K: A No Vacation Required (NVR) life is a life that you don't feel you need a break from. Whatever that means to you at any given time.

C: Yeah, it’s different for everyone and it changes over time. Our current NVR life is quite a bit different from what it was over a decade ago when we started this whole new approach to living.

C: When we were piecing together this lifestyle, we set out to make a living, make tracks, and make a difference – work on our own, explore the globe, and contribute to a better world.

K: Exactly. And things have gone better than we ever could have imagined. We now have several successful "arms" to the work we do, we've been able to see so much of the world, and we've consistently found ways to give back.

C: Well, we didn't have the "No Vacation Required" title when we were dream-scaping. We just knew what general direction we wanted to head in. We had happy lives as individuals and as a couple, but we both knew we were ready for a huge next step. We could sense that it was time for a change and that there was something much bigger out there for us.

K: Really – as we tell our clients all of the time – it’s about the decision to make a transformational but simple shift in your life. From being off purpose to being on purpose.

K: Yes, exactly. Fulfillment isn’t a destination. Every single life will have ups and downs. If you attach the “F” word, fulfillment, to big milestones – the perfect job, the ideal relationship, the bucket-list trip – fulfillment will be fleeting and contingent on those things.

C: Fulfillment is a mindset… living from a place of purpose. That way, no matter the ups and downs, you’re grounded in something that softens life’s blows and is better than any of life’s highs.

C: That’s the beauty of it. It’s really pretty simple. It starts by changing how you define success – adopting a new life philosophy. We then lean on 6 Guiding Principles that can put change into action. We believe that if you’re on board with these 6 principles, you’re well on your way. You’re already living on purpose with an Everyday Fulfillment mindset.

K: The key is jettisoning templated notions of success. You can’t change until you see the value in questioning the status quo.

K: It’s at the heart of nearly all of the work we do. Our chief mission is to increase the number of fulfilled people in the world, and the work we do with individuals and companies is a big part of that mission. The biggest shift is from off-purpose to on-purpose action. Once you’re on purpose, you just go deeper and deeper into fulfilled living. That’s where a lot of our client work takes place.

C: On the Individual side, it’s about equipping people to live with vision. In order to mastermind that vision, you have to do a deep dive into who you are – your strengths, natural talents, etc.

K: On the business side, we’re typically working with high-performing workgroups. We help them to further maximize as a group of self-aware individuals coming together to form a powerful team.

C: Again, though, the magic happens the moment you make that transformational but simple shift to be on purpose.

C: People are more and more distracted and stretched. And, with all the advances in tech, they’re bombarded with news and information and ads and social media posts that make many feel exhausted and insufficient.

K: Our work is bolstered by the fact that most change agents (and a large chunk of the self-help industry, in general) exploit fulfillment seekers by perpetuating a fear-based, high-profit message: You're not good enough. This is a doomsday message that keeps you looking outside of yourself for satisfaction and validation.

C: Another one of our 6 Guiding Principles speaks to how getting on purpose is egoless. It’s entirely an inside job that should be free of external quick fixes and validation.

K: Good question, as there are absolutely things that can foster that kind of change. For us, travel was one of the big things that served that purpose. Anything that takes you out of your own head and out of your own perspective helps.

C: Travel, education, new experiences, volunteering.

K: Nature!

C: Yes, because it’s essentially the story of our journey to getting on purpose; the very thing we now prompt our clients to do.

K: But we didn’t have the language or the framework at the time.

K: First off, we knew very early on in our relationship that, one day, we wanted to embark on some kind of entrepreneurial endeavor together. A few years into our relationship, we got to a point where we had each experienced significant success in our traditional careers and wanted something more fulfilling.

C: At that time, our dinner conversations revolved around everything our employers could be doing differently in order to be more successful. That's why we, personally, were so successful – we were great employees, but we also got the bigger picture.

K: Yes, we saw an opportunity to translate our shared passion for building better workplaces into our own business, work together, and do it now. 

K: I had decided to earn an MBA, get a Professional HR certification, and make a career shift from marketing / management into organization development/organization effectiveness/HR. During my time in marketing/management, I grew tired of seeing companies make missteps that created workgroup dysfunction and employee disengagement. I knew I wanted to make an impact on the people side of the equation and help companies avoid those kinds of mistakes.

C: And during my time in management, I was always most motivated by operational excellence and inspiring employees. With a lot of experience under my belt, I could see all the ways in which both employers and employees were preventing those things from happening and standing in the way of their own success.

C: Well, earlier I mentioned dinnertime conversations. The truth is, we weren't having many dinnertime conversations because we rarely saw each other, much less ate dinner together. So, at a certain point, we were ready for the career/life upgrades we've been talking about, and we were also ready to see each other more. 

K: I remember so many specific things about the year we decided to switch things up. The big one that stands out for me, though, is when we were so over-committed that we couldn't find a single weekend for a ski getaway. It's so stupid how you get caught up in the rat race.

C: And also during that transformative year, one of our ways of "bonding" was during training runs for the Paris Marathon. It was ridiculous and hilarious. There we were, out running at like 4 AM in order to train for this marathon while maintaining our upwardly mobile careers.

K: It was right after the 2-week trip we took for the Paris Marathon; we made the firm decision to reengineer our lives. That was the turning point.

C: I have to add that something good actually came out of those crazy, pre-dawn runs. The really long ones that we'd do on Saturdays gave us time to connect in a different way and around a common goal. We both knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that we were ready for a big change. It was like marathon training and life training. 

K: There was some undoing to be done. When you've been in a certain mode for years and years, you have to re-learn some things. Like that it shouldn't be that hard to plan a little ski getaway.

C: We took some time to really slow down. It felt amazing. Having always had a hankering for travel and learning about the world, we decided to head to Southern Africa in order to figure out our next chapter and to continue on our quest to make it to all 7 continents before we needed walkers.

K: After that adventure, we would never look at things in the same way and were even more inspired to overhaul our life. So, propelled by our time in Africa, we took off on our capstone journey to the final continents on our list: South America and Antarctica, where we spent several months exploring and volunteering.

C: We've all heard stories about the transformative power of visiting the African continent, and it was absolutely the case for us. In addition to traveling all around South Africa, we went to Zambia for some volunteering and to meet the family we had been sponsoring for several years.

K: It really helped us rethink how we define success, how we look at what matters in life, and the good fortune we enjoy simply because we were born in the USA. It was such a great experience that we then spent most of our time in South America volunteering. We had similarly life-altering experiences there as well.

C: Well, our timing was both amazing and challenging.

K: Exactly.

C: All of this went down when we were in the heart of the Great Recession, 2007-2008. Businesses were slashing budgets and closing; there was massive uncertainty about our country's future. In a sick twist, businesses were outsourcing exactly the people-centric HR/business consulting work we were aiming to do. We had some strong business connections, so a few key people gave us a chance.

K: Yes and no. Yes because The Great Recession was happening, and we did not have trust funds or huge savings accounts. No because we were ready for just this kind of move – to make a bigger impact, to be more fulfilled.

C: And we were really lucky to have a lot of early success in our careers. I mean, one of Kent's employers awarded him an SUV for his work.

K: And Caanan was the golden child where ever he worked.

C: Oh boy. That's a big question. It took us a while to find our groove. Many organizations were looking to get legal advice and other HR-adjacent things that were just not the right fit for. But we found our way pretty quickly and now have over a decade of experience helping organizations and people thrive. See, those dinner conversations earlier in our relationship really paid off. They were like training.

C: The website started as a place where we simply shared our No Vacation Required way of being and documented what was going on for family and friends as we embarked on Chapter 2. It served no larger purpose. It had (and has) nothing to do with our core business. We’ve always looked at No Vacation Required as our overriding philosophy.

K: We wrote blog posts several times a week during that long period of transformation when we were traveling in Africa and South America, figuring out our next steps. And even our motivation was kind of selfish; having the website kept us from having to write individual update e-mails to every person we knew. Sorry mom.

C: And this was right during that period when blogs were starting to become a big deal. When we saw that the site was gaining some unintended traction from readers beyond friends and family, we started to write within three distinct categories that had become the framework of our NVR life: Traveling Deliriously, Living Deliberately, and Working Virtually.

K: Not only were blogs – especially travel blogs – becoming hot, but people were attracted to our lifestyle because of the loss so many had suffered during the Great Recession.

K: People were inspired by the idea of living for now and living fulfilled. We learned that many people had felt betrayed by their employers. Years and years of service and they were just dropped.

C: And leery, really, of all kinds of things. Many had their houses taken away and felt distrustful of mortgage companies and the agencies that oversee them. People were realizing that they weren't happy. Or possibly that they were happy but not fulfilled.

C: While many people were very supportive, we were surprised by the number of people that weren't happy with our decision to leave stable jobs and to put a different set of priorities first. We'd later figure out that that was mostly about the discomfort people have when someone “leaves the pack.”

K: It forces them to look at their own lives and to face things they may not be ready to face. Complacency has a strong gravitational pull.

C: We've become very successful Strategists, helping organizations with many things but primarily change initiatives in marketing, brand, and HR. Our success helping these organizations prompted us to create an arm of the business that helps individuals with change as it relates to their careers. And, as we were saying, interest in our lifestyle really took off too. In addition to resonating with readers, destinations and travel entities loved our travel tales, so we've done a lot of work in the travel space, developing travel-related campaigns and content. 

K: Yes and yes. We've loved the work we do in travel, but it's one of the things we've been scaling way back for the last several years. We've always looked at the work we do in travel as a hobby we get paid for. The work we do as Strategists – helping people and organizations thrive – is what fulfills us most.

C: Also, scaling back the amount of travel related work we do does not mean we've "given up" travel. We travel a lot for our consulting projects, so will often tag on personal travel to that work. For instance, we recently had client meetings in Buenos Aires and then travelled around Argentina and Patagonia on our own.

K: Again, the perspective-shifting power of travel is largely to thank for us getting in an on-purpose mindset.

K: We advise others on change, so we're always aware of the need to flex those muscles ourselves. We learned when building this life that you have to be able to give things up in order to make room for the new – in order to create space to see what new endeavors might become. We're not attached. We like to keep things fresh. 

C: And websites and blogs now serve a much different purpose than they did 10 years ago. You know, as successful as our website became early on, we never bought into the different monetization tactics that propelled so many websites forward. It all just felt so fleeting and superficial to us. Paradoxically, I think it is why we were so successful in a much broader way. Anyway, now we've moved into a time when everyone with a social media handle is an "influencer," which is creating a really wonky media environment. I could go on and on, but I'll just round this out by saying we know our lane, and we’re all about growing within that lane.

C: We’re really enthusiastic about what we’ve been working on because it goes even deeper into helping individuals and organizations thrive. We’re taking a need we’ve seen come up time and time again over the last decade and moving further into that specific niche.

K: We’ve all heard and read about how so many people in society are feeling stretched by all of the commitments they have in life. This is causing a push to be hyper-productive. Additionally, society is grappling with a Workism epidemic, meaning that many people are making work the foundation of their identity. Needless to say, that’s massively problematic.

C: So often, these realities emerge in the projects we do with people and companies. So we’re working on some fantastic tools to help our clients to address these very things in a way that empowers them to feel empowered and successful but without all the feelings of dread.

C: All of our experiences have served as a reminder that – across the globe – we’re all connected and that there are a lot of senseless inequities in the world. We've got to watch out for one another. We're inspired to think freely and live deliberately by the people who don't have the same luxury. 

K: And there is nothing more fulfilling than being on purpose – feeling in sync. We never want to lose that flow.

K: Most people who know us now, never knew the early version of our life – the Chapter 1 version during which we rarely saw each other. We are both strong people and we each bring something different to the table, so it's pretty easy to make living and working together flow seamlessly. Plus, we're living a true dream life. What a gift for us to be able to spend all of this time together.

C: That's so tough, so I'll keep it short and high level. Here in the US, we think there's nothing better than the National Parks. Internationally, we really love South America. But we also highly recommend the places other people love: Italy, Spain, and Hawaii come to mind.

K: Our best experiences are usually connected to the great outdoors in some way.