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'd be fine without it.
You're listening to The Minimalist Podcast, with Joshua Fields Millburn and T .K.
Coleman, recorded live at Irving Studios in sunny California.
Thank you, Malabama.
Coming up on this free public minimal episode, a caller has a question about letting go of a deceased loved one's possessions with dignity and honor.
And then we've got a lightning round question about the best ways to preserve the memories of lost loved ones.
Let's follow by our right here, right now segment and a listener tip.
You can check out the maximal edition of episode 461.
That's the full two hour episode where we answer three times as many questions and we dive deep into several simple living segments.
That private podcast is out right now at patreon .com slash theminimalists.
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.
Give us a call, our phone number's 406 -219 -7839, or email a voice recording to podcast at TheMinimalists .com.
Also, we're looking for more listener insights and tips and responses, so if you hear a question on here, and TK and I were waxing Philosophical a typical or maybe we gave some practical instructions or observations or insights of our own.
But if you have something to add, make sure you send in a voice memo podcast at TheMinimalists .com.
We'd love to air your expression on the show on a future episode.
Our first question today is from Liz in New York.
Hello, Joshua and T .K.
and Ryan. My name is Liz and I am a Patreon subscriber, and I've been following you guys since April of 2016.
I know that because April 1st of 2016 was when I started the men's game.
I actually played the men's game for two straight years and then another two years, sort of a modified version and got rid of over 16 ,000 items out of my house.
It's a house that has been in my family since 1975.
The reason that I'm reaching out today is because the love of my life passed away ten months ago.
And although I've been able to let go of a lot of his things to his son and to some friends, I'm finding it hard to let go of things that are not necessarily sentimental, but that were his.
And I just have the feeling that I am a racing part of him.
And I know that his stuff is not him.
But getting rid of these things is proving to be harder than I thought it would be, this is different than when I let go of a lot of my parents things.
This just feels different.
I don't know if it's because the relationship was different, which I guess is probably the case, but if you guys could talk about the idea of losing someone, letting go of their stuff and not feeling that you're erasing them so much. That would be wonderful.
I just would love your insight.
Thanks so much for all you do.
You guys really did change my life.
Liz, you have such a lovely voice.
Thank you so much for leaving this heartfelt message.
First off, my heart goes out to you.
Losing someone, especially someone that close to you is incredibly difficult and in dealing with their things and all of the aftermath and the wake of that loss can be really difficult as well.
I agree. Letting go is hard, but you're also learning this other lesson.
Clinging can be even harder because when we're clinging to everything, we treat everything as though it is precious and it weighs us down.
I think about if you go out for a hike with a backpack, you want to bring the things that you need to sustain you.
But if you start putting bricks in that backpack and say, well, I need everything, it really weighs you down and prevents you from moving forward accordingly.
So TK, I'd like to address the question that Liz is asking head -on.
Basically, she's asking after I've lost someone, how do I let go of their stuff with dignity and honor?
First of all, I just want to affirm that sentiment, that desire to do the right thing, that counts for something.
You could be the opposite.
You could just not care.
And I think we tend to make better decisions when it's on the foundation of having a desire to do the right thing.
When I think about my life, personally, I've had a small number of experiences in which someone I really cared for passed away and I was physically unable to make the funeral.
Most cases I've gone through great inconvenience to make funerals.
I really value it. But there were a few times where I haven't been able to do so.
And on all of those occasions, I felt really guilty about it.
I just felt really bad in the days leading up to it that I'm not gonna be able to go.
And in every case, I stopped, thankfully, because of people in my life challenging me and thought about what would that person think?
What would they say to me if they saw me stressing out about going to their funeral?
And I could not imagine any one of those people going you jerk you ought to sacrifice everything to come to my funeral after all of the moments we had together in life.
I think they would honestly say something like hey man do what you can you've already paid your respects I am no longer here I don't want to be a form of clutter in your life I don't want to take up space in a way that separates you from the best kind of life that you have in the same way that you love me, I love you.
And because I love you, I want you to be available for what is best for you.
And you can't be available to what is best for you if you're letting a clinging to me and my stuff and my expectations be a weight in your life.
Liz, this is one of the most difficult questions that I've had to answer because it forced me to get real introspective.
I'm thinking about if I was in your position, actually if I was in your husband's position and I were to pass away, what would I want for my wife?
Well, there are a few things I would want.
I want her to feel safe and secure, so I've done some things with respect to life insurance and retirement accounts, so that she has some sense of safety there.
But I also want her to be happy and to minimize any unnecessary suffering.
It doesn't mean that she's not going to suffer if I die, I know that she will, but I'd like to minimize the unnecessary suffering.
And so when I think about it in that context, how do I let go of someone's stuff with dignity and honor and respect?
Well, that's what dignity is.
Dignity is this state or quality of being that is worthy of honor and respect.
And I can tell you one thing, that my wife Rebecca would not be respecting me if she clung to cling to everything.
no, it is clung, isn't it?
Ooh, if she clung to everything that I owned.
And the truth is if that got in the way of her happiness, I would want her to let go of all of it.
I have no expectation that she should keep certain things once I'm gone.
Once I'm gone, they're her things, and you know what she can do with her things?
Whatever she wants to do with those things.
Now, it's possible to let go of the things without letting go of the memories.
I think Liz illustrated that nicely, but I think repeating that and understanding that the memories are not in the things, and even if I do let go of the things, I'm not letting go of his memories that we created together.
I love that. There have been days where my wife is at home having coffee, eating something, and then she's in a rush and she leaves the door.
and she leaves out the door and there are dishes left behind.
Now imagine me looking at the dishes that my wife has left behind around the sink or in the sink and thinking to myself, well, I want to clean these up and put them in the dishwasher, but this is her stuff and I want to treat her stuff with dignity.
The insight that speaks to that moment would be to recognize that to do the proper thing with her stuff is the dignity.
that's the dignified course of action, to say, because I care about her and her stuff, I'm going to help these things fulfill their purpose.
I'm not going to leave them in a state that doesn't represent anything that she stands for.
And I'm not going to leave them in a state that inconveniences me at the same time, because nobody wins, everybody loses, including the people that I don't know who could benefit from your husband's stuff, right?
I'm sort of shifting stories here.
But what I mean by that is your husband's possessions are left behind.
They're not useful to you in the sense that you don't need them.
There are people out there who need them.
When you let them go, you allow those things to fulfill their purpose by becoming useful to other people.
And that honors your husband by representing his values because I'm sure he's a person that believes in generosity.
When I first talked to you about this episode, you said you wanted to title it, preserving the past. And part of that preservation, when you think about preservation societies, when they look back at the past, they do retain some things that might point toward the past. And so what TK is not telling you today, Liz, is, you know what?
You should get rid of everything.
You shouldn't cling to anything.
Now you can hold on to those things without clinging them.
You can loosen your grip.
And that is generally the first step in letting go, by the way.
not holding onto the things that cease to serve you.
But serving you can mean that it's useful in a literal, physical, practical sense, or it could be useful as a trigger for some of those memories.
I remember you once told me that there are no sentimental items, only sentimental people.
And so those items that are sentimental, if we treat everything as though it is a sentimental item, that becomes a problem because then we have much more difficulty letting go of something when it is a sentimental item.
Why is something sentimental?
Because we have now imbued it with some sort of meaning that is not intrinsic to that item.
If I found out that the guitar that I own was once played by Jimi Hendrix, now all of a sudden, now there's some sort of sentimental value tied to that.
It doesn't change the state of the guitar at all.
But then what if I find out a year later that actually it wasn't owned by Jimi Hendrix?
Now I've removed the sentiment from that thing.
Not really because it was never in that item that sentiment was only in me.
That's right you know I I had a a Bracelet that that we gave out at the funeral of my one of my best friends who who died several years ago and it has his name on it and I wore this bracelet on my arm for a long time after that funeral and I just didn't want to take it off and and for a while it started to feel like this is me keeping him in my life But the material of it would rub against my skin in a certain way and really agitate it.
I wasn't concerned about the fashion component because we all know I don't have any fashion sense.
But it was just like really irritating and bothering me, and I was putting up with it like I got to keep it on, I got to keep it on.
And at some point I lost my way.
I forgot what it was all about.
There was a good sentiment behind me holding it on, but it served its purpose.
And I just had to accept the fact that he's still in my heart, I still love him.
And if he is aware of that, he knows that.
And I can take this thing off and I kept it in a drawer.
So I still own it because that still means something to me but I don't force myself to relate to it in a way that's unnecessarily uncomfortable.
And it's like what you talked about treating everything as precious.
When everything is precious, nothing is precious.
Maybe in a metaphysical sense, everything is precious.
but imagine if we lived in this ever present psychedelic state where every blade of grass was like a mystical experience.
And at every moment, your mind is blown.
You're like, Whoa, you couldn't function.
One of my favorite books is called Jesus his son.
It's by Dennis Johnson.
And the first page of that book, it's about a heroin addict and he is really, really high.
And the line, one of the most beautiful lines he said that I knew every raindrop by its name.
Now you can be in that mystical state, but you can't function in a practical sense if you're always treating everything as though it's precious.
It doesn't mean you have to remove yourself from the present moment.
You can preserve the past without living in the past. In fact, it's not even possible to live in the past. I was having this conversation with my daughter.
She's 11 now. And we were talking about, I told her, well, yeah, the past doesn't exist. as the future doesn't exist. She goes, well, the future hasn't happened yet, but the past exists.
I said, well, where is it?
And she just paused and she looked at me, and she's like, well, it's in like, it's back there?
I said, back where?
And she goes, well, it's like in our memories.
I said, when do you have those memories?
Like right now? Like, ah, isn't that interesting?
And then she looked up a minute later, she goes, what's the meaning of life?
Oh, I said that's a much longer conversation.
Joshua feels Millbird as Socrates.
Let's went to your 12 to have that conversation.
But the thing about preserving the past is you are actually preserving the past for the present moment.
Now I would like to get practical for Liz because I could tell she's super practical.
She played the 30 -day minimalism game.
She called it the mens game.
That's the hashtag that a lot of people would use on social media.
And now that we're not on social media, you can still share on social media if you'd like.
But we're also, we have a bunch of people in the Patreon community chat who are sharing their own version of the 30 day minimalism game.
And Liz played her own version of the 30 day minimalism game.
She just kept going and got rid of 16 ,000 items. For those of you unfamiliar with the game, you can find the details at theminimalists .com slash game.
We also have a free calendar that you can download over there.
but that game is really powerful for a lot of people because the average household has hundreds of thousands of items in it, and people are overwhelmed.
They don't know where to start.
What we say is you can start anywhere, the first day of the month, you just get rid of one item.
Second day, the month, two items, third day of the month, three items. It gives you a little bit of momentum because anyone can get rid of one item today.
And my question for you, Liz, is there one item that you're holding onto that you're clinging to that was your husband, that is now yours, and maybe you just wanna loosen your grip on it a little bit.
Just one item. Not all of them.
Maybe he has 300 items left behind or 3 ,000 items left behind.
I'm not worried about those other items. What's the one item that you're clinging to right now that you're certain you're not getting any value from?
And if you let it go, not only would it take that weight off your shoulders, but maybe that same item would add value to someone else's life if you're willing to stop clinging.
I would also add to, give permission to other people, whoever the next possessor of these objects are.
Give them permission to use them in ways that are useful to them.
Sometimes we attach ourselves to the expectation or the demand that if you're going to walk away with something that belonged to somebody that was so important to me, you've got to treat it in the same way they treated it.
where you've got to treat it in a way that's really, really, really sacred, and so on.
And your husband valued those things, not because of the way the previous possessor treated it.
He valued those things because of the role they played in his life.
And so as you're letting these things go, if it's not trash...
if it's something that someone else can use...
I wouldn't throw it away!
You don't have to do that.
But I would take it through all the channels that I use to sell things, to give things away.
and you can take your time.
You've already been holding on to them for a while, keep something that's meaningful to you.
But then I would let the people who really want them, the people that are willing to come pick them up, the people that are willing to pay for them, I would give them the grace of trusting them as the new owners of that object to do with it what they need to do.
A couple other boundaries that might help you, Liz, I'm sure you're familiar with the minimalist rule book, 16 rules for living with less.
one of those rules or boundaries as it really is, is the one -in, ten -out rule.
And it was actually based on when you go somewhere and they're at capacity, if you go to a venue and it can only fit a hundred people, they might make you wait at the door and one person goes out before one person can come in, it's the one -in, one -out rule.
And quite often, it's a law in different places.
And I said, what if I apply this to my stuff?
What if I want a new shirt?
Okay, I can do that.
One in, ten out. I get rid of ten shirts so I can replace it with one that I'm really going to enjoy.
I like that. Now, obviously that doesn't work long -term.
You'll end up with a negative number of possessions, but right now, what if you did a variation of that with your former husband's things?
What if you held on to one thing, you know you wanted to keep and every time you said, I know I want to hold on to this.
I'm going to give myself permission to let go of two things or five things or 10 things, the one in, 10 out rule with the existing things that are already there.
And of course, the spontaneous combustion rule.
Did he leave behind some things where you're like, oh, if I lost this, I'd actually feel a sense of relief if it's spontaneously combusted right now.
Well, that's a sign that I definitely want to let it go.
And finally, the selling deadline rule is something that I think is useful.
I agree, you wanna take your time, but you don't want to have a nebulous amount of time.
So maybe it's by the end of the year, I'm going to sell these things.
And if I can't sell them within a week I'm gonna lower the price.
If it doesn't sell within a month then I'm going to try to donate it to someone who can get value from it.
If I can't donate it for some reason then I'll try to recycle it.
And if it's not recyclable, then I will trash it.
And working your way through that process but having a deadline along the way means those objects get out of your home.
but much more importantly, they get out of your mind and they're really weighing you down in there.
It's not the object itself that is weighing you down physically.
It's every time you see it, it's recreating some sort of micro trauma in your life.
And that's why it becomes difficult to let go.
Liz, I'd love to send you a couple of things.
Number one is, if you haven't read our book, everything that remains, it really involves my story of letting go of sentimental items. I actually started minimalism by letting go of sentimental items. A terrible place to start.
But the good news is, Liz, you already have so much momentum.
You're so good at letting go right now that I know you can let go of some of these sentimental items. And I think that story will inspire you.
If you already have the book, great.
Otherwise, I'd be happy to send you a copy of the book, or if you want the audio book or the e -book, we'll send those to you as well.
And then also, I'd love to offer you a free clutter counseling session with TK Coleman.
And this is something we've been doing now.
I know TK, you had a bunch of appointments last week and you've been interacting with people.
What's been really nice about this, there's some people who need to meet for multiple sessions, but quite often if they come to you with one specific problem within an hour, you're able to help them work through that problem, see a perspective that they may have otherwise not seen before that call.
Absolutely. There are some where it's, Hey, let's do this on a monthly basis or biweekly basis, But there are others where it's one pressing issue just one thing they're stuck on.
And we get to the bottom of it or we at least lay a foundation upon which they can build without the need for further coaching.
So this is some of the most fun I've had in years.
I've done a lot of coaching, but I got to say I love our community.
I love our family. When you do work, you certainly want to treat everyone with integrity, no matter who it is that you serve.
It's kind of like when you're a bartender or working as a server at a restaurant, everyone who comes into your section, you treat them a certain way.
But then there are some people who come in and they're just really fun to serve.
They're just really fun to serve.
And that's what our community has been like.
You are a fun, wonderful, beautiful community to serve.
And so I look forward to doing more of these.
This is really, uh, really great.
And it could be anything.
You can bring your struggles, your challenges to the table.
It can be digital clutter, physical clutter, emotional clutter, relationship clutter, your identity clutter, career clutter, education clutter, whatever it might be, TK can help walk you through and provide those insights.
So when you walk away, you'll say, wow, I feel a little bit lighter, or in some cases, a whole lot lighter.
So Liz, I'd love to offer you one clutter counseling session.
For anyone else who's interested, you can head over to theminimalists .com and click on counseling up there at the top.
And then also if you can't afford the clutter counseling, we're gonna do one scholarship every month.
All you have to do is send a less than two minute video to clutter at TheMinimalists .com, that email address is over on the webpage there, the Clutter Counseling webpage.
If you can't afford a clutter counseling session then we'll consider you for a scholarship, or TK will consider you for a scholarship in the future.
ClutteratTheMinimalists .com.
Before we get back to our callers, Malabamaw 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 maxim.
You can find this episode's Maxims in the show notes at TheMinimalists .com slash podcast and every minimal maxim 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.
What's the question of the week this week?
How do you preserve the memories of lost loved ones?
How do you preserve the memories of lost loved ones?
Well TK, before we get to our pithy answers, let's hear how some of our listeners answered this question.
Susan said, I upload photos of loved ones to my digital picture frames.
So my family is reminded of good times with them.
There's something special about digital picture frames in particular.
I do something on my fridge where I swap out a photo every month.
And it's a physical photo.
And so sometimes it's just something silly from the past. It'll be right now the one that's on my fridge is Ella when she was like maybe four or five years old.
And she has the swimming goggles on and she has like a, she's a whole swimming diver's outfit but she's in the backseat of a car.
Just snorkeling in the backseat of the car.
She is snorkeling in the backseat of the car and it's so cute.
And other ones will just be cute moments that we've had from the past. It's a way that we preserve the past, but I found that digital picture frames are especially magical because when someone comes over to your house they generally don't wanna look at all the picture frames, but if you have a digital picture frame, we were so compelled to look at a glowing screen that people were like, oh, is that when you went to Hawaii?
Oh, you were in Glacier National Park?
Oh, tell me more about this.
And it's almost this great conversation starter.
In fact, we did something a while ago called a scanning party.
We'll put a link to that in the show notes so you can see what scanner that we use and what digital picture frames that we use.
Meghan had this to say.
For the people I've lost, I use their birthday as a reminder to celebrate their lives and share the memories I have of them.
I might share a post on social media about a positive experience we had when they were alive.
A decade ago my friend Stan Dukes, I wrote an essay about him when he died really unexpectedly.
It was in his late thirties.
I think it was 36 at the time, so mid 30s, and just died out of nowhere, had a heart attack and it was gone in 2014.
It was at the very beginning of the, everything that remains tour a hundred city tour.
And I wrote this essay called live like Stan, it's actually the final essay in our book, essential, but it's also available on our website as well.
It was the way that I wanted to remember him, preserve that moment from the past. And often go back to that, usually once a year around the time of his death.
and just to remember what an outstanding person he was.
Mm -hmm. What about Taylor?
I preserve the memories of my lost loved ones by using the things they gave me.
For example, my grandmother crocheted a blanket for me and it's always at the foot of my bed for when I need an extra layer.
I like to keep her jewelry in my regular rotation as well.
So this is another way to preserve the past with things that you'll actually use.
You're carrying the past forward. you're not being dragged back into the past. Nastasia said this.
I hold on to handwritten letters, photos, video clips, and audio messages that people send me.
I have a few of my dad's T -shirts I still wear.
And I have a charcoal drawing of my mom and her favorite coffee cup.
Also, certain songs remind me of them.
Songs can definitely take me back to a moment in the past. I call it time piercing.
If I hear a song...
In fact, the book that I mentioned earlier, or everything that remains.
A few astute readers have pointed out that it has a soundtrack.
There's 12 chapters in the book and every chapter has a song that's playing somewhere in the chapter itself.
And so there's one of those by a Kentucky artist named Daniel Martin Moore.
And the song is called Stray Age.
And every time that album comes on, it reminds me of my mother's final days on this earth because it was the album that I was playing around that time.
And it's a way of not going back to the past, but pulling the past forward to the present moment.
Let's do another one from Andrew.
Andrew, Elise and Shannon all said, I preserve the memories of my loved ones by telling stories about them to my children.
So telling stories about the people that we love.
What a great way to honor someone with dignity.
Absolutely man, there's an old saying that tell me a truth and I believe, I will believe tell me a fact and I will know, but tell me a story and it will live in my heart forever.
One of the ways to keep the people in our lives alive forever is to share stories about how they've influenced our lives.
What was great about the live like Stan essay is most people who read my stuff have no idea who he was, but now there are literally hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people who have read that essay at this point.
And so now he in a way lives on in their hearts as well.
He touched people, he never even had the chance to meet, That's the beautiful thing about the written word. It's communicative, but you can communicate with that inner voice, with the brain voice of someone with whom you didn't even share the same timeline.
You can read someone who died before you were born, and yet they're communicating with you.
And they're exposing their most heartfelt, interior life onto the page.
And you get to pick that up in a way where it lives on beyond the death of that author.
Are you saying that Hemingway lives in your head rent -free?
He's like you pay me to live in your head.
What about a little more from Stephanie.
I used to keep trinkets, cards, and photos, and household items, but then I realized that I never actually searched for those things to ignite the memories.
Those memories just pop up into my head.
They can be triggered by songs, conversations, places, or even the taste of a particular food or drink.
So the sensory experience often pulls the past forward as well.
Some more time piercing there, where you taste something or especially smell.
You could smell something, ah, it smells like my mom's coat from when I was four years old.
How did I even remember that?
How did my brain keep that?
And so the sensory experience can often pull the past into the present moment.
But then at the same time, once you realize the memories are not in our things, you're free to let go.
And I think the sensory experience often does that.
Oh yeah, those memories have been in me the whole time.
When I smelled that slightly musty coat.
Oh yeah. It brings back that memory.
The memory was never in the coat.
It was always inside me.
In fact, that is my pithy answer for today.
Once you realize the memories are not inside the things, you are free to let go.
You can read dozens of other listener responses in the Patreon community chat.
How about you listeners?
How do you preserve the memories of lost loved ones?
Let us know in the comments.
Okay, give me something pithy, TK.
How do you preserve the memories of lost loved ones?
You can let go of a possession without throwing away the person.
Imagine if I have, you don't think back to the eighties where you walked around with a boombox on your shoulder.
Imagine I'm walking down the street with a boombox and I'm listening to a song and I'm jamming out.
I'm so sick of love songs and dedication to JFM.
And I dropped that boom box and it breaks and shatters and the music stops.
Imagine I scurry and I gather up all the pieces and I walk around with this broken radio and someone says, hey, brother, why do you have a broken radio?
And I say, well, the song that I was jamming out to, it was emanating through this radio.
And so I'm hanging on to it cause I got to honor the song.
Well, the way you honor the song Is it by hanging on to the broken pieces of a radio that don't work anymore?
You hang onto the song by letting go of the broken pieces of the radio and by singing it.
Because the song lives in your heart and the song is an energy that is not limited to being broadcast through that particular device, but through anything that is receptive to that energy.
And when it comes to the people that we love, we honor them by letting the song of their life live on, sing on through the way we live, through the way we represent them.
That's beautiful. Well, we're nearing the end of page one.
We still have a couple more pages to go and we're just getting started.
We have a gazillion more questions to answer, but first real quick for right here, right now here's one thing that's going on in the life of the minimalist. We do this twice a year TK.
It's called simplify everything.
What if you could remove all the clutter from your life, not just physical clutter, but also emotional clutter and mental clutter and financial clutter and digital clutter and career clutter, or calendar clutter, even relationship clutter.
Well, we've helped millions of people do that.
And now we've helped thousands of people through a course we have called Simplify Everything.
It's our first ever decluttering course.
So we've been doing the minimalist for 14 years now.
And we waited until last year to finally aggregate all of the insights, observation and wisdom that we have accumulated over the years.
And we put it into this five week course called Simplify Everything.
It includes five distinct weeks.
Each week we cover a different type of clutter.
17 different video lessons featuring me and Nicodemus and TK Coleman.
45 clutter problem areas, 135 decluttering solutions, 50 minimalism resources, a 30 -page workbook and a student forum so you can interact with other people who are taking the course at the same time.
You can now purchase this course for yourself or as a gift for someone else if they also want to declutter this year.
Enrollment will open on October 1st, 2024, and it's open for just 72 hours.
You can watch the official trailer, read graduate testimonials and enroll over at SimplifyEverything .XYZ.
It's not .com, it's .xyz, you know why?
Because XYZ is the end of the alphabet and SimplifyEverything is the end of your clutter.
Ooh, I love it. And the beautiful thing about this course is once you have access, you have access.
And that includes any updates we might make when we write notes and things like that.
And this is useful because when you take the course the first time, what you're gonna find is there are one to two areas that are really tripping you up and that you wanna focus on and it helps you immensely in those one or two areas.
But just like reading a book a second or third time, you find that your life has changed, you've evolved.
and now some other area of clutter that wasn't as relevant to you, wasn't as much of a pain point is now a big deal, and you can go back through it and focus on those other sections in a later time.
Simplify everything dot XYZ is where you can find it if you are listen to this early you want to get on the email list over there so we'll notify you as soon as it is available, simplify everything dot XYZ the end of your clutter starts with simplify everything.
Malabam what else you got for us.
Here's a minimalist insight from one of our listeners.
Hey minimalists this is Andrea.
I'm a Patreon subscriber and my tip is for anyone looking to manage kids artwork.
My husband and I preemptively decided to keep art in two categories.
The first of its kind and the best of its kind per year.
So if our little one makes a crayon picture there will only ever be one first crayon picture but each year after that we will choose the best crayon picture to keep for that year.
Anything that comes in in a close second, we'll just take a picture of if it's that meaningful.
So far, it's been working really well for us.
Thanks for listening.
Andrea, thank you so much for that artistic comment.
For anyone else who has a listener tip or insight about this episode or any other episode, leave a comment on Patreon or YouTube or better yet, send a voice memo to podcastat theminelists .com so we can feature your voice on the show.
We'd love to hear from you.
All right, that's the first 33 % of episode 461.
We'll see you on Patreon for the full Maximal edition which includes answers to a bunch more questions, questions like what are 14 simple tips that will make decluttering much less overwhelming?
How can minimalism benefit people with neurotypical disorders like ADHD or OCD?
Do you know that Martin Luther King Jr. had a speech about how much advertisements suck?
Plus, we got a million more questions and simple living segments over on The Minimalist Private podcast, we also have an outstanding home tour.
For one of our listeners this week, visit Patreon .com slash the minimalist 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 episode 001.
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 the recording space, on behalf of Ryan Nicodemus, T .K.
Coleman, Malabama post -production Peter, Spire Jeff and Spire Dave. A, B over there on the couch. We have Savvy D on the board today.
And the rest of our team.
I'm Joshua Fields Milburn.
And if you leave here with just one message.
Let it be this, love people and use things.
Because the opposite never works.
Thanks for listening, y 'all.
We'll see you next time.
Peace. 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.
