Every seven years, I close it for one year

to pursue

some little experiments, things that

are always difficult to accomplish

during the regular working year.

In that year, we are not available

for any of our clients.

We are totally closed.

And as you can imagine,

it is a lovely and very energetic time.

I originally had opened the studio in New York

to combine my two loves, music and design.

And we created videos and packaging

for many musicians that you know,

and for even more that you've never heard of.

As I realized, just like with many many things in my life

that I actually love,

I adapt to it.

And I get, over time, bored by them.

And for sure, in our case,

our work started to look the same.

You see here a glass eye in a die cut of a book.

Quite the similar idea, then, a perfume packaged

in a book, in a die cut.

So I decided to close it down for one year.

Also is the knowledge that

right now we spend about

in the first 25 years of our lives learning,

then there is another 40 years

that's really reserved for working.

And then tacked on at the end of it

are about 15 years for retirement.

And I thought it might be helpful

to basically cut off five of those retirement years

and intersperse them in between those working years.

(Applause)

That's clearly enjoyable for myself.

But probably even more important is

that the work that comes out of these years

flows back into the company

and into society at large,

rather than just benefiting a grandchild or two.

There is a fellow TEDster who spoke two years ago,

Jonathan Haidt,

who defined his work into three different levels.

And they rang very true for me.

I can see my work as a job. I do it for money.

I likely already look forward to the weekend on Thursdays.

And I probably will need a hobby as a leveling mechanism.

In a career I'm definitely more engaged.

But at the same time, there will be periods when I think

is all that really hard work really worth my while?

While in the third one, in the calling,

very much likely I would do it also

if I wouldn't be financially compensated for it.

I am not a religious person myself,

but I did look for nature.

I had spent my first sabbatical in New York City.

Looked for something different for the second one.

Europe and the U.S. didn't really feel enticing

because I knew them too well. So Asia it was.

The most beautiful landscapes I had seen in Asia

were Sri Lanka and Bali.

Sri Lanka still had the civil war going on, so Bali it was.

It's a wonderful, very craft-oriented society.

I arrived there in September 2008,

and pretty much started to work right away.

There is wonderful inspiration coming from the area itself.

However the first thing that I needed was

mosquito repellent typography

because they were definitely around heavily.

And then I needed some sort of way

to be able to get back to all the wild dogs

that surround my house,

and attacked me during my morning walks.

So we created this series of 99 portraits on tee shirts.

Every single dog on one tee shirt.

As a little retaliation

with a just ever so slightly menacing message

(Laughter)

on the back of the shirt.

(Laughter)

Just before I left New York

I decided I could actually renovate my studio.

And then just leave it all to them.

And I don't have to do anything.

So I looked for furniture.

And it turned out that

all the furniture that I really liked,

I couldn't afford.

And all the stuff I could afford, I didn't like.

So one of the things that we pursued in Bali

was pieces of furniture.

This one, of course, still works with the wild dogs.

It's not quite finished yet.

And I think by the time this lamp came about,

(Laughter)

I had finally made peace with those dogs.

(Laughter)

Then there is a coffee table. I also did a coffee table.

It's called Be Here Now.

It includes 330 compasses.

And we had custom espresso cups made

that hide a magnet inside,

and make those compasses go crazy,

always centering on them.

Then this is a fairly talkative, verbose kind of chair.

I also started meditating for the first time in my life in Bali.

And at the same time, I'm extremely aware

how boring it is to hear about other people's happinesses.

So I will not really go too far into it.

Many of you will know this TEDster,

Danny Gilbert, whose book, actually,

I got it through the TED book club.

I think it took me four years

to finally read it, while on sabbatical.

And I was pleased to see

that he actually wrote the book while he was on sabbatical.

And I'll show you a couple of people

that did well by pursuing sabbaticals.

This is Ferran Adria. Many people think

he is right now the best chef in the world

with his restaurant north of Barcelona, El Bulli.

His restaurant is open seven months every year.

He closes it down for five months

to experiment with a full kitchen staff.

His latest numbers are fairly impressive.

He can seat, throughout the year,

he can seat 8,000 people.

And he has 2.2 million requests for reservations.

If I look at my cycle, seven years, one year sabbatical,

it's 12.5 percent of my time.

And if I look at companies that are actually more successful than mine,

3M since the 1930s

is giving all their engineers

15 percent to pursue whatever they want.

There is some good successes.

Scotch tape came out of this program,

as well as Art Fry developed

sticky notes from during his personal time for 3M.

Google, of course, very famously

gives 20 percent for their software engineers

to pursue their own personal projects.

Anybody in here has actually ever conducted a sabbatical?

That's about five percent of everybody.

So I'm not sure if you saw your neighbor putting their hand up.

Talk to them about if it was successful or not.

I've found that

finding out about what I'm going to like in the future,

my very best way is talk to people

who have actually done it

much better than myself envisioning it.

When I had the idea of doing one,

the process was I made the decision and I put it into my daily planner book.

And then I told as many, many people as I possibly could about it

so that there was no way that I could chicken out later on.

(Laughter)

In the beginning, on the first sabbatical,

it was rather disastrous.

I had thought that I should do this without any plan,

that this vacuum of time somehow would

be wonderful and enticing

for idea generation. It was not.

I just, without a plan, I just reacted

to little requests, not work requests,

those I all said no to, but other little requests.

Sending mail to Japanese design magazines and things like that.

So I became my own intern.

(Laughter)

And I very quickly

made a list of the things I was interested in,

put them in a hierarchy, divided them into chunks of time

and then made a plan, very much like in grade school.

What does it say here? Monday, 8 to 9: story writing;

9 to 10: future thinking.