My Extreme Plan to Slow Down for 2 Weeks

I’m about to repeat one of the most exciting, nerve-racking, and terrifying experiences of my life.

A year ago, I flew to a small town in Mexico, where I lived for 7 weeks.

The goal was simple.

Get as fluent in Spanish as possible.

The method?

Study Spanish with a tutor 6 hours a day and live with a family that doesn’t know English.

Needless to say, it was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done in my life.

Now, a little more than a year later, I’m going back, but this time for a very different set of reasons. Let me explain.

Journal entry: November 4, 2024

I’m halfway through Spanish school, and you could say I’m staying busy. If I’ve learned anything, it’s that learning another language is incredibly difficult and not intuitive at all. But perhaps what has been impressed on me the most is the importance of maintaining a constant awareness of my pace.

The Latino culture has helped me do this perhaps better than anything I know. There are many pockets of time where everything slows down, which helps keep me in balance. Without this balance, I don’t know how I’d survive.

Present day

Now I’m back in Mexico, this time for 2 weeks. And yes, I’m reliving one of the most exciting, nerve-racking, and terrifying experiences of my life. I’m living with the same family, surrounding myself with a different language, in a different culture. But this time, it’s for very different reasons. To detach, recharge, and slow down.

Seems counter-intuitive, throwing myself into an incredibly stretching environment to slow down.

I think they knew I was coming because the first day I woke up here, there was an internet and cell phone service blackout. No data, no service, no internet for the whole town. It lasted a full 24 hours. I wrote about it in this note.

It was awesome.

Slightly inconvenient using smoke signals, pero así es la vida.

2 lessons I’m learning here in Mexico

I’m reminded of something that Tim Ferriss says about what he calls the “new rich.” He says that instead of working hard and then taking a vacation, the “new rich” learn to weave mini-vacations into their days and weeks. This allows them to live quite a different life because they constantly have more margin than the average person.

So, instead of working like mad for a year so they can take 15 days off and spend $637 going to Mexico, they spend that on themselves throughout the entire year. They take a day here, an afternoon there, and some would argue they actually get more done in a year because of this pace.

As I learned the first time I was here, this works very well. Without these mini rest periods, there’s no way I would have been able to learn Spanish. I’m learning that it’s a powerful combination to have gaps in your day where you know everything is going to slow down. What that looks like for each person is different. I talk about how I do this in my own life here.

The second thing I’m learning here is the importance of saying yes to opportunities. Such as when I said “yes” to riding along in an ambulance for a 24-hour shift, despite not having any training. That was an experience.