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04-26-10

How Not to Be an Influential Minimalist

As min­i­mal­ists, we’re pas­sion­ate about why we do what we do.  It’s only nat­ural that we want to see oth­ers incor­po­rate some of our best prac­tices.  Some­times, though, that pas­sion can come across as a bit over zeal­ous.  But, if you don’t want oth­ers to become min­i­mal­ist, here’s exactly what you should do.

Always talk about min­i­mal­ism. Every con­ver­sa­tion you get into, make sure to always bring up min­i­mal­ism, and what you’ve been doing to become more min­i­mal­is­tic.  Post 5 sta­tus updates a day on Face­book to let every­one fol­low your every foot­step on your jour­ney.  Over­all, let it become an obses­sion that con­sume your thoughts, actions, and speech.

Break out the sta­tis­tics. If you really want to dis­cour­age peo­ple from liv­ing sim­ply, always keep them up to date on how your blog stats and sub­scrip­tion num­bers are doing.  Text your friends, let­ting them know you just got a whop­ping 5 more sub­scribers.  Ask peo­ple to refer you on Twit­ter so you can get more fol­low­ers.  Oh, and don’t for­get to remind your friends to read your new arti­cle and com­ment on it.

Spam web­sites and inboxes. We all know how much peo­ple hate spam, so send out those mass emails.  Find all the web­sites out there on min­i­mal­ism and even the ones that are some­what remotely related to some­thing about min­i­mal­ism.  Post those shal­low, unhelp­ful com­ments all over the web. That’ll surely do the trick.

Tell oth­ers how much they need to change the way they’re liv­ing. When­ever you see those cars that are clut­tered with trash; the closet full of clothes that could clothe 5 peo­ple; the desk spread with papers and all those use­less gad­gets; the per­son who pulls out their credit card 5x a day to pay for those non-​​essentials; all those types of peo­ple and more, con­front them and let them know that they’re really not truly happy.  Tell them how they’re enslaved to mate­ri­al­ism and that they need to become more min­i­mal.  Oh, and vol­un­teer to throw out all their stuff for them.

Spend time on the clock build­ing your online social influ­ence. There’s noth­ing that says lack of integrity more than when you spend all your time at work on Twit­ter, Face­book, and your blog.  Your cowork­ers and bosses will see a direct cor­re­la­tion to your lack of work ethic and your min­i­mal­ist lifestyle.  You’ll be looked down upon in no time, and you can bet peo­ple at work will steer clear of minimalism.

Make min­i­mal­ism your pri­or­ity and neglect friends and fam­ily. You’re pas­sion­ate about what you do and it’s impor­tant to you.  So, focus all your atten­tion on min­i­mal­ism, don’t answer your phone when friends call, don’t do those sim­ple things like going on a walk with the fam­ily because you’re too busy try­ing to live sim­ply.  When you end up spend­ing time with those peo­ple, make sure the con­ver­sa­tion is cen­tered on you and your min­i­mal­is­tic lifestyle.

Hope that’s been help­ful, let me know how it goes for you.  If you’re one of those peo­ple who actu­ally wants to influ­ence people….am I not right?

04-23-10

12 Steps to Sleeping Better

In the past, my sleep has suf­fered greatly.  I kept wak­ing up all through­out the night, I’d wake up super tired no mat­ter how much sleep I got, and I con­tin­u­ally would have split­ting headaches from the time I got up that would last all day.  Finally, I was tired of this, so I did some research on how to sleep bet­ter.  What I found has rev­o­lu­tion­ized my sleep since I started imple­ment­ing these new sleep meth­ods.  It may come as a sur­prise to some of you, but the amount of sleep you get is one of the small­est fac­tors.  If you’re hav­ing trou­ble sleep­ing, I hope this is a help to you.

1. Shut off your com­puter and TV an hour before bed.  The type of images that those dis­plays put off make it dif­fi­cult for your brain to shut down.
2. Med­i­tate.  Med­i­ta­tion helps cool down the engines of your brain.  So, doing some light plea­sure read­ing or pray­ing for 15-​​20min works.
3. Take a hot shower. Tak­ing a hot shower imme­di­ately before bed helps loosen up tense mus­cles.  It also raises the body tem­per­a­ture so that when it drops back down, it actu­ally causes your body to relax and fall asleep easier.
4. Keep elec­tronic devices 3 feet away from the bed. Elec­tronic devices, includ­ing cell phones and alarm clocks, send out elec­tronic impulses which affect your brain waves in turn dis­turb­ing your sleep.
5. Wear socks to bed. I know the major­ity of you are going to hate this one, but it all depends on how well you want to sleep.  Your feet have the poor­est cir­cu­la­tion of blood which causes them to be the cold­est part of your body.  It’s impor­tant to have an evenly reg­u­lated body tem­per­a­ture in order to sleep more soundly.  Hence, you need to wear those socks.  Don’t worry, you’ll get use to it.
6. Be con­sis­tent. Try to go to bed and get up at the same time every­day.  Being con­sis­tent in what time you wake up is more impor­tant than what time you go to bed.
7. Visu­al­ize your morn­ing. It actu­ally helps to have pos­i­tive thoughts about wak­ing up the next morn­ing.  Try to pic­ture your alarm going off, imag­ine feel­ing rested when you wake up, and think about some excit­ing things you’re going to do the next day.
8. Don’t look at the light.  Once you go to bed, keep the room as dark as pos­si­ble.  Even the small­est sliver of light will dis­turb your sleep.  That means try to use the bath­room before bed so you don’t have to go in the mid­dle of the night.  If you end up going at 2am any­way, try not to turn on the light.
9. Find your sleep­ing cycle. Our bod­ies sleep in cycles.  There are mul­ti­ple times dur­ing the night where you’re sleep­ing deeper and other times when you’re sleep­ing lighter.  The key is to wake up on your light sleep­ing cycle.  So, you may be able to wake up eas­ier at 4:30am and feel more rested than you would if you woke up at 6am.  That’s some­thing you’d have to exper­i­ment with.  I rec­om­mend try­ing dif­fer­ent times in incre­ments of 30min and you should be able to find your cycle some­where in a 2hr block of time.
10. Cre­ate arti­fi­cial light. If you wake up before the sun comes up, try to set up some­thing that will auto­mat­i­cally turn on light to help recre­ate the nat­u­rally awak­en­ing process.  I use my com­puter which auto­mat­i­cally turns on at 5:30am.  There are alarm clocks out there with lights on them made specif­i­cally for this purpose.
11. Use more sooth­ing alarms. The more sooth­ing your alarm, the bet­ter.  It’s key to have a pleas­ant wake up.
12. Don’t wake up fast. Jump­ing out of bed like you’re in boot camp can seri­ously jog your brain and leave you feel­ing tired and pos­si­bly with a headache the rest of the day.

That’s all I’ve got for you.  Say­ing it’s worked well for me is an under­state­ment.  Let me know what your thoughts are if you try this.  I only ask that if you are going to try it, please don’t leave crit­i­cal feed­back unless you tried doing all the steps.  I’d also like to know what your meth­ods for sleep­ing bet­ter are if you have any.

Related Posts:

• 4 Ways to Sleep Better
• 55 Ways to Get More Energy

04-21-10

Getting Rid of Books the Smart Way

I have exactly 325 books that I’ve been try­ing to fig­ure out what to do with.  Good­will is one option, but I want to make some money instead of just giv­ing away my books.  I’ve been look­ing at some alter­na­tives, and if you’re try­ing to min­i­mal­ize your pos­ses­sions and books are hold­ing you back, here’s some of the things I’ve found.

Half​.com — This is a high traf­fic site, and it’s espe­cially good for sell­ing used text books.  They take a 15% commission.

Cash4Books — This is an online ser­vice that buys your books and pays for the ship­ping to send it to them.  They don’t pay much for the books, but since you don’t pay ship­ping, it kind of evens out depend­ing on what you’re selling.

Ama­zon - Another high traf­fic site that is great for sell­ing books fast.  They take a 15% com­mis­sions plus a $.99 clos­ing fee when you’ve sold a book.  Ama­zon also offers a ser­vice where you send them your books and they endorse, pack­age, and ship your books for a small fee which is nice because all you have to do is send a bulk ship­ment instead of pay­ing for indi­vid­ual pack­ages every time you sell a book which can get pricy.

Used book stores — We have a huge used book store in Knoxville that buys your books for a decent price.  If you have some­thing like that in your area, it’s worth check­ing out.

Craigslist — Depend­ing on your area, this might be a prof­itable option, but if you live in a small town or a place where books aren’t a big mar­ket, you prob­a­bly would be bet­ter off try­ing one of the above options.

Any­one have any other sug­ges­tions about being smart with get­ting rid of books?  If this post was help­ful, please leave a com­ment or tweet this.

04-13-10

A Formula for Minimalism

The Prob­lem

Mankind is wired to con­form to the env­iore­ment around them.  So, when you read about guys like Everett Bogue or Leo Babauta, you might feel like in order to be a min­i­mal­ist you’d have to do what they’re doing to achieve that type of lifestyle.  That’s not true, though, min­i­mal­ism looks and feels dif­fer­ent for each per­son.  It’s not prac­ti­cal to carry every­thing you own in a back­pack when you have a 9-​​month-​​old.

The Vari­able

The point of min­i­mal­ism isn’t to get every­thing you own under 100 items, it’s to get rid of all the things you don’t use or really need; and that’s rel­a­tive to each per­son.  If every­one adopted the min­i­mal­ist life and got rid of most every­thing they had, there would be no muse­ums, no libraries, and can you imag­ine a min­i­mal­ist hospital!?

The Equa­tion

So, in your quest to be min­i­mal, be aggres­sive in cut­ting out stuff but don’t be irra­tional.  Besides, the goal of min­i­mal­ism isn’t to have less stuff, it’s a lifestyle that enables you to live out your dreams which is a byprod­uct of hav­ing less. If your dream is to move into a smaller house and have a cheaper mort­gage pay­ment, then that’s not going to require you to get rid of as much stuff as if you were going to be a vagabond and travel the world.

My Solu­tion

I’ll be hon­est, my dream is to quit my day job and take a trip around the world.  So, my life is going to look a lot like Everett’s, but I have library of books (some that are very rare) and a col­lec­tion of indi­geouness arti­facts from my trav­els that I don’t want to get rid of.  My solu­tion is to leave them at my family’s house.

What about you, what are your dreams?  And what will it take to accom­plish those?

04-13-10

A Minimalist’s Guide to Using Twitter Simply, Productively, and Funly | Zen Habits

Link: A Minimalist’s Guide to Using Twit­ter Sim­ply, Pro­duc­tively, and Funly | Zen Habits

Maybe I’m just slow but this was a rev­e­la­tion to me.  Leo does an amaz­ing job at look­ing at things from out­side the box.  To see what I mean, fol­low the link and read his post.