Response Magic 
5
Unmissable Lessons From TED Talks on the Importance of Taking Time Off
By: Minda Zetlin
Taking time off isn't just
a necessity. It's the key to a fulfilled, successful life.
In our work-obsessed
culture, we tend to think of taking time off as a necessity--something we must
do to recharge our batteries so we can go back to being productive.
But leisure is valuable in
its own right.
It helps us expand our
creativity and take our work to the next level.
It also allows us to live
fuller and more meaningful lives.
That's the message five
TED speakers have to offer on the absolute importance of taking time off.
Take a few minutes to
watch them and learn why--no matter how much you love your work or how
important it is--the time you take off is every bit as important.
And here's how to spend
it:
1. Try going on
sabbatical--it can actually boost your business.
What would happen to your
business if you closed your doors for a year while you went on sabbatical to an
exotic locale?
Perhaps it would actually
benefit.
At least that's how things
work for Stefan Sagmeister, a designer best known for creating album covers for
the Rolling Stones, David Byrne, and other famous musicians.
Every seven years, he closes
his business down while he and his staff take a year's sabbatical, most
recently to Bali. In this engaging talk, he explains his decision to take one year off
every seven years to work purely on his own projects. The purpose was to shake
off staleness, but he says, "Financially, seen over the long term, it was
actually successful. Because of the improved quality, we could ask for higher
prices."
Most of us can't imagine
taking a year off our paying work to devote solely to projects that interest
us. But Sagmeister makes it seem like an experiment worth trying.
2. Spend 10 minutes every
day doing nothing.
And that means no texting,
no checking your email, no video games, TV watching, or reading, says
mindfulness expert Andy Puddicombe, who describes the benefits of 10 mindful
minutes of doing nothing but observing your thoughts in his talk that takes only nine--he illustrates his points
by juggling while he delivers them.
3. Take things more
slowly.
We live in a culture
obsessed with rapidity, where dialing is replaced by speed dialing, reading by
speed reading, and dating by speed dating, says journalist Carl Honore in an
engaging talk.
"Sometimes it takes a
wake-up call to alert us to the fact that we're hurrying through our lives
instead of actually living them; that we're living the fast life instead
of the good life," he says.
For him, that wake-up call
was reading to his son at bedtime and being so accustomed to rushing that
he found himself speed reading The
Cat in the Hat--much to his son's
annoyance.
That experience got him to
try taking at least some things slowly--to get in touch with what he calls his
"inner tortoise."
"My default mode is no longer to be a
rush-aholic," he explains.
"And the
upshot is that I actually feel a lot happier and healthier; I feel
like I'm living my life rather than just racing through it. And
perhaps the most important measure of the success of this is that I feel
that my relationships are a lot deeper, richer, stronger."
Maybe we should all give a
little slowness a try.
4. Take the time to feel
beauty.
Beauty is something we
feel, not something we understand, explains product designer Richard Seymour,
and he walks us through some examples
of beautiful objects and how what we know about them changes our perceptions.
And that even folding a
T-shirt can be a beautiful and enjoyable thing if you know how to do it really,
really well.
5. Make sure to balance
work with play and love.
What can we learn from the
lives of the greatest presidents?
Presidential biographer
Doris Kearns Goodwin relates one simple lesson in her thoughtful talk: that the greatest lives are those that find a
balance among the elements work, play, and love.
"To pursue one realm
to the disregard of the other is to open oneself to ultimate sadness in older
age," she warns.
"Whereas to pursue
all three with equal dedication is to make possible a life filled not only with
achievement but with serenity."
Abraham Lincoln achieved
this balance beautifully despite being the only president to have to deal with
a civil war.
Lyndon Johnson on the
other hand sadly failed, as Goodwin learned while helping him work on his
memoirs.
Retired from public life,
he had wealth, achievement to look back on, and a loving and devoted family.
Nevertheless, the absence
of work seemed to leave a hole in his heart that nothing could fill.
He defiantly resumed
smoking after 15 years, despite knowing that he had a heart condition and it
could endanger his life.
He died four years after leaving office.
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