Closed for inspiration
By Marcella Bidinost | smh.com.au | 15 May
Need spark or a breather? Marcella Bidinost says do something radical: take a sabbatical.
F or six months each year, Ferran Adria, owner of Spain's El Bulli, widely touted as the best restaurant in the world, shuts shop and travels to a workshop 160 kilometres away. There he hunkers down with his full kitchen staff for half a year of menu experimentation. No surprise the man is also considered one of the greatest chefs in the world.
Every seven years, graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister closes his New York studio for a year-long sabbatical to whirl his creative juices. So serious is he about his client-free stint that on his last break he turned down an offer to design a poster for the Obama presidential campaign.
While Sagmeister is in brainwave land, his automated phone message reads: "Hello, you have reached Sagmeister Inc. We are conducting a full year of experiments and will be back on [insert date]. Please call us then."
Every week, engineering staff at Google can take 20 per cent off from work time to pursue their own projects, while scientists and engineers at 3M can take 15 per cent. Every day or so, you might be wishing the same.
You know the scene: at work and stuck for inspiration until later, away from all your functional fixedness and even on the tiniest of career getaways - in the shower, on the toilet, staring out the window, on a walk - pop goes the insight and hello comes the eureka moment.
If those mini-breaks are like the tiniest of sabbaticals, imagine the ideas that can emerge spending whole days, months or even years away from your usual activities.
Former jazz critic Whitney Balliett once pondered: "When life becomes nothing but a bowl of cliches, how many young and successful people of non-independent means have the resilience and backbone to withdraw completely from the world and reorganise, refuel, retool and refurbish themselves?"
Balliett was leading into a story on a young Sonny Rollins, who at 79 is now touted as one of the greatest living jazz improvisers. Part of Rollins' success is attributed to the lengthy sabbaticals he took to study Zen meditation in Japan and to live in an Indian monastery, and the three years he stopped playing live so he could devote 16 hours a day to solitary practice.
Sabbaticals - a word taken from the Hebrew for Sabbath, which literally means a ceasing - were once considered the domain of academics, pastors and artists looking to expand their horizons and fulfil lifelong dreams. These days, the value of a career hiatus has spread, with countless organisations and individuals freeing up time to volunteer, research, learn new skills, travel or follow other callings.
"When you take smart, successful people out of their daily grind - and often their safety zones - and give them the opportunity to expand in real life, they return pumped with new vigour," says Barbara Pagano, founding partner of yourSABBATICAL, an American company helping people plan rewarding sabbaticals.
"A sabbatical is an opportunity to dust off and consolidate the boxes labelled 'life' and 'work'. They contribute to the betterment of the whole person, enabling people to contribute and thrive in more significant ways."
Pagano says the most meaningful sabbaticals are planned, containing specific goals and objectives designed to benefit the individual and whoever they work for.
Sagmeister admits he took his first sabbatical without a plan and that it was "rather disastrous".
"I thought this vacuum of time would be wonderful and enticing for ideas generation but, without a plan, I reacted to others' requests. To prevent that, I very quickly made a list of the things I was interested in, put them in a hierarchy and allocated to them chunks of time."
Google services such as Gmail and Google News sprung from Google's "innovation time off" program and the company now reports that half of its newer products originate from personal pursuit. The co-founder of Atari, Nolan Bushnell, recalls idly flicking sand on a beach when inspiration came for one of his best-selling video games, and if it wasn't for famed biologist Alexander Fleming returning with fresh eyes from a two-week holiday, who knows if he'd have made his world-famous discovery of penicillin?
After the Beatles' meditation retreat in India, John Lennon recalled that: "Regardless of what I was supposed to be doing [taking spiritual respite from all worldly endeavours], I did write some of my best songs there."
"People get so hung up on job continuity and the fear of losing their credentials, network or career position that they don't even begin to think that taking a sabbatical could be a good thing," says Richard Webber, a 44-year-old physiotherapist who took six months' sabbatical every six years for the first 18 years of his career.
Webber found the balance so enriching that he now incorporates it into every working week: working part-time as a physio and the rest as a figurative painter, a passion he had as a child but which he set aside to pursue "a proper career".
Sagmeister's sabbaticals were prompted by realising how tired he was of hearing about other people's happiness and by deducing that he could bring forward five of his retirement years and intersperse them between his working ones. He marks up sabbatical dates in his planner and tells everyone about it so he won't chicken out.
On sabbatical, Sagmeister says he has plenty of fun, generates copious design ideas, has started meditating and, over the longer term, has enjoyed more financial success than he would have without a break. "In fact, pretty much everything I do in the seven years following comes out of the sabbatical," he says. Best of all, Sagmeister says, "my job has become a calling again".
First published by Smh.com.au on May 15 2010
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