like, you’ve heard about the creative process where there’s no bad ideas and let’s get everything out there first and collaborate.

The other thing I mentioned earlier is just about perspective. So because you’ve disengaged from your work identity being governed by your calendar, that kind of thing, for long enough, and people will say it takes about six to eight weeks to fully disconnect, you’re able to get perspective about who you are, where you want to be going and whether how you’re allocating your time and resources is getting you there or not.

Pete Mockaitis
And so could you share some stories of some folks who did this and the realizations that they had?

DJ DiDonna
A couple of my favorite stories, one, there was a family that took a sabbatical on an island off the coast of Norway. So the father had been working in tech, had kind of burnt out, and his wife had taken a few years off from teaching in order to stay at home and raise the kids, right?

So she had wanted to get back into the workforce, he had wanted to take some time off, and so they spent a month above the Arctic Circle off the coast of Norway. She was, like, one of two teachers in kind of a one-room schoolhouse type situation for the island, and he was just experimenting, spending afternoons with his kids, doing little projects and hobbies.

He learned how to fish, learned how to smoke fish, learned how to catch fish, things that just aren’t that seemingly productive. But then he also wanted to go back to his hobby of being a computer developer. He was at management level, and so you’re not really down in the weeds.

And so mobile app development was coming out, this was about 10 years ago, and what he did was he created just a simple kind of text-to-speech app. His father had done work with kind of vision-impaired folks, and so it gave him the idea.

And as a result, he created something, published it on the app store, and it actually started gathering some steam, you know, people paying ten bucks a year. And when they came back to Boston, not only had they completely changed their relationship to money, because they had lived on a relatively meager teacher’s salary in Norway, it gave him the confidence that he could spend another year, a year and a half, building it up to support the family.

He designed the business such that he could take summers off because he was like, “Why would I not spend summers aligned with my wife’s calendar, spending summers adventuring with my kids being present?” And it gave his wife things on the resume and experience to get back into the workforce in the States. I love that story.

I think on the opposite side, it’s also important to know what you don’t want to do. So a lot of people use sabbaticals to test, like, “What’s the counterfactual to the life that I’m living?” There was someone, in the book, who was a career trial lawyer. He studied English in college, always wanted to write a novel, but kind of found himself starting a family early on, wanting to support the family.

And so after 25 years, he took six months off to write. And it allowed him to walk his kids to school, cook them dinner at night, be more present with the family, which his job hadn’t before. But, more importantly, he wrote for about two months and then he printed the manuscript out, tore it into pieces, put it in the trash, and was like, “Actually, I want to go back to being a lawyer.”

And so this concept that, like, part of navigating through life and navigating your identity is, “What are you good at? What are you not good at? What do you like? What do you not like?” And I think about sabbaticals as regret insurance, because you get to try things on for size that you would have regretted not doing at the end of your life.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s really cool. And I’m thinking about, well, first of all, I believe that’s Winston Chin, right, who made the Voice Dream Reader, an app that I use and love. And Kwame Christian did, like, a whole episode about how that’s a key part of his life.

DJ DiDonna
Oh, funny.

Pete Mockaitis
He could see, but he likes having notes read back to him at rapid speed while he’s doing other things. So that’s pretty cool. Hey, sabbatical enriching all of us.

DJ DiDonna
Developed over the winter, you know, dark, dark winter in Norway.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. So that’s really cool. And then you’re right, the regret insurance thing is resonating. I’m thinking about, I remember at Bain, they had a program, and they might still have it, they called it Take Two, which is basically this.

It’s, like, you could take two months off, I believe it was unpaid, but you keep your health insurance benefits, and you could just do whatever. And what was interesting is it was a real win-win for the consultants trying something else, like, “I always thought I wanted to work in sports.”

And so then they work in sports for two months, like, “You know what? I like consulting better.” So they come on back and they have that retention of an employee for longer because they could scratch the itch, they could take a look, and they come back and say, “Actually, this is really a pretty sweet gig. Let’s keep doing this.”

And it’s great for the people because, you know, sometimes they do discover just the thing, or they put to rest that lingering doubt. Regret insurance is well put, it’s like, “Ah, I wonder what would have happened if I worked in sports? Well, I know. I tried two months and it wasn’t all I hoped it would be.”

DJ DiDonna
Yeah, I have a fair amount of examples from the consulting field because, as you know, it’s project-based and so when you’re on, you’re on, and you’re on like 11 out of 10. And then when you’re off, you’re totally off.

Like, you’ve finished the engagement and so there’s not work to do that lingers. And I think that the economy is heading more towards this, like, cyclical project-based, like you see it in tech product development cycles.

And so I think, as the economy heads more towards natural inflection points every four or five, however many years, I think it gives you these opportunities to say, “Okay, let me step back and recharge. Let me maybe, right now, right, like let me step back and learn AI from a curiosity standpoint. Like, build something that’s interesting to me,” as opposed to, like, trying to fit it in in everything else that you have to do with life.

And then you’re actually training yourself for the next job. So I like the consulting example and a lot of consultants in the study would use that time off. You know, McKenzie has Take Time, Bain has Take Two, where you would run an experiment.

Someone in the study thought that they wanted to own an eco resort when they retired. Sounds idyllic, right? You live in a beautiful place, and he worked in Costa Rica and in Hawaii over the course of his sabbatical, you know, in the kitchen, in the front office, and he was like, “This is miserable.”

And so it’s this, like, just how can you test different hypotheses about your life so that you’re more fulfilled in the life you choose or the next life you choose?

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so lay it on us, if folks think, “Yeah, that’s great, but…” where do we go from there?

DJ DiDonna
You know, I think the first step is nurturing that seed of an idea, as kind of woo-woo as that might sound. Like, you really have to think about something concrete. Go to a cafe for an hour, no phone, no music, no friends, and just think, like, “What are things I want to do before I die?”

And I think that’s important because it just makes it more tangible because I think, then, you start to build this intuition, like, “Wait a minute, why can’t I? I’ve always wanted to do this. I’m X years into my life. Like, why have I not done this?”

For me, it was about the spiritual search, right? I felt like I was spiritual. I grew up in a religious household. I wanted to, like, nurture and investigate that side. I felt like it was important, but I wasn’t allotting time to it. And I think it’s something that takes a fair amount of time. So find that thing that is so important that you start to realize, like, “This is not fair. I will not be happy with life if I don’t get a chance to do it.”

The next thing is, I think, take your time scale away from the next 90 days, the next year, and put it into, like, a five-year plan. Of course, a sabbatical is out of reach for almost everybody. If you don’t have a company supporting it with a policy, if you’re talking about taking off three months from now.

But what are you doing in 2032, right? And kind of like plant a flag somewhere in the future that sounds impossibly far away, and say, “I’m taking the summer off with my family in 2032. We’re going to align schedules, we’re going to tell our bosses three years in advance, and it’s just part of how we live our life,” as opposed to waiting until some emergency kind of, you know, clutches you and takes you out of routine life.

Once you do that, then you can financially save 5, 10% a year. You can work out the logistics. Put it far enough in advance that it becomes logistically feasible. Dream and understand what your what the stakes are. Like what does it cost you not to do this over the course of your life?

And then the other thing that’s important, in our research we found that one of the most enabling factors of taking a sabbatical is having an example in your life of someone who has taken it. So ask far and wide, “Is there anyone in my network who has taken extended leave, who has taken a sabbatical?”

I mean, don’t be afraid to post it on LinkedIn. There’s a career break feature on LinkedIn that was rolled out in 2022, and millions of people use it. So that, like, norm around like work devotion, I think, is disintegrating pretty quickly.

But once you can get some advice and some proof and permission that it’s okay to take extended leave from someone you know, the barriers start to break down a bit.

Pete Mockaitis
Tell us about the career break feature on LinkedIn.

DJ DiDonna
So when you’re putting in the employer that you have and how long you worked for them, there’s a career break employer. And then you can kind of say, career break, skills development, personal needs, whatever, whatever.

I thought it’s pretty revolutionary, like, to have every person who’s displaying their resume online include career breaks.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I hear you, in terms of the normative piece, because I think there’s some old career resume advice somewhere, like, “Oh, make sure there’s no gaps in that resume. That’s a big red flag.” I don’t personally evaluate any candidate or talent in such a way at all.

I don’t know if maybe you could demystify some of that for us. If we have these fears about, “What will others say or think or do? Or how will this impact how I’m judged or viewed or evaluated, assessed?” What’s the scoop there?

DJ DiDonna
I think, first of all, like flipping that on its head, if you’re looking at a few different resumes, and one person says something about their life that’s interesting, right, it shows that, so there’s this concept called the red sneaker effect.

That if you have the confidence to dress unlike other people in an interview, or if you have the confidence to say, like, “You know, I took six months off to sail across the Pacific, or to take care of my parents,” that actually sends a signal that, like, “My work will kind of stand for itself. This is who I am as a person. Here’s a tiny glimpse on the resume.” So I would encourage people to think about it like that.

And then, on the negative side, if someone is going to screen you out for taking three months off to care for a loved one, probably not a good fit. You know what I mean? Like, if you’re looking for a signal that the company doesn’t value you as a human being, I think there it is.

And we know that younger generations are more likely to trade autonomy and mission and purpose and flexibility for compensation. And so it’s bubbling up within the economy anyway, as you said, outdated story. And so you can either be a part of this and encourage it and support it, or you can be kind of left behind and, you know, working two jobs and sleeping under your desk.

Pete Mockaitis
And, likewise, with regard to the, “What do other people think?” situation, if you give the boss a heads up, “Hey, three, four years from now, I want you to know I’ve got this sabbatical on the calendar,” how do those conversations tend to go?

DJ DiDonna
I mean, listen, you have to compare apples to apples, right? So in Silicon Valley, the average tenure at a company is, like, two years. And so I think if you’re saying to someone, “I want to stay at this company. I view my tenure here to be long. I like it. I want to grow here. And in four years, I want to take two months off with my family to live in Spain,” I think that’s totally manageable.

Like, people are leaving their jobs. And when people leave their jobs, managers have to scramble and hire someone else. They have to, like, train that new person. People go on parental leave. Like, you have a bit more notice, but maybe five, six months notice.

And so what you’re doing is you’re helping the organization build resilience around, “Can you survive when someone leaves the company?” You’re being super purposeful about, “Here are my tasks. Here’s who I kind of delegate them off to. Here’s how I onboard them back.”

And I think, most importantly from an employer standpoint, it’s an equitable benefit. Like, if you’re carrying water for someone else because they’re on sabbatical, and then you can take a sabbatical, that’s very different than if you’re carrying water because the staffing needs were messed up, you couldn’t hire a replacement, you’re working way more, or someone else goes on parental leave but you’re not planning on having a kid.

So I think it creates this world where, like, our humanity is honored outside of work, as opposed to just pretending like no one ever quits.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, you’re right. If you’re hearing that, it might actually be very appreciated by your employer. Like, “Oh, I didn’t realize you were planning on being here for four plus years. Most people don’t. That’s pretty cool. Okay. Well, we could probably figure that out. Sure. Thanks for the heads up.”

DJ DiDonna
Yeah, every company can figure that out, right? Like, companies have to figure out when people leave. They have to figure out when people go on parental leave. And so it’s not easy, right? This is not easy at the current state where there aren’t enabling policies for everyone. It’s not financially feasible for everyone.

But, again, like, looking at the trajectory of the paid parental leave movement, and the US is still the only high-income country in the world that doesn’t have, like, government-supported paid parental leave, but it’s increased over time. I think 40 states offer paid parental leave. And then if you apply to a job that doesn’t, it’s a bit of a head scratcher.

So I think the evolution of sabbaticals and sabbatical policies, I see taking that same trajectory, which is just, “Wait, I can’t take three months off every four years?” Like, it’s not a lot of time.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, tell us, any pro tips, top do’s and don’ts to keep in mind as we start walking down this path?

DJ DiDonna
I think the first thing is to make sure that you are sufficiently disconnected from your routine life. So if you’re stepping away from work, and you’re coming back to your job, making sure that auto-away messages, emails are being deleted, like, “I will return on X date,” making sure you have support inside the organization to say, like, what’s the break-the-glass moment where, like, “If someone reaches out about this, like, here’s my phone number, but otherwise, no.”

If you’re leaving a job, I think the way to be disconnected is, like, don’t post about it on LinkedIn, don’t tell people you’re taking time off. Just do it. You can post at the end and say, “Here’s what I learned, and many of you might have noticed,” but no one notices. Like, everyone is focused on their own life.

Most often, you’ll hear, like, “You were gone for six months? Like, oh, my gosh, it felt like you were just here yesterday.” People are busy. And that second aspect of disconnection is making sure you’re gone long enough, right?

So, again, best practice, if you can take three months or more, awesome. If you can’t, take as much as you can. I think that it’s like a gateway drug where you take a month off, and you’re like, “That really flew by, and I didn’t get to do 90% of what I wanted to do. Maybe next time in five years, I’ll take more time off.” But just start to experiment with, like, why it’s so different to take extended leave off.

And the other thing, I would encourage people to take that time to get a coach, right? A coach or a therapist to try to, like, process who you are, and use that opportunity to grow as a person. And then, finally, a lot of people shift directly from, like, work-productivity mode into, like, life-productivity mode, and they’re like, “All right, I’m done with work. Now I need to become fluent in Portuguese,” or, “Now I need to do this project I’ve always wanted to do,” which is understandable.

But I encourage people to take a beat. Take a couple weeks, just heal. Get out of your head into your body. Do things like ceramics or yoga, like things that don’t just, like, swap out one brain thing for another, or one laptop thing for another. Like, return to kind of being human again, return to body movement, all that kind of stuff, music, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And what you’re saying about the gateway drug and our beliefs and associations, I think, somewhere inside of us, I think we have kind of a belief that, “If I disappear for a while, you know, disaster will strike,” or, “If I can disappear for a while, then I guess I’m not all that essential.”

And so I’ve heard, talked to people who are taking paternity leave who have said such things. And I remember, I, one time, went on an eight-day silent retreat. And so my phone was totally off, and so I had this extensive email autoreply, as well as voicemail.

And it’s like, “Hey, if you need this, ask this person. You need this? Ask this person. You need this? Ask this person. If you really need something and it can’t wait, you know, here is the number of the retreat house.”

And I guess you can already guess, DJ, how many people felt the need to call the retreat house over eight days? Zero. And so, yeah, the world continues, and yet, we are also missed at the same time, you know?

DJ DiDonna
Yeah. I think that, listen, silver lining from COVID was that we all, especially knowledge workers, right, we found out that you actually don’t have to be in the office to get most of the work done. We had the technology to do it before that, but this kind of, like, forced us to say like, “Oh, my gosh, we can’t be in the same room. How do we get the work done?”

And so I think taking time off can be the same thing. It’s like, “How do we get this done when they’re not here?” Like, what changes when you step away from the office? I think we’re scared of change, we’re scared of uncertainty, you know, understandably, especially this kind of like age of AI.

But at the end of the day, like, you’re replaceable anyway. Like, no company, at least not any good ones, fail because one person leaves, right? And in America, you know, you are employed at will, right? And so you can be fired, for the most part, for no reason.

And so I think you have to, like, lean into that and be courageous, and say, like, “How can I arm myself? How can I improve myself in this age of uncertainty?” And in order to do that, it’s making sure you’re healthy and whole, right, you’re not burnt out, you have energy to kind of persist.

Making sure you have creative ideas for yourself and what you want to do in the future, and making sure you have confidence about what value you offer, like, “Oh, I got fired,” or, “That company shut down, like, I can find another job,” because you you have to, and that’s how the world of work is now. Like, no one is watching out for you and saving up for your retirement for you, unfortunately.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, now could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

DJ DiDonna
A quote that I have in the book that really stuck with me is Wordsworth who says, “To begin, begin,” right? If you want to have the life that you’re not going to regret, if you want to check things off your bucket list before it’s too late, you got to begin.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

DJ DiDonna
I think this concept of how you rest and recover. So I think everyone thinks that the best way to rest and recover is by doing nothing. And what we found in kind of drafting off other research is that, actually, engaging in activity that’s intrinsically chosen is a great way to recover.

So you don’t have to just sip coconuts on the beach. Many type A achiever people are, like, concerned, like, “What would I do on sabbatical? I’m going to be so bored.” You can do work, but it’s work of your own choosing. It’s intrinsically motivated. It’s something that matters to you. I thought that was a pretty empowering study to read.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

DJ DiDonna
Anything by Herminia Ibarra, Working Identity is a really good one. And I think anything by Johann Hari, I think, does really good kind of journalistic investigative work. I’m reading The Three-Body Problem right now, which has been on my shelf forever. So I’m a sci-fi person as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

DJ DiDonna
I don’t want to say what everyone says about using Claude Code, but it’s been pretty incredible to go through all of my notes over the ten years kind of investigating sabbaticals and help surface and identify people that I’ve spoken to who might be interested in the book. It’s been really nice to have like an assistant through the process.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

DJ DiDonna
It’s honestly doing the dishes in the morning. That sounds really lame, but I actually learned to love it on a meditation retreat. We should circle up on our meditation retreat experiences afterwards.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, let’s hear a smidge more. Learning to love it in what sense?

DJ DiDonna
I think appreciating something like washing dishes as, like, work for the household that adds value, and also work where you can just focus on nothing else. There’s, like, a Nintendo Switch game which is about power washing.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, it’s a top seller.

DJ DiDonna
Which is crazy, but I get it, right? I mean, you wash dishes, you kind of give that gift to your family, you leave the kitchen better off. It’s the most kind of mid-40s dad thing to say possible, but there it is.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks, they quote it back to you often?

DJ DiDonna
I think people talk about the cost of a sabbatical, the price, you know, “Does it affect your retirement?” I think it’s, “What’s the cost not to?” So, really, asking people, like, “What is the cost of living your life without pursuing your dreams, without identifying things on your bucket list, and going after it?”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

DJ DiDonna
TheSabbaticalProject.org. If you search sabbaticals and DJ, I’m all over the internet. This is not the identity that I thought I would have, but here we are. And I am on LinkedIn a lot as well.

Pete Mockaitis
And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

DJ DiDonna
I think, even outside of sabbaticals, this annual reflection of really looking back and saying, like, “How was my year? What do I want the next year to look like?” But I think one thing that people don’t do, you know, I teach at a grad school, and when you apply to college, when you apply to grad school, you have to fill out these applications and these essays, “What are three things, three mistakes, three successes? What do I want to do after I graduate from this place?”

I think, often enough, we don’t apply to the next four or five years of our life. So I kind of encourage my students, I’ve created a template where it’s like, “All right, four years from now, like what life are you applying to? Like, no one’s going to read the essays,” but as opposed to just like a one year frame, I like that four year apply to life.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, DJ, thank you.

DJ DiDonna
Great to meet you.