Minimalism: Live a Meaningful Life

by Joshua Fields Millburn

Conformity is the drug with which many people self-medicate.

We place immense pressure on ourselves to be something—or someone—we are not.

The truth is that nearly all the pressure we feel is completely internal.

Happiness comes from within, from inside yourself, from living a meaningful life.

The ingredients in this book are designed to provide you with a basic recipe for intentional living, while allowing you to adjust the recipe to suit your own taste and lifestyle.

action is what’s going to change your life.

once we’ve cleared the excess, we move beyond the stuff to the most important aspects of life: health, relationships, passions, growth, and contribution. These Five Values are the fundaments of living a meaningful life.

Real happiness, however, comes from who we are—from who we’ve become. Real happiness comes from within. Likewise, discontentment is also a result of who we’ve become.

happiness is not the point—a meaningful life is. We must stop searching for happiness and instead start looking for meaning. If our short-term actions align with our long-term values, we’ll find purpose in whatever we’re doing. Paradoxically, it is this way of living—living deliberately—that leads to true happiness.

For us, our jobs were designed to do two things for our lifestyle: allow us to make money, and give us a certain kind of social status.

We have only a finite amount of time on this earth. It can be spent accumulating monetary wealth, or it can be spent in a meaningful way—the

over the course of one week, each of us wrote down anything we thought might be an anchor (the first step to solving a problem is to identify the problem, right?).

Our next step was to identify our priorities. We started prioritizing by dividing our anchors into two categories: major anchors and minor anchors.

Major anchors were the most obvious things keeping us from feeling free,

Minor anchors made up the bulk of our lists

We are not our stuff. We are more than our possessions. Our memories are within us, not our things. Our stuff weighs on us mentally and emotionally. Old photographs can be scanned. You can take pictures of items you want to remember. Items that are sentimental for us can be useful to others.

Letting go is freeing.

Leo Babauta and Joshua Becker proved to us minimalism wasn’t only for single guys who didn’t want to work a nine-to-five: it was for anyone interested in living a simpler, more intentional life. It was for anyone who wanted to focus on the important aspects in life, rather than the material possessions so heavily linked to success and happiness by our culture.

The point is minimalism is a tool to help you achieve freedom. Freedom from fear, freedom from worry, freedom from overwhelm, freedom from guilt, freedom from depression, freedom from enslavement. Freedom. Real freedom.

Minimalism is a tool we use to live a meaningful life. There are no rules. Rather, minimalism is simply about stripping away the unnecessary things in your life so you can focus on what’s important. Ultimately, minimalism is the thing that gets us past the things so we can focus on life’s most important things—which actually aren’t things at all.

Minimalism is a lifestyle choice. Minimalists choose to get rid of the unnecessary in favor of what’s important.

Minimalists search for happiness not through things, but through life itself;

the first steps into minimalism often take radical changes in mindset, actions, and habits.

Minimalism is a tool to eliminate life’s excess, focus on the essentials, and find happiness, fulfillment, and freedom.

We took back control of our lives so we could focus on what’s important, so we could focus on life’s deeper meaning.

You should do something online. You could make a difference. The world needs people like you to help them see things clearly.

After much cerebration, deliberation, discussion, research, and experimentation, we discovered Five Values that allow us to live a meaningful life: 1. Health 2. Relationships 3. Passions 4. Growth 5. Contribution

Health is the most important of the Five Values.

Without your health you’re unable to enjoy even the simplest things in life.

We want you to enjoy your life, and living a healthy lifestyle gives you the optimum conditions to do so.

Without health we have nothing.

if we want to be happy, then we all must strive to be the healthiest versions of ourselves—broken bones, sickness, warts and all.

when we talk about health, we’re not talking about vanity muscles or improved statistics or competing with others. Those are end results, destinations. But health is not a destination; it is a vehicle.

In its simplest terms, there are two main ingredients of living a healthy life: eating and exercising. In other words: what we put into our bodies and what we do with our bodies.

The desire to improve your health has little to do with looking better. That’s not what we’re concerned with when we talk about getting healthy or living a healthy life

Instead, we’re far more concerned about how you feel. We want you to feel better; looking better is a nice perk that is essentially guaranteed once you start feeling better.

A change in dietary lifestyle is not only a change in what you consume, but a change in how you think about what you consume.

A lifestyle change, by definition, can’t fail unless you make a negative change thereafter.

the desire here isn’t to lose weight or look better; the desire is to live a healthier life and feel better.

there are certain foods you should completely eliminate from your diet if you want to feel better.

Processed and packaged foods. Our food should be as close to its original state as possible.

Sugar. This includes all varieties of plain sugar (cane, raw, etc.), as well as anything referred to as sweets (cola, cake, candy, etc.).

Gluten, breads, and pastas. Many people are allergic or sensitive to gluten without even knowing it.

breads and pastas (even the rare, gluten-free varieties) add unnecessary carbohydrates and sugars to your diet, which cause you to gain weight. Breads and pastas are processed foods that our bodies often have a difficult time digesting. The two of us tend to eat small amounts of rice instead of these foods.

Any drinks other than water.

Dairy.

Meat. This one is controversial. We stopped eating meat as an experiment a few years ago and noticed phenomenal results, so we never went back (other than fish,

Water. We recommend drinking at least half your bodyweight in ounces of water every day. If you weigh 200 pounds, drink at least 100 ounces of water.

Green drinks.

Amazing Grass Green S...