Why You Should Skip Vacation

Uh-huh. This is the Daily Boost podcast with Scott Smith. What's happening? Come on in here. Good to have you here today. Thanks for stopping by. What is today? It's a

Thursday already? Who cares? It's a podcast. It's on demand. So I skipped vacation this year. It doesn't matter. I'll get another one. I just skipped the official vacation you all take. I just

skipped it. I talked a little bit about it, but I'm going to talk more about that today. As we roll through this week, give us some great ideas about things you could do to impact your life.

Listen, if you listen to me, here's the thing. I know there's a lot going on, but I want you to live the lifestyle you want to live, not mine. If I could give you the lifestyle that you want, it would

be control your schedule, control your income. For the most part, not all the time. I mean, sometimes I have to do things I don't want to do, but for the most part, I can just decide what I want to do

and I can go get it done. I want you to have that as well. So everything I'm talking about this week and pretty much for my entire life is about that, and I hope you get there,

okay? Let's talk about this vacation I skipped. I mentioned back in. July that I started writing a book and I'm still writing it . I've got a lot to do on it still here, kind of working

through it. It took me a lot of time, a lot of years to get here. And I finally decided the vehicle. I figured out how I wanted to kind of position the book.

I figured out what the stories were going to be and how I wanted to build this thing. And I said, I got to get it done now. And so that's what I did. I canceled everything.

I told everybody that I was going out of town. It wasn't a lie because I planned to go out of town. I planned to go visit my mom, but it was over the 4th of July holiday,

and y'all on vacation, everybody gets very busy, they all start to disappear, the email goes quiet, I don't get any calls from clients, not only because they don't want to bother me, but because

they're doing their own thing, right? And I simply said, I'm going to stay home and write a book. I told my wife, I said, let's have some fun, you know, maybe we'll go to a staycation,

go down to Disney or something while I'm staying home since I live here in Daytona Beach. Didn't do it. I just got to work, that's it. Best vacation I ever took.

Hmm, let me rephrase that. Best vacation I never took. So the plan was pretty simple. The plan was to clear the runway completely and see what shows up

when nothing is scheduled to show up. So let me explain that to you because my clients that I work with all the time, a lot of people want to clear the clutter out of their life

. And you know, I'm a big guy to tell you to subtract things in your life, just get rid of stuff and make it simpler. But a lot of people that I work with like their stuff.

I got all kinds of stuff around here that I like. I don't want to clear my clutter, but like my desk, I'm building a camera for this. It's a cool rig to take out to Death Valley to do some

shooting with. And my desk is cluttered with all kinds of camera stuff. I don't want to get rid of it. I like it. But I do have to push it aside so I can do a podcast.

That's kind of it, right? Kind of clear some space. So that was my plan. Just clear some space. I told everybody I was going to be gone already. I didn't tell them I wasn't going, oh, I'm going to stay in

town. Let's talk anyway. I just stayed. I just did what I did. And then I showed up. Now what happened was I got out of bed that morning and I didn't know what I was going to write. I had just

decided it was going to make space to do it. I got out of bed that morning and I head out the door to walk by dogs and I have an idea pop into my head. So I click record on my watch.

I use just press record app on my watch. I start talking and it starts gathering information. Kept doing it. I kept whatever I said, it just recorded, right?

And then I left it going. It kept running. I went to the gym. I talked to a couple of people. I spent two hours and eight minutes of total recording time, and every single thing I'd

said was recorded. Now, fortunately, I had some really good conversations because I was thinking about writing a book. It was really cool stuff, and these guys

were pushing back on stories and giving me ideas and everything else. It was just fantastic. I was defending every moment of it. Didn't even know I was recording it.

I came home. I went, oops, look, it's still recording, and including me talking to myself on the way home trying to get stuff for the book. So I took it out of that, gave me a transcription. I ran it

through turboscribe.ai and had it format for me with timestamps. So now I had something to really look at it, man, it was cool. I sat down and started writing.

That was the base of everything. The entire base for the outline of the book came in about a two-hour and eight-minute recording. Seven days later, I nearly had the entire book finished,

about 30,000 words. I didn't get smarter in the week. I didn't get more efficient in the week, but I finally got quiet enough to hear what was already inside of me.

I had been thinking about it for a while. I decided to do it. I came upon the idea for the vehicle. I'm not going to tell you what it is now. Once I got the idea, I just needed space.

And I was in a panic because I knew I was going to get busy afterwards. I knew I'd be traveling some. I knew very likely I would not get another seven-day stint

for me to be able to sit down and just do this. One lesson I learned from this was that in the future, I'll probably schedule a week or two at a time out of town in a mountain cabin someplace just writing.

Because I saw what happened. The lesson, your best work, is it is not hiding from you. It frankly is waiting behind your calendar. That wonderful Google calendar you use all the time.

All the stuff you want to do, that little side hustle you ought to build, that business. Investments you want to make, working on your relationship, getting to know your kids better, all that stuff.

It's literally hiding behind your calendar. And if you really want to get real with this, the calendar usually represents people, its appointments. That's what it should represent, not a to-do list.

If everything you want to do is hiding behind the calendar, what is it actually hiding behind? It's hiding behind your boss, hiding behind your clients.

It's all the stuff you have to do that is not allowing you to get to do what you want to do. I teach this all the time, but I had that big lesson myself .

So you know the big thing here that really, really turned me around on this when I got done with this? Nobody missed me. Nobody missed me. And yeah, they shouldn't because I was a responsible guy.

I arranged that I would be gone. And I was also responsible. I didn't post anything anywhere. I, for all intents, I was just gone. All those obligations.

We protect like they're kind of like they're holding up the roof of our house, right? But still the world kept spinning around me. It just kept on going.

And what was I doing? I was sitting here writing. I made the space for it. I skipped the vacation and I pushed myself forward. So now I'm still pushing forward to the final version one.

I figured it would take me six or eight weeks to do it. My goal was actually have it done by the time my friend C roy started at the Death Valley Run or finished his world

record. Wouldn't that be cool if I could write a book and have it done at the same time he set the record? It's cool in my brain. I don't know if it makes any sense

at all. But what happens is life gets in the way, and I didn't get it. I got busy because I said I would go help him with his thing. There we go. I said, hey, man, I'll come help you with your run and do

the video for you, and it tosses me off from everything else I'm doing. And I knew it would. I knew it's a distraction, but I feel really obligated to go do this.

I feel happy to volunteer to go out and help him set the world record. I want to do it. I need to be there. And yeah, it tosses everything off for a little bit.

I got some airplane time. I can edit on the airplane, okay? So what do we want to do here if you're in this position? I get this is not a self-help thing. This is not a, hey, man, tell me how to fix this, how to

fix that. But I guess I'm talking to a lot of people right now who are in the same spot as I was that day, and I live and breathe in that spot all the time.

So if I'm breaking through and telling you, it's because I broke through. I'm not going to lie to you. What you need is a dense day of discovery, like I have.

You need one wide-open day. Clear the deck. One wide-open day, like I did. I actually sat down. I didn't even plan it. I cleared the deck and then my brain said, okay, good.

I got some space. Let me talk. Let me move your mouth and get this recorded now fast while it's still here. And then all I did was come in and transcribe it and sit

down in front of the computer and figure it out. And I fought with it for about six hours. That's about all the time I have for deep work. I can do about six hours work of straight nonstop work,

really, really deep. Not sure writing a book is deep work. There's a lot of crafting in that. But anyway, about six hours later, I had kind of a workable

outline. Not a big fan of doing an outline first. Sometimes the outline, I know all the writer coaches will say, do your outline, then just write. Write your book.

I've just found that sometimes you just sit down and kind of toss some things on the table, start working it, and the outline kind of shows up. It's like the title of your book

also shows up along the way. I've got a title for it. It showed up about halfway through the book. No, I won't tell it to you, but you've heard me say it before.

One day, one wide open day, it can produce more in that day than months and months of work. Creativity fits in cracks. I believe in that, That you can build up to that one day just by gathering

notes and keeping notes and keeping stuff, which is what I had done. I kept all kinds of ideas, and eventually they just kind of dumped out of me. But it took one day to put it down on paper.

So I'm out of town right now, and you're hearing this. I'm practicing what I preach. Yep, I am. I'm going to disappear a little bit, have some thinking

time, probably be sitting in the middle of the desert. Imagine me sitting in the middle of the desert at 115 degrees with my Starlink and with my Wi-Fi connection and with my computer and my S

crivener editing my book. Nobody to bug me because they really can't get a hold of me . Hmm. What are you waiting for, guys? Can't skip my vacation. Can't do that.

You know what? I don't care how tired you are. I don't care how much you need a vacation. You skip a vacation for something you really want in your life,

you'll have more energy than you ever thought was even possible. Well, all right. Let me get out of here tomorrow, swagger.