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October 15 - October 16, 2017
Conformity is the drug with which many people self-medicate.
The truth is that nearly all the pressure we feel is completely internal. Sure, this pressure is influenced by external factors, but that doesn’t mean we have to take the bait. We needn’t succumb to these influences.
Happiness comes from within, from inside yourself, from living a meaningful life.
We discovered that working 70 or 80 hours a week, and buying even more stuff, didn’t fill the void—it widened it.
It’s fine to just absorb the information to start, but action is what’s going to change your life.
As minimalists, we start with the material possessions, and then, 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.
Of course, happiness is not the point—a meaningful life is. We must stop searching for happiness and instead start looking for meaning.
Discontentment doesn’t work that way. Rather, it’s a slow burn; it’s a pernicious problem that creeps into your life after years of subtle dissatisfaction.
And with those titles came more money and more responsibility and more work. Sadly, far darker things came with those promotions, as well: anxiety and stress and worry and overwhelm and depression.
our dreams of climbing the corporate ladder seemed more like nightmares the more we talked about it.
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 latter of which doesn’t necessarily preclude someone from the former, but the relentless pursuit of riches doesn’t lead to a meaningful life.
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.
minimalism allowed him to focus on the important stuff in his life, while shedding the excess junk that had gotten in the way.
Minimalism is a tool to eliminate life’s excess, focus on the essentials, and find happiness, fulfillment, and freedom.
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.
Thus, your diet is marked by the daily habits by which you live. Once you adopt a healthy dietary lifestyle, you will feel better, and your body will thank you. Food should be treated as nutrition, not entertainment.
Living in the past is tantamount to driving using only the rearview mirror—eventually you will crash if you don’t know what’s going on in front of you.
You can’t change the people around you, but you can change the people around you.
That's either a mistake or an absurd note!
If your relationships aren’t growing, they’re dying. But when your relationships grow, you feel alive.
My God! I hardly digest the notion of growth in the corporate world, now your saying that relationships need to grow or they will die!
Meaningful relationships have eight main elements that must be nurtured for the relationships to grow and improve: love, trust, honesty, caring, support, attention, authenticity, and understanding.
So the next time you reach a fork in the road, remember T.A.R.A.: Tolerate, Accept, Respect, and Appreciate.
Said another way, passion is one half love, one half obsession. So what would you love to do each day?
Your assignment is to do the same: find at least three people making a living doing what you’re passionate about. It doesn’t have to be anything similar to what we did.
That’s what happened to us. Over a few years, everything changed: we left our big corporate jobs, changed our diets, started exercising regularly, became healthy, strengthened our core relationships, made great new relationships, started cultivating our passions, and contributed to more people than we ever had before.
And now they are making these into a so called tool of minimalism. Self-help jargon!
the more you grow, the more you can help others grow; and the more you help others grow, the more you grow in return.
While donating money to charitable organizations is commendable (and we encourage you to do so if you can afford it), the satisfaction you get from such donations pales in comparison to actual engaged contribution. The face-to-face interactions, the physical exertion, and the mental activity of being completely immersed in contribution are far more rewarding than writing a check.
A life without contribution is a life without meaning.
Minimalism is a tool to eliminate life’s excess and focus on the essentials.
The way we measure our success in each of the Five Values is through a simple equation, an equation we call the Simple Success Formula: Success = Happiness + Constant Improvement
Arbitrary and some how absurd.
