Why Take a Vacation
And why I let Neon pick my pics
Despite warnings from the Onion’s Report: Average American Worker Replaced Within 10 Minutes Of Taking Vacation, I boldy decided to take a vacation in Greece this summer.
When I fell onto the airplane in New York after a jampacked week of customer meetings, on the back of a hectic few months of product releases, financings, onboarding new team members, and press announcements, I literally felt like I could not squeeze another tiny thought into my brain. And yet by magic, when I touched down in San Francisco a mere 2 weeks later I floated off the plane, light and airy.
It’s popular now in startups to have unlimited vacation policies; nobody is counting the number of days you spend out of the office as long as you hit your milestones. My sense is the opposite is true. When no one is counting, people take fewer vacation days.
I jotted down 3 reasons why I think we all need vacations — unplugged.
1. Lighten the Cognitive Load. There is a critical chapter in Scaling Excellence by Robert Sutton and Huggy Rao that highlights the serious dangers and missed opportunities which result from constantly having too much on your mind. Using time off the grid to reflect and put space between yourself and your daily activities allows you to better assess what is really important.
2. Read. I never want to make the same mistake twice. The more you read, the more you learn from other people’s experiences. I took the opportunity during my vacation to catch up and read The Hard Things about Hard Things, Ben Horowitz’s (not so new now) book.
3. Invest time in friends and family. They are the ones that will be there for you in the hard times. Put simply: you will not get through without them. Spending time away from the office allows you to reconnect with friends and family in ways that a quick call or a late night dinner don’t.
No matter how relaxed I was when I got back, I realized the world does not stop just because you do. I needed to dive straight back in, so of course I had zero time to sort through the hundreds of photos I had taken while I was away.
So, I let Neon’s image selection algorithms pick for me.
It’s the first time that we used Neon Core, our model of the human brain, designed to extract emotionally engaging frames from video, on photographs.
I was pleasantly surprised to see the pics Neon picked.
I was also pleasantly surprised to see the pics Neon did not pick.
Stay tuned to find out how my Neon vacation pics maps to likes and retweets!
