Timeout For This Important Message

My friend Ed has just returned from a couple of weeks of holidaying in Egypt. He said it was a great vacation with a full schedule of things to see and do, although as he puts it, “My wife sets up the tour and the things we’re going to see and I just go along.” He says it was a very memorable holiday.

“This is where that James Bond movie was filmed,” Ed exclaimed at the start of a tour of one of the pyramids. The tour guide gave him a rather dismissing look – a way of suggesting that what they were about to see was considered history and culture more than a movie location.

This time though, upon returning from vacation, Ed came back with some stomach troubles. The last vacation he came back with little spider bites.

“It’s always something,” Ed shakes his head with disbelief.

It got me to thinking that summer vacations are approaching quickly so how do you maximize your vacation in order to have a balance of fun and rest? My friend, business associate and mentor, Marty Park, has also just returned from a vacation to Costa Rica. He wrote an article about that very thing on his Blog

In his Blog post, he challenges you to think about what a vacation is really for and how to get the most from it. “In order to maximize your vacation, keep it simple,” Marty suggests. Go ahead and read his Blog post.

Marty is one of those guys that anyone in business could admire: he runs five companies, looks after his home, car as well as rental properties, has a lot of friends, does yoga, plays hockey, has a good sized extended family, piano lessons, etc. He was also recognized as one of Calgary’s Top 40 Under 40 for business success. He conducts training programs and keynote presentations in sales and business growth and is currently working on completing his first book.

“Sometimes it's a race to see if I can fill all the hours in a week,” he says.

Marty knows what it takes to grow a business as evidenced by the fact that he is successfully growing all of his businesses. He writes his Blog entries on business growth as well as a second Blog on how to get more from each day.

Although my area of expertise is attitude in employee engagement, service leadership and corporate safety, Marty’s expertise is business – specifically growth. When Marty speaks, you should listen. He speaks from a depth of knowledge and experience. Many times he and I have had conversations and those conversations have caused me to re-think some of my business strategies – every single one of them successfully I might add.

So when someone as busy as Marty says you need to take a vacation, you should be paying attention. Read his Blog posts. You’ll find good information for not just your own vacation but your business as well.

Attitude Adjustment: Stop listening to the people who say you can’t do it and start paying a lot of attention to the people who are doing it. Make sure you’re reading the books from people who are at the top of their game and not those who hypothesize what it takes to get there. Who is in your circle of influence? As speaker/philosopher Charlie “Tremendous” Jones once said, "You are the same today that you are going to be in five years from now except for two things: the people with whom you associate and the books you read."