This Week’s BIG Idea
Lately, I’ve been thinking about minimalism, as well as the book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up a lot. True to its name, the book truly changed my life because it inspired me to have fewer things, but of better quality. In other words, less but better. Ironically, it’s easy to read too many books or blog posts about minimalism to the point that this too could get out of hand. But the core principle behind the movement is remarkably simple: minimalism is about less but better.
Ever since I read Marie Kondo’s seminal book, I can’t stop thinking about the following question: What if instead of surrounding myself with unremarkable things, I have a handful of possessions I absolutely love? The journey has been long and arduous because it involved getting rid of things that were part of my identity. But it was worth it. It’s easy to surround ourselves with things we don’t care about, but this holds us back from realizing our full potential. By surrounding ourselves with distractions, we never get to think about what truly matters to us. It varies from person to person, but it’s a shame that most people will never take the time to determine what’s essential in their life and what’s a distraction.
What I’m Working on
I find myself with some time off from work in the next couple of days and I want to use them to organize my life, especially my digital life. For the past few weeks, I’ve been using an app/service called Feedly. For those unfamiliar, Feedly is a news aggregator that allows you to keep track of content around the web. Before using Feedly, I used to manually go to some of my favorite news sites to see if there was anything new worth reading. This was incredibly time-consuming, but Feedly completely changed the way I work. Now I can follow my favorite sites and in a matter of minutes check out everything I’m interested in and see if any articles are worth reading.
What I’m Listening to
As usual, I’ve been reviewing some of the podcasts I subscribe to. I no longer feel the need to listen to every episode I have on my list and don’t feel like I need to have access to dozens of podcasts to stay in touch with the topics I like. I want my podcast app of choice (that’s PocketCasts in case you’re wondering) to be a source of learning, but also calm. That said, I’m currently going over old episodes of The Tim Ferriss Show and I just started listening to Ferriss’ interview with Marie Kondo where they discuss minimalism. I find Ferriss to be an extraordinary interviewer and I can’t wait to hear their exchange.
What I’m Reading
Stop Procrastinating by Niels Salzgeber: I don’t know where I first heard about this book, but it’s been on my list for some time now. As the name of the book suggests, Stop Procrastinating gives you a series of strategies to stop procrastinating. Each chapter introduces an idea and at the end, the author provides a series of science-based tactics that encourage you to take action and complete your projects. The book offers nothing particularly new, but reviewing some of these concepts never hurts.
What I’m Watching
I’ve been trying to downsize my wardrobe for some time now, but I haven’t been able to find a solid resource that taught me how to do it. I know there are some books on the subject, but I haven’t taken the time to read any of them yet. That said, I recently came across this video where Matt D’avella shares his minimalist wardrobe as well as the system behind it.
This Week’s Quote
“Thinking in bets starts with recognizing that there are exactly two things that determine how our lives turn out: the quality of our decisions and luck. Learning to recognize the difference between the two is what thinking in bets is all about.”
Annie Duke
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