Tag Archives: life

Preaching to the Congregation

Preaching to the Congregation

Preaching to the Congregation

 

When you call yourselves The Minimalists, people love to give you shit. They find it necessary to point out every irony, every seeming incongruity, every gotcha moment—everything they think makes our way of living wrong, an effort unnecessarily justify their lifestyle.

For example…

When our article, “The New Minimalism: Less Is Definitely More,” made the cover of Elle Canada next to a picture of Victoria Beckham, people asked why we would agree to an interview with an organ who’s same issue featured an article titled “Shop Now!”

A women at a meetup last December asked us about a newspaper interview in which we discussed minimalism, even though next to our two-page spread was a Mercedes Benz advertisement.

And now, as we prepare for our June Alberta Mini-Tour, people want to know why our Edmonton event’ll be held at a bookstore that happens to be in one of the world’s largest shopping malls.

The answer to each little cavil is simple…

We believe in our message. So much so that we’ve dedicated our lives to sharing that message with the world. We know that other people believe, too. These people already understand the power of simple living. That’s great, but we don’t need to focus all our efforts to reach those folks. Doing so is tantamount to preaching to the choir. Read more on The Minimalists

A Well-Edited Life

 

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David

Everyone develops their own creative process over time.

Some sculptors, Bernini for instance, build sculptures with clay. Others, like Michelangelo, carve from marble. Though I’m no Michelangelo, my creative process tends to mimic the latter, building way too much and then removing massive amounts of excess until I uncover the beauty beneath the banality.

I call this process Subtractive Creation. Unlike most carving sculptors, though, I also have to quarry the marble from which I pitch, chisel, and polish.

The essays on this site are published with around 400 words, even though they often start with 2,000 or more. My novel was 950 pages before it entered the world with only 283. The current book I’m editing, a memoir called Everything That Remains, is 550 pages, though I hope to whittle it down to fewer than 200.

When I edit this way, the final result is far more meaningful—to me, to the reader. The care and handcraftedness shows in the final work. I teach my writing students how to edit this way, too; that is, how to spend 1/3 of their time writing effectively and 2/3 of their time editing, shaping their work into something more concise, more powerful, more beautiful. [Read more on The Minimalists]

Minimalism Is Not the Path

 

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The path I’m walking down is not the minimalist path. No, I’m not headed toward some abstract thing called minimalism—never was, in fact.

Rather, the path I’m traversing is one that leads to happiness, growth, actual freedom (not the kind of “freedom” marketed to us on our TVs).

Hence, minimalism is simply the tool I used to clear that path, to make it easier to find and then easier to travel. If you’re having trouble finding your own minimalist path, stop looking. Instead, search for contentment. Find that path—discover what will make you happy—and then allow minimalism to help you clear the clutter that’s keeping you from moving forward. [Read more on The Minimalists]

YOU ARE WHAT YOU DESIRE

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Every whole person has wants, cravings, aspirations. We all desire something. We don’t, however, all have the same desires.

Some of us long to create something meaningful, to make a difference in the world, to eschew the so-called American Dream in favor of something better, something more deliberate, an experience-driven life of intentionality instead of a life pushed toward the wrong side of the consumption continuum.

On the other hand, some of us watch the luminous box flicking in our living rooms and yearn for the material things in its advertisements—the things that bring us stress and discontent and often keep us tied to a particular income, which keeps us tied to jobs we don’t love (or worse, jobs we hate), all so we can obtain the shiny objects projected on the glowing rectangle. [Read more on The Minimalists]

10 LIFE CHANGING LINKS

Change-Links

We Love You

It’s true. We get emails, tweets, and comments every day, and we appreciate them all. Most of the messages are “thank you” messages. A few are mean/hateful/ignorant messages. Some messages disagree with us in a respectful way.

Many of the messages ask us for advice. We always respond to those. Our responses often include links to specific essays on other sites that we believe will help clarify our advice.

10 Life Changing Links

Below is a list of our five favorite minimalist essays from other sites and our five favorite non-minimalist essays. These were all life changing for us. They resonated with us on a deeper level that touched our nerve-endings in a special way.

Minimalist Links

1. Paring Down (on mnmlist). We link to this short essay more than any other. Paring down is a key principle within minimalism, and it reminds us that the journey is never complete. We think about—and take action towards—paring down every day.

2. Discovering Simplicity [Audio by Joshua Becker] (on Becoming Minimalist). We share this audio with tons of people via email. If you want to hear a superbly articulate introduction to minimalism—complete with a great story about the Becker family’s journey into minimalism—then listen to this. This audio is the perfect thing to share with people who ask “what the heck is minimalism?” [Read more at The Minimalists]

TEDxPhnomPenh – Colin Wright – Extreme Lifestyle Experiments

 

Extreme lifestyle experiments.

The lifestyles we live, need to be conguesive to achieving whatever goal we wish to embark towards. In that to achieve our goals we need to first ask ourselves why we haven’t achieved them already. Most of the time, one has the idea and the only thing holding him away from his goal is a lack of  “resources”.

In my experience, however little it may be, I’ve found that most people who cry about their lack of resources actually just have either a lack of self belief or the lack of determination required to obtain those  missing resources. So if you ask me what seperates us from acheiveing our goals: it’s our lifestyles. Old habits that have taken years to develop and are now taking as long to part away with. The Procrastination, the excuse-making and the hours and hours of re-planning when in fact- you’re only stalling away from the real work. The work that actually gets your whole body aching and not just your fingers and thumbs.

Watching the above clip opened my eyes to something that should have been part of my life ever since I made the decision from working towards getting a University degreee to becoming an entrepreneur.

The twelve minutes I spent listening to Colin Wright begged me to answer this one vital question that I happened to have forgotten about: what is The Love?

What is this “thing” that I’m chasing? And what sparked off the passion for achieving it?

Once I got to re-answering these questions, I designed a bunch of lifestyle experiments which could ensure that the journey towards my goal (Zooloo) becomes a fluid one.

One that comes more naturally, because the love exists everyday.

I’ll be posting up a lot of these experiments throughout my start-up journey.