A Mid-Life Break

I've been working in one industry for the last fourteen years, and the longest time I spent away from work is roughly half a month. I said time spent away from work rather than vacation because those two weeks were really just time away from the confines of an office, but continually required me to respond to emails, dial in to some calls, and acquire periodic updates from my team at work. For fourteen years straight, I haven't really taken any real break.

I spent six years in my previous organization before joining the current one, where I am on my seventh year. Since 2011 when I was joining my current employer, I knew that I wouldn't want to stay in this industry till my 50's. The last seven years were spent to guarantee a break for a full year, maybe two. Since then I've been thinking of this as a mid-life break.

I am at the point in my career when I can take any corner office of my choosing, sit in a conference room for an entire day without getting bothered, my signature at the top of the certificates given to our amazing staff, and the responsibility to drive the financials of a multi-million dollar process on behalf of the organization. The decision to leave at this point (near the peak) is vastly unpopular.

Why Am I Taking a Break

I am calling this a mid-life break but I am not planning to sit and do nothing for an entire year. This is a break instead from the monotony of the last ten years.

Now that I think about it, I have done pretty much the same things for the last ten years. Growth was merely based on scaling the span of my responsibility. From a mid-level manager to a mid-level executive, I've been responsible for pretty much the same things; more staff, higher cost and revenue, more clients, but added absolutely nothing to my skills.

• I am taking this mid-life break to learn new things first and foremost. I've tried to learn investing, trading, farming, and now blogging at the expense of my sleep. I hardly get five hours of sleep each day. I feel really tired - too stretch like a thin slice of butter spread across too much bread. Even with such sacrifice, I am only just scratching the surface of those discipline. I feel I need more time allocated to learning those if I am to do well.

• @dandalioncub is now thirteen years old, and @littlesteemitph going on ten. While social media will show me as a great dad, I feel I barely know my daughters. I am lucky to have @dandalion who is doing such a great job at raising them, but I feel like I've missed their entire childhood. This is especially true with @dandalioncub who lived with @dandalion's folks for twelve and a half years. My work schedule works in such a way that by the time I get home my kids are already asleep, and when I wake up they've gone to school. How many parent-teacher conference have I missed? How many intramurals? How many family days? How many dances? I don't even have to spend time counting - I've missed all of them. Until very recently, I also used to spend the holidays at work, my birthdays, and my family's birthdays. I want to use the time to get caught up - get to know my daughters, spend time with @dandalion, and entire year of being there in school events, and special occasions - making them truly special.

• We want to set up a goat farm when we retire from the corporate world, and we are very excited about it. The reality however, is that we hardly know anything about it. This mid-life break will give us the time required to visit farms, study the market, try and raise a few ourselves, and have a deeper understanding of what we plan to get into when we finally take the decision to retire. The photo to the right is from @dandalion's folks in Davao. We will spend time both for vacation, and experience in raising goats there during the one year mid-life break.

• I believe in this platform and I want to be able to spread the word about Steemit more than what my limited time now allows me to do. I have tons of ideas that remain to be nothing more than that - just ideas. In my mid-life break I will work on getting at least some of them done. Here are a few of those:

Supporting The Creation of Steem-Based Economy with @SteemFix
A Philippine version of Steem Park (or Farm)
A SteemPH Manila University Promotion Campaign
Unification of Philippine Based Steemit Communities

How We Planned For This

My first concern about doing this is the potential risk exposure for my family's lifestyle. So that was the first thing we addressed. Here's a few of the things we did:

• Aggressively build a career that will increase our cash flow. I've gotten three promotions in the last seven years. Tripling my paycheck from seven years ago to today.
• Live a very simple lifestyle that fits within 50% of our means. This means a year's worth of funds to support our lifestyle for every year worked.
• Invest and build other income streams. We diversified between realty, stocks, cryptocurrency, crowdfunding, and soon co-ownership program.
• Years of bouncing ideas on timing, and building trust between myself and @dandalion.
• Always keeping an open mind about how the plan may fail, and keeping contingencies in place. Not burning bridges, building networks, doing the best we can that people will not think twice about re-hiring me.

I feel a mixture of excitement and worry about the next things that will happen, but @dandalion and I are both convinced that we really need to do this for our long term plans. We will be together to deal with the short-term setbacks this plan can cost us - and that is more than enough for me. We've always done well together, and this I think is no different.

Credits

Cover Photo Image - Pixabay
Book Image - Pixabay