Deciding to Live with Less

I pulled into my driveway on a sunny March afternoon like I had hundreds of times before. Before I exited my Jeep I could see the screen of my kitchen window was shredded and a power cord from some electronic device was dangling from the sill. It was clear that an unwelcome visitor had used the window as a point of exit from my home. What was unclear, was the condition of my beloved golden retriever, Coda.

I cracked open the kitchen door and yelled for Coda. The normal scurry of his nails across the wood floors was absent. There was no bark of relief or whimper of fear. I was afraid that Coda either fled the house during the crime or was killed. I called the police from my cell phone and waited outside.

Two police officers arrived and entered my home with guns drawn. A few moments later Coda came barreling out of the house and into my arms. Apparently the burglars locked Coda in a bedroom while they alleviated me of most of my possessions. They took my 46-inch television, video game system, and an assortment of handheld electronic toys, from iPods to cameras.

I suppose you could say this started me on my path of minimalism. But you would be wrong.

The months that followed the burglary were some of the toughest of my life. Not because my stuff was stolen, but because just two weeks before the burglary I had shut down my martial arts school of six years and was going through bankruptcy. And I couldn’t find a job. I sold anything that I could get a dollar for to buy groceries and keep the lights on. I sold all of my DVD’s, books, and the old equipment remaining from my martial arts business.

Some might think this pushed me further down the road of minimalism. And they would be wrong.

I didn’t want to be a victim of a theft crime. I didn’t want to sell my Fight Club DVD to get cash to buy a meal. Before the burglary, I was leaning on my big screen television and video games (not to mention a hell of a lot of beer) to numb the woes of my business failings. The last thing I wanted was to get rid of my stuff.

Eventually the emptiness I felt after losing my business shifted. At some point I looked at myself in the mirror through another morning’s hangover and I knew it was time to change. I was ready to start putting the pieces back together, and I was going to start with clearing my physical clutter. I made a decision to get rid of ten items per day for thirty days.

Although most of my sales-worthy possessions were already gone by that time, I still had plenty of clutter to purge. It started with donating old clothes and shoes to Goodwill and soon crossed into territory of emotional crossfire.

Did I still need the karate uniforms that I used to wear when I taught my classes? Did I need the large yearly group photos of my former students? What about the black belt that I knotted around my waist nearly every day for six years? I kept the black belt and decided that everything else was redundant in the memories they cued.

With each drawer pulled and closet door opened there seemed to be an item I kept unnecessarily for memory’s sake. I evaluated material possessions that I had emotional attachment to and made the decision to let them go—from an old broken cell phone with the first text from an old girlfriend, to my prized punching bag I could vividly remember my father hanging in our old basement when I was twelve years old. I realized memories are within us, not within our things.

At the end of the thirty days, two out of the three bedrooms in my home were completely empty. The only furniture that remained was a bed, a couch, a pub table, and a chair. A small part of me felt free.

That taste of freedom made me question everything I owned. I canceled my cell phone contract and funneled all calls and texts through Google Voice. I pared down my clothing to only what would fit in a single load of laundry. With each item I relinquished, my sense of peace and freedom grew. I gained a long missing sense of clarity and made a major decision.

I decided it was time for me to leave Columbus, Ohio (my city of nearly twenty years). I left my three bedroom house and moved into a 400 square foot studio apartment in Austin, Texas. Within three hours of arriving in Austin, I drove to one of those huge car malls and sold my Jeep. I was ready to rebuild my life. I was ready to let go of the unnecessary stuff in my life.

These days I enjoy my new life in Austin. I go to the gym, take Coda on about eight walks a day, and contribute to others largely in the areas of weight loss and fitness through my work online.

There is a pleasant flow to my life now because I made a conscious choice to eliminate the things—whether they be possessions, persons, or habits—that disrupt my path of contribution and personal growth. I’m streamlining towards strength. And it started with a decision to live with less.

Vic Magary is a personal trainer, blogger, and dog lover. He helps people lose fat and get into great shape at his website. You can follow him on Twitter, Facebook, or Google+

Afterword by Joshua Fields Millburn

We don’t accept guest essays at The Minimalists, but occasionally we ask friends to write something that our readers can benefit from. I first met Vic this year when he lived in Columbus (before he moved a few thousand miles away). He’s a great guy with a great story: he’s been through a lot of shit, he knows how to overcome adversity, and, even though he’s 40, he’s likely in better shape than anyone I know. I get a lot of my personal fitness and diet advice from Vic. Check out his website for some great personal fitness content and inspirational life lessons.

Source:
Deciding to Live with Less

Email of Yesteryear

I manage my email vastly different than I used to.

When I worked in corporate America, I would get 150 to 250 emails a day. The first thing I did in the morning was reach for my BlackBerry and check my inbox. I was anchored to that BlackBerry throughout the day, checking it every five or ten minutes, always anticipating every new message. It was an unspoken corporate expectation—to be on call, always available.

And at night, before my head hit the pillow, the last thing I did—out of habit—was check my BlackBerry for new messages. Looking back on it, it seems a bit crazy now, but, at the time, that was the expectation, and thus it felt completely normal.

The truth is that less than 40 of those 150 to 250 emails actually required any kind of action. Some of them just needed to be read and filed away mentally. Others were irrelevant but still required my precious time to read and decide whether or not it was pertinent information.

To manage such a daunting load, I developed an elaborate system to organize the chaos—constantly checking my inbox, filing messages into appropriate “to do” folders, delegating tasks to various employees, and setting priorities for various actions I needed to take. It was a vicious cycle, and I was never “caught-up.” I couldn’t, by definition, ever be caught-up with such a barrage of perpetual incoming info. But I soldiered on—reading, filing, prioritizing, delegating, and taking action to get things done.

Email Today

The picture looks much different for me today.

Size doesn’t matter. I don’t subscribe to the five-sentences email philosophy prescribed by some of my friends. I like long emails if they are clever, well thought out, and add value to my life (that last part is the most important). For some emails, however, five sentences is way too long. And most emails shouldn’t be sent at all. Besides, I’m perfectly capable of writing a two-page 277-word sentence that would render this rule irrelevant (as I demonstrated in the first sentence of the fourth story in Falling While Sitting Down). So, instead of limit myself, I think twice before I send an email. Is there a better way to communicate this info?

Use your smartphone as a tool (if you have one). I still get about the same amount of emails (thanks to the success of this site), and I still have a BlackBerry. But my BlackBerry works for me, not the other way around. It is a tool I use to respond when a computer isn’t nearby (I don’t have internet at home). If I’m writing, I leave it in the other room. If I’m on tour, I use it for short responses while I’m traveling. If I’m spending time with a friend, I leave it in my pocket or, better yet, at home or in my car.

Unsubscribe if you don’t find value. My email is my central hub, it’s what I use to aggregate all of my incoming info (comments, communications, websites, newsletters, blogs, etc.). If something is no longer adding value to my life, I unsubscribe.

Don’t respond to email every day. If you send me an email, you will get a response (if it warrants one), but that response is on my terms, on my timeline. No one should send an email to anyone and expect an immediate reply. Life is too precious to spend our days feeling anxious with required email responses.

Don’t act on everything. Not every email requires an action. In fact, most don’t. Sometimes it’s OK to just hit delete.

Delete nearly everything. I used to archive all of my messages, but now I just delete them when I’m done reading. It’s incredibly freeing. But what if you realize you need something you deleted? Well, I save the few messages I’m certain I’ll want to reference later—I save those messages in a folder and I delete everything else. I have the trash set to keep everything I delete for 30 days before the messages are gone. But, in reality, I’ve learned to let go. If something gets lost, it’s not the end of the world. I’m more concerned about the future than the past.

Question: How could you manage your email differently? Feel free to comment below.

—

Update: Please RSVP for our 33-city tour (just one click—even if it’s a “maybe”).

You can subscribe to this site via email or RSS to receive free essays and updates. Follow me on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ if you like funny things and random musings.

Please share this essay with others if you found value in it.

Source:

Email for Minimalists

Giving advice is pretty easy, isn’t it? Anyone can give advice. Anyone can make recommendations. Anyone can tell you what to do. But just because someone gives you advice, that doesn’t mean it’s the correct advice for you.

And sometimes it’s easy to take advice from other people when they are dishing it out. Having relationship trouble? We typically ask a friend for advice. Having a conflict with a co-worker? We ask another co-worker for advice. Having money problems? Well, you get the idea.

But sometimes, all we have to do is look in the mirror and ask ourselves for advice. After all, who knows you better than you? Nobody is more acutely aware of your situation. Nobody is more familiar with every particular senario and potential outcome than you.

So why do we turn to another person so often for advice? Because it’s easy. If someone tells us what to do, we don’t even have to think. Coincidentally (or not-so-coincidentally) this is also how fascism works (viz. someone else makes the decisions for you).

Or sometimes we ask other people for advice to reaffirm our own advice. But other people rarely have a stake in the outcome of taking their advice, which makes it less valid than your own point of view.

Sure, it’s OK to ask others for advice—sometimes it’s great to have a clean pair of eyes—but remember, at the end of the day, it is you who has to live with your own decisions.

You know what’s best for you. You know what you must make a must:

• I must exercise
• I must watch less television
• I must find more time for solitude
• I must stop smoking, drinking, gambling

What else must you do? Are you strong enough to take your own advice?

—

Subscribe to this site via email or RSS to receive free updates. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ if you like funny things, good quotes, and random musings.

Please share this essay with others if you found value in it.

Source:
Taking Your Own Advice Is the Hardest Pill to Swallow