Every little thing you think that you need Every little thing you think that you need every little thing that's just feeding your greed.
Oh, I bet that you'll be fine without it.
You're listening to The Minimalist podcast with Joshua Fields Milburn and T .K.
Coleman recorded live at Earthing Studios in sunny California.
Yes. Thank you, Malabama.
Hello everybody. Today on the show, we're talking about a little concept that I like to call simple work.
Coming up on this free public minimal episode, Not a caller has a question about using minimalism to simplify her home office.
And then we've got a lightening around question about simplifying your work so that you can enjoy it more.
That's followed by our right here, right now segment and a listener tip.
You can check out the maximal edition of episode 459.
That's the full two -hour episode where we answer twice as many questions and we dive deep into several simple living segments.
That private podcast episode is out right now at patreon .com slash The Minimalists.
Your support keeps our podcast 100 % advertisement free because sing along at home, y 'all.
Advertisements suck.
Let's start with our callers.
If you have a question or a comment for our show, we'd love to hear from you.
Our phone number is 406 -219 -7839 or email a voice recording right from your phone to podcasts at theminimalists .com.
Our first question today is from Tamara.
Hello, my name is Tamara.
I work for a nonprofit organization in south -central Alaska, where we have been home office since the start of the pandemic.
Could you define minimalism in the simplest terms and how to align this philosophy to best support home office settings?
I look forward to sharing your knowledge and insight with my awesome staff.
Thank you for all you do.
Okay, Malabama this is the perfect question to start with.
Thank you so much for putting this on page one here.
So what I hear TK is, how can I use minimalism to simplify my home office?
And she's also asking for a simple definition of minimalism.
Of course, whenever we define something, realize that is not the full scope of the thing, but you've probably heard me say it before.
Minimalism is the thing that gets us past the things so we can make room for life's most important things, which actually aren't things at all, but I wanna talk to you about this concept of simple work with respect to minimalism.
If minimalism is the thing that gets us past the things, quite often that means simplifying our lives or simplifying our work and getting rid of that, which is in the way.
Clutter is merely anything that gets in the way.
And the number one argument I hear against minimalism in the workplace is often about the cluttered desks that we see from geniuses like Mark Twain or Thomas Edison or Albert Einstein or Steve Jobs.
You see photos of their desks, or maybe Abe Lincoln.
Everything online is attributed to Abe Lincoln, right?
So all of these people had messy desks, right?
And you see pictures of them and you're like, oh, that genius Steve Jobs had a messy desk, And, therefore, the messy desk must be what made him a genius.
Now, I'll say a few things.
Just because someone has a messy desk doesn't mean they have a cluttered desk.
There's a difference.
Someone might find value in having a messy desk, and who am I to judge?
Who am I to say you shouldn't have things on your desk that add value to your life.
If clutter is anything that gets in the way, and you have a bunch of things on your desk, none of which get in your way, then you don't have a cluttered desk.
You might have a messy one.
However, you can have three or four things on your desk, none of which you use and some of them bother you or make you more anxious or stressed or get in the way of the meaningful work you want to do and what happens?
I guess you have a cluttered desk.
If you have three or four things that you're holding on to just in case and they're getting in the way.
And so I want to dispose of this notion that a messy desk is the same thing as a cluttered desk.
But I would also like to dispose of the notion that the cluttered or messy desk is what makes someone a genius.
Whenever there are more ice cream sales next to the beach, there are also more shark attacks.
And at first you might think, wait a minute, in order to stop these shark attacks, we need to stop selling ice cream at the beach. But of course, there's just a correlation there.
The messy desk for some of these geniuses is often a by -product of their genius.
It is certainly not what made them a genius.
That's right. And the third thing I'd like to dispel is that being a genius isn't necessarily a good thing.
I've known a couple of geniuses in my life.
One is a biological brother of mine, whom I only knew a little bit, but he was truly a genius, but he killed himself.
And he had a lot of mental issues around the genius aspects of his life.
My father was also this way.
He effectively killed himself.
He drank himself to death when he was 52 years old.
And he was certainly a genius.
But along with that genius came a lot of things that he certainly didn't want and things he couldn't cope with as well.
And so we often just prize this word genius And we use it as a compliment.
I could say that TK is a genius of living, which I think he is.
But that doesn't mean that he's going to have a cluttered desk.
And even if he does, that doesn't mean that he's inherently a good person just because he's a genius.
You remind me of something Dr. Romani said on our Narcissist episode where she said that being smart or extraordinarily intelligent isn't evidence of virtue. That's a parlor trick, you know?
And I think that's so important to remember because people can impress us with their skills, their talents, and their giftedness, but being impressive isn't the same thing as being a person of integrity.
I do have a rebuttal though with the shark and the ice cream thing.
My theory is that when you eat ice cream, it makes you taste better to the sharks.
And so that increases the number of shark attacks.
Sharks like ice cream.
Okay, look. But, you know, the messy desk thing is so interesting.
And that's a fascinating counter example.
And I think the way I would respond, if someone says, what about this person who has a messy desk?
I would react in the same way I would if someone says, look at that person.
They have a messy life.
I would say, how do you know?
What indicator are you going by?
Are you going by the fact that when you look at their life, you feel really stressed?
When you and I were talking before the show started, We're just talking about famous celebrities in the past who went bankrupt and lost all their money.
And we're talking about a particular one.
And I said, do they still have their money or do they do a lot of stupid things with their money?
And you were like, both, they did a lot of stupid things with their money, but stupid to me because I wouldn't do them, but not stupid for them.
But yeah, they still have a lot.
And I love that you made that distinction because there is a big difference between what stresses me out, what's cluttering for me, what's disorganized for me, what's silly for me and what those things are for someone else.
If you come look at my bookshelf at home, I don't know what you would think, but my wife, most of the time, she sees it and she goes, that's messy.
And you know what? Every single time she organizes it and cleans it up, I can feel it.
As soon as I walk in, I can tell.
And I go looking for a book and I say, what happened to this book?
I have a system that is very organized, very efficient.
And I know where everything goes.
And it's organized by function.
But for her, she prioritizes organization by aesthetic.
So for me, I don't mind two books perpendicular stacked on top of a shelf of books that are vertical.
My wife will notice that and feel tension because aesthetically that's messy.
But for me functionally, I know exactly where everything is because they're in the same section.
And so not only does that distinction exist between what's aesthetically organized versus what's functionally organized, but it's also relative to each individual.
So we don't know it's a mess, just because it's a mess to us.
But one more quick thing, even if it is a mess, part of the goal of minimalism is to structure things in our lives and simplify them in a way so that we can have the luxury to be playful and free in the areas that matter the most. And part of what it means to be playful and free is to have the luxury of inefficiency.
There are certain areas of our lives, we want them really streamline so that we can afford to waste time and playfully engage life in ways that don't have to be so tight and structured.
When I sit down and have a conversation with my friends, I don't want to have to say, this conversation needs to be exactly 15 minutes and then we stop no matter where we are.
But I do have to be like that in other areas of my life in order to enjoy that freedom.
And so sometimes when you see people who are very inefficient in certain areas of their lives, it may be the case that they have worked very hard to earn that freedom by being ruthlessly efficient in other areas of their lives.
The only reason we call these people geniuses is because they were ruthlessly efficient, ruthlessly streamlined, ruthlessly productive in other areas of their lives.
And they can get away with having a messy desk.
I think that's right.
And I think that a messy desk is also perspectival, as you said, to the individual.
but also it applies to the particular moment in time.
For example, we're here in our podcast studio and I have a bunch of papers on the desk here in front of me, all of which we are using, A, B, printed these out for us.
We're using them for this episode, the production notes that Malabama put together, some links to things that we want to talk about.
And so guess what we don't have in front of us?
We don't have glowing screens in front of us right now.
I found that when we're having these types of conversations, just having a glowing screen between me and UTK, it puts an invisible barrier, a smoke screen of sorts between us, right?
And so I don't want to have that, I've removed that distraction.
However, if we left these papers on the desk all the time, A, B knows how I would feel about that, right?
Because what would happen is I would feel like it was clutter in other contexts.
So clutter changes, not just for the individual, but it changes for the context as well.
In fact, if I took all of those books and just put them on your kitchen table at your home TK, now all of a sudden, those things that are really useful to you and you look at them and revere them in some way, they're on your kitchen table, now they've turned into clutter because you can't even eat your dinner right there at the table.
And so it depends on the location, it depends on the space and time, It depends on the individual as well, but I'd like to get practical here for Tamara.
Before we talk about some rules or boundaries we can set up here.
Let's talk about the workspace in general.
She's made a shift from working in an office in Alaska to working at home.
And that imposes some other clutter on us as well.
Uh -oh, I forgot to do the dishes.
Uh -oh, I need to fold the laundry.
Uh -oh, I need to take the dog for a walk.
And so there are other types of clutter we can bring to our homework environment.
That's exactly right.
Because the home office has temptations present that simply aren't there at the work office.
In fact, even variables that you can't control.
Just recently I was on an important call where I couldn't afford any interruptions or I certainly didn't want them.
It would feel unprofessional to do so.
And someone knocks on my door.
I don't know who it is.
It could be a salesperson, could be a Mormon, could be the maintenance person.
I don't know, but I don't want to tend to this right now.
The problem is I'm on a Zoom call and you can hear my voice.
And so the person outside knocking, they can hear that someone's in there.
So maybe they just need to knock a little louder or knock a little longer.
And it's like, hey, knock, knock, knock, open up, I hear you in there.
And it's like, yeah, but I'm recording a podcast and I don't want to say, can you give me a second?
That's why I can answer the door.
Fortunately, after about five minutes, they stopped and they moved on.
Five minutes though of interruption.
Five minutes of interruption.
And it's even worse than that because if you knew for five minutes, they'd be bothering you, but you don't know, they might go on for 55 minutes.
Right. And so there are ways you can set up boundaries around this too, like here in the studio, AB just printed up some new signage for us as well, replacing the old, faded one that we had here on the door, But it just says, do not disturb when we are recording.
Has a little recording sign in progress.
You see this at radio stations all the time.
The on air sign to me, that doesn't look as aesthetically pleasing.
So, we just have a nice sign that says welcome and then you flip it over and it says, recording in progress, do not disturb.
So there's a boundary you can set up for other people.
The problem is, you have to do that beforehand.
It's much more difficult when you're in the middle of that interruption to do anything about it.
That's right. And it's so important when it comes to boundaries, that you resist the temptation to define the words, I can't solely in terms of physical impossibility.
When you're at an office, well, you can't answer that door, because it's physically impossible to be two places at the same time.
When you're at home, it feels like you can answer that door, but the reality is you can't, because I can't doesn't just mean I'm physically unable to do so.
It also means I can't do it within reason.
I don't have the psychological availability, the physical energy, the mental space or the time to do this while still honoring what's important to me.
And so at home you have the illusion of I can with so many things that you'd be protected from at the office.
And it's important to establish those boundaries and respect them as much as you would physical impossibilities.
And what you're talking about there is the expenditure of resources and you might actually be saving some money which is one resource by having your home office space.
Although recently, I know TK, you went out and got a coworking space.
That's right. Because you live in Orange County which is the county below LA county which is where our studio is.
I'm one county above and so we sort of convene in the middle here.
And you realize that sometimes those distractions of home, they creep into the workplace, but the opposite of that is also true.
Sometimes the distractions from work creep into the home life.
It was one of the most insidious things about the smartphone when it was first introduced.
I got my first blackberry in 2003.
Wow, blackberry. Yeah.
When Savvy D and AB were two years old.
And I was promised it would save me an hour a day.
And then they changed the marketing that it would save me two hours a day.
But what really happened, it did add some convenience to my life, for sure.
and I can't deny that.
I could respond to an email while I was at church, but did I want to do that was the question, right?
I could respond to an email while I'm at my daughter's soccer game, right?
These are all hypotheticals.
Take a Zoom call at the beach. That's right.
And in marketing, that sounds really cool.
I get to be at the beach on the Zoom call.
Wow. But when you think about it, it's dystopian, because no, I'm not at the beach on a Zoom call.
while I'm interrupting my beach time with work.
And what happens, it all gets blended together.
And in some instances that's great.
If you get a smoothie, what do you do?
You take some of your favorite fruits and maybe some coconut milk or coconut cream and maybe throw some peanut butter in there, whatever you like, and you blend it all together and it tastes better together.
But if I say TK, I really like cheesecake and I really like salmon, Let's just throw the two of those in a blender together.
Oof. All right. That's what happens when you're taking Zoom calls at the beach. By the way, Bama, would that create salmon pie?
Y 'all better stop, get in the commas.
Is it cheesecake or cheese pie?
One of them is a real name.
That is true. And so however, let's talk about these interruptions.
Sometimes, integration is wonderful.
I've integrated my work life and my home life, but sometimes there's work -life interruption.
And this is where simple work comes in.
And I think this is where also the idea of subtraction through addition, which we'll get to during the lightning round, I think that comes in as well.
Because sometimes it's okay to have a separate device for work.
It's okay to have a separate location for work.
At home I have a home office, it's the third bedroom we have in the home, We didn't need a third bedroom.
And so we just converted that into an office space.
But you know what I don't have in there?
I don't have any clutter, clutter for me or clutter for my wife.
We have two desks in there, and if you go in there, it looks really aesthetically pleasing.
It may not be applicable to everyone's life.
They may want more pops of color or more plant life where you might want to line the walls with books.
And that's great if you want to do that, but restraint is the most important thing.
I didn't say yes to everything and simple work comes down to restraint so I can focus on that which is most important.
And so, but often it's difficult to simplify one's life because it's really easy to say yes.
You look at this studio space we're in right now and it'd be really easy to say yes to one thing.
That just adds a tiny bit of clutter.
But then we say yes to another thing.
and another thing and another thing.
And then we're bombarded with a bunch of physical clutter.
And then we say yes to an appointment.
And now we have calendar clutter that we've heaped on to our lives as well.
We've just said, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
And there's a great time to say yes, especially when you're first starting out in a career or you're starting a business.
You say yes to the opportunities that are gonna lead you down a path, but eventually you get to a point where it becomes clutter.
And then the optimal word is no. but even when we're saying no to those things, it's really about what am I saying yes to.
And that's where simple work comes in.
You want to know what am I saying yes to?
What is the work that I'm doing that having a clutter -free space, a clutter -free calendar, or clutter -free relationships allows me to say yes to?
What I love about your emphasis on Yes is that it highlights the need to not just protect yourself from the disadvantages of working in a certain kinds of kind of space, but it also highlights the importance of leveraging the advantages that you have there.
So oftentimes when you're in an office space, there's a certain social pressure to look like you're working to make sure that everybody's bodies are in the same place at the same times.
And one of the advantages you have at home is is when you get stuck or when you lose your motivation or when you're starting to succumb to those distractions you can be honest with yourself and say, hey maybe my brain and my body are just demanding a little bit of a break and I'll take 15 minutes and go walk or I'll have some structured time where I can just focus on something else like going to do the dishes or whatever it may be.
You also get to decide what are my optimal working times.
A luxury that you don't always have when you have to be in an office from eight to six or whatever it may be.
For you optimal working time might be when my energy is high, when my attention span is the best, when the kids are taking a nap, that little block that I have, when I'm alone or whatever it may be, and you get to make sure during those times you have more structure, but then you can be more playful and multitask at other times.
So, yeah. I was just talking to my friend Nastasia, you met her up in San Francisco recently.
She was contemplating, like do I need to rearrange my day a little bit?
Because I prefer to exercise in the morning, but I feel like it zaps my creativity if I try to do the creative work in the afternoon." I said, well for me, what works really well is doing the brain work, the most creative work first thing in the morning.
That works really well for me, for other people.
It might be writing at midnight, like Hunter S.
Thompson, right? And so it really depends on where your creativity works best and what timeframe, and then I shifted my exercise to the afternoon so I swim every day now.
And so around three o 'clock, I'll just book a lane and I'll go swim for 45 minutes.
And that allows me to sort of get that energy out, but also reset my mind for the evening.
So part of that is just a bit of experimentation with your own boundaries.
Now Tamara, speaking of boundaries, I'd love for you to download a copy of The Minimalist Rulebook.
It's 16 Rules for Living with Less.
That obviously applies to your home, things like the spontaneous combustion rule, the just in case rule, the just for when rule, the emergency items rule, and with simple work, the don't upgrade rule.
Those are all really helpful in the home, but it can also be really helpful for your car or your workplace as well.
You can download that for free over at theminimalists .com, slash rulebook.
If you'd like the audio book version of that, I'd be happy to send that to you as well.
Malabama, before we get back to our callers, what time is it?
You know what time it is?
It's time for the Lightning Round where we answer the Patreon community chats question of the week.
Yes indeed. Now during the lightning round, we each have 60 seconds to answer your question with a short, shareable minimal maximum, you could find this episode's maxims in the show notes at TheMinimalists .com and every minimal maximum ever at MinimalMaxims .com.
We'll also deliver our weekly show notes directly to your inbox, including seven new maxims every Monday for free.
if you sign up for our email newsletter over at theminimalists .email, we'll never send you spam or junk or advertisements.
But we will start your week with a dose of simplicity.
Speaking of advertisements, on the private podcast today, we have two sucky ads segments.
And man, rarely does an ad make me frustrated, but this one absolutely does.
And I think it's really frustrated in Malabam as well.
We'll get back to that.
But let's talk about the question of the week this week, Vamla.
What would make your work life simpler and more enjoyable?
OK, TK, so before we get to our pithy answers, let's hear how some of our listeners answered this question.
Janet said, working with someone who's more considerate would make my job simpler and more enjoyable.
I work with someone who is extremely messy, so I have to come in early to make sure the place is ready for customers.
It's very frustrating.
Speaking of frustrating here, right?
And so other people have the power to frustrate us as soon as we hand them that power.
I'll give you an example.
My wife the other day, our neighbor, he's amazing, but he's been doing something the last two weeks.
He's been parking his car in front of our house, which isn't a problem, it's a public street.
But he's parking it backwards.
So it's facing the wrong way.
And she has been so frustrated now.
Thankfully, she is emotionally intelligent enough to realize that that frustration is hers, she picked it up.
Ironically, the color of his car frustrates me because it's not monochrome.
And so, you have this green car that's parked in front of my pristine White house.
And aesthetically, it feels like a nightmare, but of course he didn't frustrate me.
And even if he was trying to frustrate me, which he's not, it can only frustrate me if I hold on to that frustration.
If I grab it from him and say, Yeah, I'll let you frustrate me.
So the question here from Janet, at least the implicit question is, how do I get my co -workers to be less messy?
Man, your theory of frustration is frustrating me.
Because, man, when people are messy or just loud and inconsiderate, Oh, I find it so frustrating and I am with you.
I do know that it's possible for me to reframe things and tell myself a different story.
At the same time, I get it though.
I totally get it. And I don't know.
I wish I could know more about the work situation where like what's the employer -employee relationship?
I assume these are coworkers that are teammates and there's an employer or a manager or a supervisor somewhere, but it seems to me that there is an opportunity to make a case to someone who has an economic incentive to listen that the messiness of my teammates is actually costing the company money, and it would do the authorities some good to look into the matter.
Because if I have to come in early in order to clean up, somebody's paying me for that time.
They better be. Not only that, my availability to other productive things I could be doing is compromised because I'm sitting here trying to get us to ground zero just so that we can have some productivity once the place opens.
So these employees who are not cleaning up after themselves or not being considerate of the environment are actually costing the company money in terms of labor and availability to other things.
Taylor had this to say.
If I didn't have to worry about looking busy, I could enjoy my work more.
It doesn't take me eight hours to do my job so I end up having to waste time making it look like I'm doing even more work." I prefer to just be done when the work is done.
Amen, me too and that is one of the rules that we have here at the Minimalists.
If you want to stretch 20 hours of work into 50 hours because you feel more calm in doing that, that's totally fine.
I remember a podcast, Sean was was really good at taking 10 hours of work and making it 20 hours, but I didn't mind because he did a really great job with what we were putting together at the time and he felt calmer and more at peace in doing it.
He just wanted to do it a bit more slowly.
I think that was great.
But if he found that 10 hours of work and moved it into five hours and the quality was still the same, that is great.
Can you talk to me about the fallacy or the productivity fallacy, I think we call it?
Yes, the productivity fallacy says that productivity equals hours work as opposed to value created?
Productivity is when you actually create experiences and results tangible or intangible that add value to your life or to other people's.
Whereas hours worked just tells us how many hours you showed up and dragged your body around and breathe up the air.
We were at our Sunday symposium this past weekend, which by the way, shout out to everyone who came to that Sunday symposium.
It was really powerful.
Beautiful event here in Los Angeles.
We're doing them monthly.
You can join us at one of those.
You can get tickets over on our website.
They are free tickets as well.
Well, they're still available, but we were talking about on stage, this sort of fallacy for a moment.
We didn't call it the productivity fallacy, but you can be really productive.
If we had Savvy D just move a bunch of rocks onto the stage and said, hey Matt, I actually need you to move them to the other side of the stage now.
You know what? I don't like the rocks over there.
Go ahead and move them to the middle of the stage.
And now he has this pile of rocks and it becomes the myth of Sisyphus at some point where he's just pushing the rocks across the stage and he's really productive, but he's not accomplishing anything that is meaningful or adding value to his life or anyone else's life.
Absolutely. And you know, when you point something like this out, it can easily sound like maybe you're being hard on people that spend a lot of hours at work.
But for me, I have the opposite in mind.
What I have in mind are the employers, the companies that fail to incentivize creative activity amongst their employees.
There are so many people like this around the country who go to work and are unproductive precisely because they have to play a social game in order to keep their jobs of looking like they're busy.
Because they work for managers who think if you don't look stressed, if you don't look They need to find something for you to do.
And that's a way of working that's based on a lack of trust. I don't trust you.
I always got to look out for the people that are trying to get over on me.
Why? Because I hired people that I ultimately don't trust and respect, and I haven't given them steak in my success.
So they don't show up here with a sense of ownership in the way that I do, because I own it, but they don't own anything.
I'm trying to get as much from them as I can, giving them as little as possible.
And so I've incentivized them to get as much from me as they can, in giving as little as possible.
So I don't trust them and respect them.
So I gotta watch them all the time.
But when you give people a sense of ownership, you give them stake and your success.
And then you encourage them to think creatively about ways they can add value to the company and ways that transcend the job description.
People get excited about their work and they start to work more and they often start to work more efficiently.
I mean, I think if people let folks take walks, or let them decide when their lunch breaks would be and give them more freedom.
You'll find that people will often flourish creatively when they have a sense of ownership and stake?
I haven't always done a good job with that, especially back in my corporate days, I was a bit of a micromanager at first, because I'm a bit of a control freak, right?
But I realized that delegating the right things to the right people, not only got those things off of my plate, but it gave them a sense of purpose in what they were doing as well.
In fact, we see it here with AB and savvy, Malabana's been training them up really, really well, and they've been this great addition to the team.
And one of the first things I've told them is, hey, you're going to get a lot of ownership around here.
Now it comes with a lot of responsibility and you're going to mess some things up and I don't mind you messing it up, I just mind you messing it up the second time or a third time after we talked it.
Let's learn from these mistakes.
That's part of what that ownership is.
Stephanie had a comment for us.
If I didn't have to deal with the pressure of social media and constantly think about what I've got to do next to stay current and engage with my clients.
It would make my job so much more enjoyable.
Yeah, I think there's something about the pressures of our jobs that can make the job less enjoyable, but I think it also depends on the person.
I think about me and Nicodemus as a good example, I was just on the phone with him yesterday and we were talking about a few things.
And one of the things we were talking about was how well he performs under pressure.
And so in a way, it's the pressure creates diamonds, but also it doesn't always create diamonds.
There's a lot of by -product that is non -diamond when you add a lot of pressure.
but with Ryan, he was always performing better under pressure.
And so when we had like sales competitions or whatever, throughout the month, he'd be somewhere in the middle of the pack, maybe even the bottom half of the pack.
But the last five days of the month, he would lap everyone.
And you would realize like, he just needed that incentive of I need more pressure in order to perform well.
I was the exact opposite.
I'd start the beginning of the month off first 10 days of the month.
And I'm so far ahead of everyone else that I get to relax the rest of the month.
And so it's all about the person and whether or not the pressure helps them or hurts them.
That's right, man. And when it comes to social media pressure, I empathize strongly here because everyone is still figuring this out.
Anyone who tells you I've completely mastered social media is either lying to you or telling you a truth that was outdated as soon as they uttered it to you.
Because once you master social media, the rules change and now you don't have that mastery anymore.
And so the pressure is real, companies are still trying to figure it out, and what they often do is the lazy thing which says I want this much activity from you because I can measure activity, but I don't really know what activity is producing revenue and so on.
And so many hardworking employees are the victims of that, and you need teams. You need to be a part of a club, a network, a group, an organization of other people that have to think creatively about social media because that helps take the edge off, give you creative ideas, and also give you people to empathize with and that helps a little bit.
We'll do a future episode on this, but since the mental health have been taking off social media, the entire year, taking a year off social media this year, you know what?
I've learned a lot of lessons, but they weren't the lessons I expected.
And there were some lessons I expected to learn and they were true, but maybe not as true or as prevalent as I suspected they would be.
And there were other things I didn't expect at all by taking a break from social media.
I think that's the nice thing from taking a break from work, or from material possessions, or from a relationship just creating some distance.
that distance allows us to appreciate the aspects that add value to our lives and it also allows us to eliminate those aspects that might be clutter.
What about Sarah? Being allowed to recruit people when I need help would simplify things for me.
I think it was T .K.
who said, sometimes you need to add something to simplify.
That's the addition by subtraction or subtraction by addition, right?
And so one way to subtract from your, one way to add to your life, to add more joy, more freedom can be to subtract the things that get in the way, right?
And so that is addition through subtraction.
But then you have this alternate concept of adding some things in order to simplify a bit.
Absolutely, sometimes the least efficient thing you can do is to do anything by yourself.
There are times where you do it by yourself and that's just simpler, but there are other times where it's unnecessarily complicated.
But we often don't want the growing pains of having to be vulnerable with someone else, ask someone else for help, or train them and give them room to grow, but when you create the space where that can happen, oh my gosh, things can get so much easier.
I'm particularly drawn to the words here, being allowed to.
Usually when people aren't able to do something like this because of a lack of resources, they just say it, I can't afford to.
But being allowed to is the kind of phraseology we often use when someone above us refuses to approve it or says, no, I don't like that idea.
I'd love to know more about that.
What's that all about being allowed to because maybe there's some room for some unpacking there, some room for some decluttering there, where we can talk about how we can shift you from a space where you feel like you're not being allowed to ask for help to where you're empowered to ask for the help that you need and where we can show other people who are affected by that, how that's better for them too.
Let's do one more, this one is from Chastity.
My job would be simpler if everyone just followed the minimalist, as a mail carrier, I would have fewer packages to deliver.
I don't know if you would because the junk mailers and the spammers I feel like they would keep just sending out all of these direct marketing the amount of nonsense that ends up in my mailbox.
I even I use the service I think I pay like like two or three bucks a month for it at this point, called Paper Karma, it's an app that I have on my phone, not a sponsor, not affiliated with us in any way, but it's just a app that I use on my phone because when junk mail shows up in my mailbox and I don't want it, I snap a photo of it and it automatically unsubscribes me from the physical junk mail, it's almost like a spam filter for your physical mail.
We automatically subscribes.
Unsubscribe. Unsubscribe.
But how do you get subscribed?
Right, that's a great question.
How does one get subscribed?
It's because people will sell your information.
Let's say, you bought a piece of furniture from Design Within Reach. Now, Design Within Reach sells to all of their partner companies that says, oh, this person likes to buy furniture and now you might want to sell them furniture as well.
So, then you start getting catalogs from restoration hardware, all of these other places because you bought one thing over here, they sell your data.
and a big part of these businesses is selling your data to other companies.
Isn't it the same thing when you go to like a gas station and they're like, sign up for the rewards.
You can get however many sent off on your gallon and just type in your phone number and things like that.
It's like, well then you start getting spam text messages and phone calls and you're like how do these people get my number?
Someone along the line took that that you volunteered informationally and sold it.
That's right. And so the level of restraint that you can incorporate into your own life.
One for me, and I'm not recommending this to anyone else, but it's really helped me.
I don't do any loyalty programs, even though it might save me a percentage up front.
It actually saves me way more on the back end by not buying the thing.
Now, if something's automatically already on sale, I'm not going to say, well, I'm gonna wait till it's back to full price.
Although I call sale price, fills price, F -O -O -L -S, Fools price, because the truth is that I didn't need that thing.
I didn't even really desire it before.
But now that it's 40 % off and supplies are limited, I'd be an idiot if I didn't buy it.
And it's creating that impulse, but of course it's a hundred percent off if I just leave it on the shelf.
So, Chasity, I agree with you.
If everyone followed the minimalist, then maybe everyone's work would be a bit simpler and more enjoyable.
Or maybe it'd be total chaos, who knows?
How about you listeners, what would make your work life simpler and more enjoyable?
Let us know in the comments.
Okay, give me something pithy, TK.
What would make your work life simpler and more enjoyable?
Less clutter equals more clarity.
For me, there's something about having those boundaries that makes everything.
Do I have the permission to go for a walk?
Do I have the permission to ignore my phone for 10 minutes?
Do I have the permission to be on this call for 30 minutes and not worry that something's gonna have burned down when I get off that phone?
And the only thing that does that is by laying down the boundaries in a way that eliminates the emotional and mental clutter that often gets caught up with work.
There's a quote by Jason Fried I love that says, ambiguity breeds anxiety.
The more I can eliminate that ambiguity in my workday in terms of what's expected of me, where I'll be, what I'll do, and so on, the less anxiety I have. I had two pithy answers.
Maybe you can help me pick which one is best for the show notes here.
Because I was thinking about joy and a simpler life.
Joy is a birthday gift from the present moment because joy doesn't exist in the future.
It doesn't exist in the past. So even if we feel joy based on a memory, it's joy in the present moment.
Or even if we feel really excited, which I don't want to confuse with joy, but we often do about a work promotion or I'm about to go on that trip.
That excitement is also happening right now in the present moment.
Or here's maybe another way to say it.
The present moment is the birthplace of joy.
Joy is not born in the future, it's not born in the past, It is born right here, right now.
I know at some of our events, people will ask me for advice at the end of them.
We were just at the Sunday symposium and someone came up and he was like, I need some advice and I need you to help me.
And I kind of need you to do it for me was the implicit message behind it.
And I've been simplifying, but I don't know what to do now.
And so I just said, well keep simplifying, keep simplifying, keep simplifying.
and of course, simplifying is sometimes addition in order to simplify your life.
You might need a tool.
If you're a carpenter, having a hammer is going to make building that house so much simpler, right?
I often think about, just with Carl Lentz recently, he had me on his podcast, Light Songs with Carl Lentz, we had him on here talking about infidelity and he brought me on his show to talk about a few things.
And one of the things I talked about was, off -camera with him, was about simplicity and complexity.
And to complect means to interweave two or more things together.
Sometimes that is really important.
It's like to say, what is better, a piece of string or a rope?
And to that I would respond better for what?
Some people might say, well, the rope is better because it's much stronger.
I say, I agree with you.
If you're climbing a mountain, you don't want that piece of string, it's gonna break and you're gonna fall to your death.
But if you're trying to floss your teeth with a rope, you're gonna have a real problem.
You need to simplify that rope.
You need to un -complex the rope in order to get down to the essence of what you need.
All right, that's the end of page one, but we're just getting started.
We have a plethora of colors to talk to still, but first real quick for right here, right now, here's one very exciting and joyous thing that's going on in the life of the minimalist. so I have a counselor, his name's TK Coleman, and he often helps me with all kinds of different clutter in my life.
I've got the physical clutter thing down really well, but sometimes there's like, emotional clutter that I need to run something by him or digital clutter, or maybe it's the busyness trap, the calendar clutter, or information clutter, education clutter, leadership clutter, all of these other forms of hidden clutter.
People will often come to us about relationship clutter as well.
And so the truth is we have trouble letting go, TK.
We have too much stuff, too much anxiety in our lives, too much stress, too much uncertainty.
And the good news is we've been talking about this for the last maybe year.
You've worked with thousands of people coaching them and counseling them on how to pursue a simpler and more light -hearted life, which is the thing that I really enjoy the most about you is your ability to create a light -hearted life, even amid the stress or anxiety.
It's not just getting rid of the anxiety, but living in a light -hearted fashion amid the stress and anxiety.
And so we just launched something called clutter counseling.
You can find it over at TheMinimalists .com, just click counseling at the top over there, And you can now hire TK Coleman, you can book an appointment with him, either in person, in Los Angeles or online via zoom to help you minimize your physical clutter, relationship clutter, emotional clutter, financial clutter, or any other kind of hidden clutter that might be in your life.
Can you talk to me a bit about the work that you've done coaching thousands of people at this point through different exercises?
Oh man at every level, whether it's at the university and corporate training, continuing education, doing work in non -profit space, doing work in all MBA and just working with people also on a personal level.
I find that, regardless of our background, regardless of our income level, regardless of our age and our ethnicity or our country of origin, at the end of the day we're all fundamentally the same.
Just as we have the same DNA, a lot of our problems have the same anatomical structure.
When it gets down to it, we all want what's best for ourselves and our families.
And we get tripped up in some ways that have a lot in common. And when you listen to a lot of the political messages of our time, it can be easy to think that we're all divided on every freaking thing.
But when you drill down and you drill down, you find that as human beings we are rooted in some very common experiences.
And so I've always loved about helping people, I've always had a conviction that space isn't just the absence of things.
It's the presence of vitality.
And so helping people declutter isn't just about helping them get rid of that thought or this thing or this relationship or this problem.
It's about helping restore them to an awareness of that which makes them feel alive.
And so sometimes we just need some act of listening, some Socratic dialogue with someone who is not directly a part of the problem who can help us see our situation with greater clarity.
And I've had people ask me for quite some time now, Hey, do you do any one on one coaching?
And I've always just had to say no, because I'm either, you know, doing work with schools or spending family time, you know, doing work at my parish and so on.
But this is an opportunity for me to make a select amount of time available for people who want to go deeper.
I've always been pretty liberal with saying, Hey, if you send me an email and you give me a whole lot of time, and I'll eventually, you know, tell you what my favorite song is.
I'll eventually give a book recommendation and do the best that I can, but for people that wanna go deeper and say, hey, let's take some time and let's take something that's really tripping you up, really frustrating you.
And let's figure it out together and figure out how we can reframe that and create some space around it so you can, you can be free.
Well, you've certainly helped me immensely and I thought it'd be great to open the door to other people as well.
So if you're interested in some clutter counseling, whether it is physical clutter, relationship clutter, emotional clutter, financial clutter, career clutter, digital clutter, or any other type of clutter that's going on in your life.
And you're looking for some insights, some observations, some guidance from T .K.
Coleman, head on over to theminimalists .com, click on Counseling at the top.
Now, he did mention that slots are limited, there are only so many hours that T .K.
has in a week but if you'd like some help, I think TK will walk you through.
Hold your hand through whatever clutter that you're working to minimize.
Malabam, what else you got for us?
Here's a minimalist insight from one of our listeners.
Hey you guys, my name is Meg and I am a Patreon subscriber here with a listener tip that was inspired by TK asking what might be a good use of your phone, or even better not being on your phone while you're in line.
I feel like I am very qualified to talk about this because I think about it all the time when I'm in line.
So one thing that I started doing is I came up with a little game that I would play where I would say to myself in my head, look for three things that are blue or you know some other color, look for like two things that are fuzzy, you know, just some random thing, and that would occupy my mind away from being self -conscious.
Like, oh my gosh, I'm just standing here in line totally unoccupied.
Someone's gonna talk to me or I'm gonna have to, you know, like to have these shifty eyes looking around.
So I think that if you can occupy your mind with something, whether that's just a little game that you come up with or God forbid you have to actually strike up a conversation with somebody.
That's one of the best things that you could do instead of being on your phone.
And if you are on your phone, maybe just put a limit on it in your mind and make sure that you're being aware of your surroundings as well because that's very important.
Plus, you don't want to be the person standing there in line, and the line already moved ahead.
And you're still on your phone scrolling through instagram and people behind you were like, is this guy OK?
So that's my listener tip.
Hopefully it was helpful.
And thank you guys again for everything.
Meg, thank you so much for that comment.
Scrolling is the new smoking indeed.
Now, for anyone else who has a listener tip or insight about this episode, leave a comment on Patreon or YouTube or better yet, send in a voice memo to podcast at TheMinimalists .com so we We can feature your voice on the show.
All right, that's the first 33 % of episode 459.
We'll see you on Patreon for the full maximal edition, which includes answers to a bunch more questions.
Questions like what does a minimalist business plan look like?
What can I do to find balance if my job is burning me out?
What's the best way to convince my poor friends that minimalism isn't only for rich people?
How can you tell whether you're decluttering or if you're just organizing?
Plus a million more questions and simple living segments over on The Minimalist's private podcast. We also have an outstanding home tour from one of our listeners this week.
Visit patreon .com slash TheMinimalist or click the link down in the description to subscribe and get your personal link so that our weekly Maximal episodes play in your favorite podcast app.
You'll also gain access to all of our podcast archives all the way back to episodes 0 0 1 by the way Patreon is now offering free trials So if you'd like to test drive our private podcast you can join for seven days for free And that is our minimal episode for today big Thanks to earthing studios for providing the recording space on behalf of Ryan Nicodemus TK Coleman, Alabama a post -production peter, Spire Jeff and Dave, A B, savvy D and the rest of our team.
I'm Joshua Fields Milburn if you leave here with just one message whether it be this.
Love people and use things cause the opposite never works.
Thanks for listening y 'all.
We'll you need. Every little thing that's just feeding your greed oh I bet that you'll be fine without it.
