The winding path to success on my terms, and what I hope you learn from it
Christina Rabinowitz is the Head of Sales Enablement at Peloton and founder of Culinary Itineraries.
It was a weekday evening sitting in my 42nd floor midtown office staring out at the lights of Times Square. I had spent the previous day (weeks, months, years...) checking off my to-do list only to immediately refill the list with tomorrow’s priority tasks. All in the pursuit of “success” and a vacation every once in a while if I was lucky. As my current project wrapped up, I found myself thinking about all the other ways I wanted to spend my time. Then a friend texted me, as my friends often did, asking for advice on a last minute dinner reservation. And despite being exhausted after my work day, I couldn’t wait to do some research and text her back my recommendation.
In that moment, I knew I was leaving the old me behind. I had spent my entire lifetime measuring my worth by my success. I was an overachieving Type A 4.0 university graduate, then a management consultant working with clients all around the Middle East, and then a manager at a huge corporate firm in Manhattan. But after 15 years, I was ready for a change. I wanted a life that felt more like me and included more of what matters to me and less of what didn’t.
Travel, adventure, and food are what make my personal world go round. So, in 2018 I left behind everything I knew - stability, a SVP title with a corner office and view to match, a routine, and most significantly, everything I had used to measure my self worth. I thought it would be sad and stressful, but if I’m being honest I walked out with a huge smile on my face. Then treated myself to a delicious 3 course lunch in the Village.
I took a leap of faith and started Culinary Itineraries. I was completely on my own, starting from scratch, and focused on the notoriously challenging NYC hospitality industry. My dream was to spend my days eating my way through NYC and then sharing all my favorites in the form of custom itineraries for clients. And while eating and researching was part of building Culinary Itineraries, I also had to learn search engine optimization, debug my website, and desperately try to snag near impossible reservations. I fortunately found success with both individual and corporate clients, and I was just starting to hit my stride. Then everything changed.
The company my husband worked for was acquired just 6 months after I got Culinary Itineraries off the ground, and he opted to leave during the merger. We had always talked about taking a year-long sabbatical to travel the world, so this was our version of "the stars aligning." Plus, Culinary Itineraries could come with us, since I managed it all remotely anyway. So we packed away our lives in NYC, started See the World in 2020 to document the next year, and hopped on a flight to Rome to kick off our next phase. We lived out of a single backpack each and spent on average 3 nights per destination over the course of 7 months in Italy, Croatia, Germany, Portugal, New Zealand, Australia, Indonesia, and Thailand. For me this was an absolute dream, the best of all possible worlds. Of course not every day was perfect but especially now, looking back, they might as well have been. Then it all came abruptly crashing down.
I'll skim over the COVID-related Indonesia island evacuation, the heartbreaking decision to cancel the rest of our travel and make the long (and scary at the time) journey from Asia back to the US where we had no home, the quarantine on a cotton farm followed by months in the South with no plan, no jobs, and no sense of purpose. Just know it was a hard time for me, like it was for many of you.
I found myself gravitating towards my core interest areas again. But this time instead of globe trotting, I was finding local nature trails to hike. Instead of dining out, I was trying new recipes at home. And I developed a daily yoga practice. The slow pace of life during this time was in stark contrast to the rest of my adult life. And the simplicity was stunning. Sleep, exercise, eat, repeat. Almost without realizing it, this time allowed me to sift through the noise and find a path forward that combined many of the things I valued most.
I'm back where I started in a sense, though I am completely different. I've returned to the NYC area and am in a leadership role at Peloton - a company that helped me strengthen both my mental and physical health over the past year, and I'm thrilled to be sharing this with others through my work. I'm keeping Culinary Itineraries going for whenever the world is ready to visit NYC and "have the best food experience possible.” And while my world travel is currently still slim to none, I'm counting down the days until I can travel again safely and get back out there to see the rest of the world.
I recently came across this @lizandmollie "Measures of Success" visual, and it really resonated with me. Not so long ago I was definitely focused on the top approach, but I'm a firm believer in the more nuanced measurement approach now. What I took away from the past few years, and really my entire life until now, is that you really have to know how you measure success, when it's time for you to make a change, and what makes your world go round! It can be difficult to see your next step when the path is unclear, but staying focused on what makes your personal world go round makes all the difference. It did for me, and I hope it does for you, too.