YOU ARE WHAT YOU DESIRE

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]

CREATE MORE, CONSUME LESS

 

Every human being has the innate desire to create. We all want to add value to the world. Hence, we are all creators of some sort. Some of us are writers, painters, musicians. Some people scrapbook or take photos or make cool things with their hands. (For a long time the two of us—Joshua & Ryan—created, gulp, spreadsheets in the corporate world, although we weren’t terribly fond of those number-filled grids occupying our glowing screens.)

Every human must also consume. There’s nothing inherently wrong with consumption. It’s necessary. We must eat food, drink water. Plus, we all tend to purchase hygiene products and furniture for our homes and other material possessions that bring us joy—books, music, etc.

Shortly after the industrial revolution, though, corporations found themselves wading through too much supply and not enough demand. So, via advertisements and various talking heads, people were told they needed to consume more. Even today, we are told that in order to “keep the economy going” we have to buy more stuff. What’s worse is that we buy into this lie.

Marketers do a great job convincing us we need more. They establish a void so we will try to fill it. This is no secret. In fact, we take it for granted now; amongst the bombardment, we realize what advertisers are doing, yet we still give them carte blanche with our attention—we let them into our homes and onto our screens and into our personal lives via Facebook and other outlets—and when we do, the void gets deeper. [Read more at The Minimalists]

THE QUICKEST WAY TO GIVE YOURSELF A PAY RAISE

 

The quickest way to give yourself a pay raise is to spend less money. 

 

The Minimalists is a website about these two guys on their journey to add more and more value to the lives of their followers… using Minimalism. Check their site out>>> The Minimalists 

HOW TO START A SUCCESSFUL BLOG TODAY

Blogging? Not Again!

Read our lips: this is the last time we write about blogging on this website. Ever.

We didn’t plan on writing anything else about blogging after publishing Who The Hell Reads Your Blog Anyway? We don’t enjoy blogging about blogging, because, well, generally blogs about blogging are banal and vapid and they just don’t interest us (Corbett Barr’s Think Traffic being the exception that proves the rule). Heck, we don’t even read many blogs, but…

Reasons You Should Blog

Today we were inspired to research and write this essay after reading Joshua Becker’s 15 Reasons I Think You Should Blog, in which essay he discusses 15 great reasons why you should start a blog. “Why” being the key word here. In other words, he talks about the purpose of blogging, not just the “how to” aspects. That’s what all these other blogs about blogging seem to miss, they miss the purpose—the why.

Reasons You Should NOT Blog

So Becker gave you 15 reasons why you should start a blog, and we’re going to show you how to start one, step-by-step, based on our personal experience, but before we give you that type of detailed instruction—which could literally save you the hundreds of hours of wasted time—we want to give you some good reasons why you should not start a blog. (Keep in mind that these reasons are just our opinions and we do not pretend to offer them up as some sort of collection of empirical blogging maxims.)

1. Money. You should not start a blog to make money. We need to get that out of the way first. If your primary objective is to replace your full-time income from blogging, forget about it. It doesn’t work that way. Do you think that Jimi Hendrix picked up his first guitar so he could “supplement his income”? No, he didn’t. Rather, he did it for the love of it, for the joy and fulfillment he received, and the income came thereafter, much later actually … [Read More at The Minimalists]

THE HIGH PRICE OF PURSUING MY DREAM

 

It turns out that the American Dream was never my dream. Rather, it was competing with my dream, clouding over my revelatory desire to be a literary writer. The big house, the fancy car, the impressive job title, the six-figure salary, the superfluous stuff. I had all of it. But none of it made me happy. And none of it allowed me to pursue my dream.

Instead, there was a void. Something was missing. I didn’t know what that void was, and working 70-80 hours a week didn’t give me much time to explore its cavernous interior.

And so before I left my job last year, I had to pay the price for my self-indulgent twenties as that scarred decade descended into the cloud-cluttered horizon. I could no longer afford the lifestyle I’d been living during my mindless twenties, a cog in a wheel of greed and lust and happenstance. Instead, it was far more important for me to pursue my dream—to pursue my passion for writing—than it was for me to keep living that empty, opulent lifestyle, a lifestyle which, by the way, was not bringing me happiness.

Thus, pursuing my dream didn’t come without a cost. Before I left my career to become a full-time writer, I spent two years paying off the vast majority of my debt: credit card debt, student loans, medical bills, and the like. Then I paid off my car and sold my large house and eventually moved into a small, $500-per-month apartment. …[Read more at The Minimalists]

TOUR MY MINIMALIST APARTMENT

The Allure of Minimalism in Photographs

Step inside my apartment for a moment. Welcome. I’m glad you could spend a few minutes chez Millburn. Please pardon the mess. Just kidding. Sorry, that’s a lame minimalism joke. Anyhow, walk this way, watch your step, I’ll show you around… [Read More at The Minimalists]

My Minimalist Bedroom

The Wardrobe

This is my new wardrobe. It has only the clothes that I need. So I definitely don’t have any shorts or boxers  hanging around- It’s winter out here.

The Books- Education

I have some of the books that I have recently read on the top shelf of the wardrobe. I often need to refer back to some quotes or even some incomplete thoughts.

Minimalist Bed Set-up

The whole set-up of my bed, reading chair and night-stand makes me focus on my sleeping. The reading chair is specifically there to allow me to do some blogging and reading before hitting the sack. This all makes the focus of the whole section more concentrated on my sleep. Being a striving entrepreneur, my hours of sleep are very limited thus however limited they are- they need to be as valuable as possible.

This is all that exists in my room. Having adopted this new lifestyle, productivity has become the name of my day-to-day game. As soon as you begin to extract all the things that don’t matter from your bedroom and ultimately- your life, you also start to focus most if not all of your attention on your goals. The chances of you reading a book in a white room with absolutely nothing but the book in there are far higher than if you had a lot of “junk” (all that is detrimental to your success) in there to distract you from your goal.

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(PEEP: an updated 2013 version of My Minimalist Room later this week)