The Next Chapter...

As most of you know by now, my last day at work is March 31st. Vocus has been very generous to me, and I appreciate the opportunity here and the great friends i have made in the last 3.5 years.

I have gotten the question at least 50 times already as to what I'm going to next, where I'm going to work, and why i would even consider quitting my job at such a young age (28), so i thought the first blog post in my new adventure would be a good place to address it. As i've told many of you before, i think that blogs are the absolute best form of communication for this type of thing, because they are the least intrusive. If you want to read it when you are bored or feel like checking in, that's great. If not, no worries...i won't bother you with email blasts, texts, or phone calls.

To be honest, i don't have a defined plan of what the next steps will be. Some days i want to work with dogs, others i want to work at a hedge fund, and other times i want to move somewhere warm and work on an organic farm. The one thing I'm certain of is that i don't want to focus the prime years of my life on saving for retirement since I'm certainly not smart enough to predict if I'll even make it to that point or when the "retirement" time should be. How much money is really enough to live comfortably and never work again? Is it $10,000, $100,000, $10 million? I don't know the answer. I am certain though that I would really hate to get run over one day on the way to work by a bus on the beltway because i was rushing to get to my cubicle for some conference call that i didn't even want to be on. I figure now is a great time to experience some things that I've always wanted to do, because money can be taken away, the gift of health can change at any time, but real life experiences can be remembered and shared for the rest of a lifetime. I definately don't have as much money as you might think, and certinaly not as much as i should hve after making a number of extremely poor finanical decisions the last few years in both the stock market and in housing. Instead of letting that get me down though and trying to save back up to get back all i've lost, i view it as kind of a sign that now is the time to move on and try something different, gain a new perspecitve on life, meet new people, see different parts of the world, and possibly even find a new career path that excites me at the moment.

Most of us spend so much time at our jobs that they become a large part of our identity. For some people their job is the majority of their life... they gossip about it with co-workers after hours, may have a significant financial interest in their company, and get depressed with just the thought of loosing their position. I have to admit, that I feel very safe and secure here at Vocus. Its hard to walk away from a place where you have so many friends, a guaranteed paycheck, a great boss, and everything else. The longer i stay though without trying anything new, the harder it gets to make a transition and explore the next chapter in my life. I want to be careful not to get trapped forever in any place because there are so many interesting things out there in the world worth exploring I'm sure...the majority of which I'm almost certainly not even aware of yet.

On April 20th I'm leaving for Amsterdam. After a few days there, I'm heading over to Germany to stay with my cousins who have lived there their whole lives. After a couple days there, I'll go back to Amsterdam for a day or so before flying to Israel to stay for a little over a week with my sister-in-law Dayna before flying home on May 5. On May 22nd I'm flying to Costa Rica for a week.

I'll try to post things during traveling to stay in touch, and depending on the level of interest in the blog, maybe I'll keep it going afterward. I'm looking forward to reading your comments.