Stefan Sagmeister‘s TED talk is a fun 20 minutes. He’s a creative designer whose practice of taking one-year sabbaticals every seven years is refreshing and probably pretty practical, if you plan for it:

The key is that his sabbaticals are about two things. First, they’re about professional and personal development. It’s not a one year vacation. Second, they’re a way to stagger retirement over a lifetime.

“Everything we designed in the seven years following the first sabbatical,” he says, “had originated in that [first] year.” Great visions take enormous amounts of time, energy, and iteration to made a reality. What Sagmeister’s touching on, I think, relates to the distinction between a vocation and a career—between a perceived calling in life and straightforward wage-earning.