Why I Love Simplicity

Simplicity is Speed, and Speed is Good

M y story begins in Vietnam. Being raised in a third world country and frequently moving from place to place for study and work, I live with anxiety and imposter syndrome that has seen me suffering more than I would like to admit.

We all have our ways of dealing with a world that feels increasingly messy and on edge. I tend to fight that sort of anxiety by turning into a control freak. The ability to be in control of my life and the elements around me is not so much a coping mechanism as it is the secret to my survival. When the outside falls apart, my mind gets busy constructing a neatly organized routine I can rely on — naturally turning me into a minimalist.

My first love was a dead man, Mie van der Rohe. He taught me “Less is more.” That became my life philosophy.

It was during my college years that my love for marketing and design started. In 2010’s, Apple began to expand throughout the world, capturing me with their new design and serene simplicity. I spent lots of my days in college, either talking with friends about Steve Jobs or studying his business approach — ultimately helping to inspire my love of simple design and marketing.

Zen is also a deep influence. You can see it in my whole approach of stark, minimalist aesthetics, intense focus. I have always found Japanese Zen Buddhism in particular to be aesthetically sublime. The most sublime thing I’ve ever seen are the gardens around Kyoto.

Upon graduating from college, I started working at an advertising agency, which allowed me to step my foot in the door of the marketing industry. I learned a lot from working closely with brands around the world and adopting Silicon Valley mindset from people on Twitter; I gained valuable insights as per their mindset towards work and life. Through experiencing different aspects of tech culture and seeing mission-driven people, I started wondering:

・What kind of life do I want to live?

・Who am I?

・What is important now?

Each fresh graduate at the time expressed some variation of “Who am I” and “What am I meant to do with the rest of my life?” As students, we were so used to being told what to do that we had forgotten that we must have rooted for ourselves.

It appeared to be a universal theme, and it was not too late to start asking the big questions and digging deep into what made me happy and fulfilled. “What do I want my life to look like?” Instead of being overwhelmed, I wanted to get excited about the endless possibilities. I wanted to be able to answer the question — “What is important now?”

I reflected on them over and over. Maybe the benefit of being older and wiser is the ability to ask big questions, meditate, ponder, search for answers, and put into practice the same framework that I use in marketing without the distractions of other things, until I came to realize I wasted my 20s with failures and wrong choices. Eventually, I found my answers.

・I want a mission-driven life with a lot of freedom.

・I want to become a marketer and investor in the tech industry that aligns with my core values.

・I only need a few things to be satisfied and achieve my goals: a roadmap with frameworks for designing a fulfilled life, social media, resources, and belongings.

The way I’m living my life, the life framework, the career, the resources, the belongings, it all comes down to this: Let’s make it simple. Really simple. Really intuitively obvious.

I always make sure I can fit my life and thinking in a suitcase. Life is like when you have to climb a mountain, you toss everything unnecessary out of your pack.

I want to clear my life so that I can make as few decisions as possible about anything except how to best achieve my mission and goal.

Simplicity helps me create a life that feels good on the inside and sets me on a path of clarity, freedom, and intentional living.

Simplicity is the new normal

All modern diseases are diseases of ABUNDANCE.

We place too much emphasis on irrelevant things and lose sight of what’s really important.

We punish ourselves by constantly entertaining our minds and bodies.

A different take on what makes us feel so busy, stressed, and anxious.

As a rule, the larger your surface area, the more energy you have to expend maintaining it.

Of course, when most of us think of surface area, we think of the area of a rectangle or how much grass we have to mow. But there is a surface area of life, and most of us never realize how much it consumes.

If you have one house, you have a relatively small surface area to maintain (depending on the age and size of the house, of course). If you buy another one, your surface area expands. But it doesn’t expand linearly — it expands slightly above that. It’s all the same work plus more.

Friends are another type of surface area. You have a finite amount of time to spend with friends before you die. The more friends you have, the less time you can spend with each one individually.

Money is another form of surface area. The more money you have, the more you have to keep track of different types of assets and investments.

When your surface area expands too much, you hire people to help you scale. Assistants, property managers, family offices, etc. They’re scaling you — but they’re also scaling the surface area of responsibility. This, of course, only masks the rapidly expanding surface area by abstracting it.

Beliefs are another type of surface area.

The thing about surface area is that the more you have, the more you have to defend and maintain. The larger your surface area, the more you are burdened with mentally and physically.

If you think in terms of surface area, it’s easy to see why we are so anxious, stressed, and constantly behind.

We feel like we need more time, but what we’re craving is more focus. What we need is a smaller surface area.

Your surface area becomes part of your identity. She’s the ‘busy person’ with her hand in every project. He’s the guy with four houses.

Competition can drive expansion. Most people want a bigger house to compete with someone else who has a nicer house. We are animals, after all. On a group level, this causes great benefits. On an individual level, it can cause unhappiness.

A lot of people don’t do well simply because they major in minor things.

They’ll spend as much time trying to decide a trivial decision as a major one. A lot of people focus on hard work and miss that what they do, who they do it with, and how they do it are so much more important. A lot of people go to the gym 4 days a week only to miss that what goes into their body and the amount of sleep matter more.

Opportunity costs affect everyday life. The opportunity cost of chasing the wrong thing is the opportunity to turn another thing into reality. Every decision in life is a trade-off. You should figure out what your #1 priority is and optimize for that. Your time, money, and energy is limited.

99% of information is noise.
99% of interactions are fake.
99% of opportunities are traps.
99% of effort is wasted.
Life is a search for the 1%.

In the age of abundance where 99% of information is noise, knowing exactly what to ignore and what to focus — separating the signal from the noise — is the key to not wasting valuable effort.

Simplicity provides that opportunity. The opportunity lost by chasing the wrong things is gained back with enhanced attention on what is important.

Mastery is an endless quest to reduce effort without reducing effectiveness.

The highest level of mastery is SIMPLICITY.

If you wish to have leisure for your mind, either be a poor man, or resemble a poor man. Study cannot be helpful unless you take pains to live simply.

I believe the way toward mastery of any endeavor is to work toward simplicity; replace complex technology with knowledge. The more you know, the less you need. From my feeble attempts at simplifying my own life I’ve learned enough to know that should we have to, or choose to, live more simply, it won’t be an impoverished life but one richer in all the ways that really matter.

The way to maximize your enjoyment in life is to keep your surface area small. It’s a lot of work but if the happiest people I know are any indication, it’s a lot less work to keep it small than to maintain it when it’s large.

Fewer stuff/projects. Fewer commitments. Fewer obligations. Fewer responsibilities.

In order to do that, I discovered the domain-specific Pareto principle by developing a sense of which variables drive most of the outcome and which are unimportant. In short, I’ve learned to separate the signal from the noise.

The 80/20 rule, also known as the Pareto Principle, states that 80% of the results come from 20% of the causes. This means that 20% of your activities are likely to produce 80% of your results.

Simplicity isn’t just a visual style. It’s not just minimalism or the absence of clutter. Simplicity, at its best, is about finding what’s best for you or finding the one decision that removes 100 decisions.

When you don’t know what’s important, you miss things that are relevant and spend a lot of time on things that are irrelevant.

One of the most critical skills in life — and yet never taught in school — is choosing where to direct your attention.

Most people’s problem is not work ethic. It’s working on the wrong thing. You need to focus on high-leverage, creative, scalable solutions. You need to outsource repetitive, non-creative actions.

Many people work hard, but few people work on the highest and best thing. Usually, it takes no more effort to work on high leverage tasks than it does to work on low leverage ones. It’s just a matter of directing your energy.

When you think of Minimalism, you likely think of getting rid of stuff, not buying anything new, and living in a small white room with no furniture or pictures on the wall.

This could be true, but in most cases it’s not.

Minimalism can be more than just removing things.

Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful.

Simplicity is about the unexpected pleasure derived from what is likely to be insignificant and would otherwise go unnoticed.

When we have a problem, our natural instinct is to add a new habit or buy a solution. But usually, you improve your life by subtracting instead. The foods you avoid are more important than the foods you eat. Subtracting distractions is the key to productivity. Minimalism is to make a shift: from a life spent trying not to neglect anything, to one spent proactively and consciously choosing what to neglect, in favor of what matters most. It’s about making room for more of what matters. It is also about deciding what is most important in life — and removing the distractions that keep you from it. It is ultimately a matter of focus. It is the intentional promotion of the things we most value and the removal of anything that distracts us from it. It means you value yourself more than other things. It means you make yourself a priority of your own life. It’s about reducing the things in your life that aren’t providing value, so you can have more space for the things that truly matter, and more opportunity and flexibility to design a life aligned with your values. It’s subtraction for addition. Simplifying your life isn’t about your possessions — it’s about value. Having less frees not only space but also your mind, letting it focus on the things that matter. It is to focus on stripping away nonessentials and freeing up as much resource as possible to focus on the extremely long term and deal with whatever is most important.

Simplicity/Minimalism means living with less. Less delivers more in terms of meaning: When you try to be everything to anyone, you end up nothing to everyone. When you are trying to do too much, you end up doing nothing much. If you chase two rabbits, you will catch neither. If we want to be friends with everyone, we cannot truly have a friend. If we want to do something well, we cannot do it all. Do less, you get more productive. Own less, you get more flexible. Eat less, you get healthier. Conform less, you get more interesting. Consume less, you get more creative. Fear less, you get happier. Right aspiration needs to go with right approach.

Minimalism is also a lifestyle that helps you question what things add value to your life; a way of eschewing the non-essential in order to free you up to focus on what’s truly important, what gives your lives meaning, what gives you joy and value; a tool to rid yourself of life’s excess in favor of focusing on what’s important — so you can find happiness, fulfillment, and freedom. Minimalism simply allows you to make decisions more consciously, more deliberately. That’s a relentless pursuit of simplicity to help add structure to a chaotic world.

As we grow older in the West, we generally think we should have a lot to show for our lives — a lot of trophies. According to numerous Eastern philosophies, this is backwards. As we age, we shouldn’t accumulate more to represent ourselves, but rather strip things away to find our true selves — and thus, to find happiness and peace.

“Even though everyone embraces minimalism differently, each path leads to the same place: a life with more freedom to live a more meaningful and healthier life.”

According to the Pareto Principle, for many events, pattern of nature in which ~80% of effects result from ~20% of causes. Roughly 80% of the effects come from the 20% of the causes, 80% of the outputs are decided by 20% of the inputs. The majority of outcomes are driven by a minority of events. 20% of the effort produces 80% of the results. You get 80% of the value out of something from 20% of the information or effort. It’s also true that you’re likely to exert 80% of your effort getting the final 20% of value; 20% of the results consumes 80% of the effort.

This can be applied to various aspects of life, like 80% of your sales coming from 20% of your customers or 80% of your results at work coming from 20% of your tasks. Identifying this vital 20% and focusing your efforts on it can dramatically improve your efficiency and effectiveness.

Did you know?

• 80% of wealth is held by 20% of people.
• 80% of computer errors result from 20% of bugs.
• 80% of crimes are committed by 20% of criminals.
• 80% of box office revenue comes from 20% of films.
• Bulk of life happiness comes from a very small number of decisions (<5?).
• Bulk of company’s value comes from a very small number of decisions.
• 10% improvement on a product that sells 10x as well is equivalent to a 100% improvement (much harder to achieve) in a 1x product.
• Success of an investment comes from getting a few key parts of the story right. The top 2.5% of VC-backed companies — 100/4,000 — make up all the returns.
• The extraordinary returns generated by technology have been generated almost entirely by only a few dozen companies globally.

Understanding this rule saves you from getting bogged down in unnecessary detail once you’ve gotten most of the learning you need to make a good decision. Instead of working harder, we should focus primarily on the efforts that produce the majority of the results and forgo the rest. That way, we have more resources to focus on the most important tasks. If you’re naturally competitive, instead of spreading a thin layer of it across all of life, pile it up in a few specific areas and just relax in the rest.

“Minimalism is not a lack of something. It’s simply the perfect amount of something.” — Nicholas Burroughs

“Simplicity is the keynote of all true elegance.” — Coco Chanel

“Instead of wondering when your next vacation is, maybe you should set up a life you don’t need to escape from.” — Seth Godin

“The Master does nothing, yet he leaves nothing undone. The ordinary man is always doing things, yet many more are left to be done.” — Tao Te Ching

“Most geniuses — especially those who lead others — prosper not by deconstructing intricate complexities but by exploiting unrecognized simplicities.” — Andy Benoit

The 1% has understood this long ago: the secret to genius is not complexity, it’s simplicity. It is difficult to find one hugely successful businessperson today who doesn’t reap the benefits of this philosophy.

The very successful are super-focused and obsessively organized. Many have extensive help to manage their lives such as an assistant, secretary, housekeeper, butler or chauffeur. They aren’t great at everything. They are not jacks-of-all-trades. They are great at one thing and suck at everything else. They focus their resources on just a few priorities and obsess over doing things right. This is simple but not easy. They collect good memories. To collect good memories, pay more attention.

Most of the really happy people I know have a relatively small surface area. I know billionaires with two houses. Most of my close friends only have 4–5 close friends — everyone else is a friend in the loose sense of the word. Most of the productive people I know at work are focused on one or two things, not 5.

“That’s been one of my mantras — focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.” — Steve Jobs

This is why Mark Zuckerberg wears the same shirt every day. He said,

“I really want to clear my life so that I have to make as few decisions as possible about anything except how to best serve this community.”

Deciding what to wear is a waste of time and energy compared to deciding how Facebook will impact the billions of people who use it. Great CEOs like Zuckerberg focus on what will have the biggest impact. And remove everything else.

Simplicity rules style everywhere. Elegance is elimination. Excess is never a sign of sophistication.

Extremely complex systems emerge from simple rules iterated many times. The most successful complex systems are found to have evolved from successful simple systems. Almost every working complex system that we see in the world today is the result of a very simple set of rules that worked. You can get more complexity out of simplicity than you can out of complexity.

• The best work resists compression. The best product is a function of subtraction not addition. A good startup should have the potential for great scale built into its first design. It shouldn’t need more features to attract more users. You can tell when a person/company has stopped innovating because they keep adding “features”. The best software delivers the same outcome in fewer clicks. A lot of the great companies replace complexity with simplicity for the end-user. An example: From a simple set of rules on Twitter (hashtags, only using 280 characters, etc.), extremely complex behavior can result — massive learning, political movements, tribe mentality, etc. It works well because users are constrained to 280 characters. Because the rules are so simple, Twitter can be adapted to more things and used in more ways. Whereas, for example, Facebook was designed a certain way — to alert your friends and family of what you’re up to. As it scaled, and they had to build Facebook business pages, it turned into a mess. All these pages operate in a different way with different rule sets… On Twitter, a business uses the same exact tools that a normal user uses. Facebook needs to keep rolling out new pages and new products for every new use case, whereas with Twitter, the same small set of rules keep getting used over and over. Google made the hard problem of searching for something on the web extremely easy.
• The best manufacturing processes create products in less time and with less waste.
• The best brands are simple from afar, but sophisticated up close.
• The best branding that gets our attention and sticks is always clear, clean, simple, honest, focused, and not ambigious. Simple packaging design increases how much customers would pay for the product. increases When it comes to designing for simplicity, the key emotional need is for users to feel that they’re in control.
• The best design is simple. You hear this from math to painting. In math it means that a shorter proof tends to be a better one. Where axioms are concerned, especially, less is more. It means much the same thing in programming. For architects and designers it means that beauty should depend on a few carefully chosen structural elements rather than a profusion of superficial ornament. (Ornament is not in itself bad, only when it’s camouflage on insipid form.) Similarly, in painting, a still life of a few carefully observed and solidly modelled objects will tend to be more interesting than a stretch of flashy but mindlessly repetitive painting of, say, a lace collar. In writing it means: say what you mean and say it briefly. It seems strange to have to emphasize simplicity. You’d think simple would be the default. Ornate is more work. But something seems to come over people when they try to be creative. Beginning writers adopt a pompous tone that doesn’t sound anything like the way they speak. Designers trying to be artistic resort to swooshes and curlicues. Painters discover that they’re expressionists. It’s all evasion. Underneath the long words or the “expressive” brush strokes, there is not much going on, and that’s frightening.
• The best typography is sans-serif font.
• The best explanations are short, but potent.
• The most effective speech is the shortest. Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg speech, known for it’s eloquence and precision, is all of 300 words. Paring down sentences and sentiments yields better results. Brevity, after all, is the soul of wit.
• Simplicity drives sales. If you want to sell more, make people think less.
• The best investors focus only on the few variables that matter and ignore the rest. The worst investors focus on every little bit of information. They’ve read every press release, news article, and earnings report. No detail escapes them. But they don’t know what’s relevant and what’s not. They don’t know what matters and what doesn’t. And because they’re looking for something that everyone is missing, they will eventually find it. The brain wants to justify the effort. So some new piece of information gets overvalued, which leads them to unwarranted confidence. You can see where this is going.
• The best architecture should be seen as neat and functional, simple, yet with an expressive spirit. It emphasizes rationality and functionality by employing clean lines and forms. The best design would convey simplicity while also revealing the depths that true simplicity entails. The best designers marry function with form to create intuitive experiences that we understand immediately-no lessons (or cursing) needed. Good design relies to some extent on the ability to instill a sense of instant familiarity. Elegance is achieved when the superfluous is discarded and construction takes place with free flowing spaces and interiors in harmony with environment. When we see architecture with clean straight lines, without the trappings of complicated design, the simplicity of the effect is uplifting. Minimalist designs are always effective in maximizing their reach as they can be interpreted in many ways.
• Homes untroubled by excess furniture and uncluttered by artifacts with clear spaces and surfaces suggest a minimalism and a freedom and openness that can be refreshing. It is not in the multiplicity and confusion of things that beauty is achieved. Perhaps, a plant in a corner can bring in the sense of outdoors.
• An elaborate wedding is a vulgar display of wealth where as a simpler event talks of taste.
• A single flower in a vase has more grace than a large bouquet, if only we can see it!
• A simply dressed man or woman with a touch of taste determine sartorial elegance rather than those overdressed in expensive clothes.
• Simplicity of manner is an example of sophistication where you treat everyone with an even hand. Reserving all niceness for those who matter and treating others dismissively is not sophistication. Politeness that is reduced to obsequiousness embarrasses one.
• A Japanese proverb says “Excessive courtesy is discourtesy.” In short, it is just being yourself. We are often struck by the simplicity of manner of those who can say much in a few words and not resort to verbiage. Much clarity is sacrificed and distortion takes place when we cannot or do not say what is actually meant.
• The best salespeople don’t look like salespeople. Thiel calls them Sales Grandmasters, where their art is hidden in plain sight. E.g. Elon Musk looks like an anti-salesman (but he can outsell any salesman on the planet). What ties all these paradoxes together is this: The stronger the signal, the less effective the signal can be. As a result, the beauty lies in the subtle signals and counter signals.
• Elaborate meals tire the tongue and the taste buds while fewer dishes deliciously turned out and beautifully dressed are something to savour even in memory.

We’re prone to thinking that life is improved by addition. A new house will make our life better. A new friend will add excitement. A new car will make me happier. A new idea will make us smarter.

Instead of addition, try subtraction. Remove a negative relationship from your life. Cancel one subscription. Drop a mindset that is holding you back. Stop adding things and start removing what’s holding you back.

If something isn’t working, if the community you want isn’t emerging, then you probably need to go back and remove something much more than you need to add something.

It’s not that you should own nothing.
It’s that nothing should own you.

The key to live simply is,

The skills to better filter and process are within our grasp:
(1) Think: focus on understanding basic, timeless, general principles of the world and use them to help filter people, ideas, and projects.
(2) Define+Plan: take time to think about what you’re trying to achieve and the 2–3 variables that will most help you get there.
(3) Act: remove the inessential clutter from our lives.
(4) Analyze: think backwards about what we want to avoid.

Ten Laws

1. Reduce
The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction. When in doubt, just remove. But be careful of what you remove. … When it is possible to reduce a system’s functionality without significant penalty, true simplification is realized.

2. Organize
Organization makes a system of many appear fewer. At first, a larger home lowers the clutter to space ratio. But ultimately, the greater space enables more clutter. Small changes in organization create big differences in a design.

3. Time
Savings in time feel like simplicity. When forced to wait, life seems unnecessarily complex. Savings in time feel like simplicity. … A shot from the doctor hurts less when it happens quickly, and even less when we know that the shot will save our lives.

4. Learn
Knowledge makes everything simpler. This is true for any object, no matter how difficult. The problem with taking time to learn a task is that you often feel you are wasting time, a violation of the third Law. We are well aware of the dive-in-head-first approach — “I don’t need the instructions, let me just do it.” But in fact this method often takes longer than following the directions in the manual.

5. Differences
Simplicity and complexity need each other. The more complexity there is in the market, the more that something simpler stands out.

6. Context
What lies in the periphery of simplicity is definitely not peripheral.

7. Emotion
More emotions are better than less.

8. Trust
In simplicity we trust.

9. Failure
Some things can never be made simple. Complexity can be beautiful. Concentrate on the deep beauty of a flower. Notice the many thin, delicate strands that emanate from the center and the sublime gradations of hue that occur even in the simplest white blossom. Complexity can be beautiful. At the same time, the beautiful simplicity of planting a seed and just adding water lies at even the most complex flower’s beginning.

10. The One
Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful.

Three Keys

In addition to the 10 Laws, there are 3 Keys to achieving simplicity in the technology domain.

1. Away
More appears like less by simply moving it far, far away.

2. Open
Openness simplifies complexity.

3. Power
Use less, gain more.

The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction. When in doubt, just remove. But be careful of what you remove. When it is possible to reduce a system’s functionality without significant penalty, true simplification is realized.

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1. Awareness — Identify What Is Important To You

Focus is the art of knowing what to focus and what to ignore.

Most people don’t stop enough and think hard enough about their priorities and the problems that are the most worthwhile for them to try to solve. They operate on a kind of first-come, first-serve basis when it comes to their time.

Simplicity, at its best, is about finding what’s best for you or finding the one decision that removes 100 decisions.

Life is pretty simple. It’s a matter of knowing your values, making some key decisions based on those values, and then managing those decisions on a day-to-day basis. That’s pretty straightforward.

Simplicity is the art of knowing what to focus and what to ignore to curate a space that reflects your values and priorities. It jumpstarts intentional living by forcing you to identify your values. It involves digging through the depth of the complexity.

To be truly simple, you have to go really deep and think very long-term and future focused.

Even as a teenager, when friends would tease me for not having tattoos or piercings, I never got them because my first thought is, “Will I want that when I’m 80?” If not, then why do it? My present life is in service of my future self — like what I do, who I spend time with, and where I am. Even though it has short-term pain, I tend to do things for my future, not my present.

What choices can I make today that minimize the regret I’ll feel as an 80-year-old looking back on my life? When I minimize future regret, I sleep well knowing I’m maximizing fulfillment.

For example, to have no screws on something, you can end up having a product that is so convoluted and so complex. The better way is to go deeper with the simplicity, to understand everything about it and how it’s manufactured. You have to deeply understand the essence of a product in order to be able to get rid of the parts that are not essential.

That’s what Apple tried to do with the first Mac & Iphone. As the headline of Apple’s first marketing brochure proclaimed in 1977 attributed to Leonardo De Vinci, “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”

Smart people are uniquely vulnerable to mistaking complexity for insight.

An executive writes a ten-page memo that could be one. An engineer builds an intricate system when a simple one would perform better at half the cost. The consultant mesmerizes clients with frameworks that conceal rather than reveal. We attach prestige to what mystifies us. Complexity intoxicates both the creator and audience, drugging us with the illusion of wisdom.

Mastery isn’t making the simple complex — it’s finding the elegant simplicity that cuts through the complexity.

Simplicity before understanding complexity is ignorance. Simplicity after understanding complexity is genius. Often things appear simplistic to us because we lack understanding. As we learn more and gain experience things quickly become complicated. As we learn more and become a master, they become simple. Simplicity on the other side of complexity is understanding. Simplistic before understanding is ignorance. Simplistic reveals your ignorance. Simple forces understanding.

To do difficult things in the simplest way, we need a lot of options.

Complexity is necessary because it gives us the functionality we need. A useful framework for understanding this is Tesler’s law of the conservation of complexity, which states: “The total complexity of a system is a constant. If you make a user’s interaction with a system simpler, the complexity behind the scenes increases.”

The law originates from Lawrence Tesler (1945–2020), a computer scientist specializing in human-computer interactions who worked at Xerox, Apple, Amazon, and Yahoo! Tesler was influential in the development of early graphical interfaces, and he was the co-creator of the copy-and-paste functionality.

Complexity is like energy. It cannot be created or destroyed, only moved somewhere else.

I believe that everything should be simple, yet with an expressive spirit. My guiding tenet is simplicity — not merely the shallow simplicity that comes from an uncluttered look and feel and surface of a product, but the deep simplicity that comes from knowing the essence of every product, the complexities of its engineering and the function of every component. It takes a lot of hard work to make something simple, to truly understand the underlying challenges and come up with elegant solutions. My goal is to fold highly sophisticated products into intensely simple designs. It is the keynote of all true elegance. The stronger the signal, the less effective the signal can be. As a result, the beauty lies in the subtle signals and counter signals. The art is hidden in plain sight.

You have to put in more effort to make something appear effortless. Effortless, elegant performances are simply the result of a large volume of effortful, gritty practice. Small things become big things. Simple is not simple. When a product or service becomes simpler for users, engineers and designers have to work harder. Norman writes, “With technology, simplifications at the level of usage invariably result in added complexity of the underlying mechanism.” For example, the files and folders conceptual model for computer interfaces doesn’t change how files are stored, but by putting in extra work to translate the process into something recognizable, designers make navigating them easier for users.

Whether something looks simple or is simple to use says little about its overall complexity. “What is simple on the surface can be incredibly complex inside: what is simple inside can result in an incredibly complex surface. So from whose point of view do we measure complexity?”

Beginner = Ignorant simplicity. Intermediate = Functional complexity. Advanced = Profound simplicity. Profound simplicity is not merely the shallow simplicity that comes from an uncluttered look and feel and surface of a product, but the deep simplicity that comes from knowing the essence of every product, the complexities of its engineering and the function of every component.

When you’re forced to be simple, you’re forced to face the real problem. When you can’t deliver ornament, you have to deliver substance. The simpler the language, the bigger the challenge. Simplicity is the end result of long, hard work; not the starting point. In fact, simple can be more difficult than complex, as only an uncluttered mind can think clearly. Therefore, reducing the complex to simple is a measure of creativity. When Marcus Aurelius, the philosopher emperor of Rome said, “The effect of true philosophy is unaffected simplicity and modesty. Persuade me not to ostentation and vain glory”, he said it all. The shape of genius is simplicity. It’s the mark of a genius to explain a complex topic in a simple way. The best thinkers are clear thinkers — they could explain a complex topic to a 5-year-old.

“Fools ignore complexity. Geniuses remove it.” — Alan Perils

“Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.” — Frederic Chopin

“Simplicity is nature’s first step, and the last of art.” — Philip James Bailey

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. It takes a lot of hard work to make something simple, to truly understand the underlying challenges and come up with elegant solutions.[…] Simple can be harder than complex. You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple.” — Steve Jobs

“Simplicity is the highest form of complexity; it is the most difficult thing in the world; it is the extreme limit of experience and the last effort of the genius.” — Leonardo da Vinci

Figuring out what matters to you most may be the most important decision you can make. In doing so, you will get on the same track with today’s greatest business successes. In a world where information is abundant and easy to access, the real advantage is knowing where to focus. Most information is irrelevant and most effort is wasted, but only the expert knows what to ignore. When you know what matters to you, it’s a lot easier to ignore what doesn’t. Focus is the art of knowing what to ignore. One of the greatest forms of freedom comes from knowing what is important to you. It grants you the freedom to ignore everything else. When you do have time to work, how easily can you decide what to work on next? There is no complexity, only a failure to prioritize. A lot of time is wasted re-figuring out what to work on, or convincing your brain to tackle a vague problem (e.g. “Do budget”). If you don’t know what you should be working on, everything is a distraction. Make it easy to know what to work on next.

Filtering is a superpower. The people you don’t hang around. The opportunities you don’t accept. The distractions you don’t allow. The relationships you don’t have. The news you don’t read. The content you don’t consume. The ultimate form of optimization is elimination. Nothing is more effective than removing the ineffective. Effectiveness begins with elimination. Wild success requires aggressive elimination. You can’t be great at everything.

Almost everyone I’ve ever met would be well-served by spending more time thinking about what to focus on. It is much more important to work on the right thing than it is to work many hours. When you get your priorities right on the short term, a lot of the longer term goals and issues take care of themselves. Know how to set a short list of priorities, and how to protect them by being really good at saying NO to anything that didn’t align with those priorities. Saying NO is how you turn filtering into action. Doing less — and sticking to that narrow scope — is key.

For me, the solution is to have a simple and trusted TO-DO system which is your current set of priorities, as concrete actions (not vague project names). Prioritize this and make it sacred. In general, don’t prioritize your schedule. Schedule your priorities.

Choose your ignorance as carefully as your interests. Put careful thought into your top priorities and remove unnecessary things from your schedule and your life. Prioritize things that are aligned with your personal and business core values and dedicate your resources to the things that are most important. Invariably these are the things that will bring the most fulfillment and will increase rather than deplete your energy. Be focused on finding the things that make your life happier and surround yourself with the things that bring you joy, while eliminating those that do not. However, figuring out what matters is the true hard part and varies from person to person. You can have a mindset of living life to the fullest with less by just making small adjustments by distinguishing between things you need rather than things you want is a financially helpful and healthy habit to put into practice. Be more conscious of what’s a waste of your time. When you find that 20%, go all in, and forget about the rest.

Cost of Delay

Cost of Delay is the newest (to me) and most exciting of the ideas and resources sent in for this edition. I had a vague, intuitive sense that we weren’t measuring the right things, or properly appreciating the cost of misprioritization, and this is the framework that made it “click.”

Cost of Delay is a way of communicating the impact of time on the outcomes we hope to achieve. Cost of Delay combines urgency and value — two things that humans are not very good at distinguishing between. To make decisions, we need to understand not just how valuable something is, but how urgent it is.

So the key questions to ask yourself are:

1. How valuable is this?
2. How urgent is this?

First, ask yourself, “What project solves the most problems?”

There’s also an similar version of this question from Tim Ferriss: “What is one thing that, if completed, makes the rest of these tasks easier?”

Remember the 80/20 Rule and know what the key 20% is. What 20% of your work drives 80% of your outcomes? What’s one thing you could do now that if you did regularly would make a tremendous difference in your life? Know what the 20% of activities that are responsible for 80% of the positive outcomes are. Don’t do anything unless it addresses the main thing holding you back. Throw 80% of things out of the window, to focus on the 20% that have the highest impact.

Once you have defined the goal there are really only two questions:

1. What’s the current limit?
2. What’s the obvious way to improve the limit?

The key is to look at the whole system to find the limit. In a company, is the limit sales? Some aspect of production? Delivery?

If you’re working on anything that isn’t improving the bottleneck, then you’re not improving the throughput of the system. Essentially wasting time and resources, where any improvement to the bottleneck would be a massive payoff.

Shift from looking at tasks to looking at problems. Look at the problems you need to solve and the possible solutions on separate levels. They triage very differently. Multiple problems can be solved with one project, but it rarely works by accident.

It doesn’t have to remove the need to complete the other tasks — just ordering projects in a way that makes the other easier, faster, or cheaper can be a great investment of time.

Second, “What activities have long-term ROI?”

All self-help boils down to “choose long-term over short-term.” We waste our time with short-term thinking and busywork. Often we solve the immediate problem with little regard to how it sets us up in the future. Examples include: Eating fast food, skipping a workout, solving the wrong problem, staying up late, and entering into a relationship where we win and someone else loses. Winning the moment is temporary. While it might seem like you’re getting ahead, you’re not.

My favorite example of this is Tim Urban’s (Wait But Why) answer to the question “What’s something I can learn or do in 10 minutes that would be useful for the rest of my life?”

Don’t win the moment at the expense of the decade. Focus on the extremely long term. Make a lot fewer short-term compromises. Eliminate short-term things. Some projects (even super small ones) can have enormous payoffs over a lifetime, if they save you time and mental clutter. Aspire to only work with people who you can work with forever, to invest your time in activities that are a joy unto themselves, to buy less but buy better stuff that you’ll feel good reusing, to avoid dinners with people you won’t see again, to avoid tedious ceremonies to please tedious people, to avoid traveling to places that you wouldn’t go to on vacation. If it is not making you happier, smarter, or healthier, or calmer, or having better relationships, or wealthier, then what good is it? It’s useless. You can safely discard it. When faced with a decision, ask yourself: “Is this helping me get what I want?”, or “What option feels like it will produce the most amount of luck in the future?” Choose it. Yet to see the Luck Razor fail. Everything else is just noise.

The best way is to have a set structure + blame it. Create systems that help you fend off distractions. Establish simple systems for things like your daily schedule, timeline, future plan, finance and also your knowledge, etc. Benjamin Franklin said, “If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail!” Have a system to help you stay on track. Scheduling things creates a visual feedback mechanism for how you actually spend your time — something we’re intentionally blind to because we won’t like what we see. Try all you might, there will occasionally be interruptions. Plan for these in advance by having some flexibility in your schedule so that you don’t get log jammed. While you can’t expect for every unexpected occurrence, you should anticipate certain obstacles. This way you can have a contingency plan so that you can keep going forward no matter what. If unexpected tasks pop-up, you can simply just go back to your plan and revise it accordingly. It’s less about how much gets done and instead establishing a vision as to how your work day will unfold.

To create an effective system, stop guessing and start backing up your decisions with data. If you can optimize websites for search engines, you can optimize your life to grow and reach your maximum potential. There are countless research studies that can offer insight on optimizing your productivity. For instance, did you know that most people are more easily distracted between noon to 4 p.m.? This was the conclusion that came from research shared by Robert Matchock, an associate professor of psychology at Pennsylvania State University. But even if you can’t find data on a particular question you might have, it doesn’t take a lot of time to run a simple split test and examine your own results.

Run a simple split test. Consider tracking everything you do, and the time it takes to complete each task, and the results. Then go back, assess your list to see what did (or didn’t) prove fruitful, and take your findings into consideration to optimize for future tasks.

For example, you can simplify your finance so you can steer yourself away from hyper-consumption. I used to be someone who bought everything with credit cards. I would estimate how much money I needed each month and pay the minimum amounts on my multiple forms of debt. Now, I’ve created a simple money management system that’s enabled me to manage my income and expenses. This includes making a budget, building an emergency fund, and investing in low-fee index funds and ETFs. I’ve also shifted from paying for daily expenses exclusively with cash or my debit card. Not only have I learned to spend intentionally, but I’ve eliminated the financial anxiety that used to plague my life. Making the conscious decision to buy less physical things and invest in experiences or myself (i.e. books), have led to a deep realization that I am already enough.

Third, ask yourself, “Does it spark joy?”.

That question is the determining factor for deciding what to keep and do.

When you use joy as your standard, you confront each of your things and activities earnestly, and reflect on whether they make you happy in the present. Consequently, you will begin to realize what kinds of things you want to surround yourself with and what your idea of happiness really is.

Then, you can apply this decision-making standard of “joy” to your work and relationships. You will begin to feel more confident in recognizing and pursuing what makes you happy.

In my experience, it takes time to tell the difference between your head saying YES and your heart saying YES. I think the key is whether you’re really excited about it. If you get that little adrenaline spike (in a good way) when you think about it, then your heart is saying YES. The corollary, of course, is that when your head says NO and your heart says YES, your mouth should generally say yes as well :-). But not when your head says YES and your heart says NO.

Fourth, ask yourself, “What is the cost of not having this (done) yet?”.

When you see what people have achieved, you can figured out what they do. When you see what they’ve sacrificed, you begin to understand who they are. How you choose to spend your time reflects what motivates you. What you’re willing to give up reveals what matters to you.

The measure of how much you love something is what you sacrifice for it. When something has weighed you down, even the sentimental, remind yourself that it has a cost. No matter where we’ve been or where we’re going, when we fixate on the past and the future, it’s at the expense of the present. The question of what you want to own or do is actually the question of how you want to live your life. Henry Thoreau put it best when he said, “The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.”

Life is a series of tradeoffs, and greater results usually require greater tradeoffs. There’s a price to pay for all the decisions you make. The person you marry is the person you fight with. The house you buy is the house you repair. The dream job you take is the job you stress over. Everything comes with an inherent sacrifice — whatever makes us feel good will also inevitably make us feel bad. What we gain is also what we lose. What creates our positive experiences will define our negative experiences. This is a difficult pill to swallow. This is why our problems are recursive and unavoidable.

The question is not, “Do you want to be great at this?” The question is, “What are you willing to give up in order to be great at this?”

Pretend you don’t own it yet. Instead of asking, “How much I value this item?”, you should ask, “If I did not own this item, how much would I pay to obtain it?”, or “How much am I willing to sacrifice my passion and purpose for possessions?”.

You can do the same for opportunities and commitment. Don’t ask, “How will I feel if I miss out on this opportunity?” but rather, “If I did not have this opportunity, how much would I be willing to sacrifice in order to obtain it?” Similarly, you can ask, “If I wasn’t already involved in this project, how hard would I work to get on it?”.

Finally, “How urgent is this?”

Apply The Eisenhower Matrix strategy (Urgent vs. Important) developed by Dwight Eisenhower for taking action and organizing your tasks. Using the decision matrix below, you will separate your actions based on four possibilities.

A quick 2x2 that asks only two questions:

• How urgent is this?
• How important is this?

And it gives you immediate next steps based on the answers to those questions. You’ve probably seen something like this box before:

• Important and Urgent: tasks you will do immediately.
• Important, but not Urgent: tasks you will schedule to do later.
• Urgent, but not Important: tasks you will delegate to someone else.
• Neither Urgent nor Important: tasks that you will eliminate.

“What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important.”
— Dwight Eisenhower

This matrix “can be used for broad productivity plans (“How should I spend my time each week?”) and for smaller, daily plans (“What should I do today?”).

Keep three and only three lists: a To-do List, a Watch List, and a Later List. The more into lists you are, the more important this is. Into the To-do List goes all the stuff you “must” do — commitments, obligations, things that have to be done. A single list, possibly subcategorized by timeframe (today, this week, next week, next month). Into the Watch List goes all the stuff going on in your life that you have to follow up on, wait for someone else to get back to you on, remind yourself of in the future, or otherwise remember. Into the Later List goes everything else — everything you might want to do or will do when you have time or wish you could do. This list is for all the things you don’t look at that often. This method extends to list making, too. Keep digital lists on an app called “Things 3” for longer-term projects. Keep lists for holidays you’d like to take, presents for your family, restaurants you’d like to try and box sets you want to watch. That way you’ll find them again, rather than having the idea and never logging it. If it doesn’t go on one of those three lists, it goes away.

Be forensic in your to-do lists. Day to day, use a single sheet of thick paper. Handwritten in pencil, and carefully sectioned off by project. If things get badly busy, you should also make an urgent list of all the things you need to do in the next few hours. It can be helpful to make your lists location specific: things you can do at your desk, calls you can make while you’re on the move, shopping to be done in a particular place. The key is to think about the steps you need to move the project from the page and into action. Once you actually start doing things, you can get it done quite quickly.

Use your values to make decisions. Understanding yourself is essential to managing your time. For example, if your top value is family then you will have to manage your work requirements according to that value. Discovering your values is challenging if you have never given thought to this area before. Learn more about it here.

Remember to do a review of the past. To prevent yourself from accumulation creep, review all the contents once a week to see if you can get rid of anything more. Get current by reviewing your upcoming calendar, projects, actions lists, and checklists and ditching the inessentials. Review your goals for the year and make plans to work on them in the coming week. Review all of your activities and see which ones aren’t helping your reach your goals. You should also look at the activities that no longer fit into your schedule. Review your calendar for the past week and the current week — look for loose ends, meetings and other matters that need further attention. Finally, get creative. Find unique ways to slip projects you’ve been putting off into your schedule.

Information

In a few short decades we’ve moved from information scarcity, the problem that defined most of human history, to information abundance, the problem that defines our present. We know too much, and it’s paralyzing. We are drowning in information. Most of that information is irrelevant. If only we could sort what matters from what doesn’t. A large part of wisdom is knowing what to ignore. A large part of expertise is knowing where to place your attention.

The good news is that you can train your brain to evaluate the quality of information. The people worth following right now are the thinkers who seem able to find the signal in the noise.

Not only can you quickly determine if someone knows what they are talking about but you can sort the important information from the irrelevant information and focus your time on what matters.

How? It turns out that Nobel Laurette Richard Feynman thought about this problem and created a series of “tricks” that he used repeatedly.

In a series of non-technical lectures in 1963, memorialized in a short book called The Meaning of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen Scientist, Feynman talks through basic reasoning and some of the problems of his day. His method of evaluating information is another set of tools you can use along with the Feynman Learning Technique to refine what you learn.

Particularly useful are a series of “tricks of the trade” he gives in a section called “This Unscientific Age.” These tricks show Feynman taking the method of thought he learned in pure science and applying it to the more mundane topics most of us have to deal with daily.

Before we start, it’s worth noting that Feynman takes pains to mention that not everything needs to be considered with scientific accuracy. It’s up to you to determine where applying these tricks might benefit your life.

Regardless of what you are trying to gather information on, these tricks help you dive deeper into topics and ideas and not get waylaid by inaccuracies or misunderstandings on your journey to truly know something.

7 “Tricks” for Evaluating Information:

As we enter the realm of “knowable” things in a scientific sense, the first trick has to do with deciding whether someone else truly knows their stuff or is mimicking others.

If you learn something via the Feynman Technique, you will be able to answer questions on the subject. You can make educated analogies, extrapolate the principles to other situations, and easily admit what you do not know. You easily switch between a macro and micro level of the topic.

The second trick has to do with dealing with uncertainty. Very few ideas in life are absolutely true. What you want is to get as close to the truth as you can with the information available.

Feynman is talking about grey thinking here, the ability to put things on a gradient from “probably true” to “probably false,” and how we deal with that uncertainty. He isn’t proposing a method of figuring out absolute, doctrinaire truth.

Another term for what he’s proposing is Bayesian updating — starting with a priori odds, based on earlier understanding, and “updating” the odds of something based on what you learn thereafter. An extremely useful tool.

Feynman’s third trick is the realization that as we investigate whether something is true or not, new evidence and new methods of experimentation should show the effect of getting stronger and stronger, not weaker. Knowledge is not static, and we need to be open to continually evaluating what we think we know.

We must refine our process for probing and experimenting if we’re to get at real truth, always watching out for little troubles. Otherwise, we torture the world so that our results fit our expectations. If we carefully refine and re-test and the effect gets weaker all the time, it’s likely to not be true, or at least not to the magnitude originally hoped for.

The fourth trick is to ask the right question, which is not “Could this be the case?” but “Is this actually the case?” Many get so caught up with the former that they forget to ask the latter.

The fifth trick is not using the same data that gave you the clue to make the conclusion. You cannot judge the probability of something happening after it’s already happened. That’s cherry-picking. You have to run the experiment forward for it to mean anything.

The sixth trick is the plural of anecdote is not data. We must use proper statistical sampling to know whether or not we know what we’re talking about.

The last trick is to realize that many errors from a lack of information. We are missing information that we don’t know we’re missing. This can be a very tough one to guard against — it’s hard to know when you’re missing information that would change your mind.

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2. Deliberate Practice — Say NO

The great baseball hitter Sadaharu Oh learned from his Zen Master and hitting coach, Hiroshi Arakawa, the power of waiting, the power of precision, the power of the void, the power of wu wei, or nonaction.

Think of Fabius, the Roman general who defeated Hannibal by not attacking, but letting him defeat himself, far from home. I have a picture in my office of Oliver Sacks and behind him is a large sign that says “NO!”

In order to apply most of your energy in one direction, you have to say NO to things that a lot of people say YES to.

Success requires you to say NO.

Say NO a lot.

Say NO often.

The difference between average results and exceptional ones is what you avoid. Saying NO to mediocre opportunities is easy. Saying NO to good opportunities is hard.

The Paradox of Freedom/Success — the way to expand your freedom is to narrow your focus.

• Stay focused on saving to achieve financial freedom.
• Stay focused on training to achieve physical freedom.
• Stay focused on learning to achieve intellectual freedom.

Anyone can say NO to bad ideas, but only a focused person can say NO to good ideas.

Most successful people are masters at eliminating the unnecessary from their lives.

When talking about one of the biggest lessons he learned from Steve Jobs, Jonny Ive said it was focus.

This sounds really simplistic, but it still shocks me how few people actually practice this, and it’s a struggle to practice, but is this issue of focus.

Jobs was the most focused person in the world. The tendency of people and organizations is to lose focus. So one way to identify outstanding people is by their ability to commit and focus on something for a long period of time.

The only people you should hire are focused ones. The only competitors you should worry about are the focused ones.

People naturally lose focus when they forget that focus means saying NO to good opportunities and good people. Average ideas are everywhere, and they try to pull you in. The more successful you are, the more people will want to work with you. If you start saying yes to average ideas, you quickly lose the space and time you need to execute on great ones.

Organizations lose focus in many ways, but the one that causes the most damage is bureaucracy. An organization where committees make decisions will always end up losing focus. When an organization loses focus, it opens the door to competitors who can focus.

The biggest fear most of us have with learning to say NO is that we will miss an opportunity. An opportunity that would have catapulted us to success, or that will never come again. And most of the time, that simply isn’t true. I’ve found that the first part of learning to say NO is learning to accept that offers and opportunities are merely an indication that you’re on the right path- not that you’ve arrived at a final destination you can never find again.

Focus is a force multiplier on work. Great vision requires a lot of focus. If you focus on too many things, you won’t be able to spend time on what makes you great. The disciplined become the free. Focus collapses your options in the short-term, but expands them in the long-term.

Everyone has unlimited choices but faces limited resources with money, energy, time, people and partnerships. It’s good to understand that you are finite and your time is finite and your energy is finite and your focus is finite. You must limit your choices to match up to your limited choices. Our possessions and activities consume our resources more than we realize. You only have so much resource — focus it on things and activities where a small injection of time can massively impact your life. The only person you can control is you. So focus on making yourself who you want to be: Faster. Smarter. Stronger. If you want to experience the best, you have to be your best. It’s a reminder to me to consider each opportunity and each ask carefully. What’s at stake is my stillness and my finite resources. So are yours! What you want doesn’t matter. Wants are negotiable. When the going gets tough, you’ll work out a settlement. Don’t waste your life chasing the many things you want, just to give up halfway. Only non-negotiables make it to the finish line.

No one can have it all. There is always a trade-off. Everything has an opportunity cost. Any energy that goes into what doesn’t matter comes at the expense of what does. With a little extra time, you can raise the standard from good enough to great. A Big Mac doesn’t cost $3.99, it costs your health. Netflix doesn’t cost $17.99, it costs your time. Social media isn’t free, it costs your focus. There is always a hidden cost. Saying YES to something really means saying NO to something else. To turn your goal into reality, you will have to say NO to yourself and everything else to stay focused. You have to say NO to protect the deep, rich, powerful YES that makes for a meaningful life. Saying NO means that you’re going to be better at the things that are most important to you. If you want to fly, give up everything that weighs you down.

Life is full of trade-offs. Every choice has a cost. When you say yes to one thing, you say no to others. This is how the world works. It’s like gravity. You can’t escape it.

Opportunity cost is what you give up when you make a choice. It’s the thing you can’t have because you picked something else. Say you have a free evening. You can work on your startup or go to a movie. If you work, you miss the fun. If you go to the movie, you miss the chance to make progress. Every choice has an opportunity cost because you implicitly say no to many other things every time you say yes to something. You need to know your opportunity costs. This helps you make good trade-offs.

A trade-­off is giving up one thing to get something else. It’s choosing between options. Each has good and bad points. Trade-offs are about priorities. When you make something, you face trade-offs. If you want it fast, you might lose some features. If you want it cheap, you might use lower-quality materials.

In life, we face ­ trade-­ offs all the time. Do you take the high-paying job with long hours? Or the low-paying one with more free time? Do you spend money now or save for later?

Making good trade-­offs is about weighing the opportunity costs and benefits of each option and choosing the one that aligns best with your goals and values. It’s not always easy, but being conscious of the ­ trade-­offs you’re making can help you make better decisions.

Wisdom is anticipating the consequences of your choices. In life and business, success is about making good trade-offs. It’s not about having it all. It’s about having what matters most. We all value different things. That’s what makes life rich. Opportunity cost is what you give up when choosing; trade-offs are the balancing acts you perform when deciding between competing options. They’re two sides of the same ­coin — whenever you make a ­trade-­off, you incur an opportunity cost for the options you didn’t choose. The key in both cases is to be thoughtful and intentional about your choices.

Own too much, and you’ll live a life owned by your stuff. Say YES when you should say NO and you’ll live a life organized by others. Keep more than you need, and you’ll give less to those in need. If you don’t say NO, there will be nothing left of you to say YES. Most of us say YES more often than we should, for a variety of reasons, including guilt and over-stretching ourselves, but also because it is so much easier than saying NO. Nobody wants to be the bad guy. It’s tempting to be a people-pleaser. It’s tempting to go with the flow, to give up a little here, a little there, just to make everyone else happy. Conflict makes us all uncomfortable. But conflict is also occasionally necessary, to stand up for what we need, to know who we are. In fact, saying YES to everything is a quick road to mediocrity.

Saying NO doesn’t mean you don’t care. It’s an act of self-care. It isn’t selfish to set boundaries. It’s selfish of others to expect you to be selfless. A gracious decline isn’t a rejection of the person. It’s a recognition that you don’t have the energy for this right now. When people overstep, it’s not always because they don’t respect your boundaries. Often it’s because you haven’t drawn your boundaries. If you don’t tell them where the line is, how can they learn to stop crossing it? You say NO to doing a bunch of meaningless shit that you don’t think is important in life. You say NO to people who overstep their boundaries and make unfair demands of your time or attention. You say NO to make it clear to others where you stand and what you will/will not tolerate in your relationships.

Focus is hard, and because it’s hard, it also creates a hidden place to find opportunities.

Since focus requires saying NO, it also means that really smart people and strong competitors are saying NO to really good ideas.

If you’re a person trying to find your way in an organization, it’s worth thinking about the most focused people around you and the best idea they’re not working on. While they might not say it directly, they’ll leave clues.

If you’re a company, it’s worth thinking about what your strongest competition is not doing. You can often figure this out by interviewing smart focused people from another company.

If you look around, you’ll notice the people and organizations moving the fastest are the focused ones. Not only do they focus on a few ideas, but within the scope of those ideas, they are able to focus on the key variables.

Identifying the variables that matter comes with focus. When you commit to living in a problem, you understand things about it that the tourist cannot.

Focus turns energy into results. Why would you spend any time on your 5th most important idea? All of the energy that goes toward anything that is not the most important thing comes at the expense of the most important thing.

Narrow the focus. Raise the standard. And set yourself apart.

“The difference between successful people and very successful people is that very successful people say “NO” to almost everything.” — Warren Buffett

“It’s only by saying no that you can concentrate on the things that are really important.” — Steve Jobs

When you get your priorities right on the short term, a lot of the longer term goals and issues take care of themselves. Be clear and focus on what you want to create in your life, career, or business. Then set strong, powerful boundaries so others are unable to “chip away” at you, your life and your business. You must protect your time and hold something back. Do not swing at every opportunity. Do not rush into action without thinking. Opt out and say NO. Have the courage to say NO to things that aren’t crucial. Stop saying YES to things that yield little or no result.

Allow yourself to embrace the joy of missing out. Embrace limitation and self-imposed boundaries. In a hyperactive world of choices, the pared-back approach can help us achieve more. Simplify every initiative, everything you do. Eliminate stuff. Don’t accept the excuse of complexity. The more you simplify, the better you will perform.

Find a purpose to serve, not a lifestyle to live. Limit your action or inaction to only what’s in keeping with the needs of your own preparation… by having some self-respect for your own mind and prizing it, so that you can prioritize what truly matters most to you. Don’t spread yourself too thin. Focus on what matters most, while ridding the rest. Quality over quantity.

Optimize your lives for what is important to you. Live minimally and with intention. Optimize your possessions, activities and thinking and more importantly, optimize your spending, time and energy. Keep your attention on the things you want, and you’ll start to attract more of those things into your life.

Less is more. Do less but do better. Narrow the focus. Raise the standard. And set yourself apart. Do less, then obsess. Focus on less things, and do the best you can. Spend over 90% of your income, energy, time, network, knowledge, skills, and aptitudes on the 20% most important things in your life and the remaining 10% on other things. Remember to only spend your resources on what matters to you.

Seek a decluttered lifestyle and advocate for living more simply with fewer activities and possessions. You need to clear your life to make it so that you have to make as few decisions as possible about anything except how to best work on your goals.

Make the most of your resources by applying the Rule 40–30–20–10.

• Spend 40% of your resources to do the most important things.
• Spend 30% to do the second most important things.
• Spend 20% to do the third most important things.
• Spend the remaining 10% to do other things.

The way to do this is by having a bigger YES burning inside.

Be quick to say NO and slow to say yes. Saying yes consumes time, saying NO creates time.

Never say yes on the spot. Always give yourself some space. Make it a rule. Tell people. That’s what Daniel Kahneman does. When he’s on the phone he says “my rule is I never say yes on the phone. I’ll email you later after I think about it more.” And when I asked him how often he later says yes, he responded “rarely.”

Never say yes because you should say yes. If you choose to say yes, make it for a reason. Your reason. If you want to see how often you say yes for the wrong reasons, try finishing this sentence every time you say yes: I am choosing to say yes because … The first few times you answer this honesty, you’ll realize just how often you say yes for the wrong reasons.

The bar for yes should be high and continuously get higher. When you’re first starting you might say yes to everything to get experience. Later, however, you’ll need to be more selective. Most people end up saying yes to mediocre opportunities.

Anyone can say NO to crappy opportunities. Only a master will say NO to good opportunities. If you don’t say NO to good opportunities, you’ll never have the time to pursue great opportunities.

Next time you need to avoid saying YES, use “I don’t” in your refusal, to reinforce the helpful behavior of saying NO to things that aren’t worth it. Don’t rely on your willpower to say NO.

Steve Kamb, the founder of NerdFitness.com, once said that the best and most polite excuse is just to say you have a rule. “I have a rule that I don’t decide on the phone.” “I have a rule that I don’t accept gifts.” “I have a rule that I don’t speak for free anymore.” “I have a rule that I am home for bath time with the kids every night.” People respect rules, and they accept that it’s not you rejecting the offer, request, demand, or opportunity, but the rule allows you no choice.

Behavior change starts with friction. Desired behaviors should be easy. Undesired should be hard.

Great trick is the 20-second rule to avoid activities that don’t add enough value to your life: For activities you shouldn’t be engaging in, or negative habits you want to break, add an element of difficulty, adding on a 20-second roadblock, so to speak, to you starting that activity. For example, if you’re trying to use lessen your use of social media, delete the tempting apps from your phone, so that it takes you another 20 seconds to find your laptop to access them. By adding in an inconvenience, you’ll be less likely to engage with that draining activity or habit. Lower the activation energy for habits you want to adopt and raise it for habits you want to avoid. The more we can lower or even eliminate the activation energy for our desired actions, the more we enhance our ability to jump-start positive change.

“Lower the activation energy for habits you want to adopt and raise it for habits you want to avoid. The more we can lower or even eliminate the activation energy for our desired actions, the more we enhance our ability to jump-start positive change.” (Source: The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work)

If you are a people pleaser and struggle with saying NO, then read The Power of No: Because One Little Word Can Bring Health, Abundance, and Happiness by James Altucher and Claudia Azula Altucher.

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Here are five things I stopped doing to become more productive and flexible:

✿ Stop multi-tasking, and start engaging in single-tasking

“The enemy of learning is not the scarcity of books but the abundance of distractions.”

Multitasking is a myth. We can only focus on one thing at a time. When we switch between several tasks we are actually refiguring the brain moment to moment, task to task — and that comes with a cost of a slower, less efficient performance.

Too much sugar leads to a heavy body, and too many distractions lead to a heavy mind. Technology has made our lives more full, yet at the same time we’ve become uncomfortably “full.”

For naturally disorganized people, the struggle to get our acts together is an uphill battle. Whether we’re juggling meetings and projects at work or dates and social obligations in our free time, something always seems to slip through the cracks. Juggling many tasks at once, switching your attention from one technology to another and hopping from job to job are the most common things that gobble up your precious time.

Multitasking doesn’t work. When we try to multitask, we might feel like we’re getting more done but as research shows, we actually do less and make more mistakes. You usually switch focus from one thing to another too often to do either of them very well. This is deadly from a productivity standpoint. It takes longer to complete a task when we multitask because our minds are shifting back-and-forth. In short, multitasking is not only not thinking, it impairs your ability to think.

A study revealed that those who had had their phones on and received intermittent text messages during a test performed 20% worse on average.

This certainly doesn’t help when we are surrounded by apps that are designed to interrupt us and get us to pick up our device and start scrolling., and once interrupted, it takes 23 minutes to get back on the same level of focus as before you were disturbed.

“Do more” types fall into two traps: they spread themselves too thin, which leads to them to miss deadlines and deliver lower-quality work. They also fall into the complexity traps: they spend time coordinating and juggling multiple activities. Things get dropped, and error rates go up. Many cope by working long hours and stressing to just keep all these activities afloat. It can work to some extent, but it doesn’t produce excellent work. It certainly isn’t being great at work.

In a world where everything is connected to everything disconnection and anti-information and no-knowledge become expensive. Explosion of information and free flowing knowledge is extremely flourishing time for people with growth mindset and probably also a time for others to shut off and avoid being overwhelmed. One hour of focused work with no distractions is more valuable than three hours of interrupted work. Time spent undistracted and alone, in self-examination, journaling, meditation, resolves the unresolved and takes us from mentally fat to fit.

If there’s one thing humans need to know how to do, it’s control their attention. Do focused work. Put everything away except the one thing you’re focused on.

Write down anything that distracts you — google searches, random thoughts, new ideas, whatever. The point is, if you write them down, they’ll stop bubbling up when you’re in the zone.

Remove the chance for interruption. It was hard when I first started working with extreme focus. I’d put my headphones on and ignore people if they spoke to me. I felt like I was being rude. Because I was thinking about my rudeness, my mind didn’t focus on my work. I realized one of the mistakes I made was not telling people how I was working. Taking the time to tell people how you’re working is much better than snapping or ignoring people if they ask you for something while you’re in focus mode. Both of these only lead to more stress which ultimately hurts your focus. If you have kids and it’s hard to remove interruptions, try adding a work session when they’re asleep early in the morning or late at night.

Ruthlessly shave away the unnecessary tasks, priorities, meetings, social media and BS. Do one task at a time, and then move on to the next. Put all your effort into the projects that really matter and are more tightly aligned with your goals. Until your top priority is done, anything else is a distraction. Success is built sequentially. It’s one thing at a time. The ONLY way to stay focused and be able to do the most high-impact work/what you’re most inspired about is to constantly, RUTHLESSLY, decline meetings. You’ll have to ruthlessly decline meetings if you want to do anything of importance in this world. Any meeting with 8 people in it sitting around a conference table — nothing is getting done in that meeting, you’re literally just dying one hour at a time. Meetings are part of how many of us earn a living. Often, however, they’re poorly organized and poorly run. Lacking an agenda or decision, they become nothing more than half-meeting half-gossip session. A giant waste of time. Keep a clean calendar by saying “NO” to meetings and then focusing time on your highest leverage critical path tasks. Do not agree to meetings or calls with no clear agenda or end time. Meetings are notorious for killing time. Unnecessary meetings (and most are) are a mutually-assured-destruction of time. They start late, are poorly run, and often end without any material accomplishment. Learning how to avoid them is a prerequisite of doing anything great. If you’re sitting in a meeting and discover that you don’t need to be there, just excuse yourself politely and leave. If the desired outcome is defined clearly with a stated objective and agenda listing topics/questions to cover, no meeting or call should last more than 30 minutes. Even better, give thoughtful consideration before the meeting as to whether you should even attend in the first place. Request them in advance so you can best prepare and make good use of the time together. No meetings before 11 a.m. No meetings when emails or calls will do. Meetings should really be phone calls, phone call should be emails, and phone calls should just be texts. If someone wants to have a meeting, suggest a phone call. If they want a phone call, suggest an email. When you do have meetings, make it a walking meeting (or a standing meeting), keep them short, and keep them small. Don’t schedule calls, text coordinate them on the fly when possible. Cram all meetings into two days a week. 1-on-1s are usually 30-minute walking meetings. Meetings are the death of productivity. As opposed to wasting your time in a meeting, you can focus on important individual tasks. Don’t go to conferences unless speaking. Business trips are almost never worth it.

Sometimes success is 3% brains and 97% not getting distracted by the Internet. Technology (Google, Facebook, your email) is designed to hijack your attention. Once your attention is hijack, it’s monetized by making you click on links — it’s all engineered. Removing tech distractions is useful to cut down on option overload. Remember, technology and life only become complex if you let it be so. With your phone always at the ready — either in your pocket, your bag or constantly glued to your hand — it’s too easy to become distracted by it too often. Create habits that separate you from your phone, before your life and business pass you by. Keep distractions to a minimum. If you really need your phone for business, make sure you close virtual doors by turning off all the notifications on your phone. Notifications make the lines between work and rest continue to blur. They are just alarm clocks that someone else is setting for you. Though many things seem urgent, they hardly ever are. Most things can wait a couple hours. Notifications are poison for your attention. Turning off notifications allows you to focus. We can’t multitask. You might feel like you can but what’s really happening is your brain is switching between tasks. Shutting down and restarting every time. Switching is inefficient. When it comes to emails and texts, try to check them while you’re on the go, to save on time. Check your apps on your schedule at specific and appropriate times throughout the day and reduce the number of times you check your phone each day.

Delete the social media and messaging apps that you do not often use on your phone. A few weeks ago, I deleted Snapchat, Pinterest and Youtube off my phone. I finally acknowledged that I suffered from the twitch — you know the one — wherein you find yourself reaching for your phone — on the subway platform, in an elevator, or perhaps even walking — to avoid momentary boredom. I wanted to break free. And so, I finally did. As a result, I’ve started to look up instead of down. I’ve become more tuned into the world. And best of all, when I do login to those social media websites from my laptop, I’ve found that I haven’t truly missed anything. As long as you check the communication regularly enough, every few hours for example, you will never miss out on anything. The only notification I get is when I receive new text messages. The person who texts me the most is my mom, so I’d like to ensure that I’m available for her. As for e-mail, news, social media, and all the other ancillary apps — I’ve turned off their notifications and background refresh.

Unless my task specifically involves marketing research, I only have one or two browser windows open at the same time. If my task only involves using Microsoft Word, then I make it a point to exit out of my browser, rather than have it minimized in the background. I also do this with email. When I’m not expecting a response from someone, I will intentionally close Microsoft Outlook and reopen it after I’ve either completed the task or taking a short break. Sometimes I even work from my phone because it forces me to only see one screen at a time. So far, I’ve not missed out on anything urgent and I’ve had an easier time diving into cognitively demanding work.

✿ Stop doing repetitive tasks, and start automating

According to a research study conducted by Tethys Solutions, a team of five people who spent 3%, 20%, 25%, 30% and 70% of their time on repetitive tasks, respectively, reduced their time spent to 3%, 10%, 15%, 15% and 10% after two months of working to enhance their productivity.

Source: Using Automation Software To Increase Business Productivity & Competitiveness -Tethys Solutions

“Systematize the predictable. Humanize the exceptional.” — Issy Sharp

People often forget that time is money. People usually do things manually because it’s easy and requires almost no research. It’s manageable to moderate 30 images on Instagram for your user-generated campaign. But if you have to manage 30,000 photos and videos from five different platforms, you need a good digital asset management software.

Automate anything you repeat. If you think you need to repeat something, write it down. Don’t waste brain power repeating things. Write it down once. Forget it forever. Create step-by-step processes to automate tasks like setting up passwords to booking flights to marketing a new feature.

It’s now possible to convert your business metrics into data points and then turn those data points over to an artificial intelligence engine that optimizes many things. You don’t have to be able to code to automate your repetitive tasks. It’s nice to have the skills or the resources, but it’s not a requirement. If you cannot build it, buy it. Just like managing rich media, you can easily purchase a software to solve almost all of your problems on the Internet.

Use an online calendar and calendar tool. With an online calendar you can access it from multiple devices, schedule meetings/appointments, set up reminders, block time, and set up recurring events. On top of an online calendar, a calendar tool creates a daily routine, puts time limits on tasks, keeps your time in-check, and helps you plan for breaks. I suggest using Google Calendar. It is free and you can set it up to send you email reminders for important activities. Receiving a reminder email about a trip a few days in advance is very useful. Declutter your calendar regularly. Calendars are paramount to time management and productivity. But, they’re not effective when they’re so full that they’re bursting at the seams. Clear the clutter from your calendar by only adding priorities that are date-specific. Don’t fill it with minute activities or events that no longer fit into your lifestyle.

Use fewer tools. Figuring out a new tool or switching tools takes time. You don’t need ten tools. Pick a few good tools that could be used for many things. I picks flexible tools I expect to stick around. If you bet on a ‘hot’ tool just because it’s hot and you have to switch later, that’ll cost you. 90% of my day happens in 4 places: Google Chrome, TextEdit, Trello, Google Docs.

Full list of tools and resources here.

If you still can’t find a solution, you can hire an expert to help you. Keep in mind that you need to spend money to make money and that time is your most valuable commodity.

✿ Stop doing everything yourself, and start letting people help you

At some point in my career, I was managing a very large community and couldn’t handle it all myself. I burnt out, and the community ended up taking over and managing itself. Surprisingly, members did a better job than I could have ever done on my own. I learned the power of community and why brands need user-generated content.

Consumers understand what they want and how they want it better than any marketer does. Did you know that, according to Octoly, user-generated videos are viewed 10 times more than brand-generated videos on YouTube? When seeking information about a particular brand, over half (51%) of Americans trust user-generated content more than what’s on the brand’s official website (16%) or media coverage on the brand (14%). It’s important for marketers to open up and seek help from the brand’s community itself.

Being a great content marketer is not about creating the best content, but building a great community that will generate high-quality content for you.

Source: Earned Media Rankings on YouTube — Octoly

Just having friends nearby can push you toward productivity. “There’s a concept in ADHD treatment called the ‘body double,’ ” says David Nowell, Ph.D., a clinical neuropsychologist from Worcester, Massachusetts. “Distractable people get more done when there is someone else there, even if he isn’t coaching or assisting them.” If you’re facing a task that is dull or difficult, such as cleaning out your closets or pulling together your receipts for tax time, get a friend to be your body double. (Source: Friendfluence: The Surprising Ways Friends Make Us Who We Are)

No matter how hard you try, you cannot be all things to all people. You are human. You aren’t perfect, you never will be. More striving, more working, more late hours won’t get you there. Let’s face it, you can’t do it all.

Even if your friends or coworkers can’t help you, simply having them around can help you become more productive.

For example, being a great content marketer is not about creating the best content, but building a great community that will generate high-quality content for you. 20% of content marketing is creating great content, while 80% is pushing it to the right people, at the right time, in the right place.

Some people take pride in working long hours. That’s dumb. You should take pride in having huge leverage (which often requires long hours). When I would work 100 hour weeks, instead of feeling self-satisfied, I knew I either 1/ wasn’t delegating enough or 2/ didn’t have the right leaders around me to delegate to.

Doing everything yourselves takes more time and costs more money in the long run. With the right systems, you can maximize efficiency and profits. By working longer hours you can get 20% or even 40% more done, but with effective delegation you can get 10x or 100x more done. It’s important for us to realize we can seek help when we need it.

Stop trying to do it all. Delegate and learn to make use of other people. Start letting people help you and spend more of your valuable time engaging in the things that you do extraordinarily well.

Set and enforce an aspirational personal hourly rate for yourself and stick to it. If fixing a problem will save less than your hourly rate, ignore it. If outsourcing a task will cost less than your hourly rate, outsource it. Instead of doing tasks yourself, delegate or outsource them to someone else so that you can focus on more important tasks. Instead of wasting time and energy overloading yourself or trying to do it alone, let others share the burden and help. Then never do anything with your time for less than that amount — whether it’s attending a meeting or returning a package from Amazon (besides things for fun and leisure, of course). If I have to return something, and it costs less than my personal hourly rate, I’ll throw or give it away. If you need to do a task, but can hire someone for less than your hourly rate — hire them. The cost of meetings is so high especially given all the people who are in there… you’re literally just dying an hour at a time. So you have to just drop non-urgent meetings or forget them all together if you want to do anything great.

Get present to all the stuff you are doing and giving attention to. All of it. Learn everything yourself. Learn the ins and outs of the most critical positions so you can replace yourself. Know your strength and weakness. Ask yourself what your time is worth. Spend your time figuring out what really matters to you and what your highest and best use is — the things that you do extraordinarily well with very little effort — and then get really good at that. Double and triple down on your most valuable activities, and keep investing in them and ignore what you’re not good at. Focus your energy on where you have the greatest competitive advantage and then leave the rest for someone else and pay them to get things done. Exploit your edge. Make sure you get to the point where you can achieve the greatest economies of scale. It is more efficient to capitalize on strengths. Do not waste time trying to “fix” weaknesses. Instead acknowledge those weaknesses, outsource to appropriate sources and do what you love. Anything below your pay grade — that can be done cheaper, better, or faster — should be outsourced. Find experts and outsource when you can. There are people much better than you at a particular function in your business. Trust them to do their job. Don’t try to do everything on your own. This means knowing what works and what doesn’t and whether it will be profitable. Once you’ve delegated at least one task, devote the time you’ve gained exclusively to working on your business.

How do you know when to delegate and when to micromanage?

• Low confidence in your own opinion + Low consequences = Delegate. Let people make mistakes and learn.
• High confidence in your own opinion + High consequences = Don’t delegate.

Apply The Eisenhower Matrix strategy developed by Dwight Eisenhower. Eisenhower’s strategy for taking action and organizing your tasks is simple. (Read more above)

You may also discover some things you are doing that are a terrible use of anyone, not just you, and don’t really need to be done at all. These you can consider dumping.

The basic steps of effective delegation:

Know other people's strengths and weaknesses. Establish clear responsibilities. Assign and describe the task and establish a deadline. Explain it to the person who will perform the task. Invest time in teaching. Educate them by providing supportive, ongoing mentorship coupled with knowledge assessments so they know how to handle problems. When you invest time and money into others, they often become even better than you! Set clear policies and procedures, and encourage their input. Make your expectations clear. Address any questions or points of confusion early on. Ask to be kept informed. Verify that the process is underway. Create a weekly reporting structure, and monitor it three times a week to hold your team accountable. Give and receive feedback.

To make decisions re delegating work, consider two variables — the potential consequences of the decision and his own level of certainty about what the right decision is — and delegates accordingly:

• High risk/high certainty: Step in, overrule, take over
• High risk/low certainty: Give more freedom but collaborate
• Low risk/high certainty: Delegate but treat as a learning experience
• Low risk/low certainty: Delegate fully

Even though you delegate, you must take what I call “extreme ownership” over everything that goes on. It’s your fault if it goes wrong.

Some great delegation ideas:

• Your morning commute. Uber works.
• Your social media. Someone else can do it better than you can.
• Your email. No, not all of it, obviously. But hiring someone to delete the trash, deal with the non-essentials and perform perfunctory inbox maintenance can free up tons of time.
• Your blogging. If you’re a committed content marketer, you’re doing a lot of writing. Your proofreaders, editors and assistants get major props for making that happen.
• Your mundane management tasks. Some parts of being a manager are routine, boring and non-critical for you to be involved in. If you’re still knee-deep in invoicing, payroll, P&Ls and other tasks, get some help.
• Your household tasks. Delegate them all as soon as you can afford it.

✿ Stop working, and take some time to do nothing at all

Have you ever wondered where the five-day, 40-hour work week came from?

In 1926, Henry Ford, American industrialist and founder of Ford Motor Company, conducted an experiment with his own staff: He decreased their daily hours from 10 to 8, and shortened the work week from 6 days to 5. As a result, he saw his workers’ productivity increase.

The more you work, the less effective and productive you become over both the short and long term, states a 1980 report from The Business Roundtable titled “Scheduled Overtime Effect on Construction Projects.”

Source: Calculating Loss of Productivity Due to Overtime Using Published Charts — Fact or Fiction

“Where a work schedule of 60 or more hours per week is continued longer than about two months, the cumulative effect of decreased productivity will cause a delay in the completion date beyond that which could have been realized with the same crew size on a 40-hour week.” (Source: Calculating Loss of Productivity Due to Overtime Using Published Charts — Fact or Fiction)

“Busy is the new stupid.” — Bill Gates

Did you know?

• Someone once asked Charlie Munger what Warren Buffett’s secret was. “I would say half of all the time he spends is sitting on his ass and reading. He has a lot of time to think.”
• Newton didn’t come up with his breakthrough observation on the laws of physics while rushing to catch a subway.
• Einstein spent a ton of time sailing and connecting with this childlike self.
• The creator of the sewing machine came up with the idea while dreaming about an island native holding a spear with a hole in the end of it.
• Warren Buffett estimates that he spends as much as 80 percent of his day reading and thinking. Sitting. Reading. Thinking.
• Leonardo da Vinci took multiple naps a day and slept less at night.
• The French emperor Napoleon was not shy about taking naps. He indulged daily.
• Though Thomas Edison was embarrassed about his napping habit, he also practiced this ritual on a daily basis.
• Eleanor Roosevelt, the wife of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, used to boost her energy before speaking engagements by napping.
• Gene Autry, “the Singing Cowboy,” routinely took naps in his dressing room between performances.
• President John F. Kennedy ate his lunch in bed and then settled in for a nap — every day!
• Oil industrialist and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller napped every afternoon in his office.
• Winston Churchill’s afternoon nap was a non-negotiable. He believed it helped him get twice as much done each day.
• President Lyndon B. Johnson took a nap every afternoon at 3:30 p.m. in order to break his day up into “two shifts.”
• Though he was criticized for it, President Ronald Reagan famously took naps as well.

Source: 5 Reasons Why You Should Take a Nap Every Day — Michael Hyatt

Many successful people have morning routines that include time for exercise, reflection, or personal projects before the workday begins. These routines can set a positive tone for the day, fostering creativity and focus.

We waste our time with short-term thinking and busy work. Warren Buffett spends a year deciding and a day acting. That act lasts decades. He famously has a nearly empty calendar, which gives him flexibility to spend time thinking and strategizing, rather than sitting in meetings all day.

I like getting things done. But when I looked at my calendar, I saw that nearly all of my work time was blocked out for doing. New goal: carve out at least an hour a day for thinking and learning.

I don’t approach creativity by solving my way past a specific problem. It’s more about thinking and absorbing, walking around and learning. I don’t know where the ideas will come from, but they’ll come.

Bloggers who post frequently (2x/wk) are rarely worth reading consistently. I read for insights. And no writer can generate profound insights on a fixed schedule. I aggregate writers who publish sporadically. When they post, they truly have something to say.

In my experience, and I’ve been at this for over 10 years, few people get their best ideas at work. I invite you to take a moment to think about that. Checking your email messages on your phone every 60 seconds will not make you more effective. Burning the candle at both ends doesn’t tap into your natural pool of creativity. Refusing to take vacations will not make your a start performer. Here’s a big lesson I’ve learned: I get the best ideas — the thoughts that have really elevated my business and revolutionized my life — when I’m relaxed and having fun.

Knowledge workers function like athletes — train and sprint, then rest and reassess. The way people tend to work most effectively, especially in knowledge work, is they sprint as hard as they can while they’re working on something, and they’re inspired and they’re passionate; and then they rest. They take long breaks. It’s more like a lion hunting and much less a marathon runner running. You sprint, then you rest, you re-assess, and then you try again. What you end up doing is you end up building a marathon of sprints. Work like a lion who hunts for food. Train hard, sprint, rest and reassess — then go at it again.

There’s great value in making the time to chill out and do the things that fill your heart with joy.

If you want to think for yourself, you can’t have someone always whispering in your ear.

If you want space to think, you need quiet and calm, not a bunch of people throwing out new ideas.

Rest is active. It’s an investment in well-being. Relaxing is not a sign of laziness. It’s a source of energy. Breaks are not a distraction. They’re a chance to refocus attention. Play is not a frivolous activity. Rest should be understood as a range of active processes that are crucial for physical and mental recovery, allowing for greater creativity and productivity.

Work and rest are not opposites but complements. High achievers, from scientists to writers and athletes, leverage rest to enhance their creativity, solve complex problems, and boost productivity. This symbiotic relationship between work and rest is key to sustaining long-term success.

I like the concept of “deliberate rest,” where rest is intentional and structured, not accidental or residual. This includes activities that mentally disengage you from work, such as hobbies, walking, or napping, that can lead to creative insights and rejuvenation.

40-hour workweeks are a relic of the Industrial Age. Machines should be working 9 to 5. Humans are not meant to work 9 to 5. A busy calendar and a busy mind will destroy your ability to create anything great. Working 50% more hours will increase output by less than 50% due to lower energy and diminishing returns. Improving your skills by 50% can produce 2000% more output because your new level of skill can be 20X more scarce. People who work 80, 120 hour weeks, a lot of that’s just status signaling. It’s showing off. Nobody really works 80 to 120 hours a week sustained at high output with mental clarity. Your brain breaks down. You just won’t have good ideas. A busy calendar and a busy mind will destroy your ability to do great things in this world. If you are working 24/7, you’re not going to have any interesting ideas. Working too much doesn’t leverage your unique qualities, it wastes them. You can’t simply power through — that’s just not how your bodies and your brains work. Most people don’t realize that when we are too focused on something, we’re essentially locking ourselves in a box which can end up being counterproductive to our work or the results we’re chasing.

For general people, going through life, just trying to be successful, hard work doesn’t matter that much. What you do, who you do it with, and how you do it are so much more important than how hard you do it. Hard work is absolutely no substitute for who you work with and what you work on. Successful people have an incentive to overstate the importance of hard work. Acknowledging your talent is unpopular. Hard work is a linear and fair game that everyone can play. But the truth is, unfair advantage is the mother of success. In physical domains (diet, workouts), consistency is king. In intellectual and social domains, wins are rare, sudden, and nonlinear — 99% of effort is “wasted.” You get rewarded for unique knowledge, not for effort. Effort is required to create unique knowledge. For knowledge work, time spent has little to do with value created and the 40-hour workweek is anachronistic nonsense.

Doing less meaningless work, so that you can focus on things of greater personal importance, is NOT laziness. This is hard for most to accept, because our culture tends to reward personal sacrifice instead of personal productivity.

Let’s define “laziness” anew — to endure a non-ideal existence, to let circumstance or others decide life for you, or to amass a fortune while passing through life like a spectator from an office window. The size of your bank account doesn’t change this, nor does the number of hours you log in handling unimportant e-mail or minutiae.

Focus on being productive instead of busy.

If you find you’re not as productive as you want to be, it’s not time you’re lacking, but focus. The world of work isn’t linear. 8 hours of work does not equate to the same output for every single person. Your output is based on the quality of work you put in. Being busy shouldn’t be a status symbol. There’s a notable distinction between being busy and being productive. Effectiveness and total hours worked are two different things. Being busy doesn’t always necessarily mean you’re being productive. It’s not a proxy of your seriousness that you’ve filled every minute in your schedule. It doesn’t make us happier, and it doesn’t make us more productive. It means we are just misusing our resources. It means we need to manage our resources better. While we work 8 or more hours a day, most of that is just busywork, the reality is that only half of that day is likely to be highly productive. Not all hours are created equal. Just because you work more hours, doesn’t mean you’re doing more (or better) work. Often leaders confuse busy activity and launching new things as progress but most of them don’t move any metric. Progress is about moving a metric positively without negatively impacting other metrics. Productivity doesn’t mean doing the most, but getting the most. It’s not about the hours, it’s what you do with them. Productivity is not based on the number of hours that you’ve worked. You don’t need more time, you need more focus. Sometimes, working less can actually produce better results. It’s not about working hard. It’s about working in a way that allows you to make your best decisions. To be clear, hard work doesn’t mean bragging about all-nighters or fetishizing long hours. It means getting impactful shit done at high velocity. Despite what some might believe, being productive is less about time management and more on managing your energy. It’s the business of life. It’s learning how to spend the least amount of energy to get the most benefits. It’s learning how to get maximum results in minimal energy.

A man may keep very busy indeed without doing any thinking at all, and the easy course — the course of least resistance — is to keep so busy that there will be no time left over for thought. Almost every man tries to dodge thought or to find a substitute for it. We try to buy thoughts ready-made and guaranteed to fit, in the shape of systems installed by experts. We try to substitute discussion for thought by organizing committees; a committee may function very well indeed as a clearinghouse for thoughts, just an elaborate means of fooling oneself into believing that a spell spent in talking is the same as a spell spent in thinking.

Results — or a lack thereof of measurable accomplishments — come from our choices and our actions. Successful outcomes are built up through good choices over time. The quality of your Decisions is determined by your Judgment. The judgment come from Mindset, from what we believe about the world. It comes from Clear Thinking. The clear thinking comes from having time to reflect and to pursue your genuine intellectual curiosity. A clear mind leads to better judgment and better outcomes. A happy, calm, and peaceful person will make better decisions. So if you want to operate at peak performance, you have to learn how to tame your mind. If you want to be effective in business, you need a clear, calm, cool, and collected mind. In practice, it’s nearly impossible to “grow together” as true growth requires obsession. You do your best work when you’re not working. Your brain needs downtime to connect the dots like your body needs rest to strengthen itself for the next workout. If you’re always working, always trying to download information, always trying to be productive, you’re stifling your best insights from bubbling up.

Although productivity in a day depends on the amount of time you spend doing, productivity and creativity in a year hinges on the amount of time you spend thinking, and productivity and creativity in a career rests on the amount of time you spend learning. Thinking is by far the most underrated activity. Thinking clearly and differently requires years of independent wandering, which often looks unproductive in the short-time even when it leads to long-term breakthrough. The Internet may inhibit this. One of my biggest worries about the Internet is that the feedback loops are too fast. People consider it “unproductive” to sit on a bench and think. So they spend their lives doing things they never thought through. An hour of clear thinking, can yield a conclusion that changes your life. If you want to be able to do great things, you need free time and you need a free mind. The only way to do great work, in any field, is to find time to consider the larger questions. The best way to improve your ability to think is to make time and space to think. All of man’s problems arise because he can’t sit by himself in a room for 30 minutes alone. This is so true — humans need CONSTANT simulation. It’s a superpower to learn to enjoy being alone without constant stimulation. You’ll do better work if you’re bored rather than busy. Time spent doing nothing rarely ever produces nothing. It’s becoming easier and easier to be social, but exceptional people are built in solitude.

It's impossible to think clearly without the space in your schedule to do so. In order to get the results we desire, we must do two things. We must first create the space to reason in our thoughts, feelings, and actions; and second, we must deliberately use that space to think clearly.

“The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours.” — Amos Tversky

“It takes a lot of time to be a genius. You have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.” — Gertrude Stein

“Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.” — Anne Lamott

“My view is that to get anywhere in life you have to be anti-social. Otherwise you’ll end up being devoured.” — Sean Connery

“Just think. Just be quiet and think. It’d make all the difference in the world.”— Fred Rogers

“The problem is no longer getting people to express themselves, but providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say…. What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing…the thing that might be worth saying.” — Gilles Deleuze

“It is good to be solitary, because solitude is difficult, and that a thing is difficult must be even more of a reason for us to undertake it. To love is good too, for love is difficult. For one person to care for another, that is perhaps the most difficult thing required of us, the utmost and final test, the work for which all other work is but a preparation.” — Rainer Maria Rilke

“Here lies the paradox of solitude. Look long and hard enough at yourself in isolation and suddenly you will see the rest of humanity staring back.” — Stephen Batchelor

“We need solitude because when we’re alone, we’re free from obligations, we don’t need to put on a show, and we can hear our own thoughts.” — Tamin Ansary

Read more about the advantage of doing nothing here.

Be Like Japan: When I ask people where they want to travel to: 90% say Japan Japan practiced an isolationist policy called Sakoku for 265 years. They largely cut off the outside world resulting in a unique culture. Once per quarter, practice Sakoku for a week.

Science has found that you should only work four hours a day. Learn what moves the needle and focus your work efforts on that, ignoring or getting rid of busywork. This doesn’t mean you can goof off the rest of the day. It’s all about focusing on your most important tasks when you’re most productive. Spend the rest of your days resting, practicing your skills, reflecting, and completing less challenging tasks.

Work more when you’re in the zone. Relax when you’re not. It’s normal to have days where you just can’t work and days where you’ll work 12 hours straight. It’s important to schedule less, walk away from work once in a while and have some alone time, which is good for the brain and spirit, according to “The Power of Lonely,” from The Boston Globe.

It’s important for us not to overwork ourselves and get enough sleep to maintain a high level of productivity. If you want to experience the best, you have to be your best. And this means taking care of you. The foundation of our productivity is our health. It costs nothing to take care of yourself, but it costs everything if you don’t.

It‘s important to take time for recharging and reflection. Pause. Reflect & Recharge. Refocus. Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you. We often find the solutions we’re looking for when we’re not actively searching for them. Thinking is by far the most underrated activity. People consider it “unproductive” to sit on a bench and think. So they spend their lives doing things they never thought through. An hour of clear thinking, can yield a conclusion that changes your life. The best way to take breaks is to schedule them throughout your day. That way you can truly control the flow of work. Take a pause from everything that’s going on and make that kind of a regular part of your day. Take moments where you’re not doing anything. So turn off the computer, turn your phone to silent, just actually finding pockets of time where you sit with yourself and you have kind of a daily check in and reflection about what you’re thinking, how you’re doing, kind of what’s going on.

I advocate for the benefits of extended time off, such as sabbaticals, which can provide opportunities for reflection, exploration, and personal growth. These periods can lead to significant professional breakthroughs and increased satisfaction in work and life. Sleep contributes to problem-solving, memory, and creativity. Focusing work into shorter, highly focused periods can lead to more effective use of time and greater room for rest. High-quality sleep is portrayed as foundational to effective rest and work.

Learning to detach from work mentally, not just physically, is crucial for rest. Techniques like mindfulness meditation, setting boundaries around work communication, and cultivating interests outside work can facilitate this detachment.

Cultivate restful mindsets and environments. This can mean designing physical spaces that encourage relaxation or developing rituals that signal the beginning and end of the workday, helping to manage stress and foster a balanced approach to work and rest.

The key to do that is, test out the Pomodoro Technique (an updated physical copy of Mr Cirillo's free ebook that explained his method and the psychology behind it was published on August 14): Work around procrastination. Procrastinate between intense sprints of work. Constrain the time you work. Work intensively in frequent 25-minute bursts. Set up a system where you focus on a specific project intensely for 25 minutes at a time, followed by a 5 minute break. The technique goes like this: Decide on a task to be done; set a timer for 25 minutes; focus on the task until the timer rings; take a short 3–5 minute break. Each 25-minute chunk is a “Pomodoro”. Repeat this process 3–4 times. Once you have completed four Pomodoros, take half an hour off, which means every four intervals take an extended break for about 15–30 minutes. Then start again, and keep going until the task is done. After that, there is nothing more to do than congratulate yourself. Or you can try working at a ratio of 90:20 — 90 minutes of work before taking a 20-minute break. This will create a “flow state”, resting your brain just enough so it’s fresh for the next 90 minutes.

The technique is a highly effective psychological trick. If, like me, you get anxious around deadlines, part of the problem is likely to be an innate dread of not being able to do the task at hand, of simply not being up to it. I work in 1–1.5 hours sessions with untimed breaks in between. 90-minute sessions and rarely worked more than four and a half hours in a day. I can feel my energy level and focus dip as I get to the end of an hour of focused work. Constraining the time you work helps you stay focused. I used to set aside full days for focused work. The problem was because I had all day, I would relax. This often led to procrastination. Now I use a timer to clock my 1–1.5 hour work sessions. If you feel like you have lots of time to do something, you’ll find ways to fill that time. Often by doing easier, less important things. By shortening the time frame, you’re forced to focus.

During my break time, I prefer to go for a quick walk around the block or run out to grab a coffee because I’d like to give my eyes a break from staring at a screen. My best ideas are never my first ideas. During my preparation for my last meeting, I wrote out three major headings and the ideas that would fall under each one. Over the two weeks following my initial sketch of ideas, almost all of it was changed and looked nothing like what I started out with. The final result was a product of meditating on my problem while I was sitting on the subway, taking my dog for a long walk, and even while I was reading on unrelated topics. Give yourself enough time to relax and revisit whatever issue you need to solve because you may be able to see it from a different angle.

Brainstorming and coding and writing are largely solitary or at best pairwise activities. You’re the most creative on your own or with one or two thought partners maximum. Once you get past that point, you’re not going to be creative anymore.

Other people aren’t going to give you the space to be creative. Other people are going to fill up your time with well-meaning tasks. They’re not going to understand you need large blocks of alone time or with a partner.

If you want to be creative, you have to be in either a very small organization or you have to be ruthless. You have to be downright rude about protecting your time so you can do solitary or pairwise work.

You have to be in a certain position to do this, but a useful hack when people ask you to do things is to say, “Actually, that’s something other people can do, so you should ask other people to do that. Ask me to do the things that only I can uniquely do.” When you list things only you can do, you focus on your strengths and what you enjoy. Doing that helps people know when to ask you things. It builds your brand, it leans into your superpower, it’s more enjoyable, it puts you in flow more often, and it’s more efficient.

It’s also important to understand that we don’t become more productive overnight. Like everything in life, it requires effort and practice. Change doesn’t happen just by sitting around and waiting for it. Instead, take the time to learn more about your body and find actionable ways to optimize your energy and time for a more successful and happier life.

✿ Stop owning too much stuff, and start prioritizing experiences over possessions

“The gentleman makes things his servants. The petty man is servant to things.”
— Xunzi

“I have memories — but only a fool ‘stores’ his past in the future.” — David Gerrold

If you pay much attention to the world of retail sales, you will notice a trend: worry.

You will certainly find short-term worry about not enough people buying enough stuff — but that worry has always existed. In a society that bases its measures of success in terms of home prices, market values, and GDP, there will always be a need to prompt citizens to buy more and more.

We already talked about “signaling”. That’s when we do stuff that makes absolutely no sense from a rational, economic point-of-view.

But you know what else is fun when it comes to lying to human beings? Lying to ourselves.

We’ve all heard of the “Placebo Effect”. That’s when a drug with no actual direct medical efficacy can help someone feel better.

Here’s the catch. We live in the 21st century. There is no constant threat of danger in most of civilization. We go from our nice, warm beds to our nice, warm cars to our nice, warm offices and back again without being physically assaulted, murdered, or eaten. (For the most part).

Wait… so… wouldn’t that mean our body can run that immune system all day long? Here’s the rub. This relative safety is recent. Our bodies have not adapted to it so, we have to trick it by swallowing a pill (whether it does anything medically or not).

In fact, our human bodies have NOT adapted to a lot of our modern conveniences. And “tricking” it is on par for the course.

In fact, we have to “create an environment” (or illusion) to be conducive enough for us to do stuff that our primitive ancestors did not have to do… however illogical it might be, like…

• Having this ritual of going to the gym, or dieting…
• Spending hours on makeup to feel good about oneself…
• Drinking liquor (with or without alcoholic content) to work up the courage to talk to a girl…

In other words, a lot of what we do in the 21st century is lying to ourselves. Or to put it more nicely, signaling to ourselves. Telling ourselves “I’m worth it”, or “I’m confident”, or “I’m in control!”, or “I deserve this pointlessly-expensive wine, watch, car, bag, hobby, or fountain pen because ‘I’ve made it’”.

Oh sure, we justify it with “rational reasons” after said activity/purchase. That’s what our neocortex is designed to do. Tell ourselves stories. But don’t kid yourself. Your monkey brain is in full control here.

And let’s be clear here. These signals-to-ourselves are just as costly, illogical, wasteful, unpleasant, draining as the signal-to-others counterparts.

Think about the last time you “invested in yourself”. Maybe you took out a loan or a big chunk of change for a cohort-based course. Maybe you travelled thousands of miles to see some speaker at some conference. Maybe you outfitted your home office with all the accoutrements of an “entrepreneur”. Maybe you bought an expensive microphone and camera as a “creator”. Maybe you bought a Remarkable 2 so you can write more.

Point is — you didn’t need any of that. Most “how to make money online” information is free online if you look. Most motivational speeches are available on YouTube. Most of you don’t need a fancy office (yet), nor a fancy equipment (yet), nor fancy writing software (ever).

But we need to “trick” ourselves with these expensive signals in order to feel like we’re serious.

In order for us to “pump ourselves up” to live better lives, we need to create this rags-to-riches narrative in our heads. We need to create (or go to) environments that push us. We need to buy things to validate our new identity.

HOWEVER — as we all know, while placebos can get our brains in the right mindset… they don’t have any actual direct medical efficacy. In the same token, all that “invest in yourself” placebos won’t actually get you fit, rich, or happy.

You still have to do the work and put the reps in.

On the other hand, beyond the short-term unease, there is a long-term anxiety clouding the retail market. This long-term worry is far more significant and can be summarized in one sentence: Millennials don’t want to buy stuff.

There was a saying in the baby boomer generation: “A car is the most expensive suit you’ll ever own.” I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a millennial who agrees with that analogy.

The thing is, the current generation of young people differs from their parents’ generation. They have other values. They aren’t impressed by flashy spending.

It is not the end of spending though. Even when minimalist principles are adopted on a large scale, the transfer of money will still take place — money will just be spent on different things than physical possessions. The Millennial generation is proving this to be true, spending less on possessions, but more on experiences. Because they believe they’ll be happier spending your money on experiences, rather than material possessions. Most smart people over time realize that possessions don’t make them happy.

In a time when consumers, especially Millennials, value experiences as much or more than objects, they are replacing materialistic items for experiences that improve their body, mind, status, reputation, economy, society and environment. Increasingly, success is not defined by people’s ability to purchase the latest handbag, but by their willingness to take the time to achieve the best possible version of themselves.

Attitudes toward ownership are rapidly changing in America and globally, with a majority of people saying they value material goods less than they used to. In general, consumer spending has indeed undergone a marked shift in the past 10 to 15 years. Consumers today seem to have less to spend on goods than they did 15 years ago. Instead, consumer spending on recreation, travel and eating out has been trending up for more than a decade.

Our lives are controlled by a sense of scarcity. We mistake the objects that provide for our needs for the needs themselves. We all have needs, both physical and emotional. And we all need to consistently fill those needs. Just like you never eat enough to last you forever, you never love enough to last you forever, or do something important enough to last you forever. Needs — whether it’s food, love or meaning — must be replenished regularly. So we cling to the object that fulfills that need. You don’t need your lover. You need to be loved. You don’t need to be beautiful, cool, or popular. You need to feel appreciated. We try to *make* the lover love us. We try to *make* the job need us. We grasp onto the people and things that make us feel important and worthy and don’t let go. This makes us slaves to those people and objects. When our only conduit for feeling appreciated is our looks or money, then we will become enslaved to our appearance and money, both of which are cruel masters. If we feel like our lover is the one and only person on the planet who can make us feel this way, we cling to them and smother them with our demands and affection, shackling ourselves to them, because what is living if it’s without them? Ultimately, what you need is you.

The more stuff you own, the more your stuff will own you. Our purchases cost us more than we realize. In stores, products are measured in dollars and cents. But as Henry David Thoreau once said, “The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.” We don’t buy things with money, we buy them with hours and energy from our lives.

Rather than seeing items as objects, see them as magnets for your attention. Each object gently pulls a certain amount of your attention toward it. Whenever you discard something, the tug of that object is released. You get some attention back.

Possessions add obligation, responsibility, weight. They’re hard to manage and control. And every purchase will go down in price over time. Poor people purchase obligations (debt), while wealthy people purchase assets (intrinsic value and/or income producing). Experience is the only thing that matters can helps us avoid “serious loans": it won’t go down in price, and no one can steal it.

While a messy space might signify your creative genius, a disorganized environment is a major source of stress for many people. Excess possessions take up residence in our homes and in our minds. Each purchase adds extra worry to our lives. Every physical item we bring into our lives represents one more thing that can be broken, scratched, or stolen. The things we own, especially if they’re very expensive, make us worry about their condition. Perhaps Randy Alcorn said it best, “Every increased possession adds increased anxiety onto our lives.” If it is causing us anxiety or worry (“Be careful or you’ll break it!”), we should get rid of it. The less you have, the less you have to be worked up about. The less you are precious about, the less that can be taken from you by swings of fate or bad luck.

Possessions require maintenance. The things we own require time, energy, and focus. They need to be cleaned, organized, managed, and maintained. They require care, maintenance, and attention. And as a result, they often distract us from the things that truly do bring us lasting happiness. Every item we own must be handled and at some point, discarded — whether by ourselves or by a loved one. Ironically, all possessions all begin to fade. They are temporary by nature. They look shiny and new in the store. But immediately, as soon as the package is opened, they begin to perish, spoil, or fade. There is always something new right around the corner. New models, new styles, new improvements, and new features. From clothes and cars to kitchen gadgets and technology, our world moves forward. And planned obsolescence makes sure our most recent purchase will be out of use sooner rather than later.

It is difficult to live a mobile lifestyle with a house full of stuff. The Millennials are the first generation born after the technological revolution. The world feels smaller to us than previous generations and we are intimately connected to one other — regardless of geography. Coffee shops have become the new office, collaboration has become the new competition, and mobility has become the new stability.

What you own is not WHO you are. Who you are is more important to happiness than what you have. The concept of ownership is no longer relevant. Shopping does not quench our desire for contentment. Contentment is never found in the purchase of more stuff. With every new purchase we feel a little happier, but a few days later that satisfaction is often gone without a trace. The happiness they provide fades quickly. 1/ We get used to new possessions. What once seemed novel and exciting quickly becomes the norm. It turns out that the main impediment to happiness is adaptation. One of the enemies of happiness is adaptation. We buy things to make us happy, and we succeed. But only for a while. New things are exciting to us at first, but then we adapt to them. The initial joy of acquiring a new object fades over time as we become accustomed to seeing it every day. 2/ We keep raising the bar. New purchases lead to new expectations. It's called “puddles of pleasure”. In other words, that kind of happiness evaporates quickly and leaves us wanting more. As soon as we get used to a new possession, we look for an even better one. As soon as something we’ve bought becomes ordinary and unexciting, the level of life satisfaction we feel falls, and we’re forced to search around for the next purchase. 3/ The Joneses are always lurking nearby. Possessions, by their nature, foster comparisons. We buy a new car and are thrilled with it until a friend buys a better one — and there’s always someone with a better one. This process is repeated again and again. Our overflowing closets and drawers stand as proof. No matter how much we get, it’s never enough. There is a way to break this damaging cycle. Far too often, we trade the pursuit of lasting fulfillment for temporary happiness. People often sacrifice things that make them happy, such as going on vacation or attending events, in order to afford possessions. We can do better. We can dream bigger.
Redirect your desires toward lasting pursuits. Find happiness there. You’ll be happier spending your money on experiences, rather than material possessions – Happiness is becoming increasingly popular in the scientific field of study on emotional well-being. The amount of happiness we derive from our purchase falls over time, whereas the memories of our traveling experience continue to supply us with happiness hormones for much longer. In fact, experiences make us happier than possessions and stay with us for our whole lives. Over the past decade, psychologists carried out a great amount of research proving that, in terms of happiness and a sense of well-being, spending money on new experiences is much more profitable than buying new things. It brings more joy. All research points to the fact there are far more effective way to find happiness: enjoying life-changing experiences, for example.

Here's why: 1/ Experiences become a part of our identity. We are not our possessions, but we are the accumulation of everything we’ve seen, the things we’ve done, and the places we’ve been. 2/ Our experiences are a bigger part of ourselves than our material goods. You can really like your material stuff. You can even think that part of your identity is connected to those things, but nonetheless they remain separate from you. In contrast, your experiences really are part of you. We are the sum total of our experiences. 3/ Comparisons matter little, which help us make friends. There is no joy to be found in comparison — and so many of the comparisons we make in our mind have to do with material possessions. It’s a shame really, those things shouldn’t impress us. But when I choose to intentionally own less, I also choose to no longer compare what I have with others. We don’t compare experiences in the same way that we compare things. It’s hard to quantify the relative value of any two experiences, which makes them that much more enjoyable. 4/ Anticipation matters. Anticipation of an experience causes excitement and enjoyment, while anticipation of obtaining a possession causes impatience. Experiences are enjoyable from the very first moments of planning, all the way through to the memories you cherish forever. Things may last longer than experiences, but the memories that linger are what matter most.

Flashy displays of wealth only impress dumb people. Stuff doesn’t equal wealth. Money and influence do. And it’s not the same thing. What matters most lies behind the curtain of someone’s finance. Success is about influence and the capacity to build up a sizeable net worth. The goal is to be richer, not to look richer. Those who have that are the ones who are truly impressive, if you ask me. You will discover other people aren’t all that impressed. Subconsciously (and sometimes even consciously), we expect our newest purchases will impress other people. They will notice our new car, computer, jacket, or shoes. But most of the time, they are less impressed than we think. Instead, most of them are too busy trying to impress you with their newest purchase. Not to mention, someone else always has more. The search for happiness in possessions is always short-lived because it is based on faulty reasoning that buckles under its own weight. If happiness is found in buying stuff, those with more will always be happier. The game can never be won.

When you buy fewer things, you open up your life to the opportunity of owning nicer things. More is not better… better is better. I will admit this benefit of minimalism came unexpected to me. For some reason, I didn’t connect owning fewer things and owning nicer things. But the truth is, they go hand-in-hand and are directly related.

Too many people waste their entire lives maintaining possessions rather than pursuing their mission and passion. Choose mission over maintenance.

Minimalist living is getting rid of things you do not use or need, leaving an uncluttered, simple environment and an uncluttered, simple life. Never store too much. Limit your material belongings. Know what to give away. Hold as much as you can carry. Do not hold on to possessions you no longer need. Do not seek to possess either goods or fiefs for your old age.

* There are several ways to simplify the material belongings:

Be sentimental but systematic.

Physical product checklist: 1/ Is it solving a recurring problem? 2/ Is it saving me time? 3/ It is saving me money? 4/ Is it making me money? If the answer the all the above is no, postpone the purchase by 6 months. You’ll avoid lots of clutter and buyer’s remorse.

Grab a trash bag and start tossing any unnecessary items.

Make it useful. Use them or pass them on. Take out the items that you never wear because you have nothing to pair them with and decide whether or not they’re worth keeping. Sift through items on a case-by-case basis, deciding what to ditch. Did you save the china that your parents received on their wedding day or a special necklace that was passed down to you? Why not use it? Wear the memorable piece of jewelry every day instead of waiting for a special occasion, or forgetting about it completely. You may come across things that you can’t use and don’t want to keep, but someone else will find your sentimental items to be quite useful. Donate your everyday plates and eat off the dishes that mean so much. Share your excess with your community.

During spring cleaning season, make plans to get this unwanted junk out of your life. Companies like Amazon and Gazelle offer headache-free trade-in services for selling used electronics. Just punch in the gadget you are trying to trade in, like a used iPhone or Samsung Galaxy device, and the sites offer a quote for how much money or Amazon store credit you can get in exchange for the gear. Then pack up the outdated hardware, slap on a shipping label, drop it off at a shipping center and wait for the money to roll in. There is bound to be unsellable e-junk in your pile. Fortunately, all Best Buy locations will take your used electronics and recycle them for free through e-recycling programs. Just bag the items up and drop them off at the store’s customer-service counter, and the retailer will take care of the rest. Unwanted tech accessories and gadgets can also be discarded responsibly through donation centers.

Say goodbye to paper altogether. Having stacks of paper all over your house and in your office is outdated, not to mention an unnecessary distraction. Think about starting processes that are 100% paperless. From document organization, email organization, taking notes, the paperless world will make your life so much more manageable. Sort through it all and toss the trash. Look into buying a scanner, anything will work that doesn’t require tons of waiting time. Scan the rest or hire someone to do it for you, and organize in folders. From there, back it up through Dropbox. Keep possessions digitally where possible. If you have been saving printed photographs, documents, receipts and other paperwork for years, it might be time to digitize your docs. Start putting them in the cloud. Or you can buy a paper shredder and start shredding the piles around you that are just taking up space. Scan the files that are truly needed. But if you are realistic and hard on yourself, the ratio of what to shred to what to scan will be 10 to one. If you consider reading a duty. On top of reading long-form articles online, either borrow books from the library or purchase books on Kindle, unless you really love it. Throw your iPad in your work bag and pull it out during your commute. After all, getting organized saving time and mental energy.

Shoot your stuff. When you are uncluttering, save the things that mean the most to you, and take a picture before letting them go. Preserve the memories inspired by stuff through photography. Group items creatively or take pictures using the things. Photo archive is searchable by place or person on your iPad anywhere anytime you want, you can view your pictures more than ever before. For instance, if you saved a baseball hat from your childhood little league team, take a picture of your child wearing it. Create a digital photo book with images and descriptive text, so you can enjoy your memories without the clutter. A book like this makes a beautiful gift to someone else in the family who wants to enjoy the memories without the clutter. It’s time to capture the moments that matter. Tell your story. The most powerful thing we can offer is our story. As you simplify your life, you will come to the realization that the most sentimental things aren’t things at all, but stories of the people and places we love, and how we spend our time. Write about the things you love, instead of holding onto them. Start a family blog or keep a personal journal. Your words may start out describing your mother’s watch, but turn into a beautiful story about an afternoon the two of you spent together.

Make pre-packable kits. Keep an armory of labeled kits pre-packed at home. For example, there’s “Cables and Chargers,” loaded with universal and laptop chargers; a monster-embossed transparent “In-Flight” case with sleeping pills, lip balm, mini toothpaste, deodorant and face masks, etc. It means that when you’re going on a trip you can just grab them and you know you’ll have everything you need. You’re not stressing out that you’ll forget things.

In the process, you may end up discarding a wire that you later need. But don’t beat yourself up. You can buy a new one if it turns out you needed it. That’s better than wasting space on something you might hypothetically need.

Approach each area or section of your life the same when it comes to letting go, and revel in what unfolds. Not only do you make room for the good stuff, but you can clearly identify what is most meaningful to you. Instead of filling boxes with the things that define your life, spend more time creating your life, giving to others and sharing your story with actions, thoughts and gratitude.

* What about the stuff we don’t see?

Whatever approach you take, don’t skimp on tidying up your data. Tidying up your digital media may not feel worthwhile because your files are not visible in the real world. Yet holding on to all the data takes up valuable space on devices while also making important files more difficult to find. Even if it doesn’t use up physical room, it can still cause you harm. It takes up so much psychic space and brings up the same negative effect: anxiety. Since we all have our phones in our pockets, we’re toting our clutter around with us. When we give our digital space the same attention we give our physical space, the time we spend on our devices will be more intentional, productive and enjoyable.

Consolidate your tools, apps, files, social media, subscriptions, emails, contact list, and notifications. Even though there are thousands of tools and apps that can assist you with time management and productivity, don’t go hog wild. Having too many of these tools and apps are counter-productive. Limit yourself to the essentials.

Tools & Apps on your phone: Go through each page of apps and delete the ones you haven’t used in a while. You can be brutal — remember you can always re-install apps later, even the ones you’ve paid for. To save time scrolling through pages of apps looking for what you need, keep all of your apps on the first page. Move the apps you use the most to the bottom of the screen (so they’re easy to access quickly), with the apps you use less often towards the top. Organize apps you rarely use into folders, but sort them by category. Place them in neatly labeled containers. Try it out for a day and I guarantee you’ll never go back. On your smartphone, prune unnecessary apps that are taking up space. On iPhones, Apple offers the tool iPhone Storage, which shows a list of apps that take up the most data and when they were last used; on Android devices, Google offers a similar tool called Files. From here, you can home in on the data hogs and delete the apps you have not touched in months.

Files / Digital assets: Think about the digital junk we hoard, like the tens of thousands of photos bloating our smartphones or the backlog of files cluttering our computer drives, such as old work presentations, expense receipts and screenshots we have not opened in years.

Much like your physical desktop, a computer desktop can get pretty cluttered pretty quickly. Like all mess, it’s fine for a time, but it needs to be cleaned up eventually. A clean desktop gives you as much, if not more, satisfaction as a clean physical space. It’s a breath of fresh air and life seems instantly more manageable. Make sure your desktop is completely cluttered. At least once per week, sort all the files and place them into labeled folders. Store all the data in a hard disk drive if possible. If you’re finding it difficult to keep on top of your desktop clutter, you can rethink your filing strategy so it becomes just as easy to file things in their correct place as it is to chuck on your desktop to look after later.

Our phones are great because we have a camera wherever we go. But it also means we have many more photos and videos. Eradicating photos is the most challenging process, the professional organizers agreed, because the thought of deleting your memories may be painful. But photos are some of the biggest data hogs of all, so some periodic maintenance is crucial.

Spend some time going through the photos on your phone. Start by trimming out the easy ones: duplicate photos, blurry shots and old screenshots. Delete all of the duplicates and low-quality ones. This alone instantly makes your photos more manageable, but you can take it one step further. Then move on to the harder part: deleting the photos that were decent but not your favorites. You could look at each photo and ask themselves a few questions: “Is this something you want to see again? Does it make you happy? Do you want to spend more time with this photo in the future?” If you answer NO to any of those questions, the photo can probably go in the trash bin. If you go to a special event or on an overseas trip, you can organize the best photos into folders. Transfer them to a hard disk drive. This will be especially handy when you’re showing friends and family at home.

My approach to managing digital photos is to purge everything without doing any organization at all. I use Google Photos, which automatically backs each shot to the cloud, compiles photos into albums and includes a tool for removing images from the device. (I also back up all my photos to an external drive in case I ever become unhappy with Google Photos.) Then I erase all the photos from my iPhone once a month and pay Google $2 a month to manage thousands of my photos at full resolution.

Social media: Social media is that friend we love to hate. People often spend too much time scrolling down social feeds. But what’s worse is they feel terrible afterwards. Go through your ‘friends’ and ‘follows’ on all of your social media accounts. Let me share a social media strategy instead. If I’m reluctant to add to my media load because it’s already heavy, I miss new things. And if I won’t cut something off because of FOMO, I’m stuck in a rut. It’s a trap. So instead, follow and unfollow on impulse. Nobody will care and you’ll be better off. Change your diet every day. Are there people who post annoying things all the time, or people who make you feel bad about yourself? Unfollow them so their posts no longer show. On Facebook, you can choose ‘unfollow’ instead of ‘unfriend’ so you can still stay connected as ‘friends’. And you can always hit ‘follow’ again if you change your mind. Also, go through the list of commercial pages you follow. Do they post content that’s valuable to you? If not, give them the boot. Make sure you clean out your ‘friends’ and ‘following’ lists every few months so the time you choose to spend on social media is uplifting and positive. Delete posts the best version of yourself will regret. I didn’t realize how much the clutter bothered me until it was no longer there. Different networks for different groups. Is your social account private or professional? This is a very important decision to make, and one you should take the time to think about. Unless you’re going to be extremely careful about it, your private life and professional life is going to clash.

To maximize distribution on social media, minimize the message.
• Books -> blog posts
• Podcasts -> snippets
• Blog posts -> tweetstorms
• Use stand-alone tweets in tweetstorms
• Tweet sparingly — high signal, low noise Readers have options — respect their time.

Subcriptions: Netflix, Dropbox, Spotify — these businesses, and countless others, are based on subscriptions. By themselves, they’re an irresistibly cheap monthly fee. But once you add them together it can come to a frightening amount. A lot of people are always drawn in by the free trials, but then they forget to cancel before the trial ends and they get charged. Make a list of everything you subscribe to, and make sure you’re using the services enough to justify the fee. Because the less money coming out of your bank account, the better.

Emails: We get many emails each day from marketers and spammers. In the middle of a busy workday, we just delete them as they come in. Harmless, right? Emails are a constant distraction throughout the day, so the less coming in, the better. Unsubscribe from newsletters. Over the next week or so, as emails from marketers come in, take an extra second to open the email and click ‘unsubscribe’ at the bottom. The emails you receive will gradually become less and less. If you choose to subscribe to a mailing list, make sure its content is useful and valuable to you. Sometimes you need to enter an email address for something, but you know you're going to receive emails you don’t want. Create a separate Gmail account for this purpose so your professional email inbox stays squeaky clean. If you communicate with your spouse or key family members via email during the day, then just set up a separate email account just for them and leave that open all day, but keep your primary email closed. And never give out the family email address to anyone noncritical — including your boss. A clear inbox is a clear head. Check your e-mail on a schedule, take advantage of features that prioritize messages by sender. Set a rule that you must process 10 emails before you look at any of the new messages (Read, not respond to). Strive for inbox zero. Delete with a vengeance. Don’t bother filing: a good search tool can scan your folders and find whatever it is you need instantly. Set alerts for the most important people, and save the rest until you reach a stopping point in your work. As you answer emails, do email exactly twice a day — say, once first thing in the morning, and once at the end of the workday. Allocated half an hour or whatever it takes, but otherwise, keep your email client shut and your email notifications turned off. Anyone who needs to reach you so urgently that it can’t wait until later in the day or tomorrow morning can call you, or send a runner, or send up smoke signals, or something else. Mark your calendar to begin each day by going through your inbox and responding to yesterday’s emails only. When you do process email, do it like this: 1/ Always finish each of your two daily email sessions with a completely empty inbox. 2/ When doing email, either answer or file every single message until you get to that empty inbox state of grace. Finish conversations on specific projects, tasked items, move the email out of your inbox to the appropriate folder for the specific project. Some emails may require more thought or a good amount of research in order for you to respond. If it’s going to take you more than 10 minutes, move the message to a designated folder and schedule time on your calendar to deal with it. Manage your emails and then take it to your documents and then follow this process into your daily lifestyle. Create folders on your computer that support the way you structure your business. These folders will also be similar to the structure in your email account. Treat your inbox like you would the physical space on your desk. So, 3/ Emails relating to topics that are current working projects or pressing issues go into temporary subfolders of a folder called Action. You should only have Action subfolders for the things that really matter, right now. 4/ Aside from those temporary Action subfolders, only keep three standing email folders: Pending, Review, and Vault. Emails that you know you’re going to have to deal with again — such as emails in which someone is committing something to you and you want to be reminded to follow up on it if the person doesn’t deliver — go in Pending. Emails with things you want to read in depth when you have more time, go into Review. Everything else goes into Vault. Every once in a while, sweep through your Action/Pending/Review subfolders and dump any of them that you can into Vault. Obviously you may need some additional permanent folders for important things like contracts, or emails from your doctor, or the like, but these are exceptions and don’t change your standard operating procedure. Ask yourself if an email can wait 48 hours without causing any harm. This is the hardest part, and will take the most discipline. If possible, set up an auto-responder that lets senders know when they’ll be checking their e-mail again. Treat it like another meeting, giving it the attention it deserves. This will keep you focused on the things you haven’t done yet and will give you breathing room when you look in your inbox. When you cut out all of the email clutter, you’ll notice and focus on the content you enjoy reading. It may not seem like a major time saver, but you’ll be well on your way to eliminating distraction throughout the day when you get your inbox under control. The more chaos you see, anywhere, the more chaotic you will be.

Notifications: Similar to emails, phone notifications can be a major distraction through the day and all hours through the night. Go to Settings and turn off all of the notifications you don’t need. Check your apps on a schedule.

Phone calls: Don’t answer the phone. Let it go to voicemail, and then every few hours, screen your voicemails and batch the return calls. Say, twice a day. Cell phones and family plans are so cheap these days that I think the best thing to do is have two cell phones with different numbers — one for key family members, your closest friends, and your boss and a few coworkers, and the other for everyone else. Answer the first one when it rings, but never answer the second one.

Personally, I tidy up things all at once by categories, and the steps are clear. For example, the first category is physical space including clothes, accessories, cosmetics, documents, housewares, sentimental treasures, the next is digital space including digital assets, tools, apps, social media, subscriptions, emails, contact list, notifications, last but not least is mental space including goals, activities, resources, etc.

I gave away or donated about 50% of my clothes to various non-profit organizations. I realized that I owned several items of clothing that I hadn’t really worn in months. If I didn’t love it, I didn’t keep it. I thought I would regret letting go of some of these things later, but I can honestly say I don’t even remember everything that I’ve gotten rid of. This goes to show that things we may have grown attached to don’t mean as much to us as we think. Of course, I still have some sentimental items (I have every single card that my girlfriend has given to me — which is now quite a lot!) and I have no problem letting them take up space.

If you are like me, learn to fight the urge of upgrading your space and instead discard items that you haven’t really used or don’t value.

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3. Habit — Choose Your Habits Well

The only way to become excellent is to be endlessly fascinated by doing the same thing over and over. Constant incremental progress over a long period of time leads to exceptional results. Compounding works with consistency over time. While eating healthy once a year is easy, doing it for a year is transformational. It’s easy to get one win. It’s hard to get a lot of wins. Boring progress makes for exceptional results. You have to fall in love with boredom. ⁠

Professionals stick to the schedule; amateurs let life get in the way. Professionals know what is important to them and work toward it with purpose; amateurs get pulled off course by the urgencies of life.

The foundation of productivity is habits. Habits are everything. If you do just about anything frequently enough over time, you will form a habit that will control you. The life that you live is most simply the result of habits you develop.

To some extent, our attitude in life, our mood, our happiness levels, depression levels, these are also habits. Do we judge people? How often do we eat? What kind of food do we eat? Do we walk or do we sit? Do we move? Do we exercise? Do we read? These are habits as well.

Your outcomes are a lagging measure of your habits. Your net worth is a lagging measure of your financial habits. Your weight is a lagging measure of your eating habits. Your knowledge is a lagging measure of your learning habits. Your clutter is a lagging measure of your cleaning habits. You get what you repeat.

If you want to predict where you’ll end up in life, all you have to do is follow the curve of tiny gains or tiny losses, and see how your daily choices will compound 10 or 20 years down the line. Are you spending less than you earn each month? Are you making it into the gym each week? Are you reading books and learning something new each day? Tiny battles like these are the ones that will define your future self.⁠ Time magnifies the margin between success and failure. It will multiply whatever you feed it. Good habits make time your ally. Bad habits make time your enemy.⁠

Good habits are those that get you to do what your “upper-level you” wants, and bad habits are those that are controlled by your “lower-level you” and stand in the way of your getting what your “upper-level you” wants. We unconsciously pick up habits in the background and we keep them for decades. We may not realize that they’re bad for us until we’re ready to move on them. You can create a better set of habits if you understand how this part of your brain works.

You absolutely need habits to function. You cannot solve every problem in life as if it is the first time it’s thrown at you. What we do is we accumulate all these habits. We put them in the bundle of identity, ego, ourselves, and then we get attached to that.

Whenever there is a gap between your habits and your goals, your habits will always win. Look at any part of your life where you’re consistently effective, and you’ll find habits that make it work. When you automate a behavior, it frees up energy that you can spend on adopting a new behavior or working on difficult tasks.

The more you do automatically, the more you’re subsequently freed to do. This effect compounds. Managing your energy is more important than managing your time. Your most essential tasks demand high energy, so time without energy isn’t worth a lot.

When a habit is truly important to you, you have to be willing to stick to it in any mood. Professionals take action even when the mood isn’t right. They might not enjoy it, but they find a way to put the reps in.

Being organized requires clear, quick decision-making. Whether they’re cleaning out the closet or planning a dinner party, organized people are able to make choices easily and stick to them. While a perfectionist might agonize over every option available, organized people have no problem with “good enough.” This skill allows organized people to prioritize their time wisely and efficiently.

Reasons to adopt simplicity

More freedom

It’s not that you should own nothing.
It’s that nothing should own you.

The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it. The purpose of minimalism and wealth is freedom. It’s nothing more than that. It is having the freedom and the options available to you to do whatever you want, whenever you want. My old definition was freedom to do anything I want. Freedom to do whatever I feel like, whenever I feel like. Now I would say that the freedom that I’m looking for is internal freedom. It’s freedom from reaction. It’s freedom from feeling angry. It’s freedom from being sad. It’s freedom from being forced to do things. When someone chains you up, it’s quite visible that your freedom is being taken away from you. But your mind is always enslaving you to its patterns. And this isn’t so easily visible. All the freedom offered by your external environment is useless if you are a slave of your mind. I’m looking for freedom from internally and externally, whereas before I was looking for freedom to. The most satisfying form of freedom is not a life without responsibilities, but a life where you are free to choose your responsibilities. An asset’s ability to let you do what you want, when you want, with who you want, is ROI that can’t be found on a spreadsheet. If you achieve wealth you will achieve financial and personal freedom and work on things you deeply care about. It is living in your own terms. People want freedom but within the cage of emotions and pleasure.

Getting organized is all about simplicity and will allow you to feel less stressed in all areas of your life. Peace of mind, clarity, success — it all comes from an organized lifestyle and mindset. Even though everyone embraces minimalism differently, each path leads to the same place: a life with more freedom (time, money, energy, knowledge, relationships) to live a more meaningful and healthier life. The more organized you are, the more freedom you have available for the things that can design a life aligned with your values, to focus on more creative endeavors and the growth of yourself and your business. The disciplined become the free. Focus collapses your options in the short-term, but expands them in the long-term.

By clearing the clutter from life’s path, you can all make room for the most important aspects of life: health, time, money, growth, contribution, relationships, economy, society, environment.

Why are people so terrible about decluttering?

Because we don’t really think about the cost of holding on to things, but we think about the cost of needing it one day and not having it. Yet because we don’t properly value time, we never end up with more; even when we find ways to work more efficiently, we don’t actually use it wisely. We simply layer in more work. We actually don’t want to be more productive. What we really want is more time.

Not wanting something is as good as having it. Each of us are living in the midst of a trial, have just emerged from one, or are heading toward another.

It is phrasing similar to another oft-quoted truth,

“Be kind to everyone you meet. You never know what battle they are fighting.”

But I want to approach this conversation from a slightly different angle. With all the weight and burden that each of us already carry in life, why would we ever choose to intentionally carry more?

Economic downturns, inflation, geopolitical crises, population growth and climate change (Read this), your mental and physical health, finance, growth, and reputation are overriding reasons why we should adopt minimalist lifestyle. As the chaos grows, so does the need to simplify.

All our diseases are diseases of abundance, not diseases of scarcity.

We are overexposed to everything. There’s too much society everywhere you go. You have society in your phone, society in your pocket, society in your ears… It’s socializing you and programming everyone. The only solution is turn it off. The way to survive in modern society is to be an ascetic, it is to retreat from society.

Life is not easy. It never has been and was never promised to be. And in our new society defined by instantaneous social sharing, not only do we carry the weight of our own trials, we also carry the weight of others.

Our environment offers constant temptation. We must all rush around seizing the day. The Latin motto “carpe diem” is now one of the most popular tattoos. But life is hard. Why would we ever choose to make it more difficult?

Everyone has unlimited choices but faces limited resources with money, energy, time, people and partnerships. It’s good to understand that you are finite and your time is finite and your energy is finite and your focus is finite. You must limit your choices to match up to your limited choices. Our possessions and activities consume our resources more than we realize. Just consider all the things that weigh down our hearts and lives: death, loss, illness, worry, politics, financial hardships, grief, guilt, marital tension, traumatic events. Each a weight that we carry on our shoulders. Many of these burdens are inevitable and entirely outside our realm of control. Regardless of their origin, we carry them — each of us, on a daily basis. It’s a reminder to me to consider each opportunity and each ask carefully. What’s at stake is my stillness and my finite resources. So are yours!

Unburden your life in the areas you can control. In so doing, you will find more freedom and capacity to navigate the trials and burdens that are outside of it. But it seems to me that many of us choose to do that very thing simply by carrying excess possessions in our homes and lives. Kicking yourself and your business into high gear isn’t easy when the things around you, in your personal and professional lives, are in disarray.

More specifically, consider these reasons:

More productivity in every aspect of life

External clutter is internal clutter on display. Brains are brilliant at having ideas but not holding them, so living minimally and having systems in place is the key to creativity for us. You have your best ideas at a clean environment.

More opportunity to pursue what’s most important

Opportunity costs affect everyday life. A lot of time the opportunity cost of chasing the wrong thing is the opportunity to turn another thing into reality. Every decision in life is a trade-off and you should figure out what your #1 priority is and optimize for that. Your time is limited.

If you wish to attract and commit energy to new things, you need to free up capacity by ridding yourself of “energy vampires,” or things that suck up all of your time and resources.

To be successful, your days must consistently be spent on high-quality things and activities. The more evolved you become, the more focused you must be on those few things which you highly value and matter most. The more focused you must become, the more consistently your daily behaviors must be high quality — and increasingly higher quality. The more successful you become — which is balancing the few essential things (spiritual, relational, financial, physical) in your life and removing everything else — the less you can justify low quality.

If your daily behaviors are consistently low quality, what do you expect your life’s output to be? Every area of your life affects every other area of your life. Hence the saying,

“How you do anything is how you do everything.”

To actually live this principle, your daily and normal life can only be filled with those things you highly value. When your days are filled with only those core essentials that mean the world to you — and you’re succeeding in those few areas — you absolutely will dominate in “all” areas of your life.

Our lives require space for important things. But in a world of ever-increasing speed, time for reflection becomes more and more difficult to discover. Countless voices and messages seek influence in our lives. They desire to shape what we believe, what we buy, what we watch, what we eat, and how we live.

Our lives are important. Why would we waste them influenced by things that aren’t? Even if for selfish reasons, it is wise for each of us to evaluate where we seek meaning. Our resources are only as valuable as what we choose to spend it on.

Once you have figured out what to do, be unstoppable about getting your small handful of priorities accomplished quickly. I have yet to meet a slow-moving person who is very successful.

Most people waste most of their time on stuff that doesn’t matter.

Yet, as Jim Rohn has said,

A lot of people don’t do well simply because they major in minor things.

Said another way, most people are caught in the thick of thin things.

The main reason people struggle to generate good things is they simply have too many. They haven’t focused on things that are most important.

It’s best to preserve emptiness because nothing is an important something.

The opportunity lost by increasing the amount of blank space is gained back with enhanced attention on what remains. More white space means that less information is presented. In turn, proportionately more attention shall be paid to that which is made less available. When there is less, we appreciate everything much more.

Minimalism provides that opportunity. Intentionality brings life back under our control. Minimalism frees up time, energy, finance and space — space that can be spent examining life to make sure we are living it to the fullest and have more intentionality in all areas of life as well as more focus on contribution. Minimalism jumpstarts intentional living by forcing us to identify our values. As a result, we can better identify how we have been swayed by artificial influences.

As I reject the empty notion of always desiring more and more for myself, I free myself to live selflessly for others. By reducing the number of decisions I make and avoiding consumption as a substitute for happiness, I’m able to focus more on the things that truly matter: health, growth, work and my loved ones. Since this shift, I am happier, calmer, and feel more free.

More flexibility and social mobility for life change

Over the past eight years, I have made some significant changes. I have changed careers. I have moved to a smaller home. I have discovered new hobbies. I have changed the way I spend my money. And I have changed many of the habits that define my life. I have made new connections. In each of the examples listed above, minimalism helped make the change possible. One of the greatest benefits of living with fewer possessions is freedom — freedom to live and change and improve — even if the specific changes are up to you.

I value freedom above anything else. Freedom to do what I want, freedom from not doing what I don’t want to do, and freedom from my own reactions and emotions…things that may disturb my peace.

More joy and harmony in life

Sometimes, the easiest way to feel more satisfaction in life is to appreciate what we already have. And it is impossible to appreciate the things you have if you’re constantly obsessing over the things you don’t. As I intentionally own less, I develop a greater appreciation for the things I have chosen to keep.

You will please yourself and be in better harmony with your fellow human beings, and more in tune with the gods — praising everything they have set in order and allotted you. It transforms yourself and truly enables you to spark more joy in your life. When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change. When you keep only the things you love, you are suddenly flooded with joy throughout the days.

More inspiration for others

Our world is losing itself in consumeristic pursuits. Home sizes are growing, but happiness is not. We chase paychecks rather than influence and success rather than significance. The results of these choices have proven detrimental: stress, anxiety, fatigue, and regret. We need new inspiration. We need more people rejecting consumerism and choosing life instead.

More confidence in yourself

You will gain greater confidence in yourself, become more optimistic and calmer in the mind. That often leads to more freedom in other aspects of your life, which can unexpectedly lead to true happiness.

To share a personal example, my self-image improves as I start living in a tidy beautiful room and owning high-quality things.

I have always had little confidence in myself. When I get nervous before a large speaking engagement, I think to myself that I’ll be fine because these clothes are protecting me and these shoes are supporting me, and that calms me down.

Once you start feeling constant gratitude for your things and your home through tidying up, you will start feeling relief and calm as if you are always protected by something larger than you.

Better problem-solving

Almost every problem you come across will be muddled with extraneous data. If you can strip the problem down to its fundamentals, you can see clearly what is going on and perhaps find a solution.

You may accidentally simplify so much that what you have left no longer resembles the original problem. But if you can solve this simple version of the problem, you can add refinements to this solution and build up complexity from a solid base until you have the answer.

When you’re forced to be simple, you’re forced to face the real problem. When you can’t deliver ornament, you have to deliver substance.

Better decision-making skill

Minimalism can also increase spiritual awareness and improve overall decision-making through the way you let go of things. Your life will be better if you own fewer possessions and focus on less things.

Better self-awareness

Minimalism forces questions of values onto a person. It caused me to question assumptions about my purpose, passion, and inward motivations. The journey inward is not always easy, but it is always important. And choosing to own less prompted that for me.

Some of these things may seem minor, but they add up. Most amount to a personal choice between immediate pleasures and lasting ones. After all, the worst thing is losing track of what really matters to you.

Adopting each and every one of these strategies is not recommended. After all, we do have important work to accomplish for ourselves and for this world. No single lifestyle, philosophy, or doctrine is meant for everyone. But if your mind needs respite from the ever-increasing flow of incoming information, implementing just one or two of the simple strategies above will provide the extra space your mind desires and demands. One size does not fit all. Find your size, and you’ll feel it when it fits. It is an enormously general concept that we can tweak as we see fit.

For me, living a simple life works. It keeps me calm in a chaotic city. It keeps me sane in a stressful work environment. And most importantly, it keeps my day-to-day problems in perspective.