Jarkko Laine

Better Ways to Measure Success

Jarkko — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 04:09:40 +0000

Even if you don’t share my love for the band Switchfoot, there is one song you should check out today. “American Dream” is a song about the very things we talk about on this blog and more broadly in the minimalist community: how wrong things go when “success is equated with excess“.

The band goes on to proclaim:

I want out of this machine
It doesn’t feel like freedom

This ain’t my American dream
I want to live and die for bigger things
I’m tired of fighting for just me
This ain’t my American dream

Yesterday, I was once again listening to this song and it got me thinking. It’s true that as a whole — even outside america, our culture measures success in the wrong way, counting the stuff we collect around us: If you drive a fancy car and live in a big house, you are considered a success in life. But what other ways are there to measure success?

1. Wealth as success

This one is just a different version of success as excess, but a significantly better version. In their top 10 bestseller, The Millionaire Next Door, Thomas J. Stanley and William D. Danko share their studies on who the real millionaires are, and (actually not so) surprisingly conclude that they are not the ones drowning themselves with stuff but the frugal ones instead.

They don’t measure success by how much stuff they own but by how much they have on their savings accounts.

This beats stuff because it’s more sustainable. When you collect wealth, at its best, it can mean that you are collecting freedom. In the book, it is calculated that the real millionaires could spend years living on their savings without having to work at all. But they rarely do. Collecting wealth and trying to be a millionaire is hard work, so they give up the freedom to save the money they have worked hard to get.

And also, coming back to my worldview, really well described by the Switchfoot song, I’d say this is still “fighting for just me.” No bigger things to live and die for over here.

2. Happiness as success

I don’t believe there is one big meaning for life; to me a meaningful life consists of small, meaningful everyday actions. We will talk more about meanings next week, but for now, I wanted to bring this up to back up the following ideas on measuring success.

First, if there is no all-encompassing meaning for life, maybe happiness could indeed be a decent goal for a good life. If you are happy, you have been successful in life, we would say. And it’s not all bad. After all, helping someone, caring for your family, collecting interesting experiences, learning new skills and being part of your community are all things that can make you happy, just like getting more stuff and working for just money tend to make you miserable.

Happiness is good, but it has one property that makes it a lousy measure for success: it’s a feeling. Some things that make you feel happy today, might not do the same for you tomorrow. You can practice being present and noticing all the things that make you happy, but if you don’t do that, it is easy to fall back to the belief that to be happy you need to spend money, and start “fighting for just me” instead of doing the things that would really make you happy.

3. Change as success

When you take the best from using happiness as a goal for life, you get some good, actionable points:

Pick small goals that matter to you, and try to make them happen. Not too big, not too small. Something you can handle and that keeps you excited for some amount of time. Don’t take them as THE meaning for life, but meaningful steps you can take in your life. You will be at your happiest while working your way to make the change happen.
Care for people. Your closest ones as well as the rest of the world in general. It will make you sad at times, but you will feel alive.

This could be the measure for success we need as a species. It is measurable: the more we change our world to the better, the more successful we are. It doesn’t harm others: Just compare to the status quo. When you are successful measured by consumerist rules, you pollute and create heaps of waste. With this measure, the more successful you are, the better it is for the rest of us!

And, you will be happy as a side product.

4. Just enough success

In the end, one question remains: are we asking the wrong question?

By always talking about success, we are turning life into a competition. It’s a cliché, but we don’t have the time to stop and smell the roses. And what kind of success we are competing for doesn’t change that.

Maybe the right answer could be to have just enough success to feel like you are making a difference. Work on something that matters to you, just so much that you have enough and you can create enough change in the world for one person. Maybe even without setting goals for yourself. Then you can slow down and enjoy your success.

***

How do you define success and how much of it is enough for you?

How to Make a Difference (Free E-Book)

Jarkko — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 04:51:28 +0000

There are times when it seems like the world is never going to change for the better, and making a difference sounds like a distant dream.

Today is not one of those days.

Raam Dev, blogger and digital nomad currently staying in Nepal, has put together an e-book that shows that there is still will, passion, and caring left in this world, and that everyone can make their lives stand for something. The way he created the book makes the message shine even brighter: The book is a collection of small tips (from a couple of sentences up to one page of text) written by over 40 bloggers unaware of each other, each trying their best to make a difference in the world.

I contributed three of the over 100 tips in the book: “Practice your enough”, “Take the first step”, and “Don’t give up”.

It’s amazing that so many people care about the topic and each responded to Raams inquiry for contributions with great enthusiasm. But to me, there is something about this book that inspires me even more and that’s how quickly Raam put it together. When you read the book, you wouldn’t believe that it was only a month ago that Raam sent out the email asking for contributions! That’s what happens when you care about something with great passion!

This is one book you don’t want to miss, if you care about making a difference in the world (as I am sure you do!). Here’s what Raam says about the book in his introduction:

This ebook is a plea for help. It’s a voice in a room full of people who care about exactly the same thing but who are entirely oblivious to each other. It’s a calling for everyone living on Earth to recognize a new responsibility that we’ve brought upon ourselves, a responsibility that we created by quenching our thirst for abundance and feeding our lust for social and economic development.

In a world where technological advancement has given entire populations individual access to more knowledge than was available in the past thousand years combined, we have a new responsibility. We have a responsibility to speak up when something isn’t right and take action when things need to change. We have a responsibility to be responsible.

I was going to write more about the book, but my older son just woke up, and I need to get this post out now. So, without further ado, go download “Small Ways to Make a Big Difference” and get inspired to keep making the world a better place! The book is free, and there are no strings attached. You don’t even have to give out your email address.

Start By Creating Art

Jarkko — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 05:04:38 +0000

On this blog, and on my newsletter, we talk a lot about how to make a living in a sustainable way, using minimalism as a tool to make it possible. But going from a consumer just like anyone else to a minimalist business owner can be a big jump. In fact so big that it is easy to get discouraged from trying at all. That’s why you need an intermediate step to start from, and here it is:

First, become minimalist to create art. Don’t worry about making it a business at first.

By becoming an artist¹ first, you don’t yet have to worry about whether your idea will be profitable or not. You can work on anything that excites you and keeps you up in the night, and enjoy the excitement that comes from creating something of your own.

That’s how it started for Jay Shafer (and most other remarkable people out there) who, without any prior construction experience, taught himself to build his own tiny house. Today, he designs tiny houses for others through his own business, Tumbleweed Tiny House Company.

Give yourself freedom to figure out what makes you come alive

For me, the most frustrating part in career advice has always been figuring out what I want to do. There are so many things that could work. When I read about turning my passion into a business, I keep coming back to the question: “so what is my passion, then?” Treating all the paths as ways to create art is making the process much easier: I can always just start practicing and creating first, and then see if that thing is something I will keep doing even after the initial excitement wears off.

Following this approach, after you have tested your passion would be a good time to start to think about ways to make a living through this passion. What if there isn’t one? That’s just fine too. After all, you have just created something of your own, something of lasting value, and only “lost” the time you would have otherwise spent watching television!

A new e-book

I was blown away when I started reading Brett Oblack’s new e-book, Consume Less, Create More. It takes the above philosophy that I have been living by for quite a while and puts it to words in a beautiful way. In fact, just reading the description of the book was one of the moments where I couldn’t help but think: “How didn’t I think of this theme for a book?”

If you are excited about the idea of using minimalism for creating more, check out what Brett has to say.

But most importantly, think about this: What could you create if you gave up some of the consumption and spent the time on building on your own ideas instead?

When we talk about art in this context, I use a broad definition that means anything that comes from you heart that you create with your own mind and two hands. Some example could be writing, baking your bread, knitting, painting or song writing ↩

There is No Substitute for Hard Work

Jarkko — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 05:36:01 +0000

As I started writing this post, I had just sent out my first ever exclusive newsletter article to my subscribers (read more about why you too might want to subscribe). It was 7:39 AM and I had been up since five. Today, my alarm failed me and I woke up only at six, fired up my computer and got to changing my world. My kids will wake up soon, and I’m a bit anxious to have the post out of the door before they wake up.

With two small children I don’t have too much time to work on my projects, so I keep coming back to the thought of working smart instead of hard. It would be nice to just work an hour or two when I feel like it and then forget all about it. But that’s not how it goes. Smart work is great, but it’s no substitute for hard work.

So, if you are procrastinating on your next big idea, here’s the deal: stop looking for the smartest ways to do it, and just get back to work. If you don’t have a plan for how to work smart, work just as hard as you can and figure out the smart as you go.

How I Work

During July (my summer vacation from my day job), I have been testing my ideal work routine, which I plan to continue when I stay home with my kids starting January 2011. It consists of nowhere close to as many hours of work as that of some of the most hardworking bloggers and internet entrepreneurs I know, yet it is as hard work as it can get for me.

I work every morning, except Sundays when I sleep in. I wake up between five and six AM depending on how late I stayed up the night before — aiming to start closer to five than six, with varying success.
I jump right in. I try to plan my work for the next day in advance before I get to bed so I have a clear plan for where to start. When I forget to do this, I can easily lose half an hour in the morning for surfing the web and looking for inspiration.
Focus. Knowing that I only have the three or so hours in the morning available for my work, I am forced to focus on the things I think matter most. When Oiva wakes up, I turn off the computer and stop my work right there. If I haven’t completed the most important task by then, the task gets postponed to tomorrow.

So, my hard work is about three hours every day. That’s not hard work, you say. And, sure, it’s not optimal yet: if I got to bed a bit earlier, I could probably wake up about an hour or so earlier and squeeze in one more hour.

But that’s not the point.

Work Hard With the Hours You Got

This is where smart work comes to play.

Most office workers spend eight or more hours at the office every day. You probably do too, just like I do, when it’s not July. And out of those eight hours, how many are actually hard work? Four? Maybe five?

When working these three hours, the risk is the same. If I don’t pay close attention to what I do, three can easily turn into one, or even less. That has happened. But when you do pay attention, you don’t need full working days to get a lot of things done. A couple of hours can be plenty.

Blog posts and e-books don’t write themselves. The world isn’t changed in five minutes (although many five minute iterations will ultimately do the trick).

So work hard with the hours you have available. It’s the only thing you can do.

Side Business, Smart Business

Reasons to Survive Without A Salary

Jarkko — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 04:47:03 +0000

Since we were kids we have been taught the process for running our lives: “Get a degree. Go to work. Trade your time for money. Buy all the cool stuff your friends have — plus a bit more.” And we have learned to be rather good at it.

Times are changing.

We are starting to realize that we don’t need all that stuff, and that it is not going to bring us the happiness that marketers want us to believe. We notice that there is more to life than filling our own material needs. We see that life is what happens when you get out of your comfort zone and start to take some risks.

As safe as a steady salary feels, together with a habit of consumption, it can be a road block that keeps you from focusing on the things you love in life. If that’s the case, you may want to think about surviving without one. Here are some reasons to get you started on the idea:

Use your time for something important: For me, what makes me think about surviving without a salary is that I want to stay at home with my two boys and get a glimpse into their worlds. For you, it could be something different: maybe you have a book to complete, a non-profit cause you want to devote your time to, or a crazy idea you just have to get out of your head and implemented.
Be free to set your own rules: If you can survive without a salary, you are free: Free to set your own hours, free to say what you do or won’t do, free to choose where in the world you call your home. Freedom can be scary, as then it’s all up to you to be significant, but that’s what makes it exciting.
Focus your spending: Surviving without a salary starts by cutting your spending. Guided by your big goal of surviving three, six — as many as you need — months without a safe stream of money, you will be forced to make smart choices and learn to appreciate what you have. This will make your lifestyle more sustainable, and even if you decide to go back to having a salary, it doesn’t have to be the main criterion for choosing your job.
Be ready for a down-turn: If it happens that the global markets go down again, you never know when is your turn to walk the plank. By learning to survive with less, you won’t even care: you will be ready.
It’s an adventure: As children, we couldn’t wait to grow up so we could embark on all the big adventures life had in store for us. Then we finally did, but what happened to all those adventures? It’s all about the journey.
Thrive: Surviving without a salary, you can build a meaningful business that leaves you time to do the important things you care about. That way, in the end, surviving will turn into thriving, and you may never want your salary back again.

Join The Newsletter

If this idea of surviving and thriving outside the normal ways of living is something that rings a bell for you, you will love what I have planned for you on my newsletter.

By subscribing to my brand new newsletter, you will get one exclusive article every week on creating your living by your own rules in meaningful and sustainable ways. The first one goes out tomorrow, Tuesday, so get on the list right now to make sure you won’t miss it! I will also be releasing some free PDF workbooks to newsletter subscribers only. And on the list, you will be the first to know of my new products around this topic.

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Learning to Be Happy With What You Have

Jarkko — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 04:56:00 +0000

In some ways, like how they jump in with both feet and enjoy the small things, children are role models who can show us how to live our lives. But many times they teach us in another way, by letting their human weaknesses show as caricatures of us grown ups. They don’t know how to pretend.

My son Oiva, who just turned three in May, is a perfect example of this. He always wants more:

We gather for lunch, and he gets his share, but he can’t start to eat because he thinks he needs more. And if his glass is filled only to the half, he can start to cry and become unable to drink any of it , just because it’s not as much as he’d like it to be.

It is frustrating to keep telling my son that he will get more once he has finished the first plate (and that he already has a lot) when all he can see is that right now the plate is not as full as he’d like it to be. But I have I realized that there is a lesson I can learn from his fear of not getting enough. This feeling of scarcity is something completely human, and it happens to us adults all the time as well.

We dream of all the big things we want to do some day: travel to exotic places, build successful businesses, write books, buy more gadgets because what we already have doesn’t seem enough. When choosing how much food to cook, I even feel the very same primitive fear of running out of food as Oiva does.

Dreaming is not a problem. The problem is when dreaming gets in the way of enjoying what we already have, and when dreaming of dessert makes you rush through the main dish.

Here is what I try to do to stay happy with what I have. My guidelines for abundance:

Realize there will always be something you don’t have. You can achieve a lot in life if you put your mind to it. But you are setting yourself up for failure if you measure yourself only by material success. There will always be someone who has something you don’t: When you finally own your mansion, there comes Richard Branson and tells you he owns his own island!
Be thankful for what you have now. A thankful heart is a happy heart. Take time to think about all the things that are right in your life. This will also be a great exercise for balancing your values: Every time I think about all the things I am thankful for in my life, I realize they have nothing to do with mansions or private islands.
Dreams are good because they give you meaningful things to do. I don’t know if this applies to everyone or not, but for me, doing great things is what makes me come alive. I love having big goals, but it’s not that much because of the goal itself but how the goal guides my actions at this point in life. For example, my goal of making a living through blogging and writing makes me write right now. It’s not a distant event in the future — it’s happening already!
Enough. What a powerful word. I don’t use it as often as I should, yet, but I’m learning. After a meal, when contemplating eating some more, if you tell yourself you’ve had enough, you value the food you already ate. You don’t put it down by saying it was too much or that you shouldn’t have eaten it at all in the first place. You just say it was enough, and that you can be thankful without getting more.

You don’t need more. This too is a choice.

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You Don’t Have To

Jarkko — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 04:10:01 +0000

Here’s a secret: you don’t have to. There is always another choice. Choosing can be hard and you may still pick either way, but you are not a mindless puppet on a string but a human being responsible for your own choices.

Pick what excites and scares you, and amazing things will happen.

You don’t have to…

Work long hours: Time is your most valuable possession, so don’t let go of it too easily. Also, long hours rarely lead to improved productivity.
Take your kids to kindergarten every morning: If you choose to live in a big house in an expensive area, and buy everything you need to fit in, you will be working all the time — and thus need someone to take care of your kids. But this too, is a choice. Do you see how things could change if you lived with less?
Go to school: Even school can be debated. Leo Babauta’s kids are unschooled and it seems like it’s working well for them.
Put off your life plans until you retire: What if you never do?
Live a routine: Living every day according to the same script is not mandatory. It’s a choice.
Buy that new Full-HD television: What was wrong with the old one? The best TV shows are great even with lower fidelity. I watch my movies from the 13″ laptop screen of my MacBook Pro. If the story is good, it will move you just the same.
Get an iPad: It might be world changing but no one knows what they will be using it for, thinking they will figure that part out once they have the device.
Always keep your phone turned on: People are clever: if they cannot reach you 24/7, they will come up with something else. My brother just spent two weeks alone at a summer house with his phone turned off and with no connection to the Internet, and he tells it was one of the best two weeks he has had in a long time. (And it’s good to know that if you don’t like the phone, you are not alone)
Earn a lot of money: It’s surprising how little you really need for a good life when you become minimalist.
Live in a big house: Not so long ago it was completely normal for two or more kids to share a room. And the kitchen table is a perfectly good place for work. Less rooms means less to clean and worry about.
Eat out every day: Planning and cooking your own food from real ingredients is as fun — if not more — as eating it.
Buy bread: You can make your own bread, and it can be better than what you get from the store!
Travel far to go camping: Using what you have and a bit of imagination, you can have a great trip without traveling anywhere!
Impress people: They are all just like you, with the insecurities and all — and they don’t care as much as you think. So, do what you feel right. Stop living for other people’s approval.
Listen to your inner critic: If your lizard brain tells you to stop, punch it and do it anyway! That’s how great things start to happen.
Be big: Small is good too.
Eat meat: You can have a perfectly healthy diet without meat. And if going all the way vegetarian is hard, eating less meat is easy.
Wear shoes when running: The Tarahumara don’t wear running shoes, yet they are some of the world’s best long distance runners!
Create things just for the money: What if you put your soul in what you create, and try to help people instead?

These are all choices that only you can make yourself. Choose what suits you but make sure when you choose you say so. There is no such thing as “have to.”

Find Better Dreams

How to Make a Living in a World of Abundance

Jarkko — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 04:25:22 +0000

If we’re adding to the noise
turn off this song
If we’re adding to the noise
turn off your stereo, radio, video

– Switchfoot, Adding to the Noise

We all have a set of basic needs: food, shelter and clothes¹. To pay for them², we need money. To get money, we have to sell something.

At the same time, in the western world today, there are already more options on the market than a regular customer can handle, and businesses, both big and small, are pushing out new stuff at a speed like nothing we have seen before. Where do you fit in?

What can you sell when too much of everything (and more) is already being sold at your local mall?

This is a hard question, and I fight it with every business and money making idea I think of — not to mention my day job. That’s why, although I can’t pretend I have it all figured out, I have to say something about this question and how it has affected my plans for making a living.

Leave a Legacy

On this planet that once seemed so big, with all ends open for exploration, we are now close to hitting its boundaries. Everything we create consumes some of the planet’s finite resources. And every time we throw away that creation, it means something will be lost forever (or, at least for a really long time).

“Let’s just create whatever we can make people want to pay for” just doesn’t seem good enough anymore. There must be something better than building this throw-away culture even bigger. There must be a way to create something we can be proud of.

We need to leave a legacy — or do nothing.

Pick Better Fights and Help People

In my current day job, I work in entertainment. I guess that explains a big part of why can’t seem to get past this question: entertainment as a business is the stereotype of the kind of business that works by trying to convince people to buy things that they don’t need or often even want.

We fight hard to beat the competition and make more money, and we don’t provide real value to the world we live in.

I don’t mean to say there is no place for entertainment in the world — in fact, entertainment could be one of the few things people in a world abundance should be doing. But that has nothing to do with today’s entertainment business. It should be entertainment created for artistic values, to provide understanding and a clearer vision of the world. It should be meaningful. And most importantly, its goal shouldn’t be to beat the competition and to grow investor value.

If we want to work long hours and fight a big enemy, we should at least make sure the enemy is worth the fight.

There are still many real issues in the world: poverty, hunger, ecological disasters, diseases, prejudices, loneliness.

How about facing one of them instead?

Time is precious. Not doing anything is hugely valuable. So, if you are not fighting a big cause, why would you spend all your time working?

Working with Ideas

The day before my summer holiday started, as I rode my bike to work, I was trying to imagine giving up different things in life. I asked myself the question: “Would I miss something if no one in the world was creating new _____s?”

I tried it with soap operas, and the answer was no.

I tried it with computer games, and answered no.

I tried it with new gadgets, and after some soul searching answered no.

I tried it with great bread, and the answer was a yes — although, I do think I could still live without bread.

But then, I tried it with books. That was a definite yes.

There is no way around it: if I lost the window to all these wise people’s minds, and all the wisdom and learning that I can get into through it, I wouldn’t be able to live my greatest passion. Without books, I wouldn’t be me.

I concluded that there is something specially valuable in written words.

And that (with a hint of bread) is where I am building my future ways of making a living in this world. Give the test to try, you might find your answer to be something different — but exciting!

July 2010

Today is the fifth day of July, and my four-week summer vacation officially starts today.

My plan is to spend this month test driving my ideal workflow and keep working on my minimalist business that leaves time for what I love the most: my family³.

I will be working in the mornings for a couple of hours, with words and ideas: building this blog to be the main platform for leaving my legacy and sharing what I learn, and writing my first information product. Work has started and I’m looking forward to being able to share all of it with you.

What about you? Will you join me and test your own ideal work this month too?

And if you haven’t already, go read these fabulous and free e-books and manifestos about making a living and changing the world in a meaningful way:

279 Days to Overnight Success and The Brief Guide to World Domination by Chris Guillebeau
How to Create a Movement by Everett Bogue
What Matters Now by Seth Godin

I have been re-reading all of them this week, and every time I am blown away with the wisdom and encouragement these guys are sharing.

I believe we are living in a time where mass-marketing products no one needs is not only boring but also getting dangerous, and we need to find better ways to make a living. Using words to improve people’s lives can be one of the ways to get food on the table without compromising your values. I don’t know if it’s the best way. And I’m sure it’s not the only way.

So, think about it: how will you make a living without adding to the noise?

Once we are covered on those, we can add more needs — but at least according to Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, those additional needs aren’t material! They are things like friendship, respect of others, confidence, achievement, love. ↩
Assuming we are not going to opt for illegal action ↩
In January 2011, I will be doing this full time, staying home with my two sons as my wife starts the practical studies phase in her psychology studies (in other words, goes to work, but with a very low pay) ↩

Minimalist E-Book Roundup

Jarkko — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 13:50:20 +0000

In the recent years, a lot has been written about minimalism online, on blogs as well as in e-book format. With all the e-books about minimalism out there, it is getting hard to decide which one to pick — unless you want to take the route I did and just read them all.

As I have read all these books already, I thought I’d help out with that question, and so I collected this list of the current top books on minimalism. Check out my short reviews, and if you’re intrigued by the book, click on the link or the book cover to read what the author tells about his book. Many of them include free chapters you can read on their sales pages.

The Art of Being Minimalist by Everett Bogue

This is the first book I read about minimalism, and the one that finally made me decide that the minimalist movement is, indeed, something I want to identify myself with. While that personal experience makes me a bit biased when comparing the book with the rest, this is one that I wholeheartedly recommend as your first step towards becoming a minimalist.

In The Art of Being Minimalist, Everett Bogue provides a convincing set of practical reasons for adopting the minimalist lifestyle, always backing the claims with his own experiences. Bogue’s goal with minimalism is to be able to live and work from anywhere, but don’t let that stop you from learning from him — the lessons apply also to those of us who are not going anywhere (and frankly, having the choice to live from anywhere gives you a lot of freedom, even if you decide to never travel!).

This is simply a well-written, very professionally laid out and passionate book with clear, actionable steps to minimalism, backed up with real experience.

The Simple Guide to a Minimalist Life by Leo Babauta

Leo Babauta, from Zen Habits fame, can be credited for starting the online movement that is currently bringing minimalism closer to mainstream throughout the blogospehere. Although I only read this book after finishing The Art of Being Minimalist, it is an online classic.

Building on top of Babauta’s blog posts, and written in a very clear style, The Simple Guide to a Minimalist Life lays the foundation for minimalism through the principles of enough and being content with life, and provides tons of useful information to minimalist life and work, especially for people who do most of their work online or on a computer, like writers and software developers.

Babauta’s background as a professional writer shows, as this is clearly the best written book in all of the ones I have read so far. And the book is practical:

Being too busy also leads to clutter, because we don’t have time to clean up, don’t have time to get rid of the unnecessary, and clutter will pile up. So reducing what you do will help clear clutter.

The book has been out there for anyone to read for a while already and the only thing that I regret is that I didn’t get and read it earlier.

Simplify by Joshua Becker

Joshua Becker is a family man and father of two, and the top minimalist blogger from Becoming Minimalist. In his book Simplify, he walks the reader through the steps he has taken in the past two years in transforming the lifestyle of his family from what the mainstream considers normal to what he calls rationalist minimalism.

At first, I was a bit afraid that rationalist minimalism would be a watered down version of the new lifestyle, but the book (and a brief discussion over at Rowdy Kittens) confirmed my worries unfounded. The minimalism in Simplify is just as powerful and world changing as in the other books — if not even more.

The real power in Becker’s writing comes from its approachability. Simplify shows that you don’t have to be young and single to become a minimalist, and it guides you all the way from deciding to realign your life choices with your values to sticking with your decision. My favorite ideas can in fact be found from chapter 5: “Persevere” that contains a section where Becker explains how Christmas almost made him give up minimalism — and what he and his wife did to stay minimalist without stealing the joy of giving from their family members.

Minimalists can sometimes feel a bit over the top to the outsider, and that can make minimalism seem scary. If that’s how you feel about minimalism, and are not sure if it is for you, this is the book you need to read. It is by far the most approachable take on minimalism I have read.

Doing with Less by Daniel Richard

Daniel Richard’s Doing with Less is the newest out of the books in this post. Richard’s impressive track record in building a minimalist life in less than half a year, including starting six profitable minimalist businesses in four months and writing his book in only three weeks!

My first freedom business, that I co-owned with my best friend, Jeff, was created in a space of 10 days, with the first sale made in the 3rd day, revamped in 5 days, and crossed $2k sales with zero promotion and advertisement in less than 2 weeks upon launch.

The book layout is beautifully clean and minimalist, and in a clear structure it walks the reader through the whys and hows of minimalism: less stuff, less work, less spending, less noise and less complexity. The book is an easy and quick read as an introduction to minimalism, but compared to some of the strongest books on the list it doesn’t quite reach the same level.

Interestingly, although Richard must have tons of personal experience in running his businesses and becoming minimalist, he is holding back on the personal touch and stays on a high level in explaining minimalist concepts. I might have enjoyed the book more if it had been split into a series of book, each topic addressed in more depth. In this version, Richard gives feeds your curiosity with interesting ideas and then just moves to the next topic.

This is a book I would have wanted to love. And, if you follow the advice in it, you will live a good life and have success in business. But given all the other alternatives, it’s not enough.

Living the Simpler Life by Sam Spurlin

In his first e-book, Living the Simpler Life, Sam Spurlin approaches minimalism from the point of view of simplifying your life where the goal is to make your life easier, so for example, giving up your car is not automatically considered simpler than keeping it. This is not quite my definition of minimalism, but I can see the value in Spurlin’s thinking.

Above all, Living the Simpler Life is an honest book written by a real human (Spurlin is not yet an A-list blogger, nor making a fortune from his writing) that goes beyond the technicalities of becoming minimalist and simplifying your life to finding your path in life. An interesting mix of career advice, finding your values and then simplifying, this book could well be worth the $7.95 it is being sold for.

Looking at artistic values, though, you can clearly see that Spurlin has focused on delivering his message rather than making it look good. The text in the book isn’t always flowing smoothly, and the layout reminds me of a school work written in Microsoft Word, so when I started reading, I wasn’t expecting too much. This changed soon, and while I wouldn’t recommend this book over some of my favorites above, this is a solid piece of writing that deserves your consideration.

Face It, Not Checking Your E-mail All The Time is Hard

Jarkko — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 06:35:59 +0000

Checking your email only one or two times a day is a topic that pops up in productivity blogs every now and then. I first got curious with the idea through writing from Tim Ferriss. Lately, many minimalist bloggers have brought up the topic again.

The promise is persuasive: by checking your e-mail less often, you free yourself to be more productive and enjoy your life more.

But here’s something that does not get mentioned often: it is hard to stay away from your inbox.

Even, if like me, you are not getting that much email during your day.

So don’t get fooled into thinking that if you manage to do this for a week or two, you’re done and freed from your old habit. I thought so, and then with no warning, found myself going back to my old ways.

Don’t Fight the Symptoms, Attack the Cause

The problem we are facing is that when we talk about email, we assume that there is something better for you to do that will magically replace the time you used to spend in your email inbox. For some people that may be the case, and for them, I believe the idea works perfectly as is. If you are one of these people, start following the tips and become an e-mail ninja.

But if that was the case with everyone, I wouldn’t be writing this post.

If you can’t keep yourself from spending time with e-mail, Facebook, Twitter and all the other quick ways to feel like you are doing something without doing anything, it is probably a symptom for one of these two very real problems: either you are unmotivated or you don’t know how to unplug from your computer. For me, it’s a mix of both.

Once you know what is making you go back to your inbox after only minutes since leaving, you can start fighting the cause rather than its symptoms, and I promise you this will lead to much better results. I won’t claim that I have mastered e-mail, but here’s what I do, and how it’s helping me:

Find something better to do: Say no to good ideas and only do things that make you go “hell yeah“, and you won’t even remember that there is an e-mail inbox you could check. You will get into a state of flow where the task itself absorbs you, and you don’t need any other productivity gimmicks to get things done (it also works as a great way of dieting, by the way). It happened to me for example when writing this blog post. But to be honest, I don’t quite get there when I work on my WordPress plugin, Donation Can (which is probably also why it’s taking so long between updates).
Work at a time that suits your body: If you try to work through your unproductive moments, you are bound to fall into busywork, and e-mail is the number one option for filler activity. It’s fine to do that if you haven’t yet taken care of your email for the day, but after that, it’s better to just disconnect: Turn off the computer, and don’t spend your precious hours just trying to get things done. You will be surprised how this makes your overall productivity skyrocket. An example of this was when, this morning, at first I didn’t feel like writing. I knew that if I insisted on it, I would spend the morning on Facebook. So, I decided to read for 15 minutes instead. That 15 minutes turned into 20, but then, suddenly, I had the inspiration and started typing these words on my computer. What started as a normal, unproductive morning, soon turned into one of the most productive ones I’ve had recently.
Don’t multitask: When working, find a quiet place or time where you can focus. If you know that you can be interrupted at any time, the safe bet your brain takes is to just default to checking e-mail. This makes perfect sense, as it is an activity that doesn’t require too much focus and doesn’t suffer from being interrupted. When working, work. When communicating, communicate. When playing, play. Don’t mix these things with each other.

This is not easy stuff. But when you get it right, it works, and you don’t need to fill your days with recurring visits to your e-mail inbox, and chances are you will even create something meaningful while at it.

So, let’s stop fighting the symptoms and go for the real causes of our collective e-mail addiction! Once we’re done with these steps, then — and only then — is the right time to do the rest of the steps.