Quarterly Week Off the Grid - Brad Feld at TEDxBoulder

Brad Feld discusses the importance of taking time off, one week in 12, with no phones, no computers, no technology for recharging our batteries, rebalancing our lives and nurturing our significant relationships.

So tonight I’m gonna tell you
about an invention of mine

that saved my second marriage,

and also has increased the quality
of my life by at least 10x.

And for all of the partners
in the crowd,

and all of the people in the crowd
who have partners,

I encourage you to
embrace this invention.

(Laughter)

We all work very hard.

These are some of our TechStars friends
from this year’s graduating class

after three or four all-nighters.

We also live hard.

For those of you that are climbers, this is
one of the rocks in Eldorado Canyon.

And we all enjoy this kind of thing
in the beautiful Boulder that we live in.

We are much much too connected.

I did a tweet about at 9 o’clock
from my house in Homer, Alaska,

a couple of weeks ago,
saying I need a picture

of somebody who’s got too many
electronic devices in their world.

And I got twenty back
within about fifteen minutes.

Life is really complicated.

We spend all of this time dealing with all of this
crazy shit that none of us really understands,

or maybe we think we understand it
but we don’t really understand it.

And it’s moving faster
and faster all the time.

We already heard this once tonight

when we were learning about
how to do social media better.

But relationships are hard.

I married my high school girlfriend
when I was 21.

(Laughter)

Now, I was legally old enough to drink,

but I should not have been legally
old enough to get married.

On my honeymoon, three days in,
I realized that I had made a mistake.

About a year afterwords I was
that dude in the middle. (Laughter)

I should've been the dude on the left,
but I was the dude in the middle.

Relationships are hard.

I failed once. I got divorced
a couple years later.

[Welcome to Fail, Population: You]
(Laughter)

In 2001,

I almost failed again.

For those of you that have been
involved in technology companies

in and around the internet bubble,

you know what the pace of things
were like in 1999, 2000, 2001.

I was embroiled in
the midst of all of that,

and on a trip to some friends
over the weekend

in Rhode Island, I met Amy in Boston

after I was in New York and
she flew to Boston to meet me,

and I rent -- had a driver drive us both
down to the Rhode Island,

which is all of an hour and a half,
so why I had a driver drive us, I've no idea.

I spent entire time in the car
on the phone.

We got to our friends' house at
about 4 o’clock in the afternoon.

I proceeded to spend the next
couple of hours on the phone

as she hang out with our two friends.

We went out to dinner.

At dinner, we were having
a nice dinner,

and about 30 minutes into
dinner I get a phone call,

and I come back to dinner
in time for dessert.

And at the end of that we go
back to our friends' house.

No, I did not get laid that night.

That was not on the agenda.
(Laughter)

Amy turned to me as we got into bed,
and she said "I’m done."

And I said to her, "Yeah, men, this was
a tough week and tired. Just a lot of work."

And she said, "No no no. I’m done.

You are not a very good roommate."

And I realized that I was almost there.

So, being a nerd and an engineer,

I decided to apply some
engineering thinking to this.

And I said to Amy, "Look, I’m not done
and you are not really done."

She wasn't mad, but she wasn’t really done.

This is, you know, 2001.

I said, "Let’s just talk this weekend
and come up with something.

Will you do me a favor?
Just give me some rules."

That’s what I really need.
I just need a bunch of rules.

I’m gonna talk to you
about one of them,

which is something we do, which we call
"one week per quarter off the grid."

Since 2001 almost 40 times,

once a quarter, Amy and I go
off the grid and totally disconnect.

We go to the airport on Saturday morning,
I hand her my telephone.

She turns it off.

She often tries to drop it in between
where you board the plane.

She puts it in her pocket.

We go, we sit down,
I get it back the following Saturday.

No phone. No email. No schedule.

The only person on the planet who knows
how to find me is my assistant Kelly.

And she tries never
to find me that week.

During this -- Hang on one second.

(Laughter)

"Hey, sweetie!"
(Laughter)

"No I’m talking to those people at
that TED thing I was doing." (Laughter)

"I’ll be home in a bit. Not too long.
I love you. Yeah, OK."

(Whistles) (Applause)

That’s the telephone version
of golden retriever eyes.

Once we all have faced time running
it'll be a little different.

These are my dogs looking at Amy

while I'm taking a picture of them.

For all of you out there that are men,

remember this picture.
(Laughter)

This is what your spouse
or partner wants.

(Laughter) (Applause) (Cheers)

I sleep a lot.

I wear a thing on my head when I sleep
so I know how much I sleep.

I got a 137. (Laughter)

It's about 12 and a half hours of sleep

one day on vacation.

I read a lot.

If you look at my Shelfari list, you'll see that
I don’t just read serious business books.

I read all kinds of different things.

And I encourage all of you when you
go on your week off the grid to do that.

I exercise.
(Laughter)

One can have goals, right?
(Laughter)

I relax a lot.

We spend a lot of the time
that week together.

We don’t do adventure vacations.

We just spend time together.

And that leads to
a lot of adult entertainment.

[CENSORED]
(Laughter)

Now, I fail at this
about once every eight times.

And this is important.

I like the notion of mastering failure.

You have to embrace the fact that
we're human, and we will fail, and that’s OK.

And because of this algorithm,

Amy and I have agreed that it's OK
for me to fail once every eight times.

There's no damage asociated with that.

And in fact, what it does is
it makes the next seven times,

until I'm ready to fail again,
that much better.

So recognize that this algorithm has
some failure in it and that’s OK.

But when it works,
it's priceless.

And I find that over
the last ten years or so,

the one week a quarter
that I take off and totally disconnect,

allows me to do all the other things
that I do, with intensity that I do,

the other 11 weeks a quarter.

I've had numerous people
over the years tell me,

"Oh, I can’t do that."

"That’s so hard", whatever,
and it’s just bullshit.

It’s totally doable.

And it’ll change your life.
I encourage everybody in this room

to try it and see how it feels.

Thanks and good night!
(Applause)