Startup Life Balance and My Mexican Vacation

Medano Beach - Cabo San Lucas, Mexico

Over the past eight months, I’ve been juggling extremely demanding startup work at Storify, exceptionally fulfilling teaching assignments at Hack Reactor, General Assembly and Marakana, and writing my books and webapplog posts. By applying Yerkes–Dodson law, stress helped me to boost my productivity and I was happier than ever. However, in the last few weeks I slightly overestimated my capacity to endure the fast-paced startup life. Happily, I was able to take two weeks off and to spend them in Los Cabos, Baja California, Mexico.

The famous Los Cabos Arch at the Lands End
The famous Los Cabos Arch at the Lands End

A passive quiet leisure time seemed like a great way to reflect, and to fill up my mental tanks for the future. I opted for Los Cabos due to its proximity to the Bay Area, convenience and friendliness of the local people. Indeed, there are plenty of English-speaking staff and my favorite chain stores, like Starbucks, Ruth’s Steakhouse, OXXO, Mega, Walmart and of course (not so favorite but still familiar) McDonald’s, and Burger King.

By the end of the vacation, I’d read a few good books and stumbled upon some amazingly fantastic podcasts about entrepreneurship:

I also started reading Smashing Node.js. It’s a very approachable beginner’s Node.js book. Nevertheless, I found there some gems such as answers to why we do things the way we do them at Storify, because the tech stack described in the book and JavaScript patterns are astonishingly similar to the ones that we have.

Pirate style party cruise ship
Pirate style party cruise ship

At the end of the break, I learned an important lesson that we need to be more realistic about our present (but unrealistic about our future), and step aside for a bit to take a look at a bigger picture. In addition, I pledged to myself to prioritize my life and the side-projects I undertake.

Author: Azat

Techies, entrepreneur, 20+ years in tech/IT/software/web development expert: NodeJS, JavaScript, MongoDB, Ruby on Rails, PHP, SQL, HTML, CSS. 500 Startups (batch Fall 2011) alumnus. http://azat.co http://github.com/azat-co

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