Vacation contributions

I do not have long vacations because long vacations drive me crazy. First, it disrupts me from my usual pattern of activities and secondly, it makes me lose my voice if I rest my throat too long. But this is the time of the year when I really look forward to a vacation taken with the entire family. This tradition has never left us, and all the kids (grown-ups now) would not want to miss them too.

But vacations are also the important time for me when I update lessons and prepare new things to share with my audiences in the coming New Year. When jet lag hits me, that is when I start banging my fingers on the keyboard to update and upgrade my lessons while the rest of the family is sleeping. While my mind may dislike the idea that vacations make me idle the reverse is oftentimes true. It is that time of the year when I slow down on speaking and speeds up in learning and lesson preparation. People who do not understand may view this as violating “vacation” but creative people would know that these are precious times when vacations turn out to be very productive.

As a matter of fact, I have collected materials over the years that would show that many breakthrough inventions come from very prominent personalities when they were on their vacation.

After World War II, a Russian doctor in frozen Siberia saw lots of patients with horrid compound gunshot fractures--the kind that, at the time, often led to amputations. So, the coolly creative doc, Gavriil Abramovich Llizarov, devised a frame using metal rings and taut wires to pull bones into alignment and hold them together while they healed. Once, Dr. Llizarov was called upon to use his whatchamacallit to help an amputee lengthen a short stump. He cut the stumped bone in half, intending to graft more bone between the two parts, and used his device to gradually pull the bone fragments not together but apart. Then, he went on vacation for a month and absent-mindedly forgot about his patient!

Uh oh. Malpractice? No, something was about to happen!

When he returned, Dr. Llizarov was astounded to find that new bone had grown to fill the gap. It took years for the medical establishment to stop calling him a quack, but Dr. Llizarov prevailed. Doctors use both his technique and his apparatus to heal and lengthen bones today, growing one millimeter per day. Thank God for vacations.

We can thank a doctor’s vacation for penicillin, too. In 1928, Dr. Alexander Fleming was researching ways to combat staph infections at St. Mary’s Hospital in London when he had a momentous idea: that he really needed a break!

So he went away for a few days, refreshed himself, and returned--only to find that some green mold had grown on one of his culture plates and that all the nasty staph bacteria were keeping their distance from it. Fleming had discovered penicillin--or, at least, penicillin had discovered Fleming. But that isn’t the end of the story. It took two biochemists, Howard Florey and Ernst Chain, and the pressure of World War II to turn the mold into a usable antibiotic. Fleming, Florey  and Chain shared the 1945 Nobel Prize in medicine for their work.

I call these vacation contributions. Vacations are not a waste of time, it is the important moment to recharge, to relax the mind and amazingly, once the mind is relaxed creative ideas begin to surface. We just need to be aware of it and to capture the ideas when it happens.

Vacations with my family is my way of saying, “Guys, your dad and mum work so hard the entire year but that is because we want to celebrate God’s goodness together because this family is the reason why we labor and save hard, and now it’s time to play and celebrate hard.”

Perhaps this is the reason why I have been doing more than 300 talks, trainings and seminars for the last 12 years or so and none of my kids would ever complain that we never have enough time for them.

Vacations have its contributions so don’t waste them. Use vacations to peacefully enjoy each other’s company without rush or agitation and create memories that they will treasure forever. For if not for this then, what is the higher purpose for work anyway?

(Mark your calendar, as Francis Kong runs his highly acclaimed Level Up Leadership seminar-workshop on Jan. 16-17, 2018 at Seda Hotel, BGC. For registration and inquiries contact April at +63928-559-1798 or register online at www.levelupleadership.ph)