Minimalism: Live a Meaningful Life

by Joshua Fields Millburn

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 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.

Minimalists search for happiness not through things, but through life itself; thus, it’s up to you to determine what is necessary and what is superfluous to your life.

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

Happiness, as far as we are concerned, is achieved internally through living a meaningful life, a life that is filled with passion and freedom, a life in which we can grow and contribute to others in meaningful ways. These are the bedrocks of happiness. Not stuff.

Five Values that allow us to live a meaningful life: 1. Health 2. Relationships 3. Passions 4. Growth 5. Contribution

we discovered four main anchors in our own lives that were keeping us from pursuing our passions: identity, status, certainty, and money.

People get so wrapped up in their vocation as their identity that it’s hard for them to realize they are so much more—they are beautiful in so many ways. When you’re trapped in this kind of identity, it’s hard to realize you are not your job, you are not your stuff, you are not your debt, you are not your paycheck—you are so much more. You are a brother, a father, a mother, a sister, a lover, a partner, a friend, a creator, a contributor, a human being capable of so much more.

Leverage is your ability to associate enough satisfaction with the change that you have no choice but to make the change a must in your life (e.g., “I must exercise” is appreciably different from “I should exercise”). The more leverage you have, the easier the decision is to make and follow through with—because the satisfaction you’ll experience on the other side of the change is so great that you must make the change a reality.

While you’re taking your daily incremental actions, it’s important to raise the bar a little each day, especially when it’s uncomfortable. Getting outside your comfort zone is an important part of growth. You needn’t raise the bar too high, but just high enough to make your change a little more difficult each day. Over time, your gradually raised standards will add up to changes larger than you could have imagined.

The same holds true for all areas of life: the key to real growth is consistency. Consistent, gradual action taken every day is the way we changed our lives.

Adding Value How does this task add value? This is a question we asked every day in our corporate jobs. More than anything else, this one question helped us succeed. We also asked our employees the same question: How did you add value today?

And now we still ask this question of ourselves each day. At its core, this question helps you identify how you’re contributing. If you don’t have a good answer, then another question is appropriate: How could I add value to this situation? or How could I better add value? By asking these questions you begin to understand how to use your limited time to better contribute to the people around you.

While this might seem like a drastic example, the point is to make the most of your interactions. If you’re constantly asking yourself How am I adding value? you’ll start getting some great answers. When you think in terms of adding value, you’ll start to notice everything you do begins to add value in various ways. That’s because over time you’ll begin to weed out anything that doesn’t add value to your own life or to other people’s lives.

Thus, there are at least two ways you can contribute to others: Local Organizations. You can contribute to local organizations who come together to contribute to your local community (e.g., Habitat for Humanity, Big Brothers Big Sisters, and various other nonprofit organizations, homeless shelters, soup kitchens, and the like). For a list of great places to start, visit volunteermatch.org or check out the classifieds in your local free community paper. Start Your Own Thing. Many people discover so much satisfaction from contributing to others that it becomes important to them to create their own means by which to contribute. For us, this meant starting a website where we documented our journey and helped other people by sharing advice based on our personal experiences. For other people, this could mean any number of things: from starting a community garden to providing work-training to inner-city children. Typically, if you’re going to start your own thing, you get there by contributing to local organizations first, determining how you can best add value in the process.

Two Types of Positive Experiences There are two types of positive experiences in life: Positive experiences you enjoy. For some people this category includes activities like playing a sport, teaching a child how to ride a bike, snowboarding, going to a friend’s house to watch a football game, and the like. These are often the best and most effortless experiences in your life. They are easy to do because they are exciting, rewarding, fulfilling. Unfortunately, these types of experiences are rare compared to the second type of positive experiences. Positive experiences you dislike. For some people this category includes most of the activities that are good for them, like eating vegetables, exercising daily, manual labor, conversing with loved ones each night, taking on new challenges. Why People Don't Contribute The reason people don’t contribute as much as they should (or as much as they want) is because they often identify contributive experiences as positive experiences they dislike. And of course, humans have a natural tendency to avoid what they dislike. This must change if you are truly committed to experiencing lasting satisfaction and fulfillment. The Key to Living Meaningfully The second type of positive experiences—the positive experiences you dislike—are the key to living a meaningful life. That is, finding ways to transform the positive experiences you dislike into positive experiences you enjoy is the ticket to changing your life long-term. This one strategy is...

The best way to do this is to simply ask yourself a question: How did I incorporate all Five Values into my life today? That is: How did I focus on health, relationships, passion, growth, and contribution?

(For practical decluttering tips, visit our “Start Here” page at minimalists.com/start to start your own journey.)

A More Meaningful Life It’s also important to ask another question about your daily tasks: How could this task positively affect one or more of the five important areas of my life? By asking better questions like this, we get better answers.

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 This equation applies to any of the Five Values. Ultimately, you are successful in any of these five areas of life if you are happy with where you currently are and if you are constantly improving that area of your life.

It is not things that disturb us, but our interpretation of their significance. —EPICTETUS