by Ben Feder
“I can’t control my schedule,” I said to her. “I did actually sign up for this, and I want to see it through. I want to succeed.”
“When was the last time you were home on time for dinner? Do you think our kids don’t notice you’re never around? Do you think they don’t notice you on a conference call when you’re supposedly watching their ball game?” Of course she was right. I committed to being home for dinner more, even though I suspected it was only a stopgap.
I returned from work one evening to find Sam sequestered as usual in his room doing homework. I cracked open his bedroom door and poked my head in. “Hey, Sam.” He barely looked up from his math problems and returned a teenage grunt.
Victoria called the kids to dinner. Nobody came. It took a few more calls for the other three kids to finally arrive in age order: first Oliver, then Rita and Nava. Only a final, angry summons convinced Sam to shuffle out from the barricade of his bedroom.
Victoria was in the kitchen spooning rice from the cooker onto a serving platter. I asked my kids, “Did anything strange or wonderful happen today?” Nava, in kindergarten, came up with a story, but Sam was lost in his thoughts.
When Victoria joined us, Sam grunted, “Chicken.” I assumed he wanted someone to pass him the chicken.
“A verb, Sam,” Victoria said. “We need a verb.”
I knew Sam was going through a normal teenage phase, but still I felt my frustration rise. I lectured him to take responsibility for his family relationships but was saddened by my perceived loss of our father-son connection. When dinner ended and Victoria and I were washing up, I turned to her and said, “Four more years of this and he’s out of the house and off to college. It’s nonstop work in his high school, and it’s nonstop work for me. By the time he’s gone, instead of building a relationship with him, I’ll have spent years building a company for some promise of a reward that seems always to be receding into the future.”
Victoria saw the situation similarly. “It’s not just Sam. Your relationship with your other kids is suffering too. Especially Nava.”
Nava was an avid reader even at a young age. On weekends, she had no time for or interest in me. When I wanted to play with her, she glared at me and then stuck her nose in her book. Between her being lost in her thoughts and my responding to the demands of my job, I was missing her childhood.
Rita, nine, was in a tough, catty, preteen social environment that deeply pained her. Nothing extreme ever happened; it could be as subtle as an eye roll or as blatant as a rejection at the lunch table. But Rita tended to process feelings on a deeper level than most. She often returned from school tearful or belligerent before she revealed what had happened that day. She was being emotionally bullied and needed my help.
I was less concerned about my relationship with Oliver. He had a tight group of friends, twelve-year-old boys who had been together since kindergarten. He was past his formative years by the time I started at Take-Two but not so old that I feared that, like Sam, his departure from home was imminent.
Still, my day-to-day experiences had gradually diverged from those of my family. We were no longer leading the same lives. When I came home with stories of travel, new cultures, or discussions with men and women who were highly effective in the world, my family was increasingly uninterested. And I sensed it acutely.
One evening, I returned home late. Exhausted from the day, I sank down into our red sofa and rested my feet on the coffee table. The younger kids were already asleep. Victoria came into the room and closed the door. She had just returned from a weekend retreat with women working in business and philanthropy. One of them had recently spent a year in Barcelona. Victoria had been gripped by the thought of it and spent the entire weekend peppering her friend with questions and squeezing out of her every bit of advice and information that she could. I listened to Victoria talk about her friend traveling abroad with her family. It was something Victoria and I had fantasized about on and off throughout our marriage.
Victoria fell silent, grabbed my hand, and gave me a piercing look. “Let’s go.” She then used a word I had thought was reserved for academics and librarians: “Let’s take a sabbatical.”
Dog-tired, I immediately focused on the negative impact a sabbatical could have on the career I’d worked so hard to develop. But I took a beat and considered the possibility. Having poured so much of myself into getting where I was, the thought of suddenly pulling myself out of the game terrified me. We talked more about how we could make the money work and deal with the kids’ schooling.
I reflected on my time at Take-Two. We had achieved great initial success. We had taken the company from death’s door to one of the best positions in the industry. None of it was easy. No organization hums along perfectly, firing on all cylinders all the time. Each is thorny in its own way, and working through those organizational challenges was part of the fun of leadership. But it was intense work for a long time, and it took its toll.
Now, as Victoria knew, battle fatigue was setting in, and somehow I couldn’t shake it. In the past, my cure for exhaustion had never been rest but rededication. I would recommit to the cause and lean into the machine. Lately, though, when I dug deep for that commitment, I was coming up empty.
The caffeine that fueled my days and the wine that buoyed my evenings also interrupted my sleep, and insomnia was becoming chronic. I could not help feeling the emotional and physical costs of personal sacrifices made for the greater good, for the mission on which I was so focused and in which I so believed. I was getting tired of the endless striving, the ambition, and the desire for more. More wanting seemed to lead only to more wanting. I wondered if I could simply declare victory and move on.
“I need some time,” I said to Victoria.
Over the years, I learned that complex decisions, which required me to simultaneously consider many variables, were better made after they marinated in the back of my mind rather than being dealt with directly, rationally, and immediately.
I was not alone. In one experiment, researchers provided participant groups complex and detailed information about four different apartments and asked them to choose the best one. The groups were allowed to devote varying amounts of time and attention to the problem. One group in particular had their conscious thoughts deliberately diverted by engaging in a task, like playing anagrams, designed for that purpose. That group performed better than undistracted groups, regardless of the amount of time the other groups had to consider the problem. In other words, often the best way to resolve complex situations is to find a distraction, something else to focus on. While it may not feel like it, the gears of the problem-solving mind crank away in the background even while the conscious mind is focused elsewhere. There was even evidence suggesting that attempts to verbalize or otherwise articulate the reasons we make decisions can lead to biases and poor decision-making.
I emailed Gloria, an executive coach I knew, and invited her to my Greenwich Village office for a few sessions. I needed a confidential sounding board to check my sanity.
“If I took a sabbatical, would I destroy my career?”
Gloria sat across my blond pinewood desk. Nine-foot-tall windows were at my back and an exposed redbrick wall at my right. The radiator banged and hissed as if to punctuate our conversation. The furniture layout was a throwback to an old-school style of management: with me behind the desk in a high-backed chair and whomever I was talking to sitting across from me in one of two low-slung chairs, the design made it clear who the boss was.
“I’ve coached lots of senior executives and have seen a lot of management situations.” Gloria was at least twenty years my senior. “I know you have a lot at stake here. It’s true that the career risks are high. But to use a worn-out phrase, are you living to work or working to live?”
I sensed she understood that something about my situation was different from her usual assignments. Executives often engaged coaches when they wanted to grow or change or when they understood they were ge
tting in their own way as they pushed to advance their careers.
“I’ve advised some terrific executives,” she said, “guys who go from one great job to an even better one. They’re constantly achieving and rising. Do you know what happens to those people?”
“Tell me.”
“They drop dead of a heart attack at fifty-five.”
That hit me. My own father suffered that fate at sixty-one. I was determined not to let it happen to me or to my children as long as I could help it. It was one of the main reasons I exercised like crazy and did everything I could to manage my risk factors.
I’d recently seen my doctor for a physical checkup. “What’s with this?” She poked my midsection, where stress-related weight gain typically appears in men. My blood pressure, which had always been low, was approaching levels that indicated hypertension. While speaking to my doctor, I thought of Bob, a friend I had lost to cancer at the age of forty-five. Who knew when this was all going to end?
I said to Gloria, “The board is really going to be pissed off.”
“The board is going to do what the board’s going to do. You need to do this for you. You need to work up the courage.”
If I were to leave, lots of people with a stake in my decision—my partners, board directors, and key employees—were not going to be happy with me. Gloria encouraged me to see past pleasing them. She asked me to find the confidence that there would be a career after a sabbatical.
“We tend to live our lives conditionally,” she said. “When such and such happens, then I’ll do this or that. But the conditions are never quite right. Maybe when we’re dead, everything will fall into place. But why wait for the situation to ripen to perfection? Why not act now?”
I added it up. Taking sabbatical would require significant sacrifice. It would mean giving up a leadership position in a high-profile company, forfeiting material compensation, and potentially separating from a business partnership that had been supportive and meaningful to me. It could even mean separating from my business partner, Strauss, who had been a mentor for many years and someone with whom I felt I could accomplish great things.
Recently, though, our relationship had become tense and fraught for reasons I couldn’t quite explain. Perhaps it was like the moment when a marriage becomes untenable—the parties involved don’t know why; they simply know the magic is gone. I knew in the depths of my being, in the way that one simply knows something to be true, that I needed to shake things up. And yet I was ambivalent. I wanted in the worst way for it to work.
Then one day on my walk home, I glanced up at another man, about my age, walking toward me. He, like me, was well dressed and obviously had a career that paid well and probably a family at home in an affluent neighborhood like mine. Our eyes met for a moment. He looked tense, exhausted, and distracted, and he seemed detached from the conversation he was having on his phone. My doppelgänger trudged past, out of sight, a mere blip in my day, but at that moment, I froze. I felt I could not take another step.
This is where it happens. Where husbands and fathers turn into men they never intended to be. They follow their ambitions, their careers, and their deluded views of what it means to succeed. Somewhere along the way, these well-meaning family men and woman eventually realize that they have neglected key relationships that feed them, relationships that are critical to their well-being. And if that realization comes late in their lives, the time may have passed to do anything about it. Children will have grown, and much water will have flowed under the bridge of their spousal relationships. If I didn’t choose the path, the path would choose me.
On a Sunday morning, when Victoria and I lingered over breakfast tea, I said, “I’m in.”
“Really?”
“Truly.”
“Really, really?”
“Truly, truly.”
As the words came out of my mouth, I had some lingering doubt but didn’t express it. When it came to decision-making, I had learned that second-guessing was a paralyzing affliction. Besides, I knew how Victoria hated when I equivocated. I committed. We committed. And when we did, we felt a soaring elation. We were set free by the sheer imagining of what we were about to do. We basked in the weightlessness of our decision. When doubts plagued me, I did not waver. If I needed to leave something behind at work to make this sabbatical happen, it was probably time to go anyway. I felt that initial commitment as pure liberty.
A few nights later, I turned to Victoria. “So. Where do you want to go?”
Meanwhile, it had occurred to me that I was not the only one who needed a change. In the aftermath of 9/11, Victoria had heard a calling to build a Jewish community in our neighborhood. We lived only ten blocks from Ground Zero, and Victoria was struck by the lack of support from the larger Jewish community. The church groups were out in droves, but the Jewish community was unfocused, unorganized, and, frankly, absent.
Victoria founded a group called Jewish Community Project (JCP), whose mission was to create a modern community life that was rich in values, culture, and tradition for the families and individuals living in Lower Manhattan. The purpose of JCP was to create a network of support that would be available to families in good times and in more challenging situations, such as the aftermath of 9/11. It started in our living room but grew to become one of the city’s prominent preschool programs and adult education learning centers. She had achieved what she had set out to do, working not only as president of the board but also, at times, as de facto executive director. For the rest of the board, this was a happy situation: a competent, committed, full-time, volunteer CEO. They hoped and perhaps assumed she would stay on forever. But Victoria needed a break and was ready for a change.
Victoria, like me, was achievement oriented, and we saw our kids setting off on the same path. They went to a Jewish prep school in Manhattan. They focused so relentlessly on their grades and competed so hard through academic achievement that we instituted a family prohibition against sharing grades at the dinner table. Sam especially was deeply vested in his own success at school. He was doing well and had a personality that chased incentives. Put a piece of cheese at the end of the labyrinth and he’d find his way through to it. Every pat on the back for academic performance was encouragement for him to achieve more. Victoria and I began to realize that a product of all that so-called achievement was a craving for yet more achievement and more success, a constant feeding that knew no end. We knew that while achievement contributed to a sense of well-being, there had to be something more. It was possibly driving out a lighter, fun-oriented part of his personality. We needed him to realize there is more to be gained from a well-rounded approach to studies, athletics, and life in general.
Victoria and I had a growing sense that we were stuck in a mindless trap, trying to achieve goals that were somehow external to ourselves: advancing our careers, making more than we needed, eyeing New York apartments that were bigger or nicer than ours even though ours was perfectly sufficient and, we thought, beautiful. Striving for those external goals came at the expense of relationships, family, and time to reflect. What happened to the fantasy we had when we were younger of traveling together as a family? I was tunneling headlong into the job, deeper and deeper, feeding my burning desire to succeed. It was only in moments of rare clarity that I thought I had arrived at a crossroads.
We had no sabbatical destination in mind, but the entire planet was open to us. She pulled up an extra chair, and we sat side by side looking at our computer monitor, the suspended orb of Google Earth slowly spinning on the screen. With a click of the mouse, we flew around the world as if on a magic carpet, ferreting out nooks of the globe that held promise. We checked out Catalonia’s Costa Brava and Brazil’s tech hub and party island city, Florianópolis. We scrolled southeast to the Lake District in Chile, then north to the rainforests and coasts of Costa Rica and Mexico’s artist town, San Miguel de Allende. We rotated the virtual earth to Hangzhou in China, a picturesque city south of Shanghai, and numerous d
estinations in the vast regions of Asia. But no destination seemed to jump from the screen as the obvious right one.
Over the next few weeks, we kept returning to the internet, searching now not for the ultimate answer but for information that would help us decide. We sought out families that had gone on sabbatical and read their blogs. Some had traveled around the globe as vagabonds; others stayed in one location. Some had taken a full year, others only a few months. Some spent their time in a developing country, others in Europe.
At one point we considered staying in perpetual motion and traveling around the world for a year. Victoria put together an itinerary: start in Africa, work our way through the south of India, then on to Cambodia, and from there to Bali, Indonesia, to spend our Passover holiday. From there we would travel north to Vietnam, China, and Japan. I thought the whole affair sounded exhausting, especially since constant travel was something from which I was trying to escape. And it would mean homeschooling our children, something that appealed in theory but, I knew, would fall apart in practice.
Despite the promise held by the enormously expansive prospect of taking off for an extended period, we were coming up empty. Bouncing around was not a good way to go about things. A lesson from my college rowing days sprang to mind. Navigating in a long shell is difficult. Coxswains steer straight by using a point: an object directly ahead of the boat at which to aim to keep the boat going in a straight line. We needed a focal point.
“We need to start with goals or we’re never going to get anywhere,” Victoria said. Earlier in her career, she had been a management consultant and now brought her discipline to bear. She pulled out a yellow legal pad and pen. We batted around ideas of what we wanted from our time away. When we were done, we looked at the page filled with circles, exclamation points, and underlining.
