Well hello there.

My last day at SDL was the end of November and since then I’ve enjoyed unplugging through the holidays. More than anything, not having to answer emails for the past month has been incredibly liberating. At first there was a brief phase of withdrawal, feeling too disconnected, but that quickly passed. Now, I dread having to get back into the email cycle. Note that for the next possible venture.

I’ve listened to some interesting pitches from start ups and I’m definitely keeping my eyes open for the right idea. However, I’m not yet ready to jump into another venture. I’m going to Montpellier, France for a couple of months to further unwind and consider different business plans. Some have asked why not Hawaii or somewhere warmer? Well, I’m not much of a beach person and I love how the French enjoy their days. I crave that right now.

With some of the extra time and given that I’m at a new cross road, I also took the time to list out and stack rank my top 50 most memorable moments (events) in my life. I then categorized these experiences into four group: Family, Career, School/Sport, Exploration. By weighting these experiences, I came up with the impact score of Career 29%, Family 27%, School/Sport 22%, Exploration 22%. The total number of actual events were Exploration (15), Career (14), Family (11), School/Sport (10).

What does this mean? Who knows. I guess I’ve been most engaged with my career and family but have a relatively balanced life given my interests (impact) in School/Sport and Exploration. I suspect moving forward family, exploration and career will continue to my most influential experiences, perhaps in that order.

The other useful part of this self-indulgent exercise was putting names of people to each of these experiences to understand who most intensify my best life experiences. Life is short, I want to be more focused on what and who will make my life richer moving forward.