Take Ania Smith, the CEO of Taskrabbit, for example.

She was seemingly at a career high, working as an executive at Airbnb, when she quit it all; she packed up her life and moved to Buenos Aires for a year in 2018 with her husband and three young children, to hit pause. 

Despite the stigma that often surrounds résumé gaps, Smith scored a promotion on her return–and has since seen her career go from strength to strength. And the 50-year-old chief tells Fortune that it’s largely down to the big reset the year abroad gave her—and importantly, her marriage.

After all, how often do you get an entire year to break away from your routine and redefine your life? 

Instead of backpacking, she enjoyed life unemployed with long lunches, cinema at 10 a.m., and space to think

Unlike your typical backpacker on a sabbatical, Smith’s year in Argentina’s capital was less on the spontaneous side. Bar from a trip to Patagonia, the family stayed in the same apartment, so the kids could attend school nearby. That meant regular routines—early wake-ups, school drop-offs, family dinners, bedtimes. No swimming with sharks or last-minute gorilla treks—just everyday structure, in a different country.

However, Smith and her husband took the long days they had to themselves to enjoy Spanish lessons, horseback riding, languorous restaurant lunches, even trips to the cinema at 10 a.m. on a Tuesday if they felt like it.

“It was jarring, but it was also great,” she says, adding that for the first half of the year abroad, they crammed in too many activities and lessons (including dancing and photography). “We felt like we didn’t want to waste it—there’s a lot to learn and a lot to see.” But then came the realization that, they’d not actually given themselves the pause they needed.

“I think it’s really nice to also have the time to rethink what’s important to you,” she explains. 

So for the second half of their gap year, they did exactly that. “We spent like five hours until we had to go pick up our children, having those types of conversations about, do we want to come back to live in the Bay Area? Do we want to move somewhere else? What would it be like to move to Park City and ski a lot more and work a lot less? Can we afford to do that?” 

“We had all sorts of discussions about life, and had the time and space to do that. So by the time we did make a decision to come back and work in technology again, and to, in fact, come back to the Bay Area, it felt so right— and it felt so that this is very intentional.”

“But we did make some big changes,” she adds—one transformative change being how they divided the household chores.

The gap year showed her husband the mental load of running a house—so she could elevate her career

Before the gap year, Smith says managing the household often fell on her shoulders, despite holding down an executive role at the time. “I was often the person who took care of all the doctors’ appointments for the kids, or the summer camps, or I would make sure that we had all the plans for the weekend.”

But without a daily 9-to-5 grind, the roles they’d automatically taken on when they became working parents quickly disappeared.

“Because neither one of us were working, we literally split responsibilities down the middle completely—and then when we moved back, that really stuck.”

Smith credits the gap year with giving her husband a “profound understanding” of the mental load that typically falls on working mothers. Today, he even takes on the lion’s share of managing the children’s routines—freeing her up to advance into more demanding positions at Uber, IKEA, and now Taskrabbit.

“That has meant that it’s okay for me to have a more rigorous role at the moment, while he steps in and helps to manage the house,” she adds. 

“And I’m not sure that we would have been able to do that without the experience we had in Argentina. It’s really hard to understand what it means to carry the mental load of running a house unless you have to do it yourself.” 

Really, it wasn’t just a gap year—it was a reset that allowed them to rethink how they sustainably balance ambition and family life, instead of slipping into default modes. The bottom line, Smith says, is simple: “We can’t both be running a C-suite and running a house.”

Tokyo Electron, one of Asia’s largest makers of semiconductor equipment, is finding the effect of American and Japanese controls, which bar the sales of cutting-edge chips and chipmaking equipment to China, to be smaller than expected, thanks to surging Chinese demand for less advanced machinery. The company generated 43% of its sales from China last quarter, up from 24% a year ago, head of investor relations Junko Takagi told the Financial Times.

Kokusai Electric Corp., another Japanese equipment maker, is also expanding its presence in China to match an expected increase in demand. China could soon make up just under 50% of the company’s revenue, up from over 40% and above the historical level of 30%, CEO Fumiyuki Kanai forecast in an interview with Bloomberg. Kanai expects investments across memory, logic, and power chips at 28-nanometers and larger.

“Countless small-scale fabrication plants are springing up like mushrooms in China,” Kanai said.

While Japan’s chip manufacturing is decades behind its competitors like Taiwan and South Korea, the country is still a major producer of the machinery used to make the chips themselves. This equipment enables companies like Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company or Samsung to make the tiny semiconductors that power our electronic devices.

Earlier this year, Japan and the Netherlands, another major producer of chipmaking equipment, agreed to join the U.S. in limiting sales of cutting-edge chipmaking equipment to China.

China has been investing in so-called legacy chips as the U.S. puts the screws on more advanced semiconductors. Many devices use mature chips larger than 28 nanometers, while high-end consumer electronics and data centers rely on the cutting-edge chips made by companies like TSMC, Intel and Samsung. The market for 28-nanometer chips will be worth $28 billion by 2030, estimates consulting firm International Business Strategies.

Chinese companies may also be using older chipmaking equipment to secretly make more advanced semiconductors. Huawei blindsided Washington in August by unveiling its new 5G phone, the Mate 60 Pro, that featured an advanced Chinese-made processor. Experts believe that Huawei and its supplier, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC), may have been able to use older-generation equipment to make the advanced chip, though are unsure whether the Chinese firms can make them at scale and at reasonable cost.

Huawei’s achievement is now pushing U.S. lawmakers to call for even stricter export controls. Representative Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), co-chair of the House Select Committee on China, suggested in September that the U.S. block all technology exports to Huawei and SMIC. Other politicians and think tanks have proposed extending chip controls to older chips and equipment as well. (The Biden administration expanded its chip controls to cover more advanced semiconductors used for AI development in October)

Still, in mid-October, the Biden administration allowed TSMC, Samsung and Korean firm SK Hynix to keep supplying legacy equipment to their Chinese chip plants indefinitely. At the time, analysts told Fortune that Washington may want to keep some foreign presence in China’s chip industry; if foreign companies left, demand would shift to local Chinese companies, leading to “less control and visibility” for the U.S.

Under the crypto club’s newly enacted rage quit rules, if 20% of Nouns NFTs call for a “fork” they can split from the main group and take their share of the project’s 30,620 ether tokens (worth about $50 million at press time) with them. Each Nouns NFT is worth about 36.5 ETH ($59,600) in book value, giving the current fork a treasury of 7,598 ETH (about $12.4 million).