I used to joke that if someone robbed my home, they would be very disappointed.
I had nothing of much value there.
The only thing I had were books. (And honestly, if they wanted them, they could have them!)
To this day, few actions transformed my life more than minimizing and simplifying everything.
That’s not to say that you can’t strive for more — a nicer home, a cooler car, a fancy watch, etc.—but it’s about being intentional with those things. It’s about buying those things with a purpose—and for a purpose—rather than just superfluously accumulating more… just for the sake of accumulating more. (i.e. if you buy a 20-room mansion but you’ll only ever use 3 of them, what’s the point of the other 17?)
In this article, I’ll explain the dramatic benefits of becoming more minimalistic and I’ll walk you through—step-by-step—how you can adopt this into your own life and get started today, no matter how much you have or what your situation.
Enjoy.
The Benefits
You enjoy more freedom. I frequently meet people who say they want to do what I do and travel the world while working remotely, etc., but then they tell me they can’t because they’re worried about 100 different obstacles that are almost always self-imposed.
How am I going to water my plants? How am I going to feed my fish? Who’s going to take care of my ______? What will I do with my [useless] stuff?
Because of this, I made a life rule many years ago that I would never reject a chance to travel because of a fucking plant.
Okay… so maybe you’re a botanist. Maybe you’re a fish lover. (According to the Simpsons, that’s a thing.) The point isn’t about the plant or the fish. The point is to decide what are the things in life that actually contribute to your happiness, fulfillment, enjoyment, and more—and what are actually your prison.
You’ll save a lot of money. Now, don’t think that I’m some frugalista who says that you should only have one lightbulb in your house that you unscrew and bring with you from room to room. But when you live a more minimal life—accumulating less, accruing fewer expenses, etc.—you automatically save a ton of money.
Then, you can take this extra money and put it in your savings and investments, or you can even put this toward your entertainment. For example, while I’m living a remote lifestyle, I will sometimes splurge on my Airbnb because I know, aside from my accommodations, I have very very few living expenses. (Just food, transit, basic utilities, and insurance, really.)
You’ll think clearer and have more peace of mind. If you look at people who’ve minimalized their life and purged a lot of useless stuff, one of the most common benefits you’ll see is that they start thinking much clearer. There’s less clutter around you and, because your environment reflects your inner world, it will help you internally as well.
“Your physical space closely reflects your mental state. If your environment is disorganized, so is your mind. Everything is energy. Your environment is constantly influencing you whether you’re aware of it or not… If you even have to waste five minutes per day on pointless garbage floating around in your environment, that’s needless friction stopping you from achieving something you actually value.”
—Benjamin Hardy, Ph.D.
“I created 40% more space in my apartment and hadn’t even grazed the surface. It wasn’t the extra physical space that I felt most. It was the extra mental space. It was as if I had 20 mental applications running simultaneously before, and now I had just one or two. My thinking was clearer and I was much, much happier.”
—Tim Ferriss
You’ll live a much more intentional life. Living a more minimal, conscientious, and deliberate life makes me feel like I’m in control of my existence. Now, I’m in the driver’s seat of life. I possess my possessions, not the other way around. I consciously decide what I get, how much I get, why I get it, how I use it, and much more—and this mentality carries over to so many other areas of life.
As you become more intentional with your possessions, I guarantee you’ll become more intentional with other things too.
How do you do one thing is how you do everything.
Now, I’ll go over step-by-step how to start simplifying your life and how to overcome any obstacles and limitations.
1. Eliminate
“One does not accumulate but eliminate. It is not daily increase but daily decrease. The height of cultivation always runs to simplicity.”
— Bruce Lee
This is the first step and it’s also the most important step.
Once you get started on eliminating various things in your life, you’ll build a lot of momentum and you can ride that momentum for a few days—or even weeks—to really unclutter your life.
But this isn’t as obvious as you might think so bear with me here.
I’ll warn you that the first time you try to eliminate things, it’ll feel like Sophie’s Choice. It’s going to be difficult and painful. Just know these are all very normal feelings.
One reason is inertia: When you’re not used to eliminating things, it becomes much harder.
Another reason is the society we live in. Most of our lifestyles are geared toward accumulation, especially in the United States and Canada where it’s so common to buy in bulk and store things for a year (or more). So we end up buying 48 packs of paper towels, tissues, and toilet paper… but then we need space to store those 48 packs.
In Europe, there are obviously big grocery stores, but after living here for almost 3 years, I’ve noticed it’s much more common to buy less stuff with each trip. There’s far less “hoarding;” people take one or two shopping bags and walk home.
Next, as you’re downsizing your stuff, don’t fall for the “once in a blue moon” problem. For some people, they have things they only use one or two times a year (“once in a blue moon”), and because they never know when they’ll need it again, they don’t want to throw it away or donate it.
In that case, they’re better off just getting rid of it and, if they ever need it again, buying, renting, or borrowing another one.
Problem solved.
To get started, clothes are an easy place to begin because all of us have clothes that we can get rid of right now in our closets.
For this, use the 80/20 rule. Generally, you wear the same 20% of your clothes 80% of the time—the rest are just for random occasions or rarities. So save that 20% and jettison the rest. (Or at least get rid of the stuff you never wear.) Then, you can continually upgrade your 20% so that it’s versatile and fashionable enough to wear 95% of the time.
Once you get rid of a few pieces of clothes (even if it’s just extra socks), you’ll build momentum and start feeling a lot less cluttered, physically and mentally, and you’ll feel more liberated.
Now, you can ride that momentum and tackle other things.
From there, go around your house and find other things to remove. What trinkets can you donate or give to your friends? What books just sit on the shelf and are never read? Do you really need 27 different plates and cups? What food is in your freezer, refrigerator, or cabinet that you never eat (or don’t want to eat because it’s doesn’t serve your health goals)? Put it in a bag and donate it to people who are hungry.
“The wise man then followed a simple way of life — which is hardly surprising when you consider how even in this modern age he seeks to be as little encumbered as he possibly can… The things that are essential are acquired with little bother; it is the luxuries that call for toil and effort… We were born into a world in which things were ready to our hands; it is we who have made everything difficult to come by through our own disdain for what is easily come by. Shelter and apparel and the means of warming body and food, all the things which nowadays entail tremendous trouble, were there for the taking, free to all, obtainable at trifling effort. With everything the limit corresponded to the need.”
— Seneca
If you’re a hobbyist, then sure, you might want a lot of things related to your hobby; but in that case, for everything that’s not related to your hobby, you can downsize.
Keep in mind: We sometimes hold onto things for “sentimental” reasons, but are they really sentimental? (I’m not talking about a precious family heirloom here.) For example, I had T-shirts people gave me as gifts, but at a certain point, I wasn’t going to wear them anymore—so why hold onto them? (The gift giver never said I needed to keep that shirt until I die, right?)
You can also do this with friends. I don’t recommend this to everybody, but every now and then, I go to my personal social media accounts and unfriend and unfollow people who I don’t talk to, who don’t talk to me, and who I don’t have a relationship with anymore. (Maybe we just added each other because we were at the same conference, but after that, we had nothing going on.)
Every time I finish, I feel lighter. Sometimes, I resist by saying, “Maybe I’ll talk to them years from now… or maybe they’ll get upset when they find out I unfriended them.”
But then again, who cares? They’ll get over it.
Finally, learn how to “take an L.” Maybe you spent $300 on a nice sweater and you never wear it anymore, but you don’t want to get rid of it because you don’t want to “waste your money.”
Here’s the problem: If you’re trying to recover the cost of every single thing you accumulated over the years, you’ll struggle to eliminate anything. It’s the classic “sunk cost fallacy.” Psychologically speaking, you need to disregard the price you spent so you can make a more rational decision.
When I left the US, I had to dump a lot of stuff. But with a tight deadline, I didn’t have time to sell things so I gave away almost everything.
Could I have made some extra money by selling them online? Probably. But would that extra money be worth the added time, work, stress, etc.? Not to me. So I decided to give it away and make someone else happy.
“It was hard to toss things I had once thought were valuable enough to spend money on. The first ten minutes of sorting through clothing was like choosing which child of mine should live or die… It was a struggle to put nice Christmas clothing I’d never worn into the “go” pile and just as hard to separate myself from worn and ragged clothing I had for sentimental reasons. Once I’d passed through the first few tough decisions, though, the momentum had been built and it was a breeze. I donated all of the seldom-worn clothing to Goodwill. The furniture took less than 10 hours to offload using Craigslist, and though I was paid less than 50% of the retail prices for some and nothing for others, who cared? I’d used and abused them for five years and would get a new set when I landed back in the U.S. I gave the grill and lawn furniture to my friend, who lit up like a kid at Christmas.”
—Tim Ferriss
Set New Boundaries In Life
Elimination is great, but if you don’t create new rules in your life, you’ll just accumulate it all back. (After all, you were the one who accumulated everything in the first place.)
Without this step, you’re not really “minimalizing” your life; you’re just doing some “spring cleaning.” That’s it. (It’s not a “way of life;” it’s just what you do when you run out of closet space.)
But if you want the full benefits of a more minimal and intentional lifestyle, you need to create new boundaries and restrictions on what you accumulate, and they need to be your modus operandi moving forward.
For example, one of my life rules is that, for every article of clothing I buy, I have to get rid of one. That way, my wardrobe doesn’t balloon in size and it forces me to be extremely intentional about what I get. Basically, whatever I buy has to be better and/or more functional than anything I already own.
In the book, Less Doing, More Living by Ari Meisel, he limited the number of electronics he owned to whatever fits inside of a shoebox. (Once the shoebox was full, he had to get rid of something if he wanted to add something new.)
Your life rule is up to you. You could limit your spending to a certain amount per month. You could put a limit on how many shelves you use, etc.
But once you create a rule, stick to it.
Consider the Upkeep
Many things we buy have hidden costs.
A common example is car maintenance — things occasionally break or need regular checks and this should be factored into the overall costs.
Always consider the upkeep when you buy something, especially if you want to live a simpler, more focused life. How much work will that purchase add to your life? And most importantly, is it worth it?
For example, if you buy clothes that are dry clean only, but nothing else in your wardrobe is dry clean only, then you must add a trip to the cleaners into your life that you didn’t have before. Or if you buy a pet, you—or someone else—will always have to take care of that pet.
You might feel it’s worth that sacrifice and that’s fine.
But if you don’t consider this sacrifice and hidden cost, then down the road, it might become your chain.
Reduce Your Own Upkeep
There’s a term called “high-maintenance,” which describes a person who is finicky, picky, choosy, etc.
They’re the kind of person that takes 90 minutes to get ready just to go to the grocery store. Or the kind of person who needs to stay at a specific kind of hotel, eat a specific kind of diet, drink a specific kind of water, etc., even on vacation.
In this step, check to see how high maintenance is your life? How flexible or rigid is it? How much money do you spend on unnecessary stuff?
Do you really need 4 different skincare products? Do you really need a super-specific type of bread? And if you couldn’t have them anymore, would you survive just fine—or would your world crumble?
For me, I have very, very little upkeep in my life. I choose the most basic cell phone packages. I wear cheap T-shirts to the gym. When I move countries, I get basic toiletries you can find in any grocery or pharmacy in Europe.
Even if you can remove one thing from your “upkeep,” it can add up tremendously. For example, maybe you can downgrade your cell phone plan because you never use all the data. It might not seem like a lot, but it builds momentum, gives you more freedom, and can save a lot of money.
“But Anthony… this isn’t practical for me.”
I know, I know…
…you have a unique reason that blocks you from minimalism. You have kids. You have an extended family. You have all kinds of expensive possessions and artwork.
Well, I want to be sensitive to your situation because I can only speak from my personal experience (and my personal experience is far different than yours).
But at the same time, I’ve never met a single person who didn’t have some obvious superfluity they could get rid of.
People sometimes get so worked up: “You don’t understand! But I need my TV. But I need my Internet. But I need my X. But I need my Y.”
First, that mindset can reveal how much you rely on other things for your life, entertainment, happiness, validation, health, etc.
Second, how about cutting it for one week and seeing what happens? (I promise you, you won’t die.) I think a lot of people resist this because they know, once they cut it, they’ll never go back.
But I want you to be able to see the difference between a real “limitation” and an “excuse.” Because if you’re resisting this emotionally, it’s usually the latter, not the former.
To help you, there’s a quote that former President Theodore Roosevelt borrowed from Squire Bill Widener:
“Do what you can, with what you’ve got, where you are.”
You can’t throw out 80% of the clothes in your closet? Fine. How about 10%? Or how about just three T-shirts that you haven’t worn since people danced the Macarena?
Do what you can, with what you’ve got, where you are.
And you’ll make your life a hell of a lot better as a result.
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