RIP Ray Liotta. Enshrined in movie greatness for Goodfellas, but delivered memorable moving performances in Blow, Field of Dreams, No Escape, and so many others. Piercing eyes. Deep voice. Grateful for the opportunity to have watched his work.
4,994 karma · joined July 18, 2011
http://baugues.com/
Parenting is a continual exercise in evaluating tradeoffs. With all due respect, folks don't know what they'll do as a parent until they're a parent.
My wife and I quit our jobs to travel Europe and work on farms (helpx.net). I set up a personal blog to write about our experience and realized that, given ample free time, my mind gravitated towards writing, coding, and photography for fun.
When we returned home, I eventually went back to work with my old employer, but with a new perspective. I had already quit, knew what the world looked like outside the office, and was no longer afraid to get fired. Paradoxically, this made me more valuable to the company -- I acted bolder and spoke more truth. I took on a new role, coding again after a hiatus, writing personally and professionally, and started speaking at tech conferences. This mix of activities led me to join Twilio as a developer evangelist in 2014.
When we quit our jobs to travel I was making ~$65k/year. When I joined Twilio a few years later, my starting salary was $120k/year.
I share the professional benefit first because the short-term professional/financial costs are the most concerning when considering extended travel. But, in a way that never would have made sense on paper, that trip catalyzed a trajectory shift that significantly increased my earning potential and professional satisfaction.
There were also a bunch personal benefits. We lived for two weeks with a family that had young kids and realized that we'd probably enjoy being parents. We now have two of our own, and we do. We saw how folks in Barcelona, Paris, and Stuttgart raised families in small apartments and rethought the necessity of the suburban homes we grew up in. We now live in Brooklyn. On a thirty-cow organic dairy farm in the mountains of northern Spain, we drank milk still warm from the udder for breakfast and cooked dinner with ingredients we harvested from the field. We eat differently now. During six weeks in Turkey, we accepted spontaneous invitations for tea in people's homes and offers for rides while walking dirt roads during rainstorms -- hospitality extended to us by Muslim strangers unlike anything we'd experienced before. My wife and I were raised in Evangelical churches.
We saw beautiful sights, experienced new cultures, challenged our perspectives, made lifelong friends, etc. All the cliches you think are going to happen when traveling the world. And we also saw tremendous professional growth, precisely because we took a break from our careers to gave our minds and hearts the space and time to explore.