104: You Can Be Ambitious and Still Want Peace: Lessons From a Sabbatical

The McClain Method Podcast Episode 104: You Can Be Ambitious and Still Want Peace: Lessons From a Sabbatical Host: John McClain

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One morning I went for a walk on the beach. All of the hotels that are on the beach are of course right next to each other, and all of the workers come out and they'll start setting up the loungers on the beach. So I saw this worker on the beach setting up the loungers, and he was singing and he was smiling while he worked, just as he was putting out lawn chairs.

Y'all, I don't know what happened. I started crying. I did. Not like a bawl, you know, cry, but more like a few tears came out. It would be very easy for me to turn him into some neat little lesson about a simple life, and that's not fair to him. That's not what this is about.

But what I do know is what happened inside of me. I watched somebody doing an ordinary task, singing to himself at sunrise, doing his work, and something inside of me noticed that. There was no stage, there were no lights, there was nobody applauding this guy.

There was nothing about that moment that would have counted as an achievement, let's say, on a resume. But it felt completely alive. I think I had spent so many years training myself to notice achievement that I had gotten less practice at noticing aliveness. Is that even a word? It is now. But Thailand started bringing that back to me, and I'm so, so grateful.

Hey, y'all. You're listening to The McClain Method Podcast, episode number 104.

Hey friends, I'm John McClain, interior designer, author, and founder of The McClain Method. Around here, we talk about the business behind the beautiful rooms: pricing, clients, marketing, systems, AI, and all the things nobody really teaches us when we're learning how to become designers. Because creating beautiful spaces is one thing. Building a business that supports the life you actually want, that's what we're here for.

Welcome to The McClain Method.

Hey, everybody. Welcome back to The McClain Method Podcast. As always, I'm so happy to have you here. Now, if you've been following me a little bit and kind of seeing what I've been doing, you've probably been noticing that I have not been in the United States. That is because I was in Thailand, and if you missed some of those conversations, I was there on a sabbatical.

I went for about almost three months total. It was supposed to be longer, but I got a little homesick and decided to come back. So I'm back now and readjusting to the United States, and just being back in a different time zone and not taking, you know, public transportation everywhere. This is really a little bit jolting to be back, but I'm so happy to be back.

I missed my husband, I missed my house, I missed my kitchen, and I missed our dog, and so it's really, really nice to be back. I will say this: I've been home from Thailand long enough to know that the trip has started to feel a little strange in my memory. Unreal. That's not the right word. More like one of those chapters of your life that was so different from your normal routine that once you're back home, you almost have to remind yourself that you actually lived it, if that makes sense.

I was there for almost three months, and the original plan was longer, as I said, and we'll get to that. But changing the plan turned out to be part of what I learned when I was there. So before I left, I had this feeling that Thailand was going to tell me something. It was on my brain. I was just going to go there to figure out what it was trying to tell me.

There was just this pull to be there for an extended period of time. Not a vacation where every hour is planned and where you come home needing a vacation from your vacation.

I wanted enough time to settle in, get bored a little, work a little, walk around, see the sights, eat good food, think a lot, which I did, travel more in the country, sit still, yes, and even see what came when my normal life wasn't in front of me. Part of me expected some huge revelation, I'm not going to lie.

Maybe I would suddenly know exactly what the next ten years of my life were supposed to look like. Or maybe there would be a temple, a sunset, a monk, a bowl of noodles, I don't know. And then lightning would strike, and I would say, "Ah, there it is. There it is. That's the reason." But that did not happen.

And I'm happy. Thank God it didn't happen, because it probably would have been unbearable to listen to me talk about it. So what did happen was a little quieter. While I was there, I started using AI sort of like a journal. I would use it as my journal, and I would just open up and speak into that.

I would come back from a day somewhere that I went out and enjoyed, and I would just kind of speak about what I had noticed, the feelings I had. Sometimes it was something big. Other times it was a thought that I couldn't quite understand yet, but I wanted to document it. Those were days when I would basically say, "Okay, here's what happened. Why do I think this is bothering me?" Or, "I love this, but I also feel guilty about this. What's going on there?" Those conversations became a record of the trip. But they also became a record of what was changing inside of me.

Looking back through all of those notes now, those daily notes that I would take, those downloads, the biggest lesson wasn't one big revelation. It was that more than one thing can be true at the same time. This showed up over and over again. It was the biggest lesson that I have learned, I would say.

One of the things I wanted from Thailand was solitude. That's important, because solitude and loneliness, by the way, are not the same thing. So my husband stayed in the United States for work most of the trip. He came over to visit me for my birthday for about ten days, and that was something we had talked through and planned.

He had his work and the life here, and I had this very strong desire to spend meaningful time in Thailand, where he is from, by the way. His mom is Thai. Neither one of us had to pretend to want what the other person wanted, and I loved that.

There was something very grown up, honestly, about allowing both things to be true without making one of them wrong. Being alone for that long was also different from being alone for a weekend, I will say that. At first, there is this novelty around it, right? You're exploring, you get to eat whatever you want, go wherever you want, and it's very easy because nobody cares if you change your mind three times before lunch, which I usually did.

After a while, though, the noise settles down a bit, and that's when you start hearing yourself. Some days I loved being alone. I did. There were long walks through the beautiful parks there when I did not have to explain anything to anybody. I could stop because a building caught my eye, or turn down a street because I was curious, or sit somewhere much longer than I had originally intended, or go back home simply because I felt finished for the day.

At other times, I missed Pete terribly. And the thing is, neither feeling canceled out the other. I could deeply enjoy being by myself and still want my husband sitting across from me at dinner. That was one of the first contradictions that Thailand made me stop trying to solve. Again, two things can be true.

Before this trip, though, I think I sometimes treated contradictory feelings like they were a problem. If I miss home, does that mean I shouldn't be in Thailand? Or when I'm happy alone, does that mean that something is wrong with wanting companionship?

If I love this place in Thailand, why am I thinking about LA and the United States? There was nothing to fix. That's what I learned. I just had more than one true feeling. Ah, aha moment. That may sound kind of obvious, but it became a very, very big lesson for me that just followed me around the entire time that I was there.

Now, another thing that I noticed was how quickly I could turn an experience into an assignment. You probably know this too as a business person. This is apparently one of my big talents. Hmm. Give me a beautiful country and enough time, and I will somehow create a performance review for myself.

It's so bad. Had I seen enough? Was I wasting today? Should I go to another temple that I haven't seen, or did I need to get out of the condo that I was in? Was I working too much, or had I somehow also found a way to worry about resting correctly? Is there a way to rest correctly? There's nothing like taking a sabbatical and then wondering whether you're achieving at sabbatical.

It's so meta. At one point, I had been doing a lot of tourist things. There are lots of tours, as you know, crowds, vans that I traveled in, people, sights, and all of the movement that comes with trying to experience a place. One day, I realized that I did not want another day of that. I wanted to be introspective, and I needed to be introspective.

There was an excursion that I had already paid for, and the old version of me would have thought, "Well, you paid for it. You should go." But the money was not the point. That little voice saying, "You should," that is the point.

So I didn't go. And guess what? Nothing terrible happened. Thailand did not revoke my visa because I failed to maximize the day, and I didn't become less grateful for being there. What I got instead was a day that actually felt like mine. That sounds like such a tiny decision, I know. But it stayed with me, because I realized how often I confuse being grateful with obligation.

I'm confusing gratitude with obligation. You can be grateful for an opportunity without squeezing every single drop out of it. A beautiful place, I learned, does not require you to see every beautiful thing. You just can't. I'm in LA. I haven't seen everything in LA, and I didn't see everything in Thailand.

But sometimes the right use of a day is to leave some space in it to figure it out on your own. So I walked a lot in Thailand, like twenty thousand steps a day, I would say, and lost like twenty pounds too. And walking has always done something to my brain. Movement tends to quiet one part of me enough that the other part can finally speak, if that makes sense.

And Bangkok is obviously not a silent place, which makes this kind of funny. There are cars and trains and people and smells and food and signs and buildings and heat and rain and about twelve thousand things that could be happening around you. Still, I found a kind of internal quiet while I was there, which was really important.

I could walk through all of that craziness and somehow pay closer attention to myself. The same thing happened when I left Bangkok for some of my trips. So I went to this place called Kanchanaburi, and there's a place inside of Kanchanaburi called Hellfire Pass. It was both beautiful and emotional, and I won't get into the details of that.

You can look that up. It was a place where prisoners of war were forced to build a railroad in a mountain, literally in a mountain. So they would take their hammers and their chisels, and they would chisel out a path through the mountain. Little by little. It was painful. There were deaths.

They didn't feed them well. It was horrible. And the place is called Hellfire Pass. That was the name that the workers gave it. And I will say, when I went there, it was gorgeous. The grounds were beautiful. The views were beautiful everywhere, but it was also emotional. And there was a place there that's called Siam Point.

And I walked beyond the main area towards Siam Point, and I just remember being struck by the fact that I was surrounded by beauty. It was so gorgeous, y'all. But it was also in a place that connected to so much suffering. So again, two things could exist together. And I even read a story about some of the people who were there, some of the prisoners of war who were working, and they too had that same feeling of being a little contradicted by the fact that they looked around and saw all of this beauty around them in nature, but there were people around them dying, and some of them were in the process of doing that as well. And I guess the best way to say it is, for me, beauty did not erase what happened there. The history did not make the landscape stop being beautiful, and I didn't need to flatten my experience into just one emotion.

That moment made me think about gratitude very differently. Sometimes gratitude gets presented to us like we're supposed to use it to talk ourselves out of discomfort. "Look how lucky you are. Other people have it worse. Just be grateful."

Have you ever said any of those things to yourself? And I don't think that that's what gratitude actually is. At least for me, it isn't anymore. I can be grateful and still hurt at the same time. A person can appreciate what they have and still want something to change. You can recognize the beauty around you, too, without denying the pain that sometimes coexists with it.

Thailand kept putting me in situations where I had to stop choosing just one emotion, and I let the whole experience be a part of my environment there.

So near the end of my trip... I can't tell you everything. I'll probably drop some hints along the way of other places that I visited, because, gosh, I visited so many beautiful places, and just so much gorgeousness around me. From boat rides to floating villas on a gorgeous lake with huge mountains around me.

I was taking a raft ride through rainforests. I saw elephants literally on the side of the road. It was an experience that I will never forget. But near the end of my trip, I decided to go back to one of my favorite places, which is called Koh Samui. And by that point, I was not interested in doing a lot of sightseeing, because I'd already been there before, and I had already been moving around for weeks.

And again, Samui was familiar to me. So my plan was kind of wonderfully boring. Walk on the beach, exercise, eat, relax, maybe write, and let the place that I love fill up my cup without turning it into another itinerary. So one morning I went for a walk on the beach. I did that pretty often. I would get up early and take walks on the beach and just kind of let the day unfold quietly, which was so nice.

And the older I get... I don't know if any of y'all have the same problem, but I tend to wake up super early now. Like, my mornings are waking me up around five or five thirty, and sometimes earlier, and I just go with it, whatever. So one morning around sunrise, I saw one of the workers from the adjacent hotel.

All of the hotels that are on the beach are of course right next to each other, and all of the workers come out and they'll start setting up the loungers on the beach. So I saw this worker on the beach setting up the loungers, and I was just walking, and he was singing and he was smiling while he worked, just as he was putting out lawn chairs.

Y'all, I don't know what happened. I started crying. Not like a bawl, you know, cry, but more like a few tears came out. But even now I can't explain fully why that moment got me, and I also want to be careful with a story like that, because I don't know that man's life, right? Maybe he loves his job.

Maybe he hates it. I don't know. He could have a wonderful family. He could have problems that I don't know about, of course, or he was just simply having a good morning. It would be very easy for me to turn him into some neat little lesson about a simple life, and that's not fair to him. That's not what this is about.

But what I do know is what happened inside of me. That's the part that I can be responsible for. I watched somebody doing an ordinary task, singing to himself at sunrise, doing his work, and something inside of me noticed that. There was no stage, there were no lights, there was nobody applauding this guy.

There was nothing about that moment that would have counted as an achievement, let's say, on a resume, or he was getting no trophy for what he was doing, I guess. But it felt completely alive. It did.

I think I had spent so many years training myself to notice achievement that I had gotten less practice at noticing aliveness. Is that even a word? It is now. But anyway, Thailand started bringing that back to me, and I'm so, so grateful. And that sunrise moment connected to another thought I had while I was away.

Years ago, I had friends, and I kind of judged their lives. I judged them as not being ambitious enough, which was not fair, and I don't love admitting that, but it's really true. In my mind, at the time, ambition meant reaching further. You should want the next thing. Building, moving, expanding, getting somewhere all felt like proof to me that you were doing your life correctly.

Meanwhile, some of my friends went to work. They came home. They had dinner with people they loved. They felt safe. They enjoyed their lives, and they did not seem particularly interested in turning themselves into some big brand. At the time, I thought I understood something that they didn't. Thailand, however, made me wonder whether they understood something that I didn't all along.

Now, I'm not saying that ambition was a mistake. It's not. I am grateful for my ambition and for what's happened to me. Ambition took me from a little town in Georgia to places that I never imagined that I would go. It helped me become a designer, build a company, write a book, teach, speak, and travel, and create a life that would have seemed impossible to this younger version of me, and I don't want to erase any of that.

I guess the question I'm asking at fifty-one, fifty-one, which I turned in Thailand, is whether ambition has to drive every single mile of my trip. Maybe there are seasons when enough really, really is enough. It does not have to be forever, nor does it have to apply to every category. Sometimes enough simply means enough for today.

That's a very different thought for me now than it was years ago, and it hits me on so many different levels now than it did back twenty, twenty-five years ago. So, as I said, I turned fifty-one while I was in Thailand, and Pete flew over for my birthday, and we spent some time together in a town called Hua Hin. H-U-A H-I-N.

Beautiful. There was something about having a birthday there that made the trip feel like more than just travel, and I love that he was there, of course, too. Turning fifty had already started a shift in me. I've talked about that before. And by fifty-one, I could see that that shift was becoming a little less theoretical and more real.

Time feels different to me now. Not in a gloomy, sad way. I'm not sitting around counting down my remaining years. No, quite the opposite. What has changed is my patience for living according to a script, or a list of things that I no longer believe. When you're younger, it can feel like there's some endless time in which you can eventually become yourself. You can spend years chasing an idea of success, years worrying about what people think, I've been there, years waiting until the timing is just right.

Then somewhere along the way, that word "eventually" starts sounding a little less convincing. Because think about it, time is such a privilege and an honor. I don't mean you have to make some dramatic changes because you're getting older. That's not what I'm saying. Because for me it's almost the opposite. I felt less interested in drama, and peace has become more attractive. Peace has become my currency, as has time. A quiet morning matters to me now more than it ever did. Home matters more. Time with my husband and my dog matters more. Hearing Yang Yang snore in the house can feel more like success to me now than something public and impressive.

And that's not because I've stopped caring about achievement. I have not. That part still matters to me as well. I just don't want achievement to be the only language I know how to use when I describe what a good life actually is.

Being away for that long also changed what I thought about "home," and I'm using that in quotes, because home can be anywhere. I had a temporary home in Thailand, many, many different cities, Bangkok being one of them. It wasn't my house in Los Angeles. Most of my things were somewhere else, along with the rest of my normal life.

I didn't travel with a lot, and most of my things were somewhere else, along with kind of the rest of my normal life too. But after a while, I found myself creating routines. I knew where I liked to order food from. There were little things that I reached for every day, familiar walks, train rides, favorite places to sit. Yep, as simple as that sounds. And this sort of rhythm, I guess. And I started to make a pattern of things that I was doing on my own, and that slowly started to appear day after day. It made me realize that home is partly a place, yes, it is, but it is also a little microcosm, if you will, that we create around ourselves. You don't need every object you own to feel grounded.

At the same time, being away made me understand why my actual home matters to me so much, because it does, and I'm happy to be back. Home isn't valuable because of the square footage or even the design. Yes, an interior designer just told you that. What I missed was the life inside of it. My life that was here, and my routines, and my family, and the ordinary familiarity of walking into a room and not thinking about where anything is.

I know it sounds simple, but it really did mean a lot. And there's another contradiction that I brought home. Travel made me appreciate leaving, and it also made me appreciate returning.

Now, I have to talk about work for a minute, because this was absolutely part of the trip, and you probably got emails from me when I was there, and you heard me on podcasts. I had planned to work a couple of hours a day. And yes, some days that did absolutely happen. On other days, my work took over, and two hours became, eh, let's just say a lot more.

There I was in Bangkok with a monitor that I bought in Bangkok, propped up on a kitchen bowl, my reading glasses everywhere, my Thai English keyboard, yes, my coffee, and I had these two little lucky cats that I got from Chinatown. They were sitting on my desk and kind of waving at me. And I kept my computer set to Los Angeles time.

It was very intentional on my part to do that, because I wanted to know where my brain should be when I was working on those things. And this condo was not huge. It was actually very, very tiny, but I had it set up in a very comfortable way for myself.

I had two bowls, I had one fork and some spoons, and I think I had two coffee mugs that I would rotate out. So it just proves that you don't really always have to have a lot. So I'd flown all the way around the world, and apparently I brought John McClain with me.

He would not leave. Like that saying, wherever you go, there you are. Yep, that's true. And at first I felt guilty about that. I would grapple with it.

But there are only so many Buddhas that you can see, and at some point you just crave a little bit of normalcy, which to me felt like work. So another truth showed up while I was there, and this was a little difficult to explain too, but I like my work. I do. Some of the things I am building were genuinely fun for me while I was there.

Teaching is meaningful to me. Creating something useful can absorb me for hours, because I truly enjoy it. I bet you're the same way. I went to Thailand kind of wondering whether I needed to get away from work, and discovered what I really needed was a different relationship with it. What I don't want is for work to own me.

That doesn't mean that work is gone. The trip actually helped me see the difference between those two things. I can now see the difference between the work I choose and work that I resent. That is probably the biggest lesson I'm going to give you in this episode. And yes, the business has to be organized and arranged so that I could leave for that long.

Of course, there was planning. But once I was there, the interesting part wasn't the systems. It was discovering the balance I had created in Thailand, in a different country. It was something I wanted to bring home with me. I don't need Thailand to say that I'm going to protect a certain space in my life.

The original trip was supposed to last around four months. I came home after almost three, as I said. That decision became really one of the most important parts of the whole experience. I kept having this whole "soul over should" thing coming back to me.

Like, what is your soul saying versus what you should do? And I think if we ask ourselves what our soul is saying, are we really listening to that? Or are we listening to what the world is saying that we should do, or this ambition that is saying what we should do? But by the time my trip got toward the end, I had gotten what I needed from the trip, and I was ready to come home. There were still places that I could have gone, like so many places, and things that I could have seen. That was never going to stop. And the visa that I had did not expire. Nobody was forcing me onto the airplane. I just knew. I knew it was time to come home. So I thought about that and realized that a younger version of me might have turned the original four-month plan into some sort of test of my character.

"You said four months, John, so finish four months," right? That's what I was hearing in my head. That's what the old me would have been saying. I could have made staying longer into proof that I was adventurous enough, or independent enough, or brave enough, or committed enough.

But once I saw that, it looked a little ridiculous. The plan was supposed to serve me. I was not meant to serve the plan, so I changed it. Coming home early did not make the trip less meaningful. If anything, it proved one of the things that I had been thinking about the entire time I was there, which is this: freedom includes the freedom to change your mind.

That is one of the freedoms that I have been building my entire life. I thought returning home would be the easy part. It has been wonderful to be back now for a month or so, but the adjustment was a little more complicated than I had expected.

Pete had been living his normal day-to-day life while I had built a completely different routine on the other side of the world. When I came home, I remember feeling like I had jumped back into part of his life, right? Which is kind of strange. That didn't mean anything was wrong between us.

It meant that three months is long enough for two people to develop separate rhythms. I had become very used to my independence, and suddenly I was back in our shared space, with our routines and our schedules and our normal lives. So there was a little readjustment. And at the same time, I also missed Thailand.

So that part surprised me too. I had been so ready to come home, and then suddenly I got home, and I missed the place that I had just chosen to leave. I remember when I got onto the plane, and again, I had made the clear decision to leave, but I sat there, and I just became so emotional, and tears started welling up in my eyes. And I was not sad, but it was a huge moment of gratefulness, and already missing the place that had given me so much.

Once again, more than one thing can be true. I could be thrilled to be home, and I could still miss Thailand. Home could feel right while Thailand could still pull at me, and it's beautiful if you allow those things to happen. Choosing to return did not invalidate at all the part of me that was loving being away.

I'm beginning to think that a lot of adulthood is learning to stop demanding that one truth kill the other one, or that it should kill the other one. That is not the way it works. I think before the trip, I imagined I would come back a different person.

Maybe that's what we secretly hope for when we take a big trip. I don't know. I did. We want the dramatic, you know, before-and-after reveal that we as designers love so much. And I thought, "Oh, I'm going to leave as one John, and I'll return as this enlightened Thailand John," apparently. He would probably meditate at sunrise and drink less coffee and know the meaning of life. And unfortunately, y'all, he never showed up.

But I came home as myself. Nice hotels still make me happy. A great restaurant still makes me very, very happy. And my coffee consumption, well, it remains none of your business. I'm just kidding. I still drink a lot, a lot of coffee, and I still work too long when I get excited about something. There are plenty of things about me that Thailand did not magically fix.

I trust some of my own signals much, much more now. If I need quietness, I notice it sooner. When an old "should" starts speaking to me, I am more likely to question where that should came from. If two feelings seem to contradict each other, I don't immediately force myself to choose one.

There's also less urgency to turn every desire into an achievement, and that realization was a huge one for me.

A lot of the conversations I was having in my AI journals while I was there, as I mentioned, kept circling around this same kind of tension that we're talking about. What do I actually want? And with that came the harder question: what do I think I'm supposed to want? Hmm. And those are not always the same answer.

I'm sure you would find that true if you asked yourself. I had already been thinking about this idea that, as I said before, I call soul over should, but Thailand gave it a much more lived meaning for me. So to me, soul over should does not mean doing whatever you feel like doing without considering anybody else.

That would be absolutely ridiculous. We all have commitments. Of course other people matter, and of course your finances matter. You have to have money. It matters. It's the real world. Your health matters. Consequences matter. Everything has a consequence. So the point is not to become selfish. What I'm interested in is the unexamined should.

It might be a rule that you're following even though you can't even remember ever signing off on it or agreeing to it. That's how I was. Maybe the ambition belonged to a younger version of you. An obligation kept hanging around simply because you carried it for so long. And sometimes the belief underneath all of it is that changing your mind might feel to you like you've failed.

Thailand kept giving me very small opportunities to notice my own shoulds. Sometimes it was deciding not to go somewhere, and another time it would be allowing myself to work because I actually wanted to. Later on, it meant admitting that I was ready to come home.

None of those decisions looked like a revolutionary moment in my life, but together, all as a package, they felt like something that I wanted to practice for my life. So if I had to put the whole trip into one idea, here is what that probably is. More than one thing can be true. My friend, you can be ambitious, and you can still want peace.

A person can love their spouse but still need solitude. Gratitude can exist beside a desire for change, and you might adore your work but still need distance from it. A homebody like myself can love being halfway around the world, and someone can be successful and still question what success is for.

You can make the "right" decision and later make a completely different one.

Those are not failures of being unclear. They're part of being a whole person, actually. And I've spent a lot of my life trying to make myself easier to explain. Here's who I am. This is what I want. And then I would name the goal, and then that comes the next thing, and the next thing.

But Thailand made me less interested in becoming that organized, if you will. I don't think that people are that tidy. At fifty-one, I'm certainly not. There are parts of me that want adventure and parts that want my own sofa. One side wants to make the next big thing, and another side wishes everybody would leave me alone for just the afternoon.

I can want to be seen and also want privacy at the same time. Some days I am deeply confident, and on another day I question every single thing and every decision that I make. That doesn't mean that I'm lost. On the opposite side of that, it actually means that I'm alive.

So what did I bring home from Thailand, other than some beautiful candles and some soaps and some lovely spray scents that I can spray into the air? On any trip that I take, I don't get some big souvenir.

I get a token of something that will remind me of the trip that I can actually use, and that we can use. So that has become coasters for me, and so I brought some lovely coasters home from Thailand, and I use those on our coffee table every day. But what else did I bring home? It was not some grand answer of life and figuring everything out.

What I brought home was more permission. Permission to want something without immediately having to explain it. There is also more room now to enjoy solitude without treating it like a rejection of the fact that I love other people, because I do love people, but I do like solitude. I have become more comfortable changing the plan when the plan stops making sense.

And there is more appreciation now for ordinary moments that would never make an accomplishment list for anybody. I also came back knowing that my ambition is still here. It absolutely is, but it no longer gets to make every decision for me. Most of all, y'all, I returned with a stronger sense that a life can hold contradictions without needing to fix or resolve all of them, and that has been very, very comforting to me.

But what else did I bring home? It was not some grand answer of life and figuring everything out. You may never want to spend three months in Thailand, and honestly, you may hear this episode and think, "Well, John, that sounds completely exhausting." Fair. Thailand, or a trip anywhere, is not the lesson. The question is, what happens when your normal life gets quiet enough for you to hear what you've been talking over top of?

Maybe you don't even need to go anywhere. Your version could happen on a walk, when you open yourself up. It might happen during a weekend when you don't schedule anything and you have that free time. Perhaps it happens when you finally admit that something that you have been chasing isn't really that interesting to you anymore.

For somebody else, that realization might be that you actually do want the bigger thing that you've been afraid to pursue. Again, there's no preferred answer here. The answer that belongs to you is really all that matters. If you're a designer listening to this, yes, your business is part of that, because the business takes up a huge portion of your life.

We all know this, but still, you are not only your business. You are much, much more. There's something I want to say very clearly. Your revenue is not your identity. A project that you love and are ready to have published somewhere is not your life. The number of employees that you have is not a measure of how meaningful your existence is.

You, yes you, are a whole person who also happens to own a company. And if the company supports the life you want, fantastic. I am there for that. But when it prevents you from living any part of the life that you really value, I want you to pay close attention to that too.

Looking back at that journal I kept on AI while I was away, I don't think the most useful question was, what did Thailand teach me? Actually, a better one was, what did I finally have enough space to notice? That is what kept popping up every day. I noticed that solitude can feel wonderful and still make me miss Pete.

Work can energize me when I choose it. An ordinary stranger seen at sunrise can move me more than something designed to impress me. A day with no sightseeing and no Buddhas and no temples can be exactly the right use of a day in Thailand. And coming home early can also be the completion of a trip, not the failure of one.

I also notice how much less interested I am in performing a life for other people, but that's still a work in progress. That's just the way I am. I don't think you arrive at some magical age where you stop caring what anybody thinks. It just doesn't happen. But I care differently now. I guess that's the different part of it.

The life that I live matters more to me than how it looks to other people from the outside, and I think that is the real change that I've made. It's not about less ambition, because I still have ambitions. And it's not about giving everything up, and it certainly isn't escaping to Thailand.

I met someone there who was like, "What are you escaping from?" And I was like, "I don't know. Maybe I am." This was early on. But what I loved was becoming more interested in whether my days actually felt like my own days. So that's the question I'll leave you with. Do your days feel like yours? Not every minute. That's not possible, of course. That's never realistic. We all have responsibilities and commitments, with work and family and things we simply have to do every day.

I'm asking you about the overall kind of shape of your life. Can you recognize yourself in it? Are there parts that you've been living because you chose them, or because someone along the way told you that you should, and decided it for you? You don't have to answer that today, by the way. And Thailand didn't answer everything for me either.

What it did do was give me enough quiet to start asking myself better questions. And maybe that's enough. Maybe that's the entire reason I went, and I don't know that I will ever know. But for now, what I do know is it's enough. I hope this episode has helped you today.

I know it was a little different than our normal jump-into-the-business episodes, but I really had this on my heart and my brain, and I wanted to share with you what I felt while I was away, the transitions that I've made in my own life, and how I'm going to apply the lessons I've learned there.

And again, there weren't these big dramatic moments, but those bigger lessons were in the moments of quietness. And I hope that you find some time to listen to the quietness yourself and ask yourself what kind of life you're really looking to lead. All right?

Until next time, I will see you on The McClain Method Podcast. Thank you for being here.

Hey friend, thank you for spending this time with me. I hope something we talked about today clicked for you. Maybe you got a new idea, or just a different way of looking at something in your business. And if you know another business owner who could also use that, send this episode their way. And remember, you don't have to change everything overnight. Just take one thing that you learned today and put it to work for you.

For more tools, resources, and practical help, you can visit me at mcclainmethod.com. And until next time, keep doing what you love, and let's build a business that lets you enjoy it. Beautiful design, better business. I'll see you next time.