n October 2002, when I sold my third company, BridgePath, I was faced with the decision about what to do next. After five years of working 90-hour weeks to build my enterprise software firm, I knew that I wasn’t ready to jump right back in to another company.Yet a sabbatical, with its image of unstructured time on the ski slopes or golf course, didn’t appeal either. Like a lot of entrepreneurs, I need to feel productive.
I could have been stuck in a self-imposed limbo save for one factor. I’ve had a deep and long-standing interest in a topic other than entrepreneurship: foreign policy. And I had always envisioned at some point pursuing that dream.
So I used my interest as base to design a different type of sabbatical, which I have come to call an intellectual sabbatical. Rather than being unstructured and open-ended, my time off was highly regimented, with a fixed beginning and end, and designed to set me on a new course.
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