Sabbatical Therapy

jonrawlinson via Compfight cc

For nearly six months I’d been planning to take some serious time off – and finally from 1st November, I took a break from my more-than-full-time quest at the National Entrepreneurship Network. I’ve now been gone a month and have still another to go, but reckoned might be as good a time as any to take stock. It has been a busy and hectic month – yet both exhilarating, fulfilling and neither as boring as others feared nor as stressful it threatened to be. The only regret I have is that I didn’t do this a lot sooner.

In this last month, I got the following accomplished

• Learnt more about college applications and essays than I’d ever want to and shared some insights with others and helped my twelfth grader think about her options – I can’t say I got more accomplished but this was the hardest thing I did.
• Read at least three books about Deccan history – absolutely fascinating period between the fall of the Pandyas in the 11th century and the rise of the Bahamani and Vijayanagar kingdoms and their eventual downfall in the 16th century. Still reading – all preparatory to my first historical fiction that’s brewing.
• Enjoyed attending three Carnatic concerts by my wife Chitra, including the prep, the recording and figuring things about her website. Barely scratched the surface – much work remains. Caught several more by others with mom who was visiting including discovering old tapes.
• Kicked off the Gratitude series – acknowledging, celebrating and thanking mentors and friends, who have helped m in the journey so far. Got ten of 30 planned completed. Again work for December all lined up.
• Outlined – okay, draft outlined – one book – Selling Your Startup – that I hope to get written in the upcoming quarter and kicked off another book project with a prospective co-author, about Technology M&A in India. You’ll certainly hear about both in coming weeks and months.
• Got a couple of travel pieces written with Chitra and already had one on the Sun Temple in Modhera, Gujarat published in the Hindu Sunday travel section.
• Learned how to use two new pieces of software – Scrivener (for writing) and Unity (for game building) – still early days and a long way to go, but it’s always fun to learn new stuff.
• As one of the organizers of our 30th Reunion chased my old college mates with varying degrees of success and good deal of fun & discovery – yep, good ol’ ITBHU in Christmas 2014 – this is going to be a great deal of fun.
• Yep, finally rewarded myself with the new Amazon Kindle and putting it through the paces. Now all I got to do is publish some of my stuff for the Kindle!

Not bad, for kicking back and not working!