4 Vacation Tips From Aruba

Anthony Lamacchia: Good morning everyone, I’m coming to you from Palm Beach, Aruba, right here in the Happy Island. Anthony Lamacchia here to talk to you about some vacation tips. I’m walking the beach, just finished my work out and heading over to get my wife’s coffee, actually. I was thinking I should share some tips with you all. First and foremost, the biggest thing that I want to mention is the fact that basically, sticking with your consistent pattern. Some people might hear this and think I’m completely crazy which is probably partly true but to me, it works really well.

I’ll just share what I do and you take the pieces that you want to. One is, I stick with the same pattern. We have an awesome recruiting coach, a guy by the name of John Chaplack. He did a video back at the first of the year and he talked about how life is not a grind. Monday morning is not a grind if you do the same thing every day. I know he lives that way and I’ve lived that way for years. I get up at the same time every morning and do the same thing every morning. Work for like an hour and then workout for about 45 minutes. I do that pretty much seven days a week, usually weeks on end. Every few weeks I’ll slack and get up later because I’ll be out the night before or something like that.

The point I’m getting at is staying consistent. Some people might hear that and say, “You’re a lunatic.” If I’m on vacation, I don’t want to be getting up early. Keep in mind, if you do it every single day, it doesn’t feel like you’re doing something that’s difficult, it doesn’t feel like that at all. That’s tip number one for me, it doesn’t mean I’m right, it’s just how I do it. I did it every single day, got up, check my emails, I can’t say I worked for 45 minutes, I probably worked for 10 or 15, checked emails, sent voice notes. By the way, another big tip here, huge tip. My executive assistant taught me this a year and a half ago. Voice note, that’s an app on your phone.

When I wanted her or someone at the office to do something or if I had a thought in the middle of the day, I record a voice note, one, two or three minutes long, email it to them. Now I’m not interrupting them, they’re not having to answer the phone and be annoyed by me. Instead, they listen to the voice note as they want to, they can hit pause when they want to, they can hit replay, whatever. We use all day, every day at our company.

The other thing that I want to mention is letting go. When you’re the leader, you have to do some letting go. I’m fortunate to have a leadership team, most of them have been with me for many years. My letting go period and sometimes letting them sink or making a decision that I wouldn’t have made was more a few years back. Now it’s much more simple. That’s another one that you have to do. If you want to groom your people to lead, you have to let them make some decisions. When you occasionally see one that you are like, “I wouldn’t have did that,” you’ve got to let them sink or let it happen because they’ll swim, they’ll catch on. That’s another one that I wanted to mention.

The other thing with respect to vacation, since we’re talking of vacation tips, it’s just prior planning. The planning that you put into it in advance, the discussions that you have with your staff, with your team, whoever it may be, your company, will make your vacation easier. There should be no reason you can’t take a vacation, you should not be on your phone all day, every day, there’s really just no reason for that. Anyway, those are my tips for the week, who knows, I might be back in touch by the end of the week but I just wanted to mention those things because they were fresh on my mind. All right, have a great day everyone, thank you.