It’s hard to leave a place that you love. I’ve really enjoyed the past few years and all the things we’ve poured ourselves into: work, apartment, daily routines, friends, and learning as much as we can about the city.
When we were making the decision to leave San Francisco, we thought about the common reasons for traveling, like pushing your boundaries, expanding your perspective, learning more about yourself, building your confidence, or feeling a newfound sense of freedom. But even beyond these, we felt there were other compelling reasons to go. With two weeks left before we leave, we wanted to share some of the things we’re specifically hoping to get out of this trip.
Pour yourself into something that’s your own.
Planning a trip is like a giant side project. You design your itinerary, prioritize what you need, and constantly work toward a larger goal. Everything you do reflects a part of you. I think it’s important to spend time creating something of your own, no matter what that thing is. It’s like paying rent vs. owning a home. While it’s flexible and comfortable to live in a temporary environment, it can be more rewarding to know your monthly payments are going toward an investment that’s your own.
We wanted to create Commonplays so we could grow in new ways—for example, we have to learn how to design a logo, create a newsletter, and share our content with others. We’ve been balancing a lot of major life changes (leaving a job, moving out of an apartment and city, and preparing for a long-term trip), and through this experience, we’ve learned the potential of how much we can really get done in a day. This patch of land on the Internet is our way to explore and document our growth. We want to naturally let ourselves be drawn to what we’re interested in and find patterns in our taste that we’ve never seen before. We want to create multiple forms of content and experiment with our voice.
Stop “chain-smoking.”
In high school and college, we always had summer and winter breaks to get out of the thick of things. However, once we started work, these extended periods of time to take a step back and get perspective became more rare. Even on vacation, it was hard to enter a new space of mind, especially in a limited time frame. Our minds were constantly on, with only fragments of time to really think.
Zooming out, we’ve also seen how easy it is to move forward on a set path with few breaks in between, and we wanted to make sure we were being intentional about the direction we were going in our careers. It’s important for us to fully reset, reflect, and refresh and we think it’ll help us move forward in our careers with new inspiration, passion, and energy.
Recognize compounding investment.
My economics teacher in high school loved to emphasize this point: the earlier you start investing in your retirement account, the more money you’ll have when you’re older. It all compounds, and the key factor for success is how early you start.
We feel like education is the same—right now, as we invest in ourselves through new skills and experiences, it’ll be more worth it than doing so later on. We’ll gain new ideas and cultural understanding and we can carry this creative education with us for the rest of our lives. Plus, a lot of companies were born from ideas gained from travel.
Build on our parents’ risk.
Growing up with immigrant parents who valued “safe” decisions with money, career, and education, we always thought our parents were risk averse.
However, we recently realized that it’s quite the opposite—they took the biggest risk of all by coming to America, with little in their pockets. Their motivation was to build a solid foundation for their children and enable them to have more possibilities. Thinking about this, we were reminded to dream big and take a leap of faith like our parents. We’re standing on the shoulders of giants, and we don’t want to waste that opportunity.
Live minimally.
We frequently reflect on whether we’re living by our values and moving in the right direction, and we’ve been influenced a lot by recent conversations around essentialism, deep work and flow, and learning to pare things down.
This doesn’t just apply to physical possessions, but also to how we spend our time and mental energy. We’re excited by the opportunity to really simplify what we have and design our ideal days —it’ll be a growing experience to prioritize based on all of the constraints that travel brings.
Incubate.
When Steve Jobs left Apple, he said, “the heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter into one of the most creative periods of my life.”
We really liked this notion of starting fresh, questioning expectations and just experimenting with who we want to be. We talk a lot about being “freshmen” again, or living like tourists in our own city, and now that will be our default setting. It’ll be refreshing to enter new environments and make time to explore what we want instead of what we’re used to doing.
It’ll also help us live a more coherent life, where we can fully align how we feel with what we want to do.